text
stringlengths 44
776k
| meta
dict |
|---|---|
Dmoz closed as of Mar 14, 2017 - scriptproof
http://www.dmoz.org/
======
exclusiv
I remember when it was a big deal to get on DMOZ because it seemed to have a
lot of SEO clout. It took me awhile to become an editor and then there were a
lot of politics in making edits.
Without having influence on search and no consumers ever using it, it stopped
serving any function.
~~~
CurtMonash
I actually edited one of the SEO sections. THAT gave me sudden status in the
SEO world ...
------
marsrover
I never found Dmoz particularly helpful. The only thing I ever used it for was
submitting my own websites many years ago. That being said, I'm surprised it
is still around and I'm surprised that it's shutting down.
I wonder why they're shutting down. It would've been nice to hear the reason.
~~~
empath75
Aol has a bunch of services that have just been hanging around for years that
they're finally getting around to shutting down.
~~~
jonknee
A shame they can't just leave it up as static files. It might already be
static files, it's a perfect structure for it.
~~~
empath75
we're giving the DB dumps to archive.org after we shut it down, I believe.
------
tangue
Good riddance. Dmoz had a toxic wikipedia-like community of editors without
having any real value for the end user.
------
endgame
There's a page for them on the Archive Team but it's not populated yet:
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dmoz](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Dmoz)
------
kome
That's sad. Directories are super useful, especially to help with
serendipity... you can't know what you don't now.
~~~
rwbt
Are there any other active directories? Seems Yahoo Directory is also gone for
good.
~~~
kome
As far I know, there are no other active directories.
~~~
sebst
There are plenty, but all of them are insignificant. What was special about
DMOZ is that Google used their data for directory.google.com and used their
description texts in some SERPs. That drove interest from SEOs to DMOZ, but
imho DMOZ failed to deliver a decent user experience and to find answers to
today's web (social media, real time, ...)
------
sebst
For those who still see value in a curated directory, please help me combine
efforts of people willing to contribute to a DMOZ revival by filling out this
form: [http://goo.gl/tktG9c](http://goo.gl/tktG9c)
------
reiichiroh
What was it? (Completely serious, not trolling)
~~~
timClicks
Before decent search engines, Yahoo and others such as Netscape built large
directories of sites. Netscape's was called DMOZ (Directory from Mozilla?) and
was probably part of AOL's acquisition of Netscape during its demise
~~~
currysausage
Yeah, it used to live at
[http://directory.mozilla.org/](http://directory.mozilla.org/) (actually that
URL still redirects to dmoz).
------
irl_
Does any know if the sources for Dmoz are available? I found
[http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/cmbuild.html](http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/cmbuild.html)
but couldn't find anything beyond that. While a global directory of the
Internet may not be too useful and have largely been replaced by spidering and
search, I think specialised directories still have a place and it would be
cool if communities could reuse the existing code for that.
------
CurtMonash
The project was on the old side when I joined and wrote about it 10 years ago.
[http://www.texttechnologies.com/2007/02/06/a-hobbit-
writes-f...](http://www.texttechnologies.com/2007/02/06/a-hobbit-writes-from-
the-odp-entmoot/)
------
nkkollaw
I remember submitting all my websites to DMOZ.
I got one on there, and I did notice a spike in traffic, mostly from third-
party directories that used DMOZ's data.
I hadn't visited in probably 10 years. I noticed they redesigned it, it looks
good!
------
frik
Wow, pretty sad. Yahoo, Google and now Dmoz killed their "directory".
I though that Dmoz was a community project, very sad that it's getting killed.
It's still a very valuable source for web crawlers, as starting point.
------
jonknee
If you want to grab a dump while it's still available...
[http://rdf.dmoz.org/](http://rdf.dmoz.org/)
I must not be the only one downloading, it's going pretty slowly.
~~~
sebst
What's missing there are the unreviewed (unedited) sites and submissions. It's
planned to get a backup of those from Aol, but I am not aware of the details.
------
powera
I feel like this is another sign the Internet of the 90s is dying.
~~~
Walf
It's a series of tubes. They can't stay filled up with nostalgia forever.
------
captainbenises
I'm working on putting up a mirror of dmoz at www.zedurl.com.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Hacking GCN via OpenGL - Impossible
https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=EBE7DEDA70D06DA0!107&app=PowerPoint&authkey=!AD-O3oq3Ung7pzk
======
striking
> GPU-based OS, anyone?
This makes me... uneasy.
Incredible work, though. I had no idea GPU shaders were run as Von Neumann
programs. I always thought they were really tiny sets of math operations with
minimal branching, because it had to scale to a bunch of little cores. But
that's not true entirely, somehow!
~~~
RyanZAG
They can read and write memory (to access textures), do math (to calculate
output colors), and can jump (necessary for bounds checks, etc). That's pretty
much the definition of a Von Neumann program:
program variables ↔ computer storage cells
control statements ↔ computer test-and-jump instructions
assignment statements ↔ fetching, storing instructions
expressions ↔ memory reference and arithmetic instructions.
Maps pretty much exactly to what you need.
~~~
greggman
This is all true but ... AFAIK gpus are optimized for graphics and therefore
suck at general purpose programs. Sure it would be fun to get some general
code to run on them just as it's fun to make a gameboy or toaster run Linux.
There's also the issue the gpus are not premptable which kind of makes
preempitve multi-tasking hard
~~~
bjwbell
Modern gpus (last 5 years) are optimized for GPGPU in addition to graphics.
They also have preemptive multitasking on either a per batch or per workgroup
basis.
Intel's latest gpu architecture has an embedded OS running on the gpu for
scheduling command batches, I'm not sure what AMD and Nvidia do.
I still wouldn't write a general purpose OS for it.
~~~
greggman
I think we have different definitions of "preemptive multitasking". There is
no GPU I know of that can be preempted once given a command to draw. Once it
starts if that drawing command takes 30 seconds there's no preempting it. This
is why Windows has a timeout that resets the GPU if it doesn't respond. (I
believe other OSes have added that feature but I'm not 100% sure). Anyway,
I've yet to use a GPU or an OS that supports preempting the GPU. I'd be happy
to be proven wrong. I can also give you samples to test. It doesn't require
fancy shaders. All it requires is lots of large polygons in one draw call.
~~~
bjwbell
That's what I know too for graphics draw calls. For GPGPU there's been hard
work for finer grained preemption, last I looked into it (~1yr ago) on Linux
it was a work in progress to put it kindly.
If you're curious, lookup the Intel Broadwell GPU specs, there's sections
devoted to the various levels of preemption. If you're really curious look up
the workarounds needed for the finest grained preemption (this would be
preempting a single GPGPU draw call).
Then decide enabling fine grained preemption should probably wait for Skylake,
unless you took too much Adderall and no challenge sounds impossible. Do I
speak from personal experience? I plead the fifth.
I've no experience with how fine grained nvidia's preemption is.
------
bjwbell
Is there a good reason to disassemble the shader machine code instead of using
what's needed from the open source Linux/Mesa GCN driver code?
~~~
Sanddancer
Because Mesa is an OpenGL system, and as such, doesn't support some of the
instructions that are available for the card. Also, the Mesa GCN code didn't
support GCN 1.2 until a couple months ago, while the first GCN 1.2 cards were
released last year. Finally, as far as I can tell, Mesa doesn't expose an
assembler and linker for shader programs, so he'd probably spend more time
chopping Mesa up to get what he wanted.
~~~
nhaehnle
There is an assembler for GCN in the AMDGPU backend of LLVM, which is what
Mesa uses to compile shaders. I haven't actually tried to use the assembler
stand-alone, but for any serious work in that direction, it makes sense to use
that.
~~~
h3r3tic
It will definitely be useful for something more advanced, thanks! One feature
I did _not_ want was register allocation, as I needed full control over it. I
figured it would be quicker to roll something custom than wrangle a complex
piece of software to my needs.
------
sklogic
Nice! But I suspect ot would have been much easier with the OpenCL driver and
the current LLVM GCN backend.
~~~
h3r3tic
I suspect AMD's OpenCL driver uses very similar or the same headers. I opted
for OpenGL because the subsequent experiments I'm doing interact with
graphics, and require indirect dispatch.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Re-live your memories with VR - tnn225
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/teleport-capture-relive-your-best-memories
======
nontechwingman
A creative way to re-live with your memories. Can not buy time, but you can
turn it back with VR tech. Nice design also.
------
doilanhuthe23
Love idea, Goodluck Anh Duy
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sawppy the Rover - msadowski
https://github.com/Roger-random/Sawppy_Rover
======
msadowski
This rover has been inspired by NASA's Open Source rover:
[https://opensourcerover.jpl.nasa.gov/](https://opensourcerover.jpl.nasa.gov/).
A shameless plug: If you like this kind of content then you will probably
enjoy my Weekly Robotics newsletter, where this link appeared last week:
[http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-
robotics-12](http://weeklyrobotics.com/weekly-robotics-12)
------
arendtio
That video at the bottom of the page made me understand that weird 6 wheels
design. Cool :-D
~~~
anotheryou
and showed a maneuver you woudn't see nasa doing on mars :)
------
pi-rat
Always wanted to build one of these :) I assume the servo motors make it quite
noisy?
~~~
msadowski
Me too! I think this will be the one for me. There is a video[1] referenced in
the repo and it indeed appears to be quite noisy!
[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acANiRFg-
qA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acANiRFg-qA)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Audio over Bluetooth - tosh
https://m.habr.com/en/post/456182/
======
sam1r
I wish there were more technical write ups as such in the music space!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: NimbusBase, a HTML5 application data storage powered by Dropbox - taskstrike
http://nimbusbase.com
======
septerr
An HTML5 application. Unless you pronounce H as Haytch
(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588>).
An is for words beginning with vowel sounds. The letter the word begins with
may or may not be a vowel. An umbrella. A university. An RDBMS. A SQL (if
pronounced sequel), an SQL (is pronounced S Q L).
\--- End of irrelevant comment ---
~~~
frootloops
What about "An historian"?
------
teach
I'm quite interested, but not interested enough to "sign up for early access".
Intend to revisit the site later (if I remember) once it's launched for real.
~~~
taskstrike
Cool, check us out in a couple of weeks!
------
dotborg
still there is "our backend", nevertheless it sounds very cool:)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Pig brains kept alive outside body for hours after death - fmihaila
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4
======
ggm
Alive at the cellular level but no coherency to neural signals.
------
namirez
This brings the concept of "brain in a vat" to a whole new level.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chili's Has Installed More Than 45,000 Tablets in Its Restaurants - jseliger
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/chilis-is-installing-tablet-ordering-at-all-its-restaurants/372836/
======
jessaustin
_The machines automatically suggest a tip of 20 percent; you can go lower than
that (or higher), but you 'll need to actively decide to make that change._
So waiters who do _less_ than typical waiters automatically get a _bigger_
tip? Yet another reason to pay with cash. Overall this system seems like a
benefit, however.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Steve Jobs – Thoughts on Music (2007) - walterbell
https://web.archive.org/web/20101007143742/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
======
ywecur
I don't understand. Both Google and Amazon sell music completely DRM-free
today, and their music selection is as big as the one on iTunes.
What's their excuse today?
~~~
gilgoomesh
All music on iTunes is DRM free and has been since 2009.
If anything, this discussion from Steve Jobs remains relevant in regards to
why _video_ on iTunes (and most other sites) remains DRM encumbered.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The former US congressional intern behind Venezuela’s cryptocurrency - hapnin
https://nypost.com/2018/03/19/the-former-us-congressional-intern-behind-venezuelas-cryptocurrency/
======
bitxbitxbitcoin
Apparently he's been working on this in Venezuela since 2015. Just being
honest, this article actually gives me a little bit of hope that the petro may
have some good intentions and most importantly local community buy in -
whether they're manifested remains to be seen.
~~~
hapnin
Agreed. I think the geekery behind the project (Jiminez and Co) have their
hearts in the right place and the govt sees a chance to profit.
Fingers crossed.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Firespotter, a Google Ventures funded incubator - turoczy
http://www.firespotter.com/
======
endtwist
"Firespotter isn’t an incubator. We aren’t looking for ideas or teams to back.
We will instead be building products that we want to use ourselves and quickly
get them out into the world."[1]
[1] <http://www.firespotter.com/blog>
~~~
razin
This sounds a lot like what Bill Gross' Idealab does <http://www.idealab.com/>
------
mpakes
The video on their 'Contact' page is particularly well done:
<http://www.firespotter.com/contact-us>
The narration is a series of excerpts from the 'Wave Speech' passage in Hunter
S. Thompson's _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ , written about the hippie
movement in San Francisco. Apropos.
Kudos to Alex Cornell, who apparently made it.
------
adrianwaj
Instead of 20% free time, it's 100% free time, and they get to own a chunk of
what they make. Smart way to outsource R&D by pre-owning a stake in what could
be the next big thing, without the complexities and competition of
acquisition.
I think they should just build what's getting funded at the time, and not get
too crazy. A fast (and better) follower mentality.
------
benmccann
The TechCrunch article gives a lot more detail about what they're doing than
their own site does:
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/google-voice-ceo-craig-
walk...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/google-voice-ceo-craig-walker-
launches-firespotter-a-google-ventures-funded-incubator/)
------
robertgaal
How do you guys think this actually works in a sense of equity? Google
Ventures gets a stake in Firespotter. What happens if they spin-off one of
their ideas into a new company? I take it Google Ventures is still involved
then, right? Why invest otherwise?
------
lotusleaf1987
There really is an unwritten law somewhere that Google must and will expand
into every possible web-related business category. They look more like Yahoo
and AOL to me. Jobs says it best: People think focus means saying yes to the
thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means
saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick
carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the
things we have done.
~~~
arkitaip
I guess that means that IBM - doing pretty much everything in IT - will fail
any day now.
~~~
lotusleaf1987
But IBM has a focus--business to business. You could argue Google's focus is
advertising, regardless Google is much more aggressive than IBM or any other
company in expanding into ever semi-related web category.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Linting 400kLOC of Python Code with Black - jbbarth
https://medium.com/botify-labs/paint-it-black-2b1b015f8f18
======
rgacote
Using black has improved my level of concentration while writing Python.
No longer do I need to worry about a line getting a bit too long, or if I have
the right number of blank lines between definitions, or did I format my
dictionary initializations consistently. Instead, I let black take care of
everything.
Black reduces the constant cognitive load of formatting while programming. Now
I just program...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory - mbchoe
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-the-doodle-improve-your-focus-and-memory-1406675744?mod=trending_now_3
======
contingencies
My brother is a conventional architect and urban designer, whereas I do
software. When we discuss complex areas together, he frequently comments in
awe of the quality of my doodling... he says they do it all the time in
architecture (being a traditionally paper-heavy industry), but rarely do
people exploring abstract notions on paper present them straight-from-brain in
a structured and logically coherent manner.
My method is simply to establish a scope or primary area of concern and to
explore it. Usually major points of inquiry come first, responses second, and
then I change colors (eg. black to red pen) and enhance those initial points
with annotations, questions/concerns and relationships. If scope changes, I
start a new page, often based upon a subset of the previous page that becomes
a new scope of inquiry. Sometimes relationships are explored more than a QA
structure. Rarely, if a mode of inquiry or visual approach is discovered to be
flawed, then the page gets redrawn with the new thinking integrated. This
works well for me, and the intended audience is usually only the self.
When I travel, sometimes for months on end and from a single small backpack,
along with the laptop my notebook and an array of pens makes the cut. I view
it as a sort of organic memory device, as well as a muse.
------
urlwolf
Explanation: where is it? How fast can you doodle? Can you train people to
improve their doodling? Does this improve memory? Can you doodle concepts like
a random forest?
~~~
allegory
Personally I just doodle with no objectives and no analysis of the outcome.
Sometimes it's a pattern, sometimes it's a picture, sometimes it's a wonderful
idea that properly kicks you in the face.
If you ask too many questions it formalises it too much and takes the joy away
and possible shapes the outcome too much.
I will say that whilst doodling in presentations and meetings I tend to come
up with some profound counterpoints while not even listening properly so
perhaps it does work.
~~~
christogreeff
Agree 100% on the meetings sentence. I do the same passive listening while
doodling thing. Works quite well.
------
SergeyHack
I wonder if doodling in this context is no more than a weak alternative to
walking or other physical activity.
------
phektus
Whenever I wait for Xcode to build I doodle random stuff on my notebook. It
helps me relax throughout the day.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How to build a secure burner laptop - marklittlewood
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hackers-activists-journos-how-to-build-a-secure-burner-laptop
======
jandrese
It sounds like he's going down the road of Trusted Computing, which would be
pretty effective at keeping malicious software off of the machine, but is
generally a pain to keep working.
It doesn't work against hardware mods like keyloggers either, although most
hardware mods aren't something you can shove into a laptop in 5 minutes while
it's inside the X-Ray machine.
But really if you set a BIOS password and encrypt your hard drives you've
already set the bar pretty high for someone to own your machine in a
reasonable timeframe. If the authorities insist they keep your laptop
overnight then you should probably just burn it, but for short stops you've
pretty much eliminated most of their options, especially with modern laptops
that are difficult to service in the first place.
------
GPGPU
I do this every year when I go to DEFCON! It's always a good idea to keep an
old laptop around for this purpose.
Some of their security-by-obscurity tips I don't think would help much against
an FBI or CIA though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Vulnerability in Microsoft XML Core Services Opens Door to Attackers - Kenan
https://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/vulnerability-in-microsoft-xml-core-services-opens-door-to-attackers
======
Kenan
See also the patch: <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/security/advisory/2719615>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The natural borders of Azure Cloud Queue scalability - hleichsenring
http://codingsoul.de/2016/01/25/the-natural-borders-of-cloud-queue-scalability/
======
lostmsu
TL;DR; Azure Queues (and any other component of Azure Storage) have
20000ops/sec limit per storage account. Those guys used a single storage
account for all queues. They increased load a bit, and hit this limit. Azure
throttled them every now and then to a complete stop.
Solution was to have multiple queues in multiple storage accounts.
IMHO, important information to keep in mind when building horizontally
scalable service. Every message channel/storage should be ready to be sharded
in some way.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Airbnb to Remove Listings in Jewish West Bank Settlements - mbgaxyz
https://www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news/airbnb-to-remove-listings-in-jewish-west-bank-settlements-1.6662443
======
dragonwriter
> Airbnb to Remove Listings in Jewish West Bank Settlements
_Israeli_ West Bank settlements is the issue, though the Israeli government
and it's backers tend to conflate the two things in order to dismiss criticism
of government policy as anti-Semitism.
> enclaves that most world powers consider illegal for taking up land where
> Palestinians seek statehood
No, they are enclaves most world powers consider illegal for taking up land in
the State of Palestine, which most of the world already recognizes.
------
uncoder0
Interesting that they're being singled out but not unexpected. Does AirBnB
operate in China, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey or do they just consider their
atrocities less severe?
~~~
ArchTypical
"a company that has no qualms about renting apartments in dictatorships around
the world and in places that have no relationship with human rights is
singling out Israel. This can only be a result of anti-Semitism or
surrendering to terrorism – or both." \- Yesha Council
This statement _in_the_article_ nods to that idea. I think the statement is
more than fair.
~~~
mlevental
isn't this just whataboutism refracted through the "anything done Jews is
anti-Semitic when it doesn't work out in their favor"?
like do we want settlers listing their apartments on Airbnb or not? if not
then this is the right move regardless of airbnb's policies elsewhere
~~~
ArchTypical
They posed that it may be one possible interpretation, which was the fair
part.
I think all totalitarian and contested land should be delisted, but this might
be a "testing the waters" act.
~~~
tomjakubowski
_The_ alternative interpretation presented is that AirBnb is "surrendering to
terrorism." Talk about a false dilemma.
------
tomohawk
All part of the new antisemitism. It's become all too acceptable. Here's
another example:
[https://freebeacon.com/national-security/cnn-commentator-
end...](https://freebeacon.com/national-security/cnn-commentator-endorses-
palestinians-using-violence-to-resist-israel/)
~~~
trisomy21
Can you point me to someone who is vocal and supportive of Palestinian rights
that you don’t consider to be antisemitic?
~~~
tomohawk
Can you point me to someone who supports violence against jews who is not
antisemitic?
Can you point me to a company that takes an action wrt Israel, but doesn't
take similar actions in similar situations elsewhere against other countries
that is not following an antisemitic policy?
~~~
dTal
Airbnb have taken similar actions elsewhere, such as removing listings in
Crimea due to Russia's annexation. Nor does the action apply to Israel, but to
Israeli settlements outside of Israel that are certainly illegal under
international law.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
AWS Import/Export Goes Global - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/aws-importexport-goes-global.html
======
PStamatiou
While I know much of the HN community employs AWS services, this place is
starting to seem like an Amazon PR Newswire with the past 2 in the last week
that I've noticed being posted directly by Jeff. Just my .02
~~~
jeffbarr
Hi Paul, I am definitely not trying to turn HN into a PR Newswire! We've been
cranking out new AWS features like crazy of late and the posting frequency has
increased accordingly.
I was a long time lurker before I started to post, and did so only because my
stories would show up here sooner or later anyway.
HN readers seem to find what I post useful, based on the number of comments
they post and the number of times they up-vote it.
I find the comment threads on my posts to be of tremendous value and I always
send them along to the appropriate team for their edification.
~~~
numair
I have to agree with this -- I like to read the HN take on what's going on
with AWS. Most of us here use AWS for something or another (if not
everything), so Jeff's posts seem pretty relevant.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Interact with R from Python - kirubakaran
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~besen/TBiB2007/lecture-notes/rpy.html
======
apathy
This is cute, RPy is " _the simplest thing that can possibly work_ " (and it
does!), and most of all, it's awesome to see an R story high on the front page
of YC.news.
But I would encourage readers (of this article and of YC news) to try playing
with R interactively, just like you should try using iPython+SciPy
interactively, to realize the truly awesome power of the libraries+language in
each case. Then you will know what can and cannot be done easily in each, and
can use your code in the other (or C, or _shudder_ maybe even Java if
necessary) to chink the gap. Both languages can play nice with C and Java,
incidentally. But that's not the point -- let's look at an everyday situation.
For example -- I might like to do some dimensionality reduction on a high-
dimensional dataset which is information-starved along some of the features
that interest me (until I collapse it a little). Obviously, I'd like to read
in the data (in as rich a form as possible), look at the combinations of
dimensions that are most informative (probably via principal components
analysis, aka PCA, but maybe I'd try some other techniques as well), plot them
as predictors, and then perhaps use a bunch of resources on the Web to do some
further annotation or testing and see how useful my pile of predictors is for
various tasks. Off the top of my head, here is what I'd think of doing:
1) depending on the nature of the data, parse it in either R or Python, and
bind it into a dataframe (sort of a fancy matrix) or list of dataframes so I
can manipulate it in R.
2) almost certainly I'd do the PCA and other EDA in R, due to the sheer power
and variety of packages available for this sort of task in the R environment.
There are lots of libraries available for this sort of thing in Python, too,
but if you have a wild hair up your ass to try some revolutionary technique
that you saw in _Bioinformatics_ or _Genetic Epi_ (or whatever), yesterday,
odds are that it was released as an R package.
3) Most likely I'd plot the correspondences for each predictor with responses
I care about in R, maybe with GGobi if I had to deal with time series or high-
dimensional plots. Not that Python can't do an awesome job, but hey, we're
already in R so let's get this over with, shall we?
4) I'd probably want to use the results in Python for web- or database-backed
inquiries, because R's DBI packages sort of suck. Maybe I'd save entire
dataframes to MySQL or SQLite or what have you, and then retrieve them in
Python to monkey around with the results (or use a stripped-down algorithm
based on my R results to implement the 'app' version in Python, because
eventually I'll bet we put this behind Django anyways...). But Python for sure
if it's ever going to talk to Windows or the Web. Like, duh, _rite_?
So the point here is that it pays to have a couple of sharp tools lying around
when your interesting problem shows up and starts flopping around on your
desk. Don't be like the RDBMS guys who try and drive every damned screw with a
filigreed hammer!
Hope this gets one or a few people to try R (on its own) and then stick it in
their utility belt for later use.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Limits of Emacs Advice - metajack
http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/01/22/
======
metajack
I had no idea about impatient-mode. It looks awesome:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV6XVyXjBO8>
Also, defadvice is great for fixing annoyances in various modes. It's really
easy to use too. Hopefully they'll find some way to fix it for narrow/widen as
well.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ruby "with statement" - otobrglez
http://blog.mrbrdo.net/2013/02/ruby-with-statement/
How would you implement "with statement"?
======
dragonwriter
Article claims that this implementation provides something like the "Pascal or
Python" with statement. But its nothing like Python's "with" statement
(PEP-343), which is a tool for encapsulating initialization, exception
handling, and cleanup logic, not a tool to avoid identifying the object on
method calls.
It'd be pretty easy to do something like Python's "with" statement as a
library method in Ruby, but this isn't it.
~~~
mrbrdo
Nope, article doesn't claim that. I just said that Python and Pascal have a
with statement, I didn't say here is an implementation of Python's PEP-
whatever in Ruby. And I have no interest or desire to get into language
flamewars. For me this basic functionality is enough.
~~~
dragonwriter
> For me this basic functionality is enough.
Its not about "basic functionality": this does exactly nothing in common with
the function of the Python with statement.
What you provide gives very similar functionality to the "with" statement in
Pascal or Visual Basic, but, aside from the name, has nothing _whatsoever_ in
common with the "with" statement in Python (which itself has more in common
with Ruby's new-with-block idiom for opening, using, and closing a resource
than with the Pascal/VB use of "with" as shorthand for object-member-access-
within-a-delimited block.)
If you didn't know what Python's with statement _does_ , you probably
shouldn't have mentioned it at all in reference to what you are providing for
Ruby.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What is the problem you face everyday and can't find a solutions 4 yet? - karimo
As A User - not developer - What is the problem that you face everyday and you couldn't find a solutions for yet?<p>Example: Information Overload, there is a lot of news and feeds that you don't have time to read every day
======
WTPayne
Information overload is definitely a problem; too many disparate pieces of
information, too many new languages and technologies to learn, too many
priorities at work; too many interruptions... (too much caffeine) all of this
leaves me in a constant state of near-panic. What I feel I really need is a
sort of automated PA / life coach; to help prioritize (home & work), schedule;
simplify and motivate. Something that takes the clutter and noise of the world
and blocks most of it out, most of the time, feeding me what I need to know,
when I need to know it, and keeping me on track.
Yesterday, Joel Spolsky talked about Software Inventory
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>), and mentioned a
minimalistic project management tool that he would like to see made called
"Five Things". Well, I think that we have a bigger problem of Intellectual
Inventory - a glut of information, too many books, academic papers and
articles that sit on the to-read list, all relevant, all interesting, and not
enough time left in our life to digest it all. (It is true ... I did the sums
- I have about 300 years worth of reading in my backlog)
So here is my problem: Intellectual Inventory management; productivity
optimization; focus management.
------
kfk
As a finance guy and programming hobbist, I say the whole business reporting
thing is a big fat problem I deal with. I get bored easily, especially when
updating power points or excel reports. Besides, when things get messy (data
scattered all over), there is always a sort of fear that you might put some
wrong numbers here and there.
Beware, there are solutions (Hyperion for financials, Business Objects for BI,
etc.), but those are all too low level and they have no decent way to build
views or to consolidate information from different sources, so people resort
to the dreaded Excel, a piece of tech 20 yrs old.
I am pretty sure that technically this is not a big problem, there is no need
for Big Data or real time or the like, but anything worth considering has to
have a great user experience as Excel has got people used to click their ways
out of troubles all the time (at cost of wasting hours on things that should
take a couple of minutes).
------
mikecane
Bookmark organization. I use Firefox. But I've also used other browsers. ALL
of their Bookmark managers and way of doing Bookmarks suck. I can never find
anything in hundreds of Bookmarks.
~~~
lelele
What about delicious.com?
~~~
mikecane
I used FURL, which stored copies of pages. Then FURL was bought by Diigo and
deleted those saved pages (not the URLs). You really think I'll trust
something like that again?
Anyway, I like things stored locally on my machine. With paranoia driving the
gov't, I don't want to make it easy for them to root around in my life. Let
them serve _me_ with a search warrant, not a Cloud firm behind my back and
without my knowledge.
------
thatusertwo
Figuring out how to make a living without having to get a traditional job.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Utopia: USB power sockets on every wall - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/118187-utopia-usb-power-sockets-on-every-wall
======
ars
300 watt sockets? So now I need a high power DC power supply with a fan in
every outlet?
Someone is not thinking this through all the way. Even at 90% efficiency you
are wasting 33 watts of energy at max, and that is a LOT of heat to generate
behind a wall with no ventilation.
Not to mention the power supply is not going to fit in a standard box. Or that
good (read: Efficient) DC power supplies are quite expensive.
And you won't be making central power supplies in the basement either. 300
watts at 12 volts is 25 amps! You would need pretty thick cables to do that.
At 5 volts it's 60 amps - that would be a wire as thick as what an electrical
dryer uses.
He can have as many dreamy smiles as he wants, but this is not going to
happen.
~~~
mrsebastian
What if we chose a voltage that could be transmitted throughout the house
without too many issues -- like 48V?
Then we could step that down in the sockets, to 12 and 5V.
We could also use USB cables that have transformers built in, I guess --
bulges in the cable, or something. But then you're moving away from the 'one
cable for everything' idea.
~~~
bhousel
I like this idea.. I've actually been thinking about something like this for a
while.
You could have a DC distribution panel next to the main one, that converts the
mains voltage to 24/48 VDC for lighting circuits and DC receptacles. 240 Watts
(10 or 5 Amps) could be enough to power a lot of devices on a branch, while
still allowing the wires to be reasonable (14 AWG or smaller).
I think the bigger win would be for LED lighting circuits, but device chargers
could use it too.
~~~
ars
Why? I can't see any gain to converting to 48 volts if you just have to
convert it again anyway. There isn't much difference between converting from
120 vs 48.
------
dalke
This looks like a marvelous way to get user data. How much do you trust every
USB plug you use? If you plug your phone/music player/tablet into a USB
"charger" could it pretend to be a host computer, and get access to all your
files without you knowing?
There's no way a USB plug will replace existing power outlets. A 15A line in
the US can handle over 1400 W, which is more than the 100W mentioned here or
the hypothetical 300W in the future. An induction cooktop draws around 2000W
and an electric oven around 7500W.
Plus, a number of devices depend on AC power to drive a induction motor, so
there's a huge installed base that can't cheaply be replaced with DC power
even there's enough raw power available.
~~~
mitakas
Coincidentally, it's the other way around with USB dead drops.[1] Either trust
that the USB won't fry your motherboard or carry a multimeter with you all the
time.
[1]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_dead_drop>
~~~
camtarn
Ouch. I'd thought of the malware risk of plugging into a dead drop, but it
never quite crossed my mind that someone could basically turn one into the
equivalent of the Etherkiller:
<http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/>
~~~
shabble
I suspect some hubs would be suitable for buffering against that sort of
attack. Not sure which though, or whether a more subtle approach (some sort of
pulsed power to avoid tripping polyfuses, perhaps) would still be practical.
If you wanted to be a dick, I think replacing the insides of a USB stick with
a large charged capacitor and leaving them in parking lots would be the way to
go.
------
chrisacky
When I built my office last year, I tried to find USB sockets and couldn't. It
was like they didn't exist. I didn't even want ones that could supply a tonne
of power, just a bare minimum would be sufficient.
In the end I retro fitting a hub to the wall that connected to my system which
is hidden in the wall ,with the cables running under the wooden flooring.
~~~
mrsebastian
FWIW, they do exist: <http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/e81a/>
------
nodata
1\. The major flaw with USB is that half the time you have to try again to get
the connector the right way round*
2\. A 5V television? Not likely. This will lead to more _types_ of sockets.
Which is the opposite of what we want.
(* yes I know that the usb symbol should always face up, but that's often
misused)
~~~
brador
I'm not an electrical expert, but:
If you have many USB ports, could you wire something up to run a television
from multiple USB 5V ports or is there a voltage/amp issue of some kind in the
way?
~~~
ars
Depends on how much power the TV took. Theoretically you could do it, but it
would be a huge waste.
Suppose you have a 300 watt plasma TV - that's 60 amps at 5 volts. That's the
kind of wire electric dryers and ovens use. You could take that wire and
divide it into many small ones, but you would still have that much wire which
would not be practical.
------
sjs382
Utopia can be simulated by carrying a little USB-to-Wall adapter in your
pocket...
------
rkangel
However much current you can draw over your USB socket, it's still only 5V.
Many devices want a (far) higher voltage than that for charging or powering
themselves. A quick glance at my laptop PSU shows 20V, presumably related to
the voltage of several Lithium Ion cells in series.
Yes, a given psu could transform the voltage back up with switchmode, but then
you've got the horrible transformation inefficiency twice! I wonder how many
devices there are out there that actually want that much current at 5V.
------
kabdib
Standard USB connectors are rated for about 1,500 connect/disconnect cycles.
You'll want something more robust built into your wall.
I've worn out the connectors on several game consoles. :-)
------
gonvaled
Which is a clear display of one of the major flaws of capitalism: duplicity
just for the sake of having a competitive advantage.
It just makes me sad to think about how much effort, materials, knowledge and
time has humankind wasted in working against each other.
And, just to avoid trolling, I have to say that I am not criticizing
capitalism per se, but just this one side of it.
There must be a better way!
~~~
spindritf
Is experimenting a wasted effort? Is an experimenter really working against
other experimenters? Is there a better way to choose a solution to (virtually
any) problem than to test multiple solutions? I don't think there is, at least
not without some kind of omniscience.
~~~
gonvaled
Sure, experimenting is a great way to reach an optimum solution to a given
problem.
Now please, go to your cellar and tell me for what kind of experiment are
those 40+ different chargers that you have for all your devices, which most of
them have _exactly_ the same power requirements.
I would say that, in most cases, those chargers were developed in order to
take that extra 1 EUR profit.
And that, *ing the customer, which somehow has been taking this mess for over
20 years.
~~~
spindritf
> go to your cellar and tell me for what kind of experiment are those 40+
> different chargers that you have for all your devices
Right now I can charge almost all my mobile devices (a phone, an mp3 player, a
kindle and the batteries for my camera) with a single charger I picked up in a
regular department store for ~15EUR (first set of rechargeable batteries
included) and two standard usb cables which came with those devices and can
also be used to transfer data. More, the charger is largely optional, I could
just plug them into into my computer -- often connecting to put podcasts on is
enough to charge the mp3 player.
Only my laptop really requires a separate, dedicated power supply. The 40+
different chargers are just remnants of my electronic history because the
current generation of mobile devices didn't even come with the chargers
(except for the htc phone, but it's a standard usb charger, I could use it
with cables and devices other than the phone).
The experimentation phase is largely over and makers are converging. Sure,
there will always be someone who diverges but it's the cost of progress (even
if progress in this context means a prettier hole in your phone).
~~~
gonvaled
Your "experimentation phase" did not ended by magic. It ended, among other,
thanks to regulation:
<http://boingboing.net/2009/02/15/european-commission.html>
Without that interference in the invisible hand of the market, your cellar
would be full with other 40+ chargers. All in name of 1€ profit.
Sure, it is in the interest of the manufacturers to use standardized
components ... unless the customer can be fooled to take pain with minimum
marketing effort. No manufacturer is going to sit down and put in their
priority list the item "how to reduce the junk electronics in the basement of
my customers". They must be forced to it, and if the customer is not able to
unite, the voter must interfere - as is slowly happening.
~~~
spindritf
> Without that interference in the invisible hand of the market, your cellar
> would be full with other 40+ chargers. All in name of 1€ profit.
At most my cellar would contain one additional charger for the phone. Other
devices didn't come with a charger at all (some aren't even covered by the
directive or were made well before its announcement). I guess in the name of
3€ of cut cost which coincidentally also reduces the number of junk
electronics in my basement.
------
spiralpolitik
Ignore the power issues and think about the security issues. Would you give
some random plug in the wall hardware access to your smartphone along the same
cable that data goes?
(See [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-
secu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/technology/electronic-security-a-
worry-in-an-age-of-digital-espionage.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all))
~~~
bhousel
One could easily make "charge only" USB cables with the data pins
disconnected. Or a passthrough dongle which does that.
------
jcxplorer
I recently stayed at a US hotel that had a couple of USB ports for charging
devices. Since I don't like having to buy even more adapters just for
travelling abroad, being able to charge all my devices at the same time was
pretty handy. Are USB ports in hotels common in the US?
------
freehunter
My first thought was "but only 5v?" Never heard of USB Power Delivery before.
After seeing the picture, I kind of want to rig something like that up in my
house.
~~~
StavrosK
I saw that when it was posted before, turns out you can't. There are problems
with having low-power and high-power ports in the same socket, I seem to
recall electricians saying it was unsafe, so you might be risking a fire with
that.
~~~
imgabe
You can, it's already for sale:
[http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/a-power-
outle...](http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/a-power-outlet-with-
usb-ports-built-in/)
~~~
ars
That has the voltage converter (power supply) in the box. What's not legal is
having a centralized power supply, and running low voltage wires from it to an
existing box that also has high voltage wires in it.
~~~
bhousel
You're mostly right, but it's legal to separate the mains voltage and low
voltage connections like this: [http://www.smarthome.com/2546/Low-Voltage-
Divider-Plate-SCDI...](http://www.smarthome.com/2546/Low-Voltage-Divider-
Plate-SCDIV/p.aspx)
------
jcoder
<http://xkcd.com/927>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
House expected to vote on search and browsing privacy this week - arunbahl
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/browsing-and-search-history-protections-gain-momentum-in-the-house/
======
notadog
Specifically, this is about the Section 215 provision of the Patriot Act. The
EFF published a piece on why it needs reform earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318184)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Analyzing the constitutional foundation for U.S. patents and copyrights - grellas
http://ipwatchdog.com/2011/05/04/patents-copyrights-and-the-constitution-perfect-together/id=16769/
======
bediger
Warning: article is essentially legalese by Gene Quinn, a lawyer who's what
you might want to call an "Intellectual Property Maximalist".
Quinn bases his arguments on a totally legal view of things, divorced from
empirical or moral or ethical concerns. Naturally, he comes to some odd
conclusions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’ - stfu
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/google-censoring-blogger/
======
domador
Why does Google need to operate locally in each country in the first place?
Isn't that just a needless expenditure? More employees, more domain names,
more dealings with localized bureaucracies and pesky removal requests? Rather
than put itself in a losing position against local governments, Google should
let local governments take on their own constituents (and risk angering them
by censoring the international version of Google's sites.) A tradeoff between
full access or no access to Google is safer for freedom than the complacency-
inducing availability of a watered-down, locally-censored Google.
Now, if it's a matter of maximizing profit, this move seems to make sense from
Google's standpoint. Having some ads on localized, yet partially-censored
Google properties would produce greater profit than showing zero ads in a
country that completely censors the international version.
~~~
rryan
Well, for one Google doesn't operate locally in every country. Moving into a
given country comes with tradeoffs which Google surely weighs. Off the top of
my head, I assume the decision to move into a country is a balancing act
between these pros and cons:
Pros:
* Quality of sales operations are probably much better when run by people local to the country. Out-of-country call-centers are probably a huge turn-off compared to someone local who can build rapport and speak fluently in the local tongue.
* Google can't hire smart engineers fast enough -- they're just too hard to find. Since smart people are found worldwide, to maximize effective hiring you need to hire worldwide.
Cons:
* You pay taxes in the country.
* You have more responsibility to adhere to local laws, takedown requests, etc.
~~~
domador
Good points!
------
ElbertF
Previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3535502>
~~~
magicalist
Thanks. As I pointed out there, google censoring content on a per-country
basis is truly a shocking and unprecedented event:
[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/removals/)
It's weird. The last time Wired covered this topic, they focused more on the
US government issuing by far the greatest number of requests for user data,
and hanging out with Germany and South Korea in the number of content take
down court orders (including 18 in 2010 and 16 in the first half of 2011 from,
wait for it...Blogger blogs).
[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/google-data-
request...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/google-data-requests/)
If Google and Twitter are going to be asked to be conscientious objectors from
internet censorship (as moral representatives for the citizens who can't get
their shit together), I can think of the first country they should probably
pull out of...
------
junto
What does this mean for blogger custom domains?
------
pasbesoin
2012: The year the Internet died.
I guess the Arab Spring et al. must have really scared TPTB.
[snark] Now waiting for the first U.S. "per country" based censoring, e.g. of
Occupy communication.[/snark]
Seriously, though. The lack of wholesale "per country" censorship seemed to be
working to some extent to pull world society closer together in terms of
understanding and supporting each other. These recent choices seem to fly in
the face of such trends.
~~~
motters
Arab Spring/Occupy probably expedited the timeline, but I've been noticing an
increasing amount of country specific stuff on the internet over the last few
years.
~~~
pasbesoin
Do you mean with respect to identification/segregation of content by content
providers, or with respect to geographic entities' attempts at censorship? Or
do you simply mean more and/or more prominent sites using country code TDL's?
The second, of course, we have. (Quip: "China was the prototype.")
The first, with attendant variation of content (i.e. you get a different view
of an individual Blogger blog depending upon whether you are e.g. in Sweden or
in Italy) seems rife for efforts to more quietly and piecemeal "pick apart"
the Internet's "common voice".
Perhaps I'm being alarmist. But placed within the context of everything else
that's going on right now with respect to Internet communication, it's
worrying.
The third I have no real problem with, although I find the many attempts to
use country code TDL's to make "catchy" domain names to mostly be ineffective
if not annoying. (I'll leave that at the level of personal preference.)
~~~
motters
I mean a combination of explicit censorship (for example, access to
sourceforge in certain countries) and also content providers attempts to
control what is seen where (seems like BS to me).
------
asabil
The end of the the Web as we know it is getting closer
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Programming Strategies and Mood and how they affect your decisions - scarletbegonias
https://medium.com/@latoza/programming-strategically-aab8ed572cfb
======
scarletbegonias
What are programming strategies, how can we leverage them to be better
developers? what kinds of things impact the strategies we choose? When you're
angry, do you code differently than when you're happy? Follow the link to read
more!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: HR code – Designed to be recognized by humans and OCR - emrehan
https://github.com/hantuzun/hr-code
======
citilife
The problem with this is that it's prone to error (doesn't have error
correcting bits). Unfortunately, that combined with speed of scanning is
really what's key for codes.
I have worked in the space, making some strides in speed & error correction.
Some of my public work is here:
[https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/](https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/)
Your best bet is actually an overlay of two codes. A regular image (for
humans), plus a code embedded in a color space (see linked post for how to do
that).
~~~
basicplus2
The whole point of having human readable code is to help avoid being scammed,
so having a code embedded that a human cant read but is what actually used for
the link defeats the purpose
~~~
tedunangst
So what happens when someone makes an image that appears like one url but
scans as a different url? goDgle.com?
~~~
basicplus2
Then that is a failure of the protocol
------
badgers
This reminds me of the E-13B font [1] seen on checks since the early 1960s,
but in a square format. The goals are similar, produce machine readable and
human readable text. There have been attempts to also make a version with
alphabetical characters as well in OCR-A [2] in the late 1960s.
[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition)
[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)
~~~
Merrill
Checks are now often scanned optically, with the MICR line, the courtesy
amount field and the legal amount field all being read by software character
and handwriting recognition. There is a small security deficit, since a
fraudulent check with a non-magnetic MICR line would not be detected.
~~~
mNovak
Since it came up.. I've always wondered how mobile deposit (cell phone photo
of a check) is remotely secure?
~~~
velosol
It's nearly as secure as going to the ATM to deposit the check and most banks
are OK with the increased risk because they have extra identifiers (phone/app
info) when you 'scan' the check. Which is to say the whole process is not
terribly secure.
History wise it came about with the removal (or reduction) of check float when
checks began to be processed electronically (turned into an ACH transaction
with images of front & back being taken by the submitting bank). In the last
TOS I read about check scanning what is actually happening is that your
scanning of the check replaces the bank's scanning and they are using
extracted data to create the ACH transaction. In the meantime they extend
credit to you to match the amount they would normally advance you (varies by
account and amount). It's been a while but I recall it being specifically
credit as opposed to the usual 'available funds' at an ATM; this seems a
distinction without a difference.
In the end - it's not secure or at least not much less secure than going to an
ATM to deposit the check. The difference is that the ATM keeps the physical
check for some small period of time such that if there is a problem with the
ACH the bank might have physical possession of the check to assist in a fraud
investigation (not that I think they'd need it as the law enabling electronic
clearance I believe made the electronic images equivalent in all ways to the
physical check).
------
gnode
This seems to be the worst of both worlds. It's not easy for a human to read a
square (compared to a line of text). The pixellated font is also not easily
readable compared to a vector font. It's also not easy for machines to read an
optical coding with no spatially distributed redundancy.
QR codes and bar codes are brilliant for machines because misreads due to some
spurious reflection or spec of dust is mitigated by error correction.
I feel like this problem is already well served by bar codes which have a
human readable text representation below them (e.g. serial number stickers).
That said, I can see the security advantage of the computer reading the same
representation as a human, although this is probably not the best place to
enforce security. As there's no integrity check, there's little guarantee the
computer will read what you see though. Maybe linear OCR combined with a
barcode checksum would be a better way to achieve these goals.
~~~
noobiemcfoob
The problem this is addressing is a code being impenetrable by a human. If
your solution is adding a second (human readable) code beneath the machine
readable code...you haven't addressed the problem. The user must still trust
their reader to parse the code.
QR codes' reconstructability is a major strength that this lacks, but I'd bet
there's a way to expand this to include ECC around it, much as QR codes can.
BUT...OCR is quickly advancing, so the need for a specialized code a
specialized machine can read will diminish over time anyway.
~~~
gnode
As I suggested at the end, you could still employ OCR and have a barcode
checksum. The checksum would ensure a misread of the human readable text would
fail. As long as the checksum was not error-correcting (so could not be
engineered to augment a correct OCR read), it doesn't matter that it is
incomprehensible to humans, because the OCR is authoritative.
You could also implement the checksum as OCR-able text, although it wouldn't
be as dense, and probably wouldn't help human readability.
I think ultimately it should not be trusted that a machine will read what a
code appears to be. That should be enforced on the device: "Are you sure you
want to visit malware.site?". It's also easy to manipulate computer vision;
you can engineer patterns which will read as one thing to humans, but another
to machines. In some ways it's better for these codes to not be human
readable, such that trust is not misplaced, and the machine is used as the
best source of truth.
~~~
ggrrhh_ta
I can imagine that it would not take long until someone comes up with patterns
which are innocent in one orientation and malicious with a ±90 deg.
rotation...
~~~
theamk
Not with QR codes, they read the same from any side
------
wfdctrl
If the app you are using to scan the QR code doesn't ask you for permission
before opening the web page that's the problem with the app not the QR code...
~~~
suyash
Most QR codes are use to open a website and you do get a prompt for that at
least on iOS so I don't see an issue there.
------
tobr
I need to ask, is this in response to the discussion in [1]? I see that the
initial commit happened _after_ that discussion started.
If so, that’s an impressively fast prototype.
1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417433)
~~~
emrehan
Yes, I've made this after reading the post. Thanks.
I haven't read that particular comment though. It is obvious that QR codes are
a security concern. First, QR code readers are required to ask for permission
to open URLs. They might as well not implement it or could have malicious
codes for misrepresenting the URL in specific cases. Second, I wouldn't be
surprised to see some bugs exploited in QR code scanning code by giving them
strange codes to scan. These would not look like valid HR codes but would look
like just another QR code.
~~~
TheDong
> QR code readers ... could have malicious codes for misrepresenting the URL
> in specific cases.
So could an HR code reader. It could just as well, when it scans a google.com
HR code, prompt "do you want to go to google.com" and then open
"phishing.free.hax"
That specific threat is ridiculous.
In addition, talk of exploiting strange looking QR codes seems silly too. HR
code readers could also have bugs in their OCR code which would result in
memory corruption or such.
Any type of encoding can have interpreting tools that contain security bugs or
malicious behaviour. The only way to remove that is to create something that
is not intended to be processed by any tools at all (e.g. a paper that users
have to manually copy the text from by hand).
------
KenanSulayman
The biggest win with QR codes is their error recovery capability, though. This
will just corrupt data if there's errors.
------
fbrchps
If OCR is required, then why not just put the link in plaintext? Makes it even
easier to be read by humans.
~~~
suyash
That would be the next logical evolution from QR code once CV becomes more
accurate for reading plaintext.
------
loa_in_
Some characters can be easily turned into others - c into o, C into D - by
addition. I think it would be a good idea to make priors have an additional
pixel or two to the font glyphs to make this impossible. Maybe even touching
the border instead of the character.
------
jolmg
I wonder if there's a font with the same idea of being easy to OCR. I mean
something that one can write full pages of and be easy to read for both the
human and the machine.
~~~
mfkp
That's probably
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-B) \-
developed in the 1960s. (OCR-A might be more common but I'd say less human
readable).
~~~
jolmg
Interesting. I was expecting something with more machine visual aids, like
square markers to easily determine the start, size, and angle of the text. I
wouldn't be able to guess that this font was designed for OCR. I wonder what
design considerations they took. From the look at the applications, maybe they
assumed perfect/consistent reading conditions, instead of e.g. a casual photo
of the text with little consideration to alignment or using a prepared format.
------
Someone
IMO, the easier and better solution would be for your device to pop up a
_”Open <URL>?”_ alert.
That way, the detection of the URL will be more robust against dirt and
damage, and the text can be displayed in a more ergonomic way (a QR code might
be 5x5 cm, at two meters height, for example, making reading it by short
humans with bad eyes a challenge)
Or are there use cases where the device reading QR codes doesn’t have a
display?
~~~
emrehan
User confirmation is a feature in most of the QR code readers. But it’s an
optional feature. We are also depending on QR code scanners not to use an
ambiguous font for URLs or misrepresent URLs in certain cases maliciously.
By encoding possibly malicious URLs in QR codes and scanning them we try to
mitigate the security concerns by having not enforced or even not specified
requirements from the QR code clients. Such as a display, user prompt, a
fitting typeface in the UI. All this could be optional with a solution like HR
codes, with the added benefit of deciding whether to scan a code nor not by
simply reading it first.
~~~
Someone
But making QR code’s readable by users doesn’t protect against that. Whatever
the QR code looks like, you have to trust the scanner. It could open
“evil.com” every tenth time you use it, roll a die to determine whether to do
so, contact its host to ask _”user u scanned QR code q. What URL shall I
open?”_ , run a quick auction for the URL to send the user to, etc.
What _does_ help is just printing the URL in text, and requiring the user to
type it in their browser’s address bar (assuming they trust their browser)
------
la_fayette
The qr code has three distinctive squares on the corners, which makes
detection in images accurate. However, the proposed approach is missing that
feature. Thats why I wouldn't call it an easy ocr problem, more like scene
text detection, which is acctually a hard problem.
------
breck
This is awesome! Feels like there's a kernel of a very interesting idea here.
Could see how this evolves into a successor for QR codes. Looking forward to
see where it goes.
------
mlindner
The name is bad. "HR code" is immediately associated in my mind with "HR" as
in Human Resources. You should pick a better name.
~~~
jolmg
Indeed, I had the same expectation that it was something related to Human
Resources, and it's not like the H replaced a word that means "machine" or
anything. It could have been "HQR code".
------
joshdance
I like the idea. Having symbols is hard because you have to know the generally
accepted name for that symbol in order to tell it to someone.
------
ecesena
This is pretty awesome! I just read a related thread on HN a few hours ago on
this very issue, so big kudos for the time of execution.
------
sytse
Is it possible to make a valid QR code that is human readable by manipulating
the size, weight, greyscale?, and positioning of letters?
------
emrehan
Wow, I didn't expect this post to have any traction. Many thanks for the
diverse feedback.
This is just a PoC of an idea I've created after reading
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21417026).
But who knows, a human readable QR code alternative could born out of this.
When I looked up for this idea, I have found out
[http://hrqr.org/](http://hrqr.org/) but didn't find it much readable. Thanks
to the comments here I came across OCR-A, OCR-B, and MICR just now. From these
I've found Westminster typeface:
[http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-48273.html](http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-48273.html)
Do you guys think using a font inspired by Westminster be a better choice than
the prototype we have now?
In any case, the font should be resistant to malicious tampering such as
creating an "o" from "c". Manual tampering could be also prevented with
trailing checksum images that could be more information dense than the
characters.
Error correction concern is the most common among the comments here. Yes, HR
code readers would need to have error correction implementations to be
reliable. Since each 7x7 grid of 2^49 binary options could only encode one of
the 85 valid characters, HR codes could be recognized with even large chunks
missing. On the other hand, implementations would be much more complex than
the QR code error correction algorithm.
I reduced 3 corner blocks of QR codes to 1. This would make detection of HR
codes much harder.
OCR, image recognition from video feed and average phone camera and processor
has advanced so much in the past years that I think these technical costs
could be favored for a human readable QR code alternative.
> If the app you are using to scan the QR code doesn't ask you for permission
> before opening the web page that's the problem with the app not the QR
> code... (wfdctrl's comment)
You're right. If the protocol is not secure enough, then the layer above must
be secured enough. But it's better to have the security at the protocol level.
Here's the other reply of mine under this thread where I speculate about
possible security issues with QR codes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21424988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21424988)
I'm open for a better name than "HR code" by the way. It is too silly that
makes it recognizable though.
------
aabbcc1241
The font and the way to break words is not quite human readable IMO …
~~~
gouggoug
I guess the keyword here is "recognizable". The goal isn't to make it
extremely readable, but make it both readable by a machine and sufficiently
readable by a human.
------
mark-r
What problem does this solve that MICR couldn't do better?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Does Apple's new section 3.3.1 mean I cant use Boost? - jason_slack
Slightly confused. I can still use a 3rd party library like Boost in my ipad apps, but the point of 3.3.1 is that I must use Objective-C, C++ or C or any combination of the 3 (essentially..)<p>True?
======
st3fan
No you can use whatever library you wish. Boost is C++ so you are fine.
Also, the whole clause is there to prevent Flash from happening on the iPhone.
There really is not that much to worry about.
~~~
jason_slack
So my app and the libraries that I use must all be C++ or C or Objective-C.
So this is why entities like Unity are crying fowl?
~~~
cpr
Or use the JavascriptCore engine that's exposed as part of Webkit.
That's how Titantium and Appcelerator are getting by.
(To answer your question: No, they must be a bunch of chickens. ;-)
~~~
jason_slack
Damn typo, ugh, slightly embarrassing!
~~~
Magneus
Can't you just edit the post?
...Or maybe you can pretend it was some sort of clever play on words next
time. :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rollendurchmesserzeitsammler (Real Time Garbage Collector) - jvoorhis
http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/rollendurchmesserzeitsammler/
======
jvoorhis
This is a real-time conservative garbage collector designed specifically for
computer music with a mechanism to simulate worst case. The overview also
contains even weirder acronyms such as SATBCUCOWIVM.
I was inspired to post this after reading
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3241093> (Optimization Tricks used by the
Lockless Memory Allocator)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How did we make the DOS redirector take up only 256 bytes of memory? - profquail
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2004/11/08/254108.aspx
======
jgrahamc
This sort of stuff used to be really common. When I first started programming
on networks we were using something called Z-NET (800kbps running over
coax[1]). The receive buffer was 128 bytes long.
Myself and another school boy wrote enough of a connection based networking
system that we could reliably send about 100 bytes of data into that receive
buffer. By having our 'protocol stack' then CALL the buffer itself we would
execute the code that we had just sent (i.e. the machine code).
Building up from 100 byte chunks we built a network monitoring and management
system which allowed things like screen mirroring, chat programs, taking
control of the keyboard and broadcast functionality. The entire thing was
written in assembly language.
The actual protocol stack was loaded into a part of the BIOS of the machine
that was unused and we just grabbed a bunch of NOPs and over wrote them. In
the end Research Machines were kind enough to send us the spec. of Z-Net
(which they considered somewhat secret) as we'd already reverse engineered the
entire thing by disassembling the operating system.
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_480Z#Z-Net>
------
Hitchhiker
For the people who do not have CONFIG.SYS / DEBUG.COM / MASM kung-fu , please
do not give up.. Google, wiki and read up. The journey will be fascinating.
Put your lenses on for jump-offs produced by Google on keywords TSR and LIM
EMS for further mind-bending fun.
And quit laughing at HIMEM.SYS
~~~
zura
I always preferred TASM than MASM.
~~~
thibaut_barrere
Seconded :) But maybe that's because I used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++! Just
before discovering (and buying) the Watcom compiler.
------
allenbrunson
Kids, I am old enough to have written a DOS TSR in 8086 assembler! Sadly, you
likely have no idea what I'm talking about. Suffice to say, I understand this
article completely.
~~~
Hitchhiker
I am 29 now. Guilty of the crime of TSR at 13. I officially declare everyone
who's commenting on this thread brothers including the brave soul who visited
us from the world of Ruby.
~~~
thibaut_barrere
It hasn't got to be one or another.
I'm visiting from the world of Ruby too, yet I was deep in masm/tasm, 386 dos
extenders back then :)
~~~
Hitchhiker
nod. My latest vice is Python. Oddly enough, still doing low-level stuff
thanks to WDK.
------
ajtaylor
I remember seeing mention of "A20" in old BIOS settings, but I never knew what
it did. Today, I know: it enabled access a 64k RAM region.
~~~
derleth
It makes more sense when you know that 'A20 line' stands for '20th address
line', and 2^20 (two to the 20th power) is one megabyte, so you need 20 bits
to give unique addresses to all of the bytes in one megabyte.
~~~
pgeorgi
Since those lines start counting at A0, it's the 21st bit.
The thing is, with 20 bits you can address one megabyte, but without a 21st
line, any calculated offset (be it indirect addressing or, more commonly,
segments) will roll over.
For compatibility with some ancient programs that exploited the rollover
(access 0xfffff+0x400 -> 0x3ff), 80286+ gained the "A20 Gate", which allows to
simulate the rollover effect (by always forcing A20, the 21st line, to 0) or
not (in which case you can go above 1MB using offsets).
Note that the A20 Gate is only active in 16bit modes, otherwise even more fun
trickery becomes possible (since half the 32bit accesses with A20 pulled low
would change, too)
------
0x12
djgpp ftw.
This was a fun read, and what is scary is how much of this memory is fresh as
newly plucked fruits with uncounted boxes full of APIs that have long gone to
dust sitting besides it.
Maybe one day it will come in handy again.
In case you don't know what djgpp is: <http://www.delorie.com/>
~~~
epenn
I miss DJGPP. When I was first learning C back in the days when DOS ruled my
world, DJGPP is almost invariably what I used. I clicked the "by DJ Delorie"
link on his page and saw that he now works for Redhat working on GCC. Strange
or not, that continuity brought a smile to my face.
Also found this quote on the History of DJGPP page: _DJGPP was born around
1989 (originally called djgcc), when Richard Stallman spoke at a meeting of
the Northern New England Unix Users Group (NNEUUG) at Data General, where I
then worked. I asked if the FSF ever planned on porting gcc to MS-DOS (I
wanted to use it to write a 32-bit operating system for PCs), and he said it
couldn't be done because gcc was too big and MS-DOS was a 16-bit operating
system. Challenge in hand, I began._
I like his moxie.
------
rbanffy
Well... I don't want to brag much about it, but on the Apple II+ (I relied on
rotines in ROM and it wouldn't work on a plain II) I did a "window stacker" in
about 1K of 6502 code... People used it for dialog boxes.
------
1amzave
Neat stuff -- note that the Linux kernel (and probably others, I'd guess) uses
a similar technique to tag code/data that's only used during initialization.
It gets put in a dedicated section of the kernel (or module thereof) that's
discarded once it's up and running so it can reclaim some space. (See
include/linux/init.h in the kernel source tree.)
------
monochromatic
I learned to program in Ruby and what is this?
~~~
Zev
These are the shoulders of the giants that you stand on.
(or: the fun stuff that you never get to see anymore.)
------
wazoox
Just a small off-topic notice: He's got the Raymond Chen blog address wrong,
it's <http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/>
Check it, it's really enjoyable (even for a rabid Unixoid GPL lover like yours
truly).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ammonia: Zero-carbon fertiliser, fuel and energy store - mhandley
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/green-ammonia/
======
mhandley
I posted this because I haven't heard much about ammonia being used as both a
fuel and an energy store for renewable energy. The full report goes into much
more detail: [https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-
ammon...](https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-
ammonia/green-ammonia-policy-briefing.pdf)
It's part of a series in the Royal Societies Low Carbon Energy Programme:
[https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-
carbon-e...](https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-
energy-programme/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Amazon Kinesis - nphase
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/11/amazon-kinesis-real-time-processing-of-streamed-data.html
======
zhaodaxiong
As a team member helped built the service, I would like to offer some of my
personal understanding. I am not with Amazon now, and all my views are based
on public information on the website.
Like all AWS offerings, Kinesis is a platform. It looks like kafka + storm,
with fully integrated ecosystem with other AWS services. From the very
beginning, the reliability, real-time processing, and transparent elasticity
are built in. That's all I can say.
------
mikebabineau
This is essentially a hosted Kafka
([http://kafka.apache.org/](http://kafka.apache.org/)). Given the complexity
of operating a distributed persistent queue, this could be a compelling
alternative for AWS-centric environments. (We run a large Kafka cluster on
AWS, and it is one of our highest-maintenance services.)
~~~
kodablah
We are about to deploy Kafka in our ecosystem and I am curious what
maintenance you have? Can you explain or write a blog post? Is it on 0.8 beta?
We are choosing Kafka over other solutions like RabbitMQ because we like the
persistent txn-log-style messages and how cheap consumers are.
~~~
mikebabineau
We're running 0.7 and most of our problems have been around partition
rebalancing. I'm not the primary engineer on this, but here's my
understanding:
If we add nodes to an existing Kafka cluster, those nodes own no partitions
and therefore send/receive no traffic. A rebalancing event must occur for
these servers to become active. Bouncing Kafka on one of the active nodes is
one way to trigger such an event.
Fortunately, cluster resizing is infrequent. Unfortunately, network
interruptions are not (at least on EC2).
When ZooKeeper detects a node failure (however brief), the node is removed
from the active pool and the partitions are rebalanced. This is desirable. But
when the node comes back online, no rebalancing takes place. The server
remains inactive (as if it were a new node) until we trigger a rebalancing
event.
As a result, we have to bounce Kafka on an active server every few weeks in
response to network blips. 0.8 alleges to handle this better, but we'll see.
Handle-jiggling aside, I'm a fan of Kafka and the types of systems you can
build around it. Happy to put you in touch with our Kafka guy, just email me
([email protected]). Loggly's also running Kafka on AWS - would be
interesting to hear their take on this.
~~~
idunno246
Pushing a couple terabytes a day through kafka 0.7. We don't use zookeeper on
the producing side and it alleviates this a lot. It's a little more brittle
pushing host/partition configs around, but we accepted loss of data in this
system and its worth the simplicity of it. Also played with the idea of
putting an elb in front.
I'm having way more trouble with the consumer being dumb with the way it
distributes topics and partitions. End up with lots of idle consumers, while
others are way above max.
~~~
mikebabineau
Thanks for the note, we'll have to take a look at that sort of configuration.
Your consumer problems sounds similar to one we had. Root cause was that the
number of consumers exceeded the number of active partitions. The tricky part
was that the topic was only distributed across part of the cluster (because of
the issue described in my parent post), so we had fewer partitions than we
thought.
------
pvnick
What's going on with Amazon recently? We're seeing a torrent of new
technologies and platform offerings. Are we finally catching a glimpse of
Bezos's grand scheme?
~~~
skorgu
Amazon's reinvent conference[0] has been going on over the last few days, it's
an obvious time/place to announce.
[0] [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)
~~~
pvnick
Oh, derp. Well that makes more sense.
------
kylequest
The 50KB limit on data (base64 encoded data) will be a gotcha you'll have to
deal with similar to the size limit in DynamoDB. Now you'll have to split your
messages so they fit inside the Kinesis records and then you'll have to
reassemble them on the other end... Not fun :-)
------
kylequest
Having to base64 encode data is also a bit awkward. They should be passing
PutRecord parameters as HTTP headers (which they are already using for other
properties) and let users pass raw data in the body.
------
itchyouch
It's interesting to see these messaging platforms and the new use cases
starting to hit the mainstream a la kinesis, storm, kafka.
Some interesting things about these kinds of measaging platforms.
Many exhanges/algo/low-latency/hft firms have large clusters of these kinds of
systems for trading. The open source stuff out there is kind of different from
the typical systems that revolve around a central engine/sequencer (matching
engine).
There's a large body of knowledge in the financial industry on building low-
latency versions of these message processors. Here's some interesting
possibilities. On an e5-2670 with 7122 solarflare cards running openonload,
its possible to pump a decent 2M 100byte messages/sec with a packetization of
around 200k pps.
Avergae latency through a carefully crafted system using efficient data
structures and in-memory only stores can pump and process a message through in
about 15 microseconds with the 99.9 percent median at around 20 micros. This
is a message hitting a host, getting sent to an engine, then back to the host
and back.
Using regular interrupt based processing and e1000s probably yields around
500k msgs/sec with average latency through the system at around 100 micros and
99.9% medians in the 30-40 millisecond range.
Its useful to see solarflares tuning guidelines on building uber-efficient
memcache boxes that can handle something like 7-8M memcache requests/sec.
------
carterschonwald
Before I clicked the link I was hoping Amazon was releasing a clone of the
kinesis keyboard. Anyone else have that initial hope? :-)
~~~
rbanffy
I wondered why would Amazon enter the keyboard market...
~~~
ewoodrich
They already have:
[http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-KU-0833-Wired-Keyboard-
Bl...](http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-KU-0833-Wired-Keyboard-
Black/dp/B005EOWBHC)
~~~
cypher543
I could be wrong, but I don't think Amazon actually designs or manufactures
anything under the AmazonBasics brand. It's like buying a "white box" PC from
a company like MSI and reselling it under your own brand name.
------
dylanz
Can someone with enough knowledge give a high level comparison to Kinesis
compared with something like Storm or Kafka?
------
vosper
I'm really excited about this - data streaming has been a crucial missing
piece for building large-scale apps on AWS.
If the performance and pricing are right it's going to relieve a lot of
headaches in terms of infrastructure management.
~~~
cjwebb
Forgive my ignorance, but what would this potentially replace?
Kafka/Storm/Something else?
~~~
hatred
Yep, Amazon's version of Kafka/Storm with pay as you go minus the headaches of
maintaining the cluster.
------
andrewcooke
_it is possible that the MD5 hash of your partition keys isn 't evenly
distributed_
how? i mean, apart from poisson stats / shot noise, obviously (and which is
noise, so you can't predict it anyway).
thinking some more, i guess this (splitting and merging partitions in a non-
generic way) is to handle when a consumer is slow for some reason. perhaps
that partition is backing up because the consumer crashed.
but then why not say that, instead of postulating the people are going to have
uneven hashes?
[edit:] maybe they allow duplicates?
~~~
twotwotwo
Yes, duplicates, I think. Looks like the partition key can be set to whatever
you want, so maybe you log, I dunno, hits sharded by page, and your homepage
gets a ton. I'd lean towards sharding randomly to avoid that, but, eh, they're
just giving you enough rope to mess up your logging pipe with.
------
fizx
Seems like a useful reworking of SQS, but all the hard work is being done in
the client: "client library automatically handle complex issues like adapting
to changes in stream volume, load-balancing streaming data, coordinating
distributed services, and processing data with fault-tolerance."
Unfortunately, there's no explanation of the mechanics of coordination and
fault tolerance, so the hard part appears to be vaporware.
~~~
vosper
> Unfortunately, there's no explanation of the mechanics of coordination and
> fault tolerance, so the hard part appears to be vaporware.
I think it's unfair to call it vaporware - Amazon doesn't tend to release
vaporware. You can also be fairly confident this has been in private beta for
some time, so we'll probably see a few blog posts about it from some of their
privileged (big spending) clients - typically someone like Netflix or AirBnB.
But I agree it would be nice to get some more information on the details.
As for the client library handling load-balancing, fault tolerance, etc - that
might not be ideal, but as long as I don't have to do it myself then it might
be okay.
~~~
fizx
The client handling it is ideal from a systems perspective, because the app
won't forget to be fault tolerant on its connection to the server.
Its less ideal from a maintenance perspective, because there will need to be
feature-rich clients in Java and C (with dynamic language bindings).
Applications will be running many many versions of the clients. Also, for
coordination, the clients will need to communicate, so there may be
configuration and/or firewall issues for the app to resolve.
It will be interesting to see Amazon make this tradeoff for what I believe is
the first time.
~~~
aluskuiuc
It's not exactly the first time, but close - the Simple Workflow Service has
client helper libraries for both Java and Ruby.
------
kylequest
The Kinesis consumer API is somewhat equivalent to the Simple Consumer API in
Kafka. You'll have to manage the consumed sequence number yourself. There's no
higher level consumer API to keep track of the consumed sequence numbers.
~~~
kylequest
Looks like AWS decide to put this capability in their Kinesis Client Library,
which keeps track of the checkpoints in DynamoDB.
------
kylequest
Interesting I/O limitations in Kinesis:
1MB/s writes with 1000 writes/s 2MB/s reads with 5 read/s
~~~
senderista
Per shard.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Singular Value Decomposition Tutorial - roundsquare
http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-articles/articles/30-singular-value-decomposition-tutorial.html
======
ivankirigin
After I learned all the details in grad school, I found out how to implement
it in a real world setting:
[U,S,V] = svd(X)
~~~
sprachspiel
Unless X has 17,770*480,189 elements like the netflix dataset. Then you can
use something like this: <http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html>
The site is currently down, google chache link:
[http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:h4Ljyun3gUcJ:sifter.org...](http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:h4Ljyun3gUcJ:sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html+simon+funk+try+this+at+home)
------
gane5h
The SVD connects the four fundamental subspaces of a linear system. I was
fortunate to receive this great insight from one of Strang's lectures. I
highly recommend you watch one of his videos online on this particular topic.
This post doesn't do full justice to the beauty of the SVD. Intuitively, you
are trying to compute a transformation that diagonalizes the covariance matrix
of the data. Computing the covariance has two problems: 1) this is a O(n^2)
operation and 2) can lead to big numerical errors for really small values in
the matrix.
By creative use of elementary matrix operations, the SVD gives you the
transformation on the original matrix. If you are interested in just the first
few singular vectors, certain math libraries also support an _economical_ mode
that does just this.
------
sweis
I messed around with analyzing US senate votes using a SVD several years ago:
<http://saweis.net/svd/>
~~~
roundsquare
Wow, this is really great. The data seems to to support the claim that
politics has gotten more divisive over the past 2 decades. (I get unreasonably
happy when data actually supports a broad claim). Very creative way to show
this.
Have you thought about going further back? I'd be curious to see this on
voting records as far back as possible, just to see what trends might have
happened.
------
mattrepl
For anyone that finds the posted site painful on the eyes, here's another
introduction to SVD that is all on one page by default and isn't crowded by
advertisements.
[http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-
system-i...](http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in-
ruby/)
~~~
codexon
Or you could just use the print version.
[http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-
articles/art...](http://www.puffinwarellc.com/index.php/news-and-
articles/articles/30-singular-value-decomposition-
tutorial.html?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=)
------
manvsmachine
Another good one: <http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/svd.html>
and its HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=736618>
------
cf
Don't most people use NNMF instead these days?
~~~
Tichy
What is NNMF?
~~~
cf
Nonnegative matrix factorization. It was the advantages of keeping a sparse
matrix sparse, can be iteratively created and generally the bellkor team's
matrix factorization of choice.
------
pz
everyone loves to reference the SVD because the concepts are principled and
intuitive. but i've found that, as often as it is brought up in conversation,
its rarely used in practice. anyone here used SVD in a production setting?
~~~
KonaB
Rarely used in practice??? Dude, are you being facetious?? SVD is the
sledgehammer that cracks any problem you come up against...
~~~
pz
really? it doesn't scale and is not amenable to online updates. unless...
wait... are YOU being facetious?
~~~
KonaB
SVD solves most problems I need to solve. But then, I conjecture we are in
different fields.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Dog Days are Over - alagu
http://notmysock.org/blog/misc/the-dog-days-are-over
======
sanxiyn
Contrary to my expectation, this post was quite upbeat. Good for him.
------
tomkit
Great insight and objective elaboration into the Zynga culture. "Adapting to
thrive" and "treat[ing] crises differently" is what made this guy have a fair-
headed and upbeat retrospective instead of it deteriorating into a rant that
happens so often.
------
DividesByZero
I that this post reflects more on the author than it does on the organisation.
The challenges the author overcame are mostly to do with organisational
frictions and processes that make Zynga sound like a terrible place to be for
engineers.
Good for the author, not so great for Zynga to lose someone who could tolerate
their environment.
------
mattdeboard
Very classy farewell blog post.
------
dmor
Sounds like the right trajectory.
Yahoo! < Zynga < next thing
------
mycodebreaks
Product Managers can be obnoxious at times.
~~~
krob
At a lot of companies, the project manager is the first line of defense
against a late project, it's their job to harass their people to move quicker,
otherwise they are often the first to be on the chopping block if things don't
go smoothly. It's their job to fire ineffective employees when they notice
slowdowns or incompetence.
~~~
mycodebreaks
Product Managers don't have to put long hours at work when the schedule they
came up with is unreasonable. Engineers have to make adjustments, put long
hours to make things work.
Product Managers should be doing better than just shouting in morning status
meetings.
------
underwater
@gopalv82, your first comment seems to have got your account hellbanned. No
one will see your comments.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Open Letter to Brogrammers - rosser
http://tacit.livejournal.com/588807.html
======
baweaver
As much as it sucks to be in the recieving end of misogynistic douche bags,
can we all get over this nonsensical notion that one sex is objectively
better? While we're at it, that how hardcore a programmer us is just as
irrelevant as their sex.
All this does is spew more hate, which is doing nothing. Those women are
incredibly good, fine, but you still come off as very confrontational. Can we
all just act with a little bit more civility and tact on such matters? It's
irrelevant if the 'other side' fails to, be the better person.
~~~
guncheck
I agree on this point. This seems more like being a white knight than
anything. I have nothing against female programmers, in fact, I actually wish
more would come into the profession. But this is a bit much.
There will always be assholes everywhere you go. Labeling all male programmers
as misogynists is kinda insulting.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why You Can’t Trust Google - dnewcome
http://gigaom.com/2009/09/24/why-you-cant-trust-google/
======
vijayr
Yet another misleading headline - it should be something like "Why google apps
is not reliable" or such.
This headline reads like Google violated some privacy stuff...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Language complexity, measured by how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has - acidflask
https://gist.github.com/jiahao/8b19775cee3a6d51706acf0a8c0ec376
======
dietrichepp
I love these metrics that are 99% meaningless but you still want to know how
your language compares. Like average identifier length, source tree directory
depth, etc.
~~~
sdesol
If you are into novelty metrics, you might find the following interesting:
[http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm](http://imgur.com/a/xhxtm)
It shows how actively the gitignore files are modified.
~~~
cloverich
"Novelty Metrics" \-- I kind of want to put that on my resume just to see what
happens with it. Or, I could imagine an entertaining blog existing solely
based on that premise.
~~~
kbenson
You might really enjoy the Strange Maps[1] section of bigthink.com. There are
some real wonderful ones in the past entries. I have this in my feed, but look
at it far too infrequently for how interesting it looks.
1: [http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-
maps](http://bigthink.com/articles?blog=strange-maps)
------
mpermar
A more accurate way imho to see this data is: "Tooling support, measured by
how many rules GitHub's .gitignore has"
~~~
ChemicalWarfare
exactly. tooling and framework config files. for 'pre-compiled' languages also
build dirs but that doesn't necessarily mean the language is more complex.
------
czardoz
This measures the number of rules in .gitignore files, not language
complexity.
~~~
deathanatos
In Github's .gitignore template, too.
For example, most of the entries in the Python one are utterly inane, and
won't apply to your project. You can easily trim that file to 1/5 it's size.
It includes the ignores for a bunch of directories I've never see any project
ever have, two unit test frameworks, two web frameworks, pip's files that are
already better covered by virtualenv ignores, _four_ different ways of naming
your virtualenvs…
This isn't measuring language complexity; this is someone trying to pre-cover
any potential case generated by any popular-today third party library.
~~~
danielbarla
The visual studio one seems to cover just about every way you could use VS,
and every plugin made for it. This measurement comments more on the neatness
of the IDE(s) than any kind of language complexity.
~~~
paulirwin
Agreed. VS supports dozens of languages across web, desktop, mobile, etc. C#,
VB, F#, C, C++, JavaScript, T-SQL, Python... and that's just what I can list
off the top of my head. Even with single languages in the list it's not
apples-to-apples. "Language complexity" should be removed from the link title.
------
SeriousM
Oh my dear... That's so pointless... It's like judging your intelect depending
on the amount you dump every day.
------
MAGZine
Interesting, though especially for the entries in the list that are
frameworks, you could conceivably just bury all of the ugly stuff in a
`framework` folder, and have only one ignore.
~~~
zamalek
Visual Studio seems to be moving in this direction: I've noticed a .vs folder
and the .suo seems to live in it for now. I guess more and more will be moved
into it as time goes on, but considering the .gitignore contains VS6 ignores
we'll probably be stuck with the large file forever.
------
KingMob
I'm not at all surprised Magento is number 3. I've never seen anything so
simultaneously overly- and poorly-engineered.
It's like someone combined the worst parts of 10-year-old Java (XML
configurations over conventions, AbstractEntityBeanFactory-style classes) and
PHP (no namespace, autoloading override plugins) into one awful mess. Throw in
the use of EAV everywhere, and the "schema" is a nightmare to decipher.
Maybe version 2 fixes some of these issues, but Magento 1.x is awful.
~~~
DCoder
Magento 2 fixes the "no namespace" issue. Everything else is still there, and
some parts are taken to eleven.
A while ago, I ran PHPStorm's code inspections against Magento 1.x core code,
and the result wasn't very encouraging:
[https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR](https://imgur.com/RMxWEgR)
------
ramenmeal
TIL visual studio is a language.
~~~
koder2016
Most developers don't know the difference between IDE, language, library,
framework, platform and technology.
~~~
Luyt
You got downvoted for your sarcasm, but you have a point. Some people think
that Ruby classes are instantiated using the _create_ method.
------
pmontra
Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Looking at them, half
of the files makes sense, the other half is really project and dev env
dependent and they don't seem to be made for the same environment. Hardly
comparable.
[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitigno...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Ruby.gitignore)
[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitign...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/Rails.gitignore)
~~~
krzrak
> Ruby 25 and Rails 23, really? I'd expected the opposite. Is there really a
> difference between 25 and 23?
------
HugoDaniel
Why no JavaScript ?
~~~
petetnt
There's really no common patterns of just plain JavaScript files being ignored
(to some extend, other cases are mostly covered by the `node` file).
~~~
vorg
Looks like a similar situation with Apache Groovy. Only "grails" and "gradle"
are in there.
------
oneloop
What a useless exercise. It seems to me that we're seeming more and more of
these irrelevant posts hitting the front page.
~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Be the change you want to see in this forum.
~~~
emodendroket
How do you propose he prevents inane content from being upvoted by others?
~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
If oneloop doesn't like the submissions that have been made, oneloop (who
appears to have submitted a total of "2" links in their posting history)
should submit more of the kind of things they feel is appropriate.
~~~
oneloop
Sure, if everyone submitted lots of good stuff it would be less likely that
we'd see this garbage on the front page. But for me individually to make a
difference I would have to come up with insane amounts of stuff myself. I
don't have time for that. If I find good stuff sure, I'll share it. But if
you're suggesting that I should spend more of my time looking for good stuff
around the web for the sole purpose of helping out the quality of an
aggregator website, you got another thing coming.
~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
You seem to be ok with spending more of your time complaining about it.
------
leecarraher
at least it has a nice power-law distribution. otherwise pretty useless...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Thanks for the Advice, Grandpa – Debunking Conventional Startup Wisdom - jv22222
https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/thanks-for-the-advice-grandpa-debunking-conventional-startup-wisdom/
======
compy234
Great article! I think this really highlights and challenges some of the
assumptions that newcomers make about how they approach their ideas and build
their companies.
Too many people are focused on protecting their ideas and finding funding (to
the point where they ask potential investors to sign NDAs) that they never
focus on the most important thing: the product and whether or not it solves
issues for potential customers.
It's always good to see a call to action for future bootstrappers and
micropreneurs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: K8up – Kubernetes Backup Operator Based on Restic - tobru
https://k8up.io/
======
bryanlarsen
Any advantages over velero?
[https://heptio.github.io/velero/master/restic.html](https://heptio.github.io/velero/master/restic.html)
~~~
yebyen
It says 404 there isn't a GitHub Pages site here... where did heptio docs move
to now that they are VMware?
~~~
mroche
[https://velero.io/docs](https://velero.io/docs)
------
glesperance
We've been using k8s-snapshots[1] Very easy to setup and use. Very simple to
add snapshots too.
How does this compare?
[1]
[https://github.com/miracle2k/k8s-snapshots](https://github.com/miracle2k/k8s-snapshots)
~~~
tobru
* K8up uses Restic, k8s-snapshots Tarsnap
* K8up doesn't do snapshots but file-based backups supporting any RWX storage and to some extend RWO (still to be improved)
* K8up can do pre-backup tasks like dumping a database to have application consistent backups
* K8up has a great amount of monitoring backed in for providing a good overview via Prometheus if the backups really work
* K8up can send webhooks about backups available to allow integrations into third party control panels. F.e. Lagoon[1] uses it
[1] [https://github.com/amazeeio/lagoon](https://github.com/amazeeio/lagoon)
~~~
rsync
"* K8up uses Restic ..."
Does that mean I could use the SFTP transport of restic and send my K8up
generated backups to any old SFTP server ?
~~~
tobru
In theory yes, we need to implement support for more remotes. Please open a
GitHub issue so we can take care.
------
tamalsaha001
You can also try Stash
[https://github.com/stashed/stash](https://github.com/stashed/stash) . This
has been in use since 2017 and always worked with Restic.
Disclaimer: My company, AppsCode is the primary developer behind Stash.
~~~
SomaticPirate
How does this compare? It appears to only backup chosen apps, not necessarily
a whole cluster?
~~~
tobru
K8up currently is optimized for PVs and will probably be able to backup
objects in the future. It's not meant for cluster disaster recovery or full-
cluster backup. (Deployment artefacts should anyways come from GitOps)
------
yebyen
I actually have a cluster that I need to tear down and do disaster recovery
practice on, but didn't know how, so I'm still paying for the "important data"
that I generated on it.
I will use it tonight, thank you friend!
------
joseph
Cool. I was about to hack a CronJob to take some backups with pg_dump, but I'm
going to give this a try.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What is causing this bug in HN? - bhudman
This may be old news to you, but there seems to be a bug in the comments count being displayed.<p>I was looking at an old news item that was on HN, and it was pushed way back. When I did get to the article (the item was in the 14 hundreds..), I noticed that the # of comments is displayed incorrectly - the number of comments is missing completely.<p>https://img.skitch.com/20101221-b5rea4wjxxkgqpyp2mst3ekswc.jpg<p>That question does have a bunch of comments..<p>https://img.skitch.com/20101221-8m4b9ffd8a9kuyjaaw8jnaiy1y.jpg<p>I am suspecting that the count function that counts the comments is slow in responding? Could this happen because the DB is taking too long to get the results back? Note that I did not find the counts to be incorrect - it just does not show up.
======
pg
That's not a bug, that's an optimization. I think I made this change around 9
months ago.
~~~
bhudman
I noticed that counts show up sometime, and sometimes it doesn't. Since this
is not consistent behavior, I assumed this is a bug.
I'd be curious to know why this changes.. I am trying to find out the most
common news source on HN based on comments.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chernobyl zone shows decline in biodiversity - all
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10819027
======
blots
Why don't they cite the publication? Is there a publication?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Live Twitter Sentiment Analysis for #GE2017 - DizzyEwok
http://xavkearney.com/sentiment
======
adamwoodetc
> The results are only based on the tweets posted in the last few seconds,
> hence the sometimes dramatic variation that you may see.
This thing is going to be wild to watch during the televised debates.
~~~
DizzyEwok
That was the plan!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Fury at 'Bodega' tech startup that aims to put corner shops out of business - kawera
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/13/tech-startup-bodega-corner-stores
======
arkitaip
I don't see how these tiny "vending machines" can be considered to compete
with bodegas. Especially since many bodegas carry products targeting
immigrants, whereas these vending machines to carry the absolute bare minimum
of the most mainstream products imaginable.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is the purpose of school to create obedient workers? Questioning a narrative - paulpauper
http://greyenlightenment.com/is-the-purpose-of-school-to-create-obedient-workers-debunking-a-popular-narrative/
======
gregjor
Author should study some of the people who already “questioned the narrative.”
Ivan Ilich, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto come to mind.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: I Remember My First Time – Share fun and informative 1st time experiences - IRMFT
http://www.iremembermyfirsttime.com/
======
fiatjaf
I think there are already too much "sharing" in this world.
Also, there was a Google service for people to publicize experiences they had
and incentivize other people for doing it, so everyone would comment. I forgot
the name, but the logo was a mustache, I think.
I liked it, it was very clean, but they closed the service.
------
IRMFT
IRMFT (I Remember My First Time) is a sharing platform for fun and
informational first time experiences. You are presented with a statement (i.e.
"I remember my first time buying a car") and are asked to rate the experience
as either positive, have never done it (virgin), or negative.
We are currently looking for feedback and beta users.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling - tenkabuto
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html
======
fyfy18
Does anyone know why more countries haven’t taken a stance like Germany with
glass bottles? For those who aren’t aware, in Germany there are standard glass
bottle shapes that are used for beer and soft drinks. Instead of being
recycled, the bottle is cleaned, refilled and relabelled - most likely by a
different producer. The bottles can be reused up to 50 times.
A lot of countries have the infrastructure of refunding a deposit when a
bottle is returned, but it sounds like most of those are just going to end up
in a landfill.
~~~
siberianbear
The United States used to have this for soft drinks. I remember taking my
father's empty Dr. Pepper bottles back to the supermarket for gas money as a
teenager. The rebate (just a refund of what you paid for it when you bought
it) was about $1 per eight-pack of bottles... this was around 1990 or so. I
remember how heavy and sturdy these re-usable bottles were.
This was phased out sometime in the 1990s. I guess it was just too costly for
the bottlers.
~~~
JeanMarcS
Same in France where when I was young (late 70’s until mid 80’s) you could
return your glass bottles and exchange for money.
But then PET bottles start to rise and the returnable policies eventually
disappeared in most country.
~~~
dagw
Here in Sweden at least you can return PET bottles for money (about
0.10-0.20€).
~~~
yeezul
Same in Quebec. I believe other provinces in Canada have similar policies.
$ 0.05 on all non-refillable single-fill containers that are 450 ml or less in
size
$ 0.10 on all single-fill and glass containers up to 450 ml size
$ 0.20 on all single-fill containers larger than 450 ml
$ 0.05 for each soft drink container sold
------
RyanShook
I think this is a sign of things to come. The developed world has become so
used to benefitting from China’s willingness to take our trash, dangerous
labor and low paying work that we’re outraged and shocked when they decide
they no longer have to.
~~~
mc32
> that we’re outraged and shocked when they decide they no longer have to.
Who's outraged? Maybe some places were caught by surprise at the change in
policy (perh no fair warning), but I don't recall any outrage. It's their
right to refuse. I mean, its a bit different from say OPEC in the 70s suddenly
artificially constraining supply --no one would like the US to constrain wheat
or corn exports for example.
But this is altogether different. It's probably a good thing as people may be
forced to think more in a cradle-to-grave product life-cycle and thus make
things with that built-in.
Given the added costs, it may well bring a few jobs back home to boot.
~~~
dao-
> no one would like the US to constrain wheat or corn exports for example.
Are you sure? I don't know much about US agriculture exports, but the
aggressively subsidised exports from the EU are known to cripple agriculture
in Africa.
~~~
mc32
Pretty sure constraining supply would have a ripple effect on food prices
everywhere because those two grains are the basis for much of "processed"
foods as well as feed for meat producers, etc.
What poor African counties arguably don't need is "dumped" donated aid which
undercuts their farmers and weakens their agriculture and makes them
increasingly dependent on foreign aid as well as enriches and strengthens the
position of those in charge of distributing this largesse (i.e. corrupt local
officials)
~~~
AstralStorm
Depends on the country in question and whether there is a humanitarian crisis.
Moist of these are avoidable, such as droughts and desertification of
pastures, but African farmers cannot afford measures to do it and the minor
change from doing direct aid will not help.
------
gumby
> Every year, Britain sends China enough recyclables to fill up 10,000
> Olympic-size swimming pools, according to Greenpeace U.K. The United States
> exports more than 13.2 million tons of scrap paper and 1.42 m...
Wait, so is it volume or weight? Aren’t editors supposed to catch this stuff?
At least the Olympic swimming pool and short ton are official units in some
jurisdictions: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-
conv...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-
converter.html)
~~~
dao-
Trash has both volume and weight. It's not either-or in the cited sentences,
and the two numbers aren't supposed to be directly comparable nor convertible.
~~~
mc32
Ok, sure, but why have the reader try to do the conversion when they, the
writers, should "standardize" for the reader so as to let them read on without
interrupting their thought processing.
~~~
dao-
Like I said, it wasn't supposed to be directly convertible. The point of these
sentences was that the UK and the US produce gigantic amounts of waste. That's
it. Who of the two is worse is besides the point, and absolute numbers would
only tell part of the story anyway. Since the US is much bigger, we already
know it produces more waste.
Edited to add: The sentences also talk about different kinds of waste. Apples
to oranges really. There's no point in converting.
------
j_s
Another article on this topic was discussed last month; I look forward to
further updates on this issue:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827)
_Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' (npr.org) 318 points
by srameshc 39 days ago | 233 comments_
It sounds like recycling will be going to the dump until someone is willing to
process it for slightly less money.
~~~
ISL
Until environmentalists sue on the grounds that our "Recycle bin" should be
getting recycled (as it should).
I've been grazing for US and non-Chinese recyclers in which to invest, but
haven't yet found any good values.
------
drdrey
Is it weird that we take throwing stuff away in the trash for granted? We know
that whatever we throw in there (for free) will end up in a landfill or
incinerated, and somehow that's okay? I find it hard to tell that to my kids
with a straight face
~~~
guelo
for free? In all USA cities I have lived there is a fee for residential trash
pickup.
~~~
drdrey
Yeah 'for free' is a bit of a stretch, I was thinking more about public trash
cans than residential. Still, the idea is you can throw away pretty much
whatever, no questions asked, and someone will put it away so you don't have
to think about what happens to it
------
ggm
The relationship between this article, and the one on the end of cheap clothes
in charity/goodwill shops into the supply chain for "shoddy" comes to mind
~~~
jngreenlee
Can you link to the Goodwill article please?
~~~
grzm
I believe they're referring to "No One Wants Used Clothes Anymore"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16168410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16168410)
~~~
ggm
Yes. Different economy, different drivers, but a similar global economic
decision logic consequence I suspect.
------
Simulacra
Perhaps this will spur American innovation to recycle reduce plastic
domestically.
~~~
siquick
The American innovators are too busy figuring out ways to make people click
more ads or to blow people up. /s (kind of)
~~~
adventured
Or, you know, building numerous space launch and transport systems (Boeing,
SpaceX, Blue Origin) to go to the moon again and Mars.
Figuring out how to cure disease with CRISPR. Editas, Intellia, Crispr
Therapeutics, and The Broad Institute, all just in Boston.
Leading the world in artificial intelligence, with only China as a close
competitor, and everyone else _dramatically_ far behind.
Leading the world in cloud computing and cloud software broadly, with only
China as a close competitor, and everyone else _dramatically_ far behind.
What are Europe's ten largest technology companies again? I really can't
recall.
Leading the world, along with China, on everything mobile. There are no close
competitors anywhere except for Samsung.
Leading the world in electric vehicles and driverless vehicle technology.
Leading the world in biotech, basically across the board. There are one or two
major competitors in Europe doing interesting things in biotech (using US
technology purchased from the likes of Genentech, InterMune, Genzyme, etc),
and that's it.
Dominating pretty much every segment of technology in every country that isn't
named China. In fact, dominating to such a hilarious degree, the world has to
aggressively try to curb the US tech hegemony because it's too overwhelming.
Or you know, sure, figuring out ad clicking. Yeah, that's it.
~~~
mping
You forgot leading the world in inequality and healthcare costs. For me, far
far more important than going to the moon or making a car drive itself.
~~~
tengbretson
> You forgot leading the world in inequality
I'm not even going to say citation needed. This is just false.
~~~
siquick
Leading the world is a big stretch but "The income inequality in the United
States, according to the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0 is
perfectly equal and 1 is perfectly unequal) is about 0.45, which is awful..."
[http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/wealth-gap-
america/](http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/wealth-gap-america/)
[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html)
But for the worlds richest and most technologically innovative country that's
a terrible charge to have on your record.
------
fouc
I feel that the first person to automate recycling and "mining" of trash at a
large scale will make a lot of money. And do the world a huge favour.
------
Analemma_
I think this can only be a good thing. A depressing percentage of people have
no idea that "recycling" is, for the most part, a lie, and that up until now
most things you "recycled" just went in a dump like everything else, except it
was a dump in China. A wake-up call as to the reality of the situation should
encourage better practices.
~~~
quotemstr
"Recycling is largely ineffective for substances that aren't aluminum" is just
the tip of the iceberg as far as truths we never mention in polite company.
I'm looking forward to a phase change into a society that's more honest with
itself.
~~~
QAPereo
And glass. And steel. And precious metals.
As for an honest society, do you have some historical reference point, or are
you just aiming for utopia?
~~~
ars
Not glass. Yes metal.
Glass is so worthless for recycling, all they do with it is crush it and use
it to cover landfill each night to keep down rodents and dust. That's
considered "recycled".
> As for an honest society, do you have some historical reference point, or
> are you just aiming for utopia?
For some reason greenwashing is really prevalent among people who should know
better (policy makers, scientists, environmentalists). And regular people
desperately want recycling to be a real thing so that they feel better about
themself.
It's a perfect match, leading to the situation we have now.
~~~
yorwba
Broken glass may be essentially worthless, but intact bottles can be cleaned
and refilled. Since that actually happens, I imagine the logistics involved to
be somewhat cost-effective compared to making new glass (or maybe it's all
fueled by subsidies).
~~~
ars
> but intact bottles can be cleaned and refilled
Only a very small percent of them. You are probably thinking of soda bottles,
and yes, they used to do that. But today it's plastic bottles (and I'm glad
for it!). Milk in glass bottles is all but dead.
Most glass these days is jars for olives, and salsa, and tomato sauce, and
other random things, where there is just not scale to collect them. It's not
anymore all uniform, every jar is a difference size.
Beer from the very largest companies might still work, although I think it's
mostly cans now. But there are a lot of small producers, and routing the glass
back to them would be too expensive.
We haven't even touched on how there is basically no point in doing it anyway.
The entire crust of the planet is basically made of glass. We can't run out
without dismantling (discrusting? :) the planet. It's also harmless to dispose
of, just crush it first.
Recycle metal, burn plastic and paper (for energy!! not for disposal!!), crush
and landfill glass and other organics. Those are the most environmentally
friendly options.
~~~
QAPereo
It takes far more energy to make new glass than to clean and reuse old glass.
Even melting existing glass is valuable, as it lowers the melting point of the
raw materials and therefore energy expenditure. Until glass manufacture uses
solar or wind or something similar, it’s an issue.
The problem isn’t a lack of silica, it’s yet more waste of energy and
pollution purely screwing is over.
------
rinka_singh
Classic example of Whataboutism: Is plastic waste from overseas “the reason
why you can’t see blue skies in China?” he asked. “I don’t think so. Go fight
the big battles, not the small battles.”
Way to go China!!! We - all of us need to optimize our manufacturing and
consumption systems to reduce and eliminate waste.
~~~
seanmcdirmid
It probably plays a role in soil pollution and ground water contamination,
china has more than just air pollution problems. China should have put a stop
to this a long time ago, they also drove more expensive but more responsible
options out of business. Eventually, the WTO is going to have a consider
environmental impact as a reason to restrict trade.
------
ktta
List of what is being banned for import is here:
[https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename...](https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/G/TBTN17/CHN1211.pdf)
Plastic seems to be the important part, and 'unsorted paper' is a bit vague.
So I'm thinking bulk of the paper/cardboard products atleast are unaffected.
~~~
emj
You sort out newspaper and officepaper which is pretty ok to recycle by
themselves. A mix of those and e.g. glossy magazines is pretty hard to
recycle, more or less like plastic you need one type of clean plastic to get
good recycled plastic.
------
blondie9x
We need to get off plastic. Gotta stop using plastic bags. And all plastic
disposables that aren't biodegradable.
Reusable bottles and storage containers are absolutely essential.
~~~
AstralStorm
Plastic bags are perfectly fine, as long as they are sturdy and can be used
multiple times. Mandate minimum thickness and price perhaps? Only fabric bags
are better.
Paper bags are about as bad as single use plastic ones. They take a lot of
water to produce and energy to mill. The only difference is they are more
biodegradable in a landfill.
This id's similar to situation with plastic vs glass bottles. Sturdy plastic
ones are better, but since three is no mandate to standardize and make them
sturdy, they get recycled instead of reused. That costs a lot of energy.
(Though less than recycling glass.)
------
lobo_tuerto
I think a more appropriate title would read something like: "... China refuses
to take the West's trash anymore"
------
tmaly
I would love to see packaging switch to corn based plastics or maybe some
other type where the plastic would decompose faster.
~~~
bob_theslob646
Unfortunately most likely not going to happen because of how cheap plastic is.
Fortunately though there is some interesting research in how to break it down.
"From garbage to gold: How advances in plastic recycling can help save the
environment"[[https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/06/advances-
recyclin...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/06/advances-recycling-
save-environment/)]
([https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/06/27/ibm-research-
scientis...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/06/27/ibm-research-scientists-
in-san-jose-find-new-way-to-recycle-plastic/))
>On Monday, IBM Research said that scientists from the Almaden lab found a way
to transform polycarbonates into a stronger type of plastic that doesn’t leach
BPA, a chemical that has sparked health concerns in recent years.
------
fullstackwebdev
there is a technology available called thermal depolymerization that can
convert some of this into energy. I could never figure out if it was not net
positive for the only reason it isn't done. Even if it isn't net positive, if
they placed the recycling center near an area with surplus electricity, and
melt it down into some fuel on low peaks, I think that would be a positive.
Would somebody please tell me if its feasible?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization)
~~~
AstralStorm
Yes, but produces nasty pollution, often chemical and hard to scrub. Consider
it a version 2 of usual burning.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Distributed Call Center - nyc111
Where can I find a phone forwarding system for cell phones? I was thinking to utilize people working from home for a distributed call center. When a call comes in the forwarding software will call an available person. I don't even know where to look for such a system. Thanks for any suggestions.
======
ramon
You'll need to build a solution for that because each business has specific
requirements. There will be a ring group and someone will pick-up the call
from the group that's being ringed. If you have 10 people, 10 people will ring
at the sametime, one will pick-up the phone call.
I can help you with that Gmail ramonck
~~~
nyc111
Thanks. I will contact you. But at this point I'm just investigating and
trying to understand what needs to be done. When you say you need to build a
solution, where is this done? On the phone? On the computer?
------
dexcs
[http://www.live.sipgate.co.uk/](http://www.live.sipgate.co.uk/) for
example...
~~~
nyc111
Unfortunately, sipgati is UK only. I'm in Turkey.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask YC/HN: Where/How Do You Find Your Consulting Contracts/Gigs? - Mystalic
So I'm currently working a full time job, a part-time job, and side projects. I've decided that I'm moving from Chicago to San Fran in April, no matter what.my situation is.<p>I already have a part-time gig lined up (contract essentially), so it seems natural to find one or two more and do consulting/contract work - I can do my work from practically anywhere, it gives me a chance to work on side projects, and I have more autonomy, even if it ends up being more work.<p>So what websites do you visit/what do you usually do for contracts and consulting? I have a large network, but have yet to tell them this is the direction I'm going in.<p>Thanks.
======
physcab
Go to seminars, give seminars, go to conferences, talk at conferences, and
ask.
This is what advice I was given. At school we had someone who was an alum come
in to give a talk about how she got her own show on Discovery Channel (sorry,
I forgot what the name of the show was--it was about doing absurd/impractical
things to be "green" ie beaming solar power on a mountaintop to another place
50 miles away). Basically she got the gig because she was a phenomenal
presenter. Really really engaging. At one of the conferences she presented at,
a scout for the Discovery Channel told her that they wanted a PhD who was
entertaining enough yet had a way to capture the attention of a non-scientific
audience. She flew to NY to audition and was later placed with a team of
engineers and given a $40million budget to design the show.
Moral of the story: Be good at conveying information and stand out with niche.
------
SwellJoe
Word of mouth. Your first job will beget more jobs, if you are good. And, of
course, you have to make it clear in all of your marketing materials (your
blog, business cards, author info in any books or articles you write) that you
are a consultant/contractor working in whatever field you're working in. It
depends on what it is you do...but some fields are so empty of competent
providers and demand is so high (this is definitely the case in system
administration) that you can't help but work if people know about you and know
you're competent and reliable.
------
omnivore
I've been thinking the same thing but I find that consulting is really based
on personal connections and so, that's where I've always got mine. Which makes
it harder in leaner times to get anything done.
I've also found that your personal network are usually supportive and wholly
useful when it comes to generating business, because the work they can get you
is usually not within your realm of expertise or isn't needed when need the
money.
But if you have a part-time gig already lined up when you go, that'd be a good
step. Curious to hear what others think on this subject...
------
Tangurena
I have a friend who is much better at getting work than at completing the
work. So I get his "overflow."
I've had exactly zero success with websites such as guru.com, craigslist and
odesk. Sometimes I treat the more interesting guru.com assignments as ungraded
homework - namely I do them for my own intellectual curiousity for the sake of
"sharpening the saw" even though there is no contact with the person/company
requesting the job - since I don't get the job for some/whatever reason.
------
wallflower
> I've decided that I'm moving from Chicago to San Fran in April, no matter
> what.my situation is.
Congratulations on your commitment!
My friends who freelance full-time - most of them are graphic designers not
programmers - one says "Sometimes I have to pick which bill to skip or delay
payment on but the daily feeling of working for yourself makes it all worth
it."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is it possible to sign up for a Google account without Gmail and phone? - throw_throw
Normally you can sign up for a Google account using your own (non-Gmail email address) here:<p>https://accounts.google.com/SignUpWithoutGmail?hl=en<p>But of late, the reCAPTCHA has been replaced with a phone number requirement.<p>Is there no way to remain anonymous with Google now?
======
smt88
Your phone number is anonymous. In the US, you can go to a store, buy a $40
prepaid phone with cash, and use Google anonymously.
~~~
peter_tonoli
Other jurisdictions, such as Australia, require identity checks
[http://acma.gov.au/Citizen/Phones/Mobile/Prepaid-
mobiles/new...](http://acma.gov.au/Citizen/Phones/Mobile/Prepaid-mobiles/new-
rules-streamline-identity-checking-for-prepaid-mobiles)
~~~
smt88
Burner[1] (or similar services) might be an option for people in such
jurisdictions.
1\. [https://www.burnerapp.com/blog/2015/3/26/burner-is-now-
avail...](https://www.burnerapp.com/blog/2015/3/26/burner-is-now-available-in-
australia)
~~~
ktta
Google often just shows up a 'This number cannot be used for verification'
message.
------
whyagaindavid
Why are u so worried? 1\. Sim card location? Google can get an approximate
location from your IP, WiFi like Starbucks. 2\. If u are so paranoid you need
a different service!
Buy a sim card activate; enable 2FA with authenticator. Destroy sim. I am not
sure google can ASK operator for name and SSN.
------
bsvalley
:) Leave the phone number field empty and click "Next Step". It's an optional
field, they just trick people to collect phone numbers.
~~~
throw_throw
Clicking Next Step then asks you to enter a phone number to either receive a
call or text message for verification.
~~~
FullMtlAlcoholc
If you list you age between 12 - 14, tgey will let you sign up without
providing any other information.
~~~
throw_throw
Haven't been able to replicate this.
~~~
b5ec5a483dfd14
I was able to register an account without a phone number using this method.
------
grawlinson
Ironically, google have stopped enabling me to create gmail accounts because
my phone number has been used too many times for activation.
Doesn't matter anymore, I self-host as much as I can anyway.
~~~
oridecon
how many accounts you had?
~~~
grawlinson
At least three.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Byzantine Generals Problem (1982) [pdf] - typedweb
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf
======
mjb
If you're interested, here's some other interesting reading in this area:
* Castro and Liskov, "Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance", [http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf](http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf) As the title says, this paper describes a practical consensus algorithm that tolerates Byzantine failures. In some ways it is provably optimal.
* Lamport, "Leaderless Byzantine Paxos", [http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/d...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/disc-leaderless-web.pdf) Interesting follow-on from Castro and Liskov, removing the role of the leader.
* Driscoll, "Murphy was an Optimist", [http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/DriscollMurphyv...](http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/DriscollMurphyv19.pdf) These things really happen in practice.
* van Renesse et al, "Byzantine Chain Replication", [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/rvr/newpapers/opodis2012.pdf](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/rvr/newpapers/opodis2012.pdf) Very fast replication in a model that allows Byzantine failures.
~~~
th3iedkid
One more i would like to add to this list is:
Tolerating Byzantine Faults in Database Systems using Commit Barrier
Scheduling [[http://people.csail.mit.edu/benmv/hrdb-
sosp07.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/benmv/hrdb-sosp07.pdf)]
------
kanzure
Here is the explanation that Satoshi Nakamoto was using (and you should
totally read most things written by Lamport):
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090309175840/http://www.bitcoin...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090309175840/http://www.bitcoin.org/byzantine.html)
A number of Byzantine Generals each have a computer and want to attack the
King's wi-fi by brute forcing the password, which they've learned is a certain
number of characters in length. Once they stimulate the network to generate a
packet, they must crack the password within a limited time to break in and
erase the logs, lest they be discovered. They only have enough CPU power to
crack it fast enough if a majority of them attack at the same time.
They don't particularly care when the attack will be, just that they agree. It
has been decided that anyone who feels like it will announce an attack time,
which we'll call the "plan", and whatever plan is heard first will be the
official plan. The problem is that the network is not instantaneous, and if
two generals announce different plans at close to the same time, some may hear
one first and others hear the other first.
They use a proof-of-work chain to solve the problem. Once each general
receives whatever plan he hears first, he sets his computer to solve a
difficult hash-based proof-of-work problem that includes the plan in its hash.
The proof-of-work is difficult enough that with all of them working at once,
it's expected to take 10 minutes before one of them finds a solution and
broadcasts it to the network. Once received, everyone adjusts the hash in
their proof-of-work computation to include the first solution, so that when
they find the next proof-of-work, it chains after the first one. If anyone was
working on a different plan, they switch to this one, because its proof-of-
work chain is now longer.
After about two hours, the plan should be hashed by a chain of 12 proofs-of-
work. Every general, just by verifying the difficulty of the proof-of-work
chain, can estimate how much parallel CPU power per hour was expended on it
and see that it must have required the majority of the computers to produce in
the allotted time. At the least, most of them had to have seen the plan, since
the proof-of-work is proof that they worked on it. If the CPU power exhibited
by the proof-of-work is sufficient to crack the password, they can safely
attack at the agreed time.
~~~
ekajjake
I don't quite understand - what happens if two of them find a hash solution at
the same time and both broadcast it? Then you have the same problem as before,
right?
~~~
sjeohp
The two chains will fall out of sync before they're finished. Chance of all 12
proofs being completed at exactly the same time and broadcast to groups of
identical computing power every step of the way is very small.
~~~
elpachuco
Murphy's law: "If it can happen, it will happen"
~~~
blake8086
What if it involves hash collisions?
~~~
tomp
No SHA2 hash collisions have ever been found.
------
AceJohnny2
This is a classic paper from 1982, which contributed in setting Leslie Lamport
as a top distributed computing researcher.
What did the poster want to indicate?
~~~
jnks
Perhaps because there's a lot of breathless press [1] about Bitcoin solving
this "impossible" problem that was in actually solved decades ago?
[1] [http://nonchalantrepreneur.com/post/70130104170/bitcoin-
and-...](http://nonchalantrepreneur.com/post/70130104170/bitcoin-and-the-
byzantine-generals-problem)
~~~
zik
It's simplistic to say that the problem was "solved decades ago". Every
existing attempt at Byzantine fault tolerance is limited in one way or another
- if you're looking for a solution it's really a matter of choosing a solution
based on which set of painful limitations you want to live with.
Bitcoin's solution is a pretty good one for its use case. Most other solutions
would have trouble scaling like the blockchain can, but in many applications
its very long consensus lead time would be unacceptable.
------
tormeh
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thesaddes...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thesaddestmoment.pdf)
One of the funniest things I've read about tech.
~~~
codemac
JAMES: I announce my desire to go to lunch.
BRYAN: I verify that I heard that you want to go to lunch.
RICH: I also verify that I heard that you want to go to lunch.
CHRIS: YOU DO NOT WANT TO GO TO LUNCH.
JAMES: OH NO. LET ME TELL YOU AGAIN THAT I WANT TO GO TO LUNCH.
CHRIS: YOU DO NOT WANT TO GO TO LUNCH.
BRYAN: CHRIS IS FAULTY.
CHRIS: CHRIS IS NOT FAULTY.
RICH: I VERIFY THAT BRYAN SAYS THAT CHRIS IS FAULTY.
BRYAN: I VERIFY MY VERIFICATION OF MY CLAIM THAT RICH CLAIMS THAT I KNOW CHRIS.
JAMES: I AM SO HUNGRY.
CHRIS: YOU ARE NOT HUNGRY.
RICH: I DECLARE CHRIS TO BE FAULTY.
CHRIS: I DECLARE RICH TO BE FAULTY.
JAMES: I DECLARE JAMES TO BE SLIPPING INTO A DIABETIC COMA.
RICH: I have already left for the cafeteria.
~~~
lectrick
This is amazing. And also begs the question, how is "authority" established so
much easier "in real life" vs. digitally? Side channel information?
~~~
mkramlich
use of force (cops, military)
Chris: You do not want to go to lunch.
Rich points gun at Chris.
Chris: Let me rephrase that. I misspoke. I'm sorry.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Startup Quote: Jim Collins, author, Good to Great - raychancc
http://startupquote.com/post/7284306657
======
raychancc
Good is the enemy of great.
\- Jim Collins
<http://startupquote.com/post/7284306657>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why are there so many Amazon stories on the front page? - _Understated_
Am I imagining this? It seems that there are loads of Amazon-related stories on the front page all of a sudden. I count 8 at the time of this post.
======
kafkaesq
A big developer conference going on, combined with one of their employees
having thrown themself off of one of their tallest buildings, recently.
------
khnd
because they're having their aws reinvent[1] conference where they announce
all kinds of new development.
[1]: [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)
------
wmf
Some Amazon conference is going on.
------
_Understated_
Ah, that explains it :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Who invented GUI data binding? - pier25
Data binding is all the rage these days in the JS world, but where did it originate?
======
eesmith
Try using Google Scholar?
It's at least 20 years old, if I read
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US6065012A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6065012A/en)
correctly.
~~~
pier25
Thanks, didn't think there would be a patent for something like this.
~~~
eesmith
The pointer to the patent was to show that the term 'data binding' in the
modern sense was already in use by that time. I did not read the patent to
know what it was about.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Germany, Not Greece, Should Exit the Euro - cs702
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-10/forget-greece-a-german-euro-exit-might-be-better.html
======
cs702
This article is obviously proposing something that Germany would never agree
to, but in doing so the article lays bare an important truth: the adjustments
necessary to save the Euro zone should perhaps come from _everyone_ \--
including Germany. Along with Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and all other
'peripheral' Euro zone countries, Germany is partly responsible for the
current crisis: it financed the consumption and housing booms in those other
countries.
Let me offer a poor analogy which I find insightful: Germany acted like a rich
neighbor who irresponsibly lends a ton money to his poorer neighbors so they
can throw a really costly, drunken, all-night-long party, and then demands to
be repaid the next day without acknowledging that he knowingly made a really
stupid loan.
The main implication of the article: Germany is trying to force austerity and
deflation unto the Euro zone's 'peripheral' countries, but the adjustment
would be a lot easier and faster for everyone if Germany simultaneously forced
profligacy and inflation unto itself. (A higher rate of internal inflation in
Germany would have roughly the same impact as a revaluation of a newly
reissued Deutsche Mark were the country to leave the Euro zone.)
~~~
o1iver
Germany may have profited from the spending sprees of the southern nation, but
it did not directly cause the problem. Lack of discipline is what caused the
crisis. Germany passed difficult structural reforms in the 2000s and is now
reaping the rewards, whilst the southern nations abused the availability of
cheap money. Germany reformed and invested, whilst the southern nations
didn't! And it is not like Germany was just sitting by doing nothing... That
money going to Greece and Spain is coming from somewhere! German politicians
are very hard at work keeping the German population from revolting about so
much money being "transferred"!
My personal opinion is that the correct way _is_ austerity, but not like it is
being forced unto Greece at the moment. The greek economy is in shatters as
is, the current austerity measures are not helping. I think the solution is
that Germany should lend Greece way more money than currently so that they can
build up their economy, whilst enforcing structural _and_ governmental reform
(ex: taxes must be collected, bureaucrats fired, etc)... Finally the money
should be paid back over the next 40 years, as the economy recovers.
~~~
_delirium
Spain actually had _better_ fiscal discipline than Germany during the boom,
with lower government deficits and lower public debt, so
"discpline/indiscipline" is definitely not the whole story.
~~~
JumpCrisscross
The _central_ government was. But historically as now the relatively weak
central government wasn't the problem - the regional governments ran up (and
some continue to run up) exorbitant deficits. This is in exclusion of private
Spanish debts, which are very large.
~~~
_delirium
I believe it's still true even if you add in regional debts. From what I can
find, before the current crisis, outstanding central government debt hovered
around 30-35% of GDP, while regional debt added up to around 10% of GDP, for a
total of 40-45% of GDP, one of the lower debt totals among large economies in
Europe. Lately it's been ballooning due to a mixture of: 1) interest-rate
rises producing a self-fulfilling prophecy; 2) recession reducing tax revenue
and increasing safety-net expenses; and 3) recession causing the GDP
denominator to get smaller.
The main difference I can see is just that the German economy is much stronger
than the Spanish economy, not any difference in fiscal discipline. Germany can
afford to carry bigger deficits and bigger debts because it has a
comparatively strong economy; same reason the U.S. can maintain much higher
deficits than Spain without borrowing costs increasing.
------
lispm
This article is absurd.
The cost of doing so would be gigantic. Nobody in Europe would want to pay
that.
Actually the Euro was introduced to keep Germany under control:
[http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/historischer-deal-
mitt...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/historischer-deal-mitterrand-
forderte-euro-als-gegenleistung-fuer-die-einheit-a-719608.html)
Without the Euro the Bundesbank had controlled the most important currency,
the Deutsche Mark, alone. Many countries in Europe had been depending on the
Deutsche Mark anyway - without being able to influence any decisions.
The Anglo-Saxon press is obsessed with the Euro. I've been reading a lot now
over the last years about the Euro - mostly written against it. Article over
article predicted its death, often within days or weeks. The Euro is still
there.
Instead the articles get more laughable day by day.
~~~
mafribe
And such undemocratic machinations are a really good reason to abolish the
Euro. Or don't you like democracy?
~~~
lispm
what?
~~~
iuguy
I think the parent may be referring to some of the undemocratic elements of
the European Council, or the bailout fund that was proposed a while back to be
run by a separate body to the ECB.
------
Spooky23
The problem with the Euro is the moral hazard that it creates.
People in the "PIGS" countries were able to borrow and spend based on the
credit of more robust economies such as Germany. So now, the people in these
countries will be suffering for years under devaluation or austerity, but the
rich who were the biggest beneficiaries of the bubble are completely safe,
with their fortunes migrated to strong German banks with the click of a mouse.
The Germans and northern Europeans are culpable in this -- they essentially
co-signed billions of loans to countries like Greece that lack the governance
ability to function with a German credit line.
~~~
gaius
There's actually nothing to stop the EU declaring that all accounts _anywhere_
in the EU belonging to a Greek national (say) get redenominated in Drachma.
~~~
_delirium
I don't believe that would be legal under most EU countries' domestic banking
laws, not to mention EU law. For example, I'm a non-Danish national (American)
with a Danish bank account, and under Danish law the government could not
treat my bank account in a disadvantageous way (such as confiscating it, or
unilaterally redenominating it) solely because I'm American. They could pass a
law forcing me to close the account (e.g. by tightening the rules on foreign-
owned bank accounts), but they would have to let me withdraw my money if they
did so, in the same currency as it's denominated in (DKK).
~~~
gaius
It wasn't "legal" for countries to stray from the stability pact either, but
they did! We're in the realm of making stuff up as we go along here. Or the
Greek government could declare it illegal for Greeks to hold bank accounts
elsewhere. Certainly it's not tenable for the average Greek to squirrel away
all his or her money in German banks, waiting for the "grexit", then cashing
in.
~~~
excuse-me
It's not tenable but I suspect it's what's happening. Actually it's what's
been happening in Greece since WWII. First you have fascist governments that
you don't trust and then you have democratic governments that want you to pay
tax. Greeks have long been used to keeping their money where the government
can't find it - in US$ under the bed or in Euros in German banks.
The situation in Spain at the moment seems to be that every Euro sent in the
bailout is removed form a Spanish account and paid into a German bank.
Spaniards speak Spanish, they read Argentinian newspapers when their brilliant
economists 'solved' their currency problem by seizing the accounts of everyone
who wasn't a ruling General.
~~~
gaius
Well, the Greeks freely voted for politicians that promised lavish spending
from the public purse - I don't think they deserve too much sympathy for the
taxes to pay for it all.
~~~
excuse-me
When did US voters last pick a government that didn't promise tax cuts and
then increased spending ?
But that's not the point - the point is that there isn't very much you can do
at this point to stop Gresham's law in Greece/Spain/etc. Short of building a
wall searching people at border Greek 'money' is going to be flying out of
Greece at the moment, whether it's to Euro savings accounts in German banks or
US$ held by their brother/cousin/uncle in New York.
------
lifeisstillgood
Are you sure this was not written by Angela Merkel?
Germany is desperate not to have the euro / union explode, and is basically
saying if you want any more cash then there is proper fiscal union (ie
everyone follow Germany's industrial and fiscal models.) This will screw most
of Southern Europe who don't manufacture anything, so cannot export anything
that is not subsidised under CAP.
So the Germans will only pay up if the whole of Europe agrees to tighter
fiscal controls.
And you don't agree to tighter fiscal controls, we just walk away. Didn't you
see the positive reaction to those articles we planted :-)
However the Spanish _government_ followed the fiscal rules. It was their banks
(with political connivance) that massively over reached.
I think fiscal union is the only solution Europe has. But it will also need to
reign in banks otherwise another Spain will occur. Presumably a combination of
never trading privately (ie only over public exchanges where markets can
assess the deals) and never being allowed to exceed certain crash levels
(again guaranteed through the derivative markets). Oh and never letting the
Greek government lie about its borrowing levels.
Just like every other government in Europe has in one way or another. (The UK
government uses PFI - they ask private finance to build a hospital and they
rent the hosiptal grounds for 30 years. Never mind it is always cheaper in the
long run to build your own, is that private debt? Yes according to UK
government. But they will never ever stop paying the rent. Or let a hospital
provider go bust.)
Its only becoming clear to me how much debt is an addiction to banks.
~~~
mafribe
Most German citizens would be very happy to get rid of the Euro, but the
ruling parties refuse to have democratic elections of this question. What we
are seeing is democracy being eroded away under the banner of European
unification.
~~~
lispm
What? Few German's would be 'very happy'.
> ruling parties refuse to have democratic elections of this question
Seems like you don't know much about the system in Germany.
~~~
mafribe
None of the major transfers of political power away from the German
parliaments/citizen towards the democratically non legitimised EU institutions
have been put to a referendum in Germany (and various other countries). That's
a clearcut erosion of democracy.
~~~
lispm
How can that be an erosion? A referendum was never necessary. There is an
European parliament. For major decisions the Bundestag remains decisive.
------
piquadrat
... and thereby killing the Swiss economy, thankyouverymuch. We're struggling
enough with the strong Swiss Franc against the Euro as it is. A further
devaluation of the Euro would be pretty devastating for Switzerland, even if a
strong Deutsche Mark would mitigate the effects a bit.
~~~
polshaw
No offence but the competitiveness of the Swiss economy really isn't something
anyone is concerned with outside of Switzerland (vs the whole EU).
~~~
piquadrat
None taken, we're quite clear on how importantly the big players take
Switzerland's economic health.
------
polshaw
An interesting proposition (and seemingly fiscally sound), but it misses a lot
of the point of the European integration, which is long term peace in Europe.
Separating Germany seems a particularly bad idea in that context.
~~~
yummyfajitas
Are you suggesting that if Germany were to leave the currency union, a war
would result? If not, then why bring up "long term peace in Europe"?
~~~
nhaehnle
I'm not sure that he is suggesting it, but it is a reasonable worry. Not in
the near term of course, say over the next 20 years or so. Within that time
frame, a war within Europe is almost unthinkable. However, combine the
geopolitical situation in Europe with a new generation or two for whom the
disintegration of the Euro is the defining event in their perception of
Europe, and mindsets will change.
In the face of declining European integration, our best long-term hope against
wars would be the declining size of populations combined with a relative
dearth of resources. Some people are hopelessly optimistic that this is
enough, but I personally wouldn't count on it.
~~~
yummyfajitas
Any war-related worries one might have if Germany leaves the currency union or
the EU should also apply to Norway [edited] and Switzerland (not in the EU at
all), as well as the UK, the Czech Republic and Hungary (in the EU, but not
Euro nations).
So is a war between the Czech Republic and Hungary, or Finland and Sweden a
reasonable worry over your 20 year timeframe?
[edit: confused Finland with Norway.]
~~~
EdiX
7% of Greeks voted for a party under the slogan "so we can rid this land of
filth", here is their flag:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meandros_flag.svg>
I wouldn't be so optimist.
------
markessien
This euro debates show the silliness of countries dismantling their factories:
Germany has a social market economy with high taxes and large social
contributions. It also has a highly skilled knowledge-based economy. In spite
of that, it retains manufacturing ability and continues to develop and export
machinery - having moved from simple machines to more high tech machines.
That's what countries should do - continue building machines right at home.
When there is competition from other cheaper countries, build more complex or
better functioning machines.
The countries in the south of europe have not done that, and so they cannot
export, irrespective of what the euro value is. Devaluation hardly makes any
sense for these countries that don't earn their money by exporting.
~~~
gaius
_The countries in the south of europe have not done that_
Except that they have. Machine tools is one of Italy's major industries.
~~~
riffraff
it's tipically meaningless to conflate "countries of southern europe" together
because they have basically zero in common economy-wise.
But, hey, who wants to get in the way of some good ole' rethoric?
~~~
excuse-me
It doesn't even make sense inside a country. The economy of Milan has nothing
to do with Sicily.
That was one of the UK's arguments against the Euro - that the economy of
different Eu countries was far too different to have a single currency. And
yet it was perfectly reasonable that the city of London had exactly the same
financial needs as an ex-mining village in the North of England.
------
j_col
A strong Deutsche Mark would make Germany's exports more expensive, last thing
they want (see what's happening to Switzerland right now for example).
~~~
mtgx
I remember a lot of Germans were very upset about switching to Euro from the
Mark, because for example if before a cup of coffee was 1 Mark, after that it
would've become 1 Euro (~2 Marks at the time). I don't remember if they
converted everyone's salaries 1:1 to Euro, too, though. If they did, I guess
that worry didn't make much sense.
~~~
megablast
This is a ridiculous statement, there were lots of measures in place to ensure
that exactly this did not happen, with huge fines for anyone who tried to
overcharge once the changeover happened.
~~~
icebraining
Agreed, 'though people here (Portugal) will still tell you that stuff is now
much more expensive due to the Euro. They don't seem to grasp the concept of
inflation.
------
bking
Whether or not I agree or disagree with the argument of this artice, it has
made me ponder momentarily Europe. If my college history serves me right, it
looks like the floundering countries might vilify Germany and a few of the
other more secure nations. War is usually brought about by a large group being
in a bad situation, finding common ground from which their pain stems, and
finding a common "enemy" to blame. The better question is whether or not the
Eurozone tension will diffuse before any charismatic leader can rally the
troops...
~~~
tomjen3
Ha, there isn't going to be another war in Europa proper. Trust me, no
european wants another war.
You can have that in the US because the US doesn't typically pay the price of
war, and the country knows it. The greek people know they will pay the price
for invading Germany. And that price is enormous.
~~~
waterlesscloud
WWI exacted a high price that people never wanted to pay again.
The fact that it is now named with a number tells you how that worked out.
Europe needs to go more than a few decades before it can declare itself the
kingdom of peace.
~~~
tomjen3
And everybody tried to run WWII in such a way that we would never end up like
WWI.
We now know that that isn't possible. We know that the cost of bombed cities,
etc is prohibitily high.
------
DasIch
Germany's economy depends a lot on exports by exiting the Euro Germany would
take a huge hit in that regard possibly causing a recession. That along with
the obvious conflict in political goals makes this a scenario that no one in
Germany will ever seriously consider.
Besides at the moment Germany is one of the most if not actually the most
powerful country in the world (economically speaking). Germany currently
controls the future of the Euro and with that a big part of the future of the
EU and the world economy. Why give up that power?
~~~
lispm
And I was under the impression that the US has much more economic power than
German. Or China with its billion+ people market.
The Euro is the attempt to balance this power with an European currency. The
market of the Eurozone is the sum of the countries and Germany is a part of
that. Germany alone is relatively small (a market of just 80+ million people -
compare that to the US, China, ...).
------
EdiX
What would be Germany's incentive to exit given they benefit from euro's low
valuation?
~~~
JamisonM
If the Germans do nothing at this point the Euro collapse will take down their
banks as well.
The other incentive as I see it is that this could also be argued as a more
politically palatable solution for the ruling party since they have been
(rather disingenuously) selling the line that only the Germans were
responsible in the run up to the crisis and pulling out of the Euro fits
rather neatly into that model of the world. My understanding is that most
Germans that support the ruling party see inflation as something that is bad
for them and erodes their savings and they link Euro-bonds and Euro QE with
that. Bringing back a strong Mark that does not devalue would present a facade
of non-inflation since there would be no QE for the Germans and no German-
sponsored Euro-bonds but the new Mark would bring _actual_ inflation because
the Euro would immediately devalue.
As has been pointed out elsewhere the big problem is that the Germans pulling
out of the common currency would be a step backwards in the political union
objectives. If you believe that there is even a remote chance of a European
war between major powers then this is a bad thing (I do not).
I think it is clear that the better solution is more political union in Europe
instead of trying to drag the current arrangement through the crisis as-is. We
have unfortunately seen a real rise of an "I got mine jack" voting all over
the western world and this crisis is really not being dealt with precisely
because that philosophy is tied to the right-wing parties that have risen to
power (and are now maybe starting to fall) in Europe.
~~~
EdiX
> If the Germans do nothing at this point the Euro collapse will take down
> their banks as well.
Agreed, but leaving would be a big blow to their export market. Their best
interest would be for the PIGS to stick around as weak as possible (to keep
the euro devaluated) but still (mostly) solvent.
> The other incentive as I see it is that this could also be argued as a more
> politically palatable solution for the ruling party since they have been
> (rather disingenuously) selling the line that only the Germans were
> responsible in the run up to the crisis and pulling out of the Euro fits
> rather neatly into that model of the world.
Maybe, but I'm not seeing a strong push to leave from Germany. And let's not
forget that there isn't any opt out procedure from the euro: do other
countries have a say?
> I think it is clear that the better solution is more political union in
> Europe instead of trying to drag the current arrangement through the crisis
> as-is. We have unfortunately seen a real rise of an "I got mine jack" voting
> all over the western world and this crisis is really not being dealt with
> precisely because that philosophy is tied to the right-wing parties that
> have risen to power (and are now maybe starting to fall) in Europe.
I wholeheartedly agree with every single word of this, my fear is that we
European aren't really ready to be that united and we'd all rather die leaving
than get hurt to save another country in the "union" and as a result the EU
will fail the only way it can: spectacularly.
------
ticks
I don't know where I read this, but I always thought the EC/EU/Euro was an
effort by the allied countries to tame a future German economy. _If_ that's
true, then Germany distancing themselves would surely defeat the purpose of
the union.
~~~
myspy
Don't be afraid, we have no interest in fighting wars and shit. I don't think
this will happen. Europe has a more social view on the world than the rest,
especially the US.
~~~
Nrsolis
I think this viewpoint represents the best example of the triumph of hope over
experience.
European history has been littered with examples of bitter and costly wars
between nations and states. We (the world) are still resolving the aftermath
of the Bosnian conflict.
There are very smart people wringing their hands over the collapse of the EU
and the kind of social turmoil that might develop if the economies of these
nations fail. The riots we saw in Greece and Italy were just a teaser.
In 2008, when the US was looking at its own financial crisis, one of the items
on the minds of the policymakers was the very real prospects of riots in US
cities. There were stories of financiers packing up and leaving the country in
anticipation of what might happen.
The biggest mistake you can make is to think your country is immune to ruin.
History has shown us many times that it comes quickly and with little or no
warning.
~~~
pnathan
Nrsolis has read his/her history. In addition, I'd like to point out that
humans are still humans, and cultures can change very fast given a
precipitating crisis.
~~~
Nrsolis
I'd offer the opinion that "people" haven't changed much over the centuries.
The fact that we still have the same problems across cultures, genders, races,
and geography seems to bolster this view.
Things change, but not nearly as much as we might like, and only at the
margins.
------
RivieraKid
_All the debate about the pros and cons of a Greek exit from the euro area is
missing the point: A German exit might be better for all concerned._
No, this idea has been part of the debate for months, if not years. I hate
that he makes it sound like it's his idea.
Germany is partially benefiting from current situation because capital is
moving from Greece, Spain, etc. to Germany. Also, cheap Euro helps German
exports. If Germany switches to Mark it would hurt exporters a lot.
~~~
RivieraKid
Why the downvote?
~~~
danmaz74
No idea. I upvoted; that has been part of the debate here at least for months.
------
danmaz74
The article isn't totally unreasonable, but there would be a much safer
solution to the current crisis: Converting the BCE to a normal central bank,
just like the Fed, Bank of England, etc. etc, ie a lender of last resort.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lender_of_last_resort>
Of course this would require a much tighter central control on each Euro
country balance, one that would make it impossible for any one country to
cheat the others (as unfortunately happened with Greece). But I think that all
the EU countries would accept this right now to save themselves from a
potentially catastrofic crisis.
Greece is for now the only failed state in the EU, but it has such a tiny
economy (3% of the EU GDP) that it would be much lest expensive to bail it out
now, with a decisive move, than try to punish it for its mistakes and, in
doing so, prolonging the crisis. Fixing the other imbalances in the EU would
still require a lot of work, but it would be definitely be possible if the
interest rates for the countries at the center of the crisis went back to
normal (as it would happen with a Fed-like BCE).
------
nickik
Guys the Euro is not the problem. Under the (real not brandon woods BS)
Goldstandard countrys had the same currency for a long time and it worked
quite well. ECB buying tons of debt and exepting bad papers as colatoral shoud
of course be stoped.
These countrys should default (get ride of the debt), balance the buget (you
cant live of other people forever). Iceland has done that (the stumbeld into
it).
If your smart you are going to put in place a new constitution and a new
democratic system too.
------
damian2000
I don't know if this is a good idea, but its surely better than waiting around
for a death by a thousand cuts, which is all that seems to be happening right
now.
------
gpvos
> Other relatively strong euro-area nations, such as the Netherlands, would
> probably pause before following Germany’s lead.
This would probably be true for most of these countries; however, the
Netherlands would probably just adopt the new Deutschmark. The Dutch guilder
used to be practically tied to the Mark for several decades before the Euro
was introduced.
------
tobias3
We all know the Euro is a sinking ship. The idea is now to take the engine of
that ship (Germany) and put it into another smaller ship. Replacing the engine
by... a new one that is yet to be build.
That will surely safe the Euro ship... I for one, would panic and try to get
to the new currency.
~~~
planetguy
Sometimes analogies, like ships, break down quicker than you'd like.
~~~
tobias3
My internal critique couldn't find a counterexample for this one.
------
aseembehl
At first, I thought the article is about the soccer tournament. :)
------
excuse-me
And it's obvious that Wall St should exit the Dollar for the same reasons
------
soc88
Interesting, but not much different from the age-old concept of a "North"-Euro
and a "South"-Euro.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Wirify lets you turn any web page into a wireframe - tortilla
http://www.volkside.com/2010/12/introducing-wirify-the-web-as-wireframes/
======
petervandijck
That is really quite nifty :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Relational Program Synthesis - lainon
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.02283
======
platz
cf: Recurrent Relational Networks: Complex relational reasoning with neural
networks.
[https://rasmusbergpalm.github.io/recurrent-relational-
networ...](https://rasmusbergpalm.github.io/recurrent-relational-networks/)
------
slaymaker1907
I'm a grad student in computer science who reads papers (though more focused
on systems) almost every day and I just have to say.... is there an English
translation available?
~~~
onemoresoop
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02283.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02283.pdf)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
25 things I learned from Fred Wilson - asanwal
http://25iq.com/2014/07/05/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-fred-wilson/
======
asanwal
I think the point Tren makes about dilution and how the fancy office and Aeron
chairs which are funded by investor capital all can be translated into equity
given up is spot on. Think founders often forget that especially in our
current culture of fundraising being celebrated as a sign of success.
As I read Tren's example, it seemed insanely short-sighted especially when the
goal should be not just maximizing the value of the equity but maximizing the
amount retained by the people building the company on a day-to-day basis.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition - shawndumas
http://www.davidflanagan.com/2011/02/javascript-the.html
======
telemachos
Probably many people will recognize the book right away from the URL of the
page (author's name and all), but why not add "Javascript: " to the title of
the post?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Feedback on Startup Idea – digital business card - aszoke
Hi HN,<p>I'm thinking about an idea for mobile application and I wanted your advice. Here is my hypothesis:<p>We are living in a high-speed economy. The paper business cards provide static engagement. So modern business men / women want a more dynamic branding and marketing tool to enable vibrant mutually beneficial partnerships that take full advantage of internal and external synergies by sharing up-to-date information with each other, referring each other based on a face-to-face meeting initialized visually creative digital business cards.<p>Does it make sense? What is your opinion? Would you buy a product like this?
======
BjoernKW
Been there, done that:
[https://github.com/BjoernKW/Freshcard](https://github.com/BjoernKW/Freshcard)
Digital business cards are one of those ideas that just seem natural,
especially to digital natives, and hence come up again and again and yet none
of these countless implementations - including my humble attempt - has
succeeded so far.
The reasons for this are numerous, e.g.: \- chicken and egg problem: How do
you convince people to use your business card replacement when nobody else is
using it? \- lack of perceived benefit / pain point for casual business card
users: While they're a source of needless clutter to anyone accustomed to
using technology for keeping data most people simply couldn't care less. \-
lack of reliability: Paper at least works everywhere and under most
conditions. How does your solution fare when there's no reliable network
(which is surprisingly common even in industrialized countries, e.g. at most
larger conferences ...)?
If you'd like any further information on this subject just drop me a note.
------
creamyhorror
1\. Your pitch is too full of marketing fluff. Get to the point, use simple
words to explain what your product would do, and don't oversell the idea.
2\. If you think about and iterate your idea a bit more, you get LinkedIn.
You'll need to take a different direction that offers some other
value/convenience that LinkedIn doesn't. Your differentiator might be allowing
users to personalized the design of their "virtual card", but that might not
offer enough added value over LinkedIn.
------
J-dawg
> enable vibrant mutually beneficial partnerships
> take full advantage of internal and external synergies
Sounds like marketing speak. What would the product actually do?
Also, based on what I've witnessed in meetings recently, the current norm
seems to be to exchange traditional cards, then add each other on LinkedIn,
either immediately or later that day. Some people have started to skip the
traditional cards step. I think your product would need to offer a clear
benefit that LinkedIn does not have.
------
rmason
People have been building software products to try and replace the business
card for close to twenty years. I don't wish to discourage you but spend some
time researching the companies that tried first.
If you can offer something truly novel or can articulate how a certain idea
didn't work before but would work now you may see success.
------
brudgers
Asking "Would you buy a product like this?" is empty. There is no "this" and
therefore there is no way of knowing if what you mean by "this" is consistent
with what I think you mean by "this".
My advice: build a mockup or prototype. Make a "this".
Good luck.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Influence and influencers, the thin line between sharing and spamming (2015) - wslh
https://medium.com/digital-identity/influence-and-influencers-online-the-thin-line-between-sharing-and-spamming-e759ee47bfb
======
wslh
I find this topic and discussion super relevant in 2020. I Just tried to share
some of my companies articles to a subreddit and because my blog posts are
connected to a company they are reluctant to accept it. On the other hand
YouTube and Blog influencers which have their own agenda are not considered
when they are trading their influence there and many times have sponsors.
The main point is when your rules are contradictory or not have a precise
threshold. It reminds me of Wikipedia notability rules.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Cannot Measure Productivity - alexfarran
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html
======
lifeisstillgood
I am going to get my drum out and bang on it again.
Software is a form of literacy - and we measure literacy completely
differently. In fact we measure it like we measure science - you are not a
scientist unless other scientists agree you are, and you are not a coder
unless other coders say you are.
What Fowler wants to measure is not the top echelons of productivity but the
lower bounds - presumably to winnow out the unproductive ones.
But that is not how we conduct ourselves in literacy or science. We _educate
and train_ people for a very long time, so that the lower bound of
productivity is still going to add value to human society - and the upper
bounds are limitless.
What Fowler is asking for is a _profession_.
~~~
foobarbazqux
> you are not a scientist unless other scientists agree you are
Science requires one thing: making and testing falsifiable hypotheses. A
priest is able to determine whether or not you are doing that. If anything,
it's philosophers who decide what science is, e.g. Karl Popper.
~~~
swombat
Doing science does not make you a scientist.
~~~
epenn
Can you elaborate on why you believe this to be the case? Saying that a
scientist is one who does science seems like a truism bordering on being
tautological. I'm curious why you disagree.
~~~
swombat
Does knowing a bit of physics make you a physicist? Does praying make you a
monk? Does mixing a few chemicals make you a chemist? Does having some
theories about people's motivations make you a behavioural psychologist? Does
balancing a budget make you an accountant?
"Scientist" implies a certain amount of knowledge, training, discipline, etc.
I'm not implying that every scientist needs to have undergone academic
training - there are other ways - but merely doing a scientific experiment is
not enough to call yourself a scientist.
A scientist is one who "does science" with some knowledge, consistency and
perseverance.
~~~
foobarbazqux
I guess you'd better edit Wikipedia:
> In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the
> scientific method. [...] This article focuses on the more restricted use of
> the word.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist)
~~~
swombat
Wikipedia is not the ultimate repository of human knowledge, particularly when
it comes to more tricky questions like "what is a scientist?"...
If we're going to throw definitions around, how about dictionary.com:
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientist?s=t](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientist?s=t)
> an expert in science, especially one of the physical or natural sciences.
~~~
foobarbazqux
Actually I think Wikipedia is pretty good for tricky questions, in that they
attract a lot of attention and receive a lot of edits.
If being a scientist is determined by the consensus of one's peers, it seems
like it makes sense to accept an article defining what scientists are that is
written as a consensus opinion.
But anyway, if you think it's wrong, why don't you edit it?
------
ChuckMcM
It has been more than 10 years, it has been at least 50 since there were moans
about productivity in the early 60's.
Feynman had some interesting thoughts on minimal computation that sort of
paralleled Shannon's information complexity. As you know Shannon was
interested in absolute limits to the amount of information in a channel and
Feynman was more about the amount of computation per joule of energy. But the
essence is the same, programs are a process that use energy to either
transform information or to comprehend & act on information so 'efficiency' at
one level is the amount of transformation/action you get per kW and
"productivity" is the first derivative of figuring out how long it takes to go
from need to production.
It has been clear for years that you can produce inefficient code quickly, and
conversely efficient code more slowly, so from a business value perspective it
there is another factor which is the _cost_ of running your process versus the
_value_ of running your process. Sort of the 'business efficiency' of the
result.
Consider a goods economy comparison of the assembly line versus the craftsman.
An assembly line uses more people but produced goods faster, that was
orthogonal to the quality of the good produced. So the variables are quantity
of goods over time (this gives a cost of goods), the quality of the good
(which has some influence on the retail price), and the ability to change what
sort of goods you make (which deals with the 'fashion' aspect of goods).
So what is productivity? Is it goods produced per capita? Or goods produced
per $-GDP? Or $-GDP per goods produced? Its a bit of all three. Programmer
productivity is just as intermixed.
~~~
hcarvalhoalves
> It has been clear for years that you can produce inefficient code quickly,
> and conversely efficient code more slowly (...)
That's not only false, but is often the opposite.
The symptom number one of an inexperienced programmer is to waste development
hours reinventing the (square) wheel, while a good programmer is lazy (already
knows which solution works best, and will probably just import it from a
tested library).
So an experienced programmer not only doesn't waste computation power, also
doesn't waste hours on the development cycle.
I agree with everything else you pointed.
~~~
ChuckMcM
Since I'm trying out my CODE keyboard [1] I thought I'd go into a bit more
detail.
My statement about inefficient code quickly is in terms of joules per
computation. So while it is absolutely true that a junior perl programmer
might slowly generate inefficient code and an experienced (lazy) perl
programmer might quickly generate optimal perl code, neither of them would
produce the same product written in assembly code (or better yet pure machine
code).
To put that in a different perspective, I once wrote a BASIC interpreter in
Java (one of my columns for JavaWorld) and it was pretty quick to do, and yet
looking at the "source" to Microsoft BASIC written in 8080 assembler it was
not very efficient. But it took Bill a lot longer to write Microsoft BASIC in
assembler, and you couldn't even _begin_ to port a full up Java VM to the 8080
(let's not argue about J2ME).
But step back then from that precipice, you have two versions of BASIC, one
runs in a Browser and one runs on a 16 line by 64 character TVText S-100 card.
(or 24 x 80 CRT terminal). Now you can run the same program in both contexts,
unchanged, but the amount of energy you expend to do so varies a lot. So which
is more "efficient?" I'd argue the one written in 8080 assembly is more
efficient from a joules per kilo-core-second standpoint. Which was written
more quickly? Mine, it only took about a week.
That is why talking about efficiency and productivity without getting anally
crisp in your definitions can lead to two opposite interpretations of exactly
the same statement.
[1] I find the lack of a wrist pad to rest on a challenge.
------
integraton
The sad part is that even after decades of technologists debating this, the
reality is that most non-technologists working in the industry don't know,
don't care, and really just want their pet features. The real measure of
productivity in organizations with non-technical stakeholders therefore
becomes whether or not a stakeholder feels like they are getting what they
want. Attempts to measure productivity, whether via lines of code or
"velocity," are often little more than a way for everyone to pretend their
opinion is backed by something quantitative. In especially bad cases with non-
technical management, they'll just keep swapping out processes until they
either get what they want or have something with numbers and graphs that makes
it look like they should.
While I could be accused of excessive cynicism, I do believe this is common
enough that it should be addressed. There's a pervasive delusion that
decisions are made by rational, informed actors, when that is rarely the case.
~~~
lifeisstillgood
> becomes whether or not a stakeholder feels like they are getting what they
> want.
If the stakeholder you choose is a customer, then that is a valid measure of
business productivity.
Which I guess is kind of the point - we are trying to measure on a granularity
beyond what we can validly do.
Which indicates to me that a world of smaller organisations, made up of
software literate people will be one where rewards will follow talent. That
may not be a world we want to live in - and my cynicism sees your cynicism and
raises :-)
------
mathattack
There are two types of productivity:
1) Are you doing the right things?
2) Are you doing things right?
They can be imprecisely measured, but every metric has problems and can be
gamed. Combining the measurements is extremely difficult.
Let's start with 1 - doing the right things. Someone who chooses to have their
team work on 3 high value tasks, and stops their early on 6 low value tasks is
by one definition more productive than someone who forces their team to do all
9 things. Or at the very least they are more effective. This is what Fowler is
getting at.
On point 2... Let's assume that the appropriateness of what you are doing is
immaterial. How fast are you doing it? This can be somewhat approximated. You
can say "Speed versus function points" or "Speed versus budget" or "Speed
versus other teams achieving the same output" and then bake in rework into the
speed. All of these metrics are doable. Lines of code isn't a good base
though.
The real question is, "What are you going to do with all of this productivity
data?" If the answer is systemic improvement, you're on the right track. If
you try to turn it into personal performance (or salary) then people wind up
gaming the metrics.
------
seiji
Is measuring productivity isomorphic to the hiring problem?
Everybody says there's a "shortage of developers," but I know good developers
who keep getting shitcanned after a few interviews where nothing seemingly
went wrong.
We can't tell who's going to be productive. Since we can't tell, we come up
with ten foot high marble walls to scale. Our sterile interview problems make
us feel "well, at least the candidate can do our Arbitrary Task, and since we
decided what Arbitrary Task would be, they must be good, because they did what
we wanted them to do."
Productivity is pretty much the same. There's "just get it done" versus
"solving the entire class of problems." Is it being productive if you do 50
copies of "just get it done" when it's really one case of a general problem?
I'm sure doing 50 copies of nearly the same thing make you look very busy and
generates great results, but solving the general problem could take 1/20th the
time, but leave you sitting less fully utilized after (see: automating
yourself out of a job).
~~~
kasey_junk
They are absolutely the same problem. Because we can't measure productivity,
we can't determine relative quality in an objective way. If we could, it would
make the hiring process much more simple.
The question I have is, how is this much different than any other profession?
How do we measure doctor productivity? What keeps me up at night is that it is
very likely that the 90/10 crap to good ratio in software developers is
probably the same ratio as surgeons.
~~~
vadman
Must be the same in every profession. How many of e.g. your school teachers
were good? About 10%.
I am wondering if the ratio holds for crap to good parents. The scarier aspect
of this is that people are actually being trained for their professions, as
opposed to parenting, so the ratio may be even worse.
------
RogerL
A very wise man said "there is no silver bullet". Yet we keep trying all these
schemes to automagically solve what are hard optimization problems only
amenable to heuristics and deliberate, intelligent introspection. Very simply,
you cannot run some tool to measure the information density of a large
project. Graphical programming isn't going to turn a bunch of marketers into
programmers. Doing user stories and forcing people to stand up as they talk
isn't going to remove all the need for planning and tracking. And so on.
You know how I figure out if something can be improved? I dig in, understand
it, and then look for ways to improve it. If I don't find anything, of course
it doesn't mean there is no room, but I'm a pretty bright guy and my results
are about as good as any other bright guy/woman.
I was subjected to endless amounts of this because I did military work for 17
years. You'd have some really tiny project (6 months, 2-3 developers), and
they'd impose just a _huge_ infrastructure of 'oversight'. By which I mean
bean counters, rule followers, and the like - unthinking automatons trying to
use rules, automatic tools, and the like. Anything to produce a simple, single
number. It was all so senseless. I know that can sound like sour grapes, but
every time I was in control of schedule and budget I came in on time and on to
under budget. But that is because I took it day by day, looked at and
understood where we were and where we needed to go, and adjusted accordingly.
Others would push buttons on CASE tools and spend most of their time
explaining why they were behind and over budget.
I like Fowler's conclusion - we have to admit our ignorance. It is okay to say
"I don't know". Yet some people insist that you have to give an answer, even
if it is trivially provable that the answer must be wrong.
~~~
chromatic
Please excuse this small rant.
If you're referring to Fred Brooks, he wrote "[T]here is no _single_
development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself
promises even one order of magnitude improvement _within a decade_ in
productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." (emphasis mine)
The surrounding context makes his comment a very specific prediction which
means something different from what most people claim he meant. Much of the
rest of his essay suggests techniques which address the issue of essential
complexity and which, when applied together, he hoped would produce that order
of magnitude productivity.
Perhaps there was no _single_ such improvement in the years 1986 to 1996, but
when people use the phrase "no silver bullet" to dismiss potential
improvements in productivity, I believe they're doing Brooks and the rest of
us a great disservice.
~~~
jacques_chester
You missed a key point of the essay, which is that no matter _how_ much
progress we make in accidental complexity, essential complexity does not go
away.
~~~
chromatic
Of course that's the key point of the essay, but I've never observed that
anyone who says "There's no silver bullet in productivity" has made it past
the desire to misuse the title of a Fred Brooks essay to support a middlebrow
dismissal to the nuance of distinguishing between accidental and essential
complexity.
After all, much of programming culture is stuck on the idea that the clarity
of syntax of a programming languages to novices is more important to
maintainability of programs written in that language than domain knowledge,
for example.
------
nadam
You can quite well measure productivity if you set a task, write tests for it,
and tell two independent groups to implement it. You give them the same amount
of time.
Now the _more productive_ / better group is which can do the task with
_smaller complexity_.
Complexity measures measure size of code and number of dependencies between
blocks in different ways. But even the most simple comlexity measure is quite
good: just measure number of tokens in source code. (It is a bitmore
sophisticated than LOC). You can then make competitons between groups, and
measure their productivity. (I am writing a book now titled 'Structure of
Software' which discusses what is good software structure on a very
generic/abstract level. It relates to 'Design Patterns' as abstract algebra
relates to algebra.)
~~~
alok-g
Genuinely asking: Why not just stop at "tell two independent groups to
implement it"? That is, why constrain to the same amount of time?
~~~
nadam
Because we measure the quality of their output. A weaker group can solve the
problem with the same quality as a stronger group given much more time. (For
example by doing refactoring in the plus time.)
~~~
alok-g
I see. The time constraint you set is on the tighter side. I was considering
it to be on the relaxed side which would allow the weaker group to improve as
you said.
On the other hand, setting the time constraint (as opposed to measuring both
time taken and solution complexity for the two groups) is important because
deadlines help.
------
artumi-richard
The book "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It"
([http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Software-Really-Works-
Believe...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Software-Really-Works-
Believe/dp/0596808321/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377809167&sr=8-1&keywords=making+software))
has a section on this.
Chapter 8 "Beyond lines of Code: Do we need more complexity metrics?" by
Israel Herraiz and Ahmed E Hassan.
Their short answer is that, in the case they looked at, all the suggested
metrics correlated with LOC, so you may as well use LOC as it's so easy to
measure.
IIRC they believe it's only good to compare LOC between different employees if
they are doing pretty much the exact same task however, but since LOC is
correlated with code complexity, there is some measure there.
I recommend the book, as really focusing on the science of computer science.
------
gz5
Heisenberg principle variant for software:
Measure it. Or optimize it. Can't do both without impacting the other.
Software is a work of art and creativity, not the work of a rules-based
factory.
------
stonemetal
So two teams build identical databases in identical time frames. One becomes
popular and has sells in millions of dollars. The other flops, with sells in
the hundreds of dollars. Sure there is a difference in business results but I
fail to see how the two teams were not equally productive at creating
software. Sure I don't have a good definition of software development
productivity but this is open to so many non software development productivity
elements as to be nonsensical.
Basically I see this as marketing. We may not be the fastest but who cares
about that we have the special insight to build the hits that keep you in
business.
------
wciu
Most performance indicators are imprecise. P/E ratio is one of the stupidest
measure of value, but it is widely use in finance. No one(at least no value
investor) would invest based on P/E ratio alone though, there is a lot more
due diligence that's done before investors put their money into a stock. (At
least that's what you hope happens.)
The problem with productivity measures, is not how they are measured but what
they are used for. Most managers want to use productivity measures to evaluate
individual or team performance, however, performance is tied to incentives, so
you always end up with a lot of push back from the team or someone gaming the
system. (IMO, this is because of lazy managers wanting to "manage by numbers",
without really understanding how to manage by numbers.)
Rather than using it as a performance management tool, productivity measures,
however imprecise, can be used alongside other yardsticks as signals of
potential issues. For example, if productivity measure is dropping with a
particular module/subsystem, and defect rate is increasing, then one might
want to find out if the code needs to be rearchitected or refactored. In these
cases, it is okay to be imprecise, because the data are pointers not the end
goal. When used correctly, even imprecise data can be very useful.
------
dirtyaura
The quest for a single measure of hard-to-define concept like productivity is
doomed. Even Fowler's article highlights the fact that we don't have a shared
understanding what the word productivity means: writong quality code, shipping
useful products or making money? all of them? It's no surprise that there is
no numerical measurement that captures a badly-defined concept.
In my opinion, we should approach measurement from a different angle: can we
learn something useful about our profession by combining different types of
measurements. Can we, for example, easily spot a person who is doing what
Fowler is calling important supportive work. Can we detect problem categories
that easily lead to buggy code and allocate more time for code quality work
for tasks and less for those that are known to be more straight-forward.
------
Jormundir
It drives me nuts when programmers brag about their productivity, measured by
how many lines of code they've written.
You end up with something like feature 1: +12,544 / -237 lines. Done in 2
weeks.
Then comes feature 2, 2 and a half months later, the stats: +5,428 / -9,845.
Look at that, you had to tear down everything they wrote because they cared
about amount of code over code quality. The more they brag, the more you think
"oh s$%t, every line they add is a line I'm going to have to completely
untangle and refactor."
I think software engineering productivity can be measured, though not well by
today's standards. There will probably be a decent algorithm to do it in the
future that takes in to account the power of the code, how easy it is to build
on top of, how robust it is, etc.
~~~
matwood
Nothing makes me happier than removing code. If I can find ways to deliver the
same functionality in less code I get excited.
Now, I do like to look at my personal lines of code because it gives me a
gauge to compare features I implement on a relative basis. It also gives me a
relative, rough measure how much effort a particular feature took to produce.
~~~
RogerL
You will like this story from Apple, when they for a time required engineers
to report LOC produced that week.
[http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Neg...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date)
------
kailuowang
The purpose of measuring productivity is to manage it. There are two
categories of factors that decide the overall productivity: the factors within
the developers (capability, motivation, etc) and the factors outside the
developers (tools, process, support, etc).
True, it's hard to objectively measure the overall productivity using a
universal standard, but it is relatively easier to measure the productivity
fluctuation caused by the external factors. Velocity measurement in Agile
practice is mostly for that end.
For the internal factors, the best way, and arguably the only effective way,
to manage it is probably to hire good motivated developers. I think most top
level software companies have learned that.
~~~
lifeisstillgood
This is true - to an extent. Scrum screams out to measure relative story
points, and never provide the data for "management" purposes. But even the
same team estimating in succession will face external pressures - and if those
pressures will be alleviated by gaming story points, they will. This catch-22
had me - I truly think the only way is to report only an estimated finish
date. Any public posting of velocity eventually filters into a management by
velocity - because that's the only metric management has. And we are back on
the same old loop - we can have a measure of productivity as long as we do not
use it in any manner as a measure of productivity.
Add to this I don't think scrum has become setup to take this to its logical
conclusions - agile/scrum has been sold as a fairly fixed methodology, not as
a means to get some relative metric out of teams and use that in a series of
experiments to achieve productivity improvements. And even if it were, the
major wins we _know_ and can prove work (quiet conditions, minimal
interruptions, trust, respect, time for reflection and education, are a long
way from being accepted by today's enterprises.
In short there is no silver bullet, and while agile looked a magic bullet it
just turned out to be plain old lead.
------
mtdewcmu
The article makes the point that the LOC metric is confounded by duplication:
> Copy and paste programming leads to high LOC counts and poor design because
> it breeds duplication.
This problem is not insurmountable. Compression tools work by finding
duplication and representing copies as (more concise) references to the
original.* The size of the compressed version is an estimate of the real
information content of the original, with copies counted at a significantly
discounted rate. The compressed size of code could be a more robust measure of
the work that went into it.
* Sometimes this is done explicitly, other times it's implicit
------
alightergreen
And what about Iteration? The learning value that can come from doing things
poorly?! Imagine if Microsoft had LEARNED something from what they did wrong
in Windows 95? Or Windows ME! Imagine how amazing their software would be now.
They couldn't have done it without having totally screwed up first. Of course
they didn't do that in the end...so...
------
chipsy
Productivity by any volume measure seems meaningless in the software context.
That's like measuring writing productivity by word count. Nobody really likes
high-volume communication, unless the goal is to write a lot of trash.
Even if you deliver a system with a lot of features and no known bugs, if they
aren't the right features, it's not valuable software.
------
AlisdairSH
If you don't work >43 hours/week, you aren't productive. At least according to
one boss I've had. :|
------
scotty79
I think that the the one thing that enables science is that even though you
cannot measure all you want, you can still measure some things and that
measurements are useful, just not directly.
------
est
Because this
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox)
productivity of working on a software is like measuring fractals.
------
platz
Perhaps trying to measure true productivity reduces to the halting problem
------
dredmorbius
Software productivity management (as an end in itself) fails to account for
another fundamental axiom: that software itself isn't the end-product, but
itself is a tool or defines a process by which some task is accomplished.
Count lines of code, function points, bugfixes, commits, or any other metric,
and you're capturing a _part_ of the process, but you're also creating a
strong incentive to game the metric (a well-known characteristic of assessment
systems), and you're still missing the key point.
Jacob Nielsen slashed through the Gordon's knot of usability testing a couple
of decades back by focusing on a single, simple metric: does a change in
design help users accomplish a task faster, and/or more accurately? You now
have a metric which can be used _independently_ of the usability domain (it
can apply to mall signage or kitchen appliances as readily as desktop
software, Web pages, or a tablet app).
Ultimately, software does _something_. It might sell stuff (measure sales), it
might provide entertainment, though in most cases that boils down to selling
stuff. It might help design something, or model a problem, or create art. In
many cases you can still reduce this to "sell something", in which case, if
you're a business, or part of one, you've probably got a metric you can use.
For systems which don't result in a sales transaction directly or indirectly,
"usability" probably approaches the metric you want: does a change accomplish
a task faster and/or with more accuracy? Does it achieve an objectively better
or preferable (double-blind tested) result?
The problem is that there are relatively few changes which can be tested
conclusively or independently. And there are what Dennis Meadows calls "easy"
and "hard" problems.
Easy problems offer choices in which a change is monotonic across time. Given
alternatives A and B, if choice A is better than B at time t, it will be
better at time t+n, for any n. You can rapidly determine which of the two
alternatives you should choose.
Hard problems provide options which _aren 't_ monotonic. A may give us the
best long-term results, but if it compares unfavorably initially, this isn't
apparent. In a hard problem, A compares unfavorably at some time t, but is
_better_ than B at some time t+n, and continues to be better for all larger
values of t.
Most new business ventures are hard problems: you're going to be worse off for
some period of time before the venture takes off ... assuming it does.
Similarly, the choice over whether or not to go to college (and incur both
debt and foregone income), to to learn a skill, to exercise and eat healthy.
It's a bit of a marshmallow experiment.
And of course, there's a risk element which should also be factored in: in
hard problems, A _might_ be the better choice only _some_ of the time.
All of which does a real number in trying to assess productivity and employee
ranking.
Time to re-read _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_.
------
swombat
[2003]
------
a3voices
Also if you procrastinate a lot, you might end up learning something useful
and get new insights that will make you more productive in the long run.
~~~
sgarman
I'm going to keep telling myself this as I sit on HN...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Decrypting the Aphex Twin Soundcloud - pizzosteez
https://medium.com/cuepoint/making-some-sense-of-the-aphex-twin-soundcloud-f551b6f81344?source=latest
======
strictnein
If you're an Aphex Twin fan, this, along with his new album, has been a
goldmine of great music. Really like this track:
[https://soundcloud.com/user48736353001/35-japan-1](https://soundcloud.com/user48736353001/35-japan-1)
Very clearly from when he was working with Trent Reznor on NIN's Further Down
the Spiral and made the track "At the Heart of it All" \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MdcVdL2kIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MdcVdL2kIY)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
GDB 8.3 - lelf
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-05/msg00007.html
======
kjeetgill
> GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Go, Rust, and many other
> languages.
Wait, really? I'd used it for C/C++ programs but I had no idea it could
support other languages. Ada and Go are especially surprising. I didn't even
know Ada had an opensource presence, and Go because I assumed the
goroutine/scheduler runtime would make stepping through a thread hard.
------
purplezooey
that c++ compilation and injection stuff looks like some very exciting black
magic shit..mist check it out
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tutorial: Writing an Android Location-Aware App - openmobster
http://code.google.com/p/openmobster/wiki/LocationApp
======
openmobster
Integrating Location based functionality into your apps makes them more
feature rich and robust. In this tutorial you will learn how to use Android's
built-in Location service. The tutorial comes with a fully functional app that
you can download and play around with. Enjoy!!!!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google wins final approval to acquire Motorola; deal to close imminently - raldi
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-19/google-wins-final-needed-approval-for-motorola-mobility-purchase
======
DHowett
"This page is not available for mobile viewing at this time."
I am assuming that the article is just text, and that that text is somehow not
available because my user-agent claims that I am on a mobile device. Why?
~~~
mparlane
With the amount of link spam on the sides and the usage of flash ads, I think
they couldn't guarantee you would get to see the site in it's full glory on a
mobile device.
------
dr_
This is sort of a non story at this point. More interested to know what Google
plans to do with Motorola now that they have it. Will they really manufacture
their own phone in house? Or are they just going to engage in patent wars?
~~~
myko
All indications are that Motorola Mobility will continue to be run as a
separate entity, though I wouldn't be surprised to see unlocked bootloaders
and a more stock Android feel on newer devices produced by the company.
------
nextparadigms
Hopefully this means more stock Android devices arriving on the market.
------
forcer
Can someone explain why Google must have sought Chinese approval? Both
companies are American, so what's the problem? Why get approval in
US,Europe,China but not somewhere else?
~~~
vladd
It doesn't matter what nationality the company has, but rather the laws of the
countries where it operates.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How often does it happen that the oldest person alive dies? - SandB0x
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/how-often-does-it-happen-that-the-oldest-person-alive-dies
======
StavrosK
I love mathematicians. They give a complicated function, explaining how they
derived each term, and then consider the problem solved, without bothering to
give a number.
It's correct, of course, as the problem _is_ solved, but most people would
attempt a ballpark approximation in the end!
~~~
cschmidt
That is kind of like how you can take a class in number theory, and not
actually use any concrete numbers (like 7, say).
~~~
crntaylor
There's an excellent quotation attributed to Alexandre Grothendieck, one of
the greatest mathematicians alive. At a seminar he was giving on analytic
number theory, someone suggested that they should consider a particular prime
number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person
replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck replied "All right, take
57."
~~~
JonnieCache
Is there a significance to 57 there?
~~~
lkozma
Yes, it isn't prime, that's the joke (I guess).
~~~
Someone
Yes, but not in the sense that Grothendieck made a joke by saying '57', but in
the sense that Grothendieck, who knows quite a bit about prime numbers, said
'57' without realizing that it is composite.
~~~
lkozma
Yes, I understood it in this sense too :) Quite a character, Grothendieck.
------
gjm11
It seems to me that we can get a pretty decent approximation as follows:
1\. At any given time, Pr(oldest person <= age x) = Pr(one person <= age x)^N.
So (over time) the median oldest-person age is the (1-2^-1/N) quantile of the
age distribution. (For large N, this is roughly 1-log(2)/N.) (You can get that
from actuarial tables, or use the Gompertz-Makeham approximation.)
2\. So, crudely, the time between oldest-person deaths is comparable to either
the expected lifetime of a person of the age found in step 1, or 1/Pr(someone
of that age dies in a given year). (Both are approximations. The former will
give shorter inter-death times.)
3\. According to Wikipedia (which is always right, except when it's wrong),
once you get old enough it's a decent approximation to say that that a Very
Old Person has about a 50% chance of making it through any given year, and
that figure doesn't depend very much on exactly how old they are.
Which would suggest that we should get a new oldest person about once every
two years, and that for decent-sized populations (say, 1000 or more) the
figure should depend only very weakly on population size.
If #3 is correct and at very advanced ages the mortality rate is roughly
independent of age, it seems like this result shouldn't actually depend much
on the details of the probability distributions. (The oldest person alive will
almost always be very old.)
(You'd get quite different results if, e.g., there were a hard divinely-
appointed cutoff at some particular age.)
~~~
crntaylor
Do you have a link for 3? It would probably affect my answer[0] as I was
assuming that the probability of dying between ages x and x+1 increases as a
power law after age 60 (which fits well for 60 <= x <= 100, but I don't have
data for beyond 100).
[0] <http://math.stackexchange.com/a/387581/4873>
~~~
gjm11
All I have for #3 is a brief comment on a Wikipedia page. I wouldn't trust it
much, and would in fact expect your model to be nearer the truth.
In fact, I'd expect your model to be nearer the truth than it actually is. It
seems that the true oldest-person death rate is on the order of 2 per year; my
argument yields one per 2 years, your simulation yields one per 1.6 years; is
it possible that there's a bug still lurking in your simulation code? (I know
you fixed one already! ... and I see you've already responded to my asking the
same question over on math.se. [EDIT to add: and I think I may have found a
bug, which would make your code underreport oldest-death events. I've reported
it on math.se.])
What happens as you twiddle the parameters of your power law to make mortality
increase more sharply with increasing age? What do you need to do (if it's
possible at all) to get the oldest-person death rate up to 2 per year?
It's conceivable that there's some bias in the reporting of deaths of oldest
living people that causes too many to be reported -- but I haven't been able
to think of any remotely plausible mechanism that would have that effect.
~~~
crntaylor
The latest iteration of the code (I fixed the bug you pointed out, and another
one that I spotted myself) reports 1 death per 0.66 years, which is close to 2
per year. The remaining difference, as you said, could be due to the mortality
rate in my model not accelerating fast enough past 100 years old. I'll have a
play and let you know.
------
tokenadult
The person who asked the question on math.stackexchange.com referred to news
reports, and is asking what is essentially a historical question, so the
question really should have been asked on a question-and-answer site about
historical research rather than on a site about mathematics. That's why the
answers are so irrelevant to the nature of the question.
The Nexis commercial database of news stories may be comprehensive enough
these days to answer a question like that in detail going back to your own
birth year. It would cost money to do the Nexis search, and you'd probably
have to pay someone to pore through the search results and edit a document
that would accurately summarize the results, but this should be a solvable
problem these days.
(As another comment here has already pointed out, the basic answer is "Every
time someone becomes the oldest person in the world, that person eventually
dies," but I take it that the question actually asked means "How often does
the identity of the 'oldest person in the world' change to being a new
individual?")
~~~
gwern
> That's why the answers are so irrelevant to the nature of the question.
I posted a historical response there, so hopefully that settles the issue.
~~~
tokenadult
Thank you for that. I see the French woman Jeanne Louise Calment (21 February
1875 – 4 August 1997) who long held the title of world's oldest person is an
impressive outlier.
I heard a description of the life of Calment by a local researcher who
participates in longitudinal studies of extreme old age. She outlived her
husband, and all her (few) descendants. She only gave up smoking when she
became so blind that she could no longer see the end of a cigarette to light
it. The researcher told me this story (taken here from Wikipedia) about how
she kept living in her house after she became aged and widowed:
"In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her
former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract.
Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs
until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than
$180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's
death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments
until Calment's death."
------
kyllo
You can't trust the actual data on this one, because the "oldest person alive"
is often a deceased Japanese person whose death has not been reported, for the
purpose of pension fraud.
~~~
gwern
That's why they start by mentioning the GRG, which does do some investigation
of its official entries and is aware of issues like pension fraud.
~~~
gwern
If anyone is curious, I just updated the post with a quickie analysis of the
GRG data (I'm on the mailing list and brought this and the post up and someone
else posted the relevant table). Turns out the actual timing differs on
whether you're looking at mean or median, because Calment screwed things up by
living a ridiculously long time.
------
jeremysmyth
Every time. 100%. Next question please!
------
pierrebai
Since the question is about the average, it seems the question can be simply
answered: the next-oldest person, on average, will die at the same age as the
current oldest person. (Obviously, assuming an unchanging mortality rate over
time, but this sounds like a valid approximation for very old people. There
seem to be a wall around 122.) Thus the average waiting time between two
oldest-person deaths is the average age difference between the two oldest
living persons.
Edit: actually, an even simpler first-order approximation is possible. If we
take at face-value that very old people have a 50% chance of living one more
year, and that this statistics holds whatever the baseline date, then upon the
death of the eldest person, the average life-span of the next eldest person is
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 ... IOW, 1 year.
------
JohnLBevan
Should it be of interest, here's a list of those people born in 1800s still
alive today (i.e. over 113 years old):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_1800s-born_peopl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_1800s-born_people)
~~~
JohnLBevan
ps. All are from Japan, US, Italy or UK. I suspect that may be down to record
keeping as much as lifestyle. For example, a friend's wife is from Turkey and
doesn't know how old she is as her date of birth was never recorded; one year
her parents just made a guess saying "well, you were born in summer and you
look like an 8 year old, so we'll stick you down as 21st June 1965".
------
jaynos
This seems like one of those interview questions where there is no right or
wrong answer, they just want to see your method. I'll probably waste most of
my day thinking about this.
------
sageikosa
For the last 20 oldest, the five person rolling length of time as oldest seems
to be hanging around 200 days.
------
Kiro
I need a number.
~~~
uptown
3
~~~
Kiro
So the oldest person dies every 3 years.
------
ExpiredLink
tq;dr
tq = teaser question
------
ttrreeww
Depends, in some specie, the older you are, the less likely you are to die.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN - Relatable.io, turn spreadsheets into customizable apps - rschooley
Hi HN,<p>We've been working on a product idea and would like your feedback.<p>The product site and app can be found at: www.relatable.io<p>The target consumer is small businesses that run their companies out of spreadsheets. Our web app turns those tables into simple grids and forms with validation. Users can then create new tables in the product and relate data to other tables. This is all done by users and doesn't require custom app development.<p>We'd like to add a bunch more features, but would like to know what more people think. If you have any issues in the app and would like 1 on 1 support please email me: [email protected]
======
eddyparkinson
Cool home page I wish mine was that good. Impressive UI.
Related work: (my stuff)
[http://www.cellmaster,com.au/AppBuilder.html](http://www.cellmaster,com.au/AppBuilder.html)
The product is is different, unlike other approaches, you can create
sophisticated custom software. Create custom software, with spreadsheet
formulas, the kind a only programmer is able to create.
[http://stoic.com](http://stoic.com) \- this is maybe the closet to
relatable.io
[http://www.spreadsheetconverter.com](http://www.spreadsheetconverter.com)
[http://www.spreadsheetweb.com](http://www.spreadsheetweb.com)
[http://BaseCase.com](http://BaseCase.com)
[http://www.smartsheet.com](http://www.smartsheet.com)
[http://www.forguncy.com/](http://www.forguncy.com/) (Japanese)
------
rkv
Tried it out. Very sleek with a nice ui but I fail to see the benefit or even
the use of it. Why not just use Excel where you have access to hundreds of
features (charts, vba, lookup tables, better filtering/sorting, validation,
conditional formatting)? My suggestion, after trying it out, would be to add
API bridging where they can populate tables from external data. Adding the
right features (like ones that are difficult for users to do in Excel) could
give this app some traction.
~~~
rschooley
Thanks for trying it out.
I agree there are a lot of things that Excel does that the product does not.
We plan to add better grid functionality like sorting, filtering, reordering
and saving of those views for later. We also plan on adding charts to better
visualize data.
We do not plan to try and replicate all of Excel's functionality. Power users
in that system are there for a reason. But there are companies using
spreadsheets to run their business because they don't know any better, or
don't want to foot the bill for custom development. We are focusing on those
users right now.
Some of the things that Excel cannot do well that we plan on adding are things
like workflows of data, triggering notifications on field values, and rollup
dashboards. We are also currently finishing adding teams for groups to manage
data together.
As for an API, we have one in place with how we designed the app. The front
end is built in angular and packaged with grunt. The backend is a node API
that only talks JSON (except the initial payload). They only look like one
entity for the sake of not using CORS.
Exposing the API to the public is something that would be targeted to
developers and IT departments rather than end users which wasn't the plan.
However if that ends up being where the demand is we will follow it.
Thank you for the feedback, we appreciate it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Billionaire wants Michigan to reject free bridge to Canada & use his bridge - slaven
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/10/23/greedy-u-s-billionaire-urges-michigan-voters-to-reject-free-bridge-to-canada/
======
alanpca
I live in Windsor, so it's pretty cool to see this make HN. I don't know what
will happen if they do strike this down, because we've already been working
__heavily __on the infrastructure for this for a year.
The fact that a single person is allowed to own an international crossing is
laughable. I know they probably can't take it away from him, but that it
happened in the first place is a joke. I hope that this never happens again.
Edit: especially an international crossing that accounts for 25% of US-CAD
trade.
~~~
walkon
> The fact that a single person is allowed to own an international crossing is
> laughable. I know they probably can't take it away from him, but that it
> happened in the first place is a joke. I hope that this never happens again.
Why laughable? If the owner of the bridge does not provide good enough value
and operational efficiency, then competing bridges will be received with favor
instead of skepticism. If the government owns the bridge/infrastructure and
does not provide acceptable value or efficiencies, it would likely be even
harder to create an alternative.
~~~
kristopolous
If I owned the only bridge in town, I'd be giving lots of money to the people
that had the power to authorize new bridges; they may even be personal friends
or current employees of mine (who better to call the shots on the bridge than
someone who has already built one).
I'd also sign near perpetuity contracts with all the shipping firms offering
them lower rates for exclusivity of my bridge.
I'd push for tougher building and environmental standards so that any would-be
competitor would have a larger barrier to entry and have to go through a
longer approval and vetting process than I ever did.
My bridge would be the one with the proximity of gas stations, factories and
major roads simply because it was there first.
Other bridges then wouldn't be built not because I'm offering a better
service, not because the patrons are charged fair tolls, and not because the
roads are clean and well maintained.
No. Other bridges wouldn't be built because my friends wouldn't approve them;
they would be further away from the major roads, they would have to go out and
pitch to each shipping client, and face a substantially higher cost of
constructions. Additionally, they would have to deal with the arguments "We
already have a bridge" and all the NIMBY lawsuits that comes with it. Hell,
I'd even pay for their lawyers.
I'd focus on maximizing profit and making sure I remain the only game in town.
When someone has the capital and motivation to effectively stop the
competition from ever forming it's in their interest to do everything they can
to pre-emptively do so from the start.
Heck, it's probably even outlined in the initial business proposal given that
addressing potential competition is such standard practice.
------
the_real_plyawn
Canada's not only paying for Michigan's $550 Million share, but also financing
them and collecting back via tolls. The bridge will connect directly into
motorways (the current bridge dumps you downtown) check out
<http://www.economist.com/node/21563756>
------
aculver
So, this is the first I've heard of this. Are there any interesting economic
details as to why the Canadians are willing to pay for the whole thing?
Growing up in Hamilton, having family in Windsor, and frequently visiting the
Detroit area, it was clear that the U.S. bound truck traffic heading over the
Ambassador produced totally insane backups. (Similar backups regularly exist
for the Blue Water Bridge a little further north in Sarnia.)
~~~
bbaker
The Canadian auto industry (as well as the American one) feels that the
friction caused by the current congestion is slowing down their industry
enough that it's worthwhile, even to pay for it in full. The gov't feels the
same way. At this point, parts make many crossings as they're built into
finished cars - the industry in Ontario and Michigan is completely
intertwined.
------
dpatru
A common question for anarchists (people who argue that government is
unnecessary) is "Who will pay for the roads?" Here we have an entrepreneur who
has paid for a bridge, and the government is trying to compete with him.
Government should not be in competition with business because it's based on
coercion and it's inefficient. Coercion should be used only as a last resort.
~~~
forensic
Because when billionaires own everything they won't be able to coerce us?
Government is the ONLY entity capable of checking the power of the private
oligarchs who control the majority of the world's wealth.
Do anarchists have a solution for the straightforward fact that "free markets"
lead to massive concentration of power in the hands of a few unaccountable
billionaires?
~~~
jamesbritt
The wealthy seem to extert power by buying off governments. Reduce the power
of gevernment and there'll be less for the wealthy to buy.
~~~
ubernostrum
"Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to
keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such
a war as is of every man against every man."
~~~
forensic
The economic ignorance on display at Hacker News is pretty solid evidence for
the necessity of liberal educations to maintain a civilized society. There are
now entire generations of engineers who never read any philosophy, economics,
or history, yet believe themselves to be experts on questions addressed by
these fields. It's astounding how smart people can be so stupid when they are
denied a liberal education.
Anyone who considers himself educated should be able to instantly spot the
author of that quote. How many HN readers, aside from pg, could do that? It's
not okay that this kind of ignorance is now considered acceptable among the
"educated" and wealthy classes.
~~~
mentat
Religion major, music and philosophy minors, so yes, I instantly recognized it
as well as it's philosophical context. We are here on HN too.
~~~
forensic
I'm here too. I know that we exist.
But Peter Thiel's entrepreneur/libertarian monoculture is expanding. These
culture killers are celebrating the death of the liberal arts. It used to be
that entrepreneur billionaires funded the arts, now they are actively seeking
to dismantle them out of some kind of resentment. Things are looking bleak for
the open, civil society.
Mark Zuckerberg called for the end of privacy in his book. Our society is
putting sophomoric man-children in charge of the cultural landscape.
------
krichman
Why on Earth was "greedy" in quotes in the title?
~~~
Cogito
Could be a selective grab of one of Mr. Norton's quotes in the article:
_“The Morouns are greedy. They are manipulative. They are cynical.”_
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
This is how you leave a company - danryan
https://gist.github.com/9cfe62fe0ba1348aa670
======
cema
Did he receive his PTO? Inquiring minds want to know.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled? - sillysaurusx
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/arts/design/gauguin-national-gallery-london.html
======
sillysaurusx
I submit this not because I agree with it but because it marks a striking
change in the lens through which we view history.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Building Browser Extensions at Scale - pritambarhate
https://tech.grammarly.com/blog/building-browser-extensions-at-scale
======
pritambarhate
Comprehensive coverage on various guidelines on building browser extensions.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bead sort: faster than O(N log N) sort - zkz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bead_sort
======
amalcon
There are "sorting algorithms" faster than O(n log n); that limitation only
applies to comparison sorts. These typically have complexity depending on the
keyspace (for example, counting-sort has linear complexity in whichever is
greater, the size of the input list or the keyspace).
They're also typically kind of useless, as in this example, because we rarely
care to sort an arbitrary list of integers with no metadata. Radix-sort is a
rare exception, in that it can easily be modified to carry metadata, hence
people actually using it in some applications.
~~~
Liron
"They're also typically kind of useless, as in this example, because we rarely
care to sort an arbitrary list of integers with no metadata."
O(n) sorting algorithms are only impractical if the size of the keyspace
dwarfs the number of elements to be sorted. In general a key is a variable-
length string of bits, which makes for an exponentially-sized keyspace, so you
want to stick with comparisons of element pairs.
But "metadata" has nothing to do with it. The last bead in each BeadSort row
can contain a sticker with some metadata. That kind of trick generalizes to
all sorts.
~~~
praptak
"The last bead in each BeadSort row can contain a sticker with some metadata."
Wrong. The beads in columns remain in the original order (not sorted) and so
would these stickers.
------
jaydub
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_sort>
~~~
Yrlec
Radix-sort is actually not linear. The algorithm will only work if the word-
length w>=log(n) (because otherwise you can't store all possible n) so O(nw)
is practically the same thing as O(nlog(n))
~~~
tybris
Not sure what you mean by storing all possible n. Radix sort is O(nw) and for
most use-cases w is smaller than log(n).
~~~
Yrlec
A word which is w bits long can hold a number between 0 and 2^w-1. If you want
to hold a larger interval than that you need to increase the size of w.
Perhaps you can make it smaller than log(n) for many use cases by restricting
the type of input you accept but O(f(x)) only refers to the worse case.
------
bayareaguy
Previously posted here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257374>
------
ars
Is there any theory on analyzing sorting real world objects? Like playing
cards.
In a computer, picking the n'th item in an array is O(1), in the physical
world it's O(n). In a computer inserting an item is O(n), but in the physical
world it's O(1).
Are there any good algorithms for sorting playing cards?
~~~
iofthestorm
I think Insertion sort tends to be the most natural sort for doing things like
sorting playing cards. Anything else seems like it would be more of a hassle
than it would be worth in real life.
------
karanbhangui
I thought about this sort on my own a couple years ago, and I thought I'd
discovered the most amazing thing in sorting :P
Not only did I realize I was beaten to the punch few years earlier, but also
that efficiency is lost in implementation.
------
ralph
The brightly coloured slides on CSP-style programming, using Occam, at
<http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/08/modules/CO/6/31/slides/> include a O(n)
"sort pump" starting on page 14 of
[http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/08/modules/CO/6/31/slides/...](http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/08/modules/CO/6/31/slides/replicators.pdf)
that's also O(n) for space.
Those slides are an interesting read generally if you're not familiar with
CSP/Alef/Limbo-style programming, despite the crufty Occam syntax.
------
prodigal_erik
If you have to represent each value in unary, how can you even set up the
input and read the results in less than O(N^2), much less carry out the
"fall"?
------
stcredzero
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort>
The advantages of this sort:
1) It involves something ridiculous (in the CS context) like Pasta.
2) You have an excuse to play the theme from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"
in that section of the talk.
------
die_sekte
Now we will need extra hardware just to do sorting!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sandvine Cancels Belarus Deal, Citing Abuses - jbegley
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-15/sandvine-says-it-will-no-longer-sell-its-products-in-belarus
======
avmich
> “We don’t want to play world police,” said chief technology officer
> Alexander Haväng.
Well...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What should have been an IMG element became this - seapunk
https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045
======
danShumway
The hoops people are going through to justify this are crazy to me. The
comparison is not no-JS vs a business-capable website. They could serve a
static image tag that would load quickly, and then load the comments/content
around it. Progressive enhancement has been a well-known development pattern
on the web for a very, very long time.
The comparison here is, "serving your content, and then doing whatever the
heck you want", and "dynamically fetching all of your core content on the fly
after synchronously downloading and executing all of the auxiliary content
that >85% of your users do not care about."
I think Youtube is overengineered as well, but at least Youtube has the good
sense to prioritize loading the video _first_ , and the
recommendations/comments _second_.
It is surreal to jump from a thread with a Google dev telling me that user-
agent scraping is necessary because progressive feature detection would
require shipping unnecessary polyfills to modern browsers, to a conversation
with an Imgur dev telling me that because 5% of their users need a special
feature, everyone should wait twice as long to get core content served to
them.
I realize these aren't the same people, and the web development community is
diverse, but... I don't know how to reconcile those perspectives. We will jump
through so many crazy, horrifying engineering hoops to get bundle sizes down:
using statistics/user-behavior to calculate dynamic bundles on the fly, user-
agent sniffing, compiling Javascript frameworks, prefetching URLs, HTTP2. But
serving an img tag with our core HTML is a bridge too far?
~~~
folkhack
It's cargo cult development. I've seen it everywhere I've worked, and have
been a huge offender myself. It's the engineer interjecting themselves vs.
doing what's best for the end-user: KISS (keep it simple stupid).
As a webdev I actually target older methods in order to get my work done. Is
it as "sexy" as a ton of stuff you mentioned? Nope. But I can get a lot done
with 20-50 lines of jQuery (or maybe a bit more verbose w/vanilla JS) by
directly working with the DOM vs. roping in frameworks in every situation I
find myself in. I try to build those "business capable" websites you're
mentioning in the first paragraph.
The biggest thing that bothers me is most of us in the industry are
"abstraction obsessed" where we would rather have discussions on the complex
tools we use vs. how we solve the problem at hand. God help you if you're that
one older dev in the back of the room going, "yeah but can't we just throw
some vanilla JS/basic jQuery/simple DOM manipulation at that and be done with
this?"
~~~
hakfoo
A company I know has been replacing some pre-Cambrian "Individual PHP-built
HTML pages with the occasional JavaScript enhancement" pages with a React-
based app. There is a case for updating the site-- it predates responsive
design and several corporate rebrandings-- but I'm not sure new-era web tech
is actually doing them any good.
It moved a lot of complexities from the server side to the client side--
management of state and orchestration of data, turning a single request for a
finished page into a whole streak of API hits to populate out a template.
They went for an API-based approach with the thought they could expose it
directly for external power users, but the API ends up not even serving their
INTERNAL needs well (the information you want for this report is scattered
across 12 different tables, but combining them together violates the REST
spirit)
I'm not sure it will be faster or more stable than the old code even once they
finish optimization. The only user-facing benefit appears to be that they
replaced the 200-millisecond flash of white as it loads each page with a
5-second spinning beachball in the template as it collects the data a piece at
a time.
I strongly suspect a lot of the motivation was the devs wanting to put some
trendier technologies on their resumes.
~~~
charrondev
Too be honest that’s just poor development practice.
We run a React SPA, and our backend for initial page load & API is in PHP.
Frontend devs work with backend devs to ensure the critical path of the page
can we gathered in 1 request. This usually means having some expand query
params on the get request.
We also preload critical API responses in the initial page load to prevent
this initial loading indicator.
~~~
folkhack
^^ Also agree on this. I have seen the whole "it has to be RESTful" thing that
the parent comment was discussing as a way to justify huge amounts of HTTP
overhead too many times however.
------
greenleafjacob
Former Imgur engineer here who worked on the desktop site and helped on mobile
when I could. A lot of the code that is loaded supports features that are used
by a long tail of users [1]. However, they do serve the javascript with
appropriate cache-control headers and serve them from Fastly's CDN so
analyzing a cold load is a bit misleading to say the least. Moreover, as other
commentators have mentioned, they optimized more for the subsequent images
than the initial pageloads (they'd prefetch the next N images).
Keep in mind Imgur is not a large company despite their high traffic, even at
their peak of employees the engineering team was pretty small (probably about
12-15 people after series A), and the mobile web team in particular was a
handful of people, with a handful of people on iOS and Android, and a handful
of people on desktop/backend/API (where I worked).
That said, I think Alan does care about these things. I know at some point
they did support NoScript and did care about the experience with JavaScript
off (and had code to support uploading images and viewing images with no
JavaScript at all). But it's hard to have it as your top priority when Reddit
and Instagram are trying to eat your lunch.
I'm sympathetic with the page bloat problem and noscript and I do think more
effort should be spent on optimizing this stuff, especially because bandwidth
is much of their opex.
[1] Posting, voting, commenting, uploading, accounts, tagging, albums, search.
There is even a hidden-ish feature to "auto-browse" in a slideshow-like manner
which you can find if you crawl around the source code.
~~~
zzzcpan
> A lot of the code that is loaded supports features that are used by a long
> tail of users
Bounce rate 53% according to alexa. So, majority of imgur users don't
appreciate it, do hit cold load, etc. A user probably has to be dozens of
interactions deep for initial loading cost to not be so high, but more likely
there is no way to ever offset overhead of all that bloat for any user.
Personally, I use an extension to fix imgur brokenness and extract images from
imgur pages without loading anything else.
~~~
PretzelFisch
Or the signal indicates most visitors are a result of an accidental link
click.
------
deanCommie
I find it ludicrous that amongst the hundreds of comments between here and on
Twitter, people seem to completely ignore that this is a FREE WEBSITE. But one
that is likely incredibly expensive to operate.
How to reconcile this and attempt to make up the shortfall? You're looking at
it.
Imgur started as hardly more than an IMG element. It burned and burned and
burned money, and their users were happy.
Then it added ads, but it didn't matter because people direct linked from
reddit anyway, which was the vast majority of the traffic.
Then imgur realized they need to break their dependency on the reddit social
mass, and built their own to apparently great success.
Now people go to imgur for images directly, and stay.
So. All that "bloat" came around for a reason and it was to try to make the
company sustainable as a business.
Dammed if you do, and if you don't.
~~~
saagarjha
And in doing so, they made their website awful for the one thing that most
people were using it for.
~~~
nsgi
Doesn't matter, people still use it. It's not completely awful for what people
use it for as long as it stays up.
~~~
flukus
> So. All that "bloat" came around for a reason and it was to try to make the
> company sustainable as a business.
Until someone comes along with a simple basic service that just works, exactly
like how imgur replaced imageshack.
~~~
deanCommie
Imgur now is still multiple orders of magnitude better than what Imageshack
and Photobucket were when it disrupted them.
------
stupidcar
This is a big problem, but calling it over-engineering seems too generous. I'd
characterise it as _under-engineering_ : Developers unwilling or unable to
give proper consideration to non-functional requirements such as performance
and design an optimised solution, and instead just layering on more and more
dependencies.
There's a happy medium between serving a single <img> tag and this
monstrosity. It would be totally feasible to use PWA techniques and a
lightweight JS framework to build an image host that was performant and still
provided all the other features Imgur does.
But let's face facts: It's not going to happen, no matter how many angry
Twitter threads get posted to Hacker News. The web platform is completely
unsuited to mobile, and there are simply too many perverse incentives in
commercial web development to expect that most developers will expend the
effort to build an optimised PWA when they can slap something together with
React, knowing it'll work fine on the CEO's iPhone on office wifi.
The only real fix would be a complete reinvention of the web to fix the myriad
design flaws. That is what Google's AMP was supposed to be, but people seem to
hate it and see it is proprietary and evil. Maybe it is, but from a technical
perspective, it's likely the only kind of solution that has a chance of
working.
------
vfc1
I think the whole comparison of imgur with a blank page with an image is a bit
silly. It's not just the image, its a whole application with comments,image
galeries, video playing ability, and of course a ton of iframes with ads which
load a lot of content (more images etc.)
Try to do the same feature set without a Javascript framework and using only
plain Javascript or even plain HTML and CSS, and then come and tell us about
the results.
Also, a lot of the bloat is probably not under the developers control and is
added by non technical marketing departments, which want a tracking pixel for
this, a tracking pixel for that etc.
But yes its true its insane and its getting worse, and 4G and HTTP2 will not
be a solution for most of us anytime soon.
~~~
alkonaut
But I don't care about any of that. I don't even care if the rest of the app
is what keeps the lights on. Everyone* who visits imgur does so following an
image link, they want to view that single image, and will not click anywhere
else on the page. Optimizing for another use case seems crazy.
*There is set of users who browse imgur or otherwise use imgur as a kind of "web application", I'm disregarding that part of their userbase for the sake of this discussion. It would surprise me a lot to learn they are more than 1% of users .
~~~
vfc1
> But I don't care about any of that
OK, fair enough but then it's a different discussion and a different
conclusion.
We can't really blame Javascript frameworks for a particular business that has
decided to monetize its user base in a different way, by adding more features
that are not widely used by their userbase.
Imgur can't exist in a vacuum, it's a business there is a whole team behind
it.
Now we might question that whole business model as well and the whole internet
supported by ads thing, but that is a whole different barrel of fish that is
in my view not attributable to Javascript frameworks.
------
bayindirh
For me, this is just the revealing of the inevitable because of the mentality
of:
\- The network is reliable
\- The bandwidth is cheap
\- The hardware is also cheap
All three statements are wrong, because _everything is fast when the n is
small_. We're past that point. Network is not reliable, bandwidth and hardware
are not cheap. At least in terms of time, and my time is neither cheap nor
free.
Developers don't or can't optimize because it's either too much work, or it's
working reasonably fast. Reasonably fast is not fast enough. We're wasting too
much resources in cases like this.
<img> _old man yells at cloud_ </img>
</rant>.
------
pflenker
The author of the tweet missed the obvious reason for that performance, even
though he even mentioned that this is the mobile behavior:
They want you to use the app!
The button to open/install the app is clearly visible at an early stage. And
since imgur users are the product, and not the customer, you want them in the
app where you can retain them more easily (think notifications) and ad-target
them more precisely based on all the data you can collect directly on the
devices.
~~~
hu3
By that logic Reddit does the same: horrible website that pushes users into
installing the app.
Hasn't worked with a single person I know.
I tend to correlate bad website with possibly bad app and I suspect others do
too.
~~~
pflenker
I think reddit is very obvious about it. They only care enough about their
mobile website to add huge, impossible to miss „download our app“ callouts and
ignore the rest.
------
mattigames
This has little to nothing to do with overengineering, its because Imgur.com
revenue depends 100% in you clicking the small thumbnails on the side bar or
one of the ads placed there (and make sure that if you do click a thumbnail
the next image and its comments do load really fast to get you hooked to those
dopamine shots), because _that_ is where the money is, meaning when you waste
your time there because the longer you spend the more likely you are going to
click their ads (and download their app and sign up and everything else that
may help that goal)
~~~
manigandham
None of that requires 5Mb of cruft or an entire React app to load. It would
take a few lines of JS for some dynamic comments. This is the very definition
of overengineered.
Compare that to Stackoverflow which generates completely dynamic pages with
more interactivity in 50 ms. Also making the site faster would generate more
revenue as more users would actually finish loading page.
~~~
mattigames
"Some dinamic comments" is easy to see you are not understanding all it does
here, the comments are more than 100 per image, replies are hidden until
clicked, the points of each comment update in (almost) real time, the comments
are posted using Ajax to never lost the scroll position, same than all the
other interaction such as upvoting, downvoting and report, like everything is
over Ajax it needs to keep track of url history itself, all this needs to work
on IE10 and other shady browsers (due being one the most popular sites). They
don't have much control over some of the assets because they are from the
advertiser and have little say what's going on there if they want to win
money. Is one of the top 20 sites visited in the United States and I seriously
don't think being slightly faster would help much or maybe at all.
And most important than all that: All the assets are properly cached, so
despite bothering thousands of engineers for most people the load nuisances
only happen once or at most a few times.
~~~
manigandham
We're talking about just the frontend here. I can definitely redo it with
substantially less code and no frameworks, including automatic transpiling for
different browsers. No need for React + jQuery with megabytes of JS, but if
you must have a framework then use Preact or Svelte.
Ads are different but I work in adtech and site speed matters. Faster sites
make more money. Remember this is on a mobile page. People don't wait more
than 3 seconds for a site to load. You're not getting any ad impressions from
visitors who never show up or leave.
~~~
mattigames
Doesn't matter if you can redo with a couple of jQuery lines, their site has
more traffic than any other image hosting the world and they need some code
that if tomorrow all the engineers leave it still can be maintained, and React
plus jQuery is a extremely smart decision for that goal.
~~~
manigandham
Maintainability is a product of good engineering practices and documentation.
No framework magically solves for that.
~~~
mattigames
>good engineering practices a
One of the "good engineering practices" is to use a baseline code widely know
and that's what full frameworks like React and Angular buys you, of course you
still can create a mess with any of those 2 but is way harder to do that than
to do it with in-house custom framework, nothing makes an JS developer run
faster from a job position than being told they are using some custom
framework that has been growing organically for years, regardless of how good
your documentation is.
~~~
manigandham
> _" of course you still can create a mess "_
That's exactly what happened here, and what this entire post is discussing.
The frameworks aren't the problem, aren't really necessary, and there are
faster alternatives if they must be used (like Preact and Svelte).
~~~
mattigames
No is not what happened here, what happened here is that engineers voices get
amplified from their anger because they value megabytes because they are more
aware of their existence than the average joe; for average people nothing of
this matters as the assets are being cached, it doesn't matter even for the
developers of the site because is doing pretty well being one of the most
visited sites in the world.
~~~
manigandham
Again, this page for a mobile site took more than 40 seconds to load a single
image. The average user is not waiting, they've already left. You seem to be
missing that detail. Performance matters and has been proven by metrics and
research from every major internet company.
Site popularity has nothing to do with UX. Imgur is popular because of reddit,
and there's plenty of users who dislike Reddit's slow and heavy redesign too.
------
dspillett
_> What’s even more even more disgusting is that THIS IS THEIR M-DOT SITE.
This was a deliberate strategy for serving mobile devices._
More likely incompetence than malice, designing for mobile in terms of
screensize and UI but neglecting to consider network bandwidth and memory+CPU
resource. That and no doubt a fair chunk of that payload relates to
advertising in some way.
If it _is_ by design then I suspect it is intended as a way to funnel people
into installing their app, much like reddit's user-hostile mobile design (I
should thank them, they've saved some time in my day by song me bothering with
that site on mobile).
~~~
gameshot911
i.reddit.com is the only way I browse on mobile.
------
fortran77
Imgur is struggling and gasping for a business model. They do serve a useful
purpose, but there's no possible way for them to make money without wrapping
images and trying to engage users to stay longer (and eventually get served
with an ad).
------
tannhaeuser
I think we're at the point where these abominations should be served as
application/html rather than text/html. At the end of the day, users come for
content, so let them decide to block crap that serves no purpose and wants to
reimplement a browser in the browser. I've found that the value of content
correlates inversely with the amount of JavaScript on a page.
------
yayana
Is there a static Twitter thread cache somewhere? Loading this fails with
"something went wrong" and then "you are rate limited".
If Twitter's dark pattern to force login/app usage were just a little closer
to the headline, I would have thought the failure was the punchline of this
posting.
~~~
jml7c5
This happens _every single time_ I open a link to twitter if it's been >~1
hour since I last viewed a twitter page. Different devices, different
networks, etc. It's been this way for at least a year. All I can think of is I
don't have some tracking cookie they're using to guess that I'm not a bot.
Reloading the page (w/ F5) fixes it.
Presumably logging in or using their app would fix it, but I've got far too
much spite for that. Instead I just avoid the site where possible.
------
cmroanirgo
Google search results are equally abysmal. Most of the download has little to
do with the 10 URLs that we want.
~~~
netfl0
I remember when they introduced ads and it was jarring. After switching to DDG
about a year ago, it’s very frustrating to try to interpret google results of
I’m ever presented with them.
I have to do this mental dance: * are these ad links? * are these knowledge
graph links? * how many results did I get?
It is a bit tiring.
------
hombre_fatal
> This industry needs some sort of regulatory body.
Yikes.
If you can do it better and make money, then build it and compete with them.
What kind of bureaucratic dystopia would even "fix" this?
~~~
ben509
Yup, the market _is_ a regulatory body.
------
Sawamara
As someone have pointed out in the thread itself: this is not in any way
React's fault. If you want, you can add (p)react for a few kb to your page,
serve a max 20-25k js code with it and still do not match the served image's
size.
However, when websites decide to instead track the everliving hell out of
their users, this is what happens. Absolutely pathetic. Another similar
experience I have with mobile sites is Reddit, its intentionally throttling
the site and tries to turn you towards their app.
~~~
ajot
> Another similar experience I have with mobile sites is Reddit, its
> intentionally throttling the site and tries to turn you towards their app.
That's why I use the .compact version of reddit on mobile. It's as ugly and
clunky as it's snappy.
------
buboard
It's funny because their website is pretty basic in features. Also try
dragging multiple pictures to upload , there is no progress bar, no feedback
nothing. It seems to upload 1 or 2 of them and then stop. Anyway good thing
you can just copy the image URL and send that one instead
------
Asooka
The entire modern web feels like someone reading that joke interview with
Stroustrup and not realising it's a joke and you shouldn't actually keep
piling complexity and building an infinitely tall job security tower. Or put
another way - it's developers working in a way that optimises for profit and
job security (which we all want, duh), but the incentives higher up are so
aligned that good simple engineering is never the optimal strategy for maximum
profit and job-security. There's probably several books on project management
and sociology to be written from examining how the mis-engineering of the
modern web came to be.
------
lovetocode
This is a naive assessment. Imgur is running a business and with that comes
all the surrounding cruft Harry is complaining about. I hate including
marketing and tag management tools in my project at work but that is what the
business wants.
~~~
csswizardry
OP here. My beef wasn’t and isn’t with the ads or monetisation: it’s with the
engineering decision to bury the product’s _primary content_ in a 1.2MB JS
application. The image itself just needs to be an `IMG` element in a server
rendered page—ads, tracking, comments, upvotes, etc. can and should be all
loaded as secondary content.
My beef is with a ‘mobile-optimised’ image hosting platform taking over 40s to
display an image on mobile.
~~~
halfjoking
Imgur used to be just an img tag. They found out they couldn't make money that
way. Eventually the images became the 110th most important thing on the page.
That wasn't an engineering decision - it was a business decision made to force
people to switch to the app. Ever try browsing imgur on mobile web? You can't
- it keeps popping up the 'download the app' button. Infinite scrolling breaks
because of that popup (by design). If you don't want to support a business
that tries to force people to use their app by making the mobile web version
horrible you don't have to.
~~~
jml7c5
>If you don't want to support a business that tries to force people to use
their app by making the mobile web version horrible you don't have to.
There's no hypocrisy in using something while complaining that it's absolutely
terrible. (Particularly if there isn't a real alternative; "don't ever open
any link to any image hosted on imgur even though you'd prefer the person had
hosted it somewhere else" is not reasonable.)
------
boomlinde
This cycle seems consistent with past popular image hosting services. First,
attract users with a simple, no-nonsense service. Second, shove ads in there.
Third, try to build some sort of community. More ads. Lastly, fade into
obscurity.
------
cryptica
I've been saying this for years. Capital is distorting science and technology.
The React ecosystem succeeded mostly because it was backed by and associated
with Facebook. Most popular tools these days are popular because of some
social or business connection to a large pile of capital.
There are a lot of amazing tools which are not popular because they are not
connected to capital. But those tools are great precisely because they are not
connected to capital.
Too much capital invariably leads to overengineering.
For example, if you consider the PHP Hiphop compiler by Facebook. It tooks
years to create it. It's an over engineered solution that did not need to
exist. They could easily have rewritten their software in a different language
instead if they really cared about saving a bit of CPU. The speedup which
HipHop provided was a constant factor. In fact, they could probably have
achieved a higher speedup with a simple rewrite even in PHP without HipHop
(with just simple algorithm optimizations).
Corporations are extremely innefficient. Their main purpose is to create
useless jobs.
------
jancsika
How much of that bigness is devoted to exfiltrating data?
If it's non-zero then you must compare to an IMG element design that can also
efficiently exfiltrate the same amount of user data. Otherwise you're
comparing apples to oranges.
~~~
jancsika
Oh, and your design should also be equally extensible. If I want to add
ambient light readings to the data set it should be essentially free to ship
the change to the img element design across all browsers.
------
gsaga
If you right click on an image you get an option named "open image in new
tab". You can just share the direct link to the image.
~~~
miyuru
That does not work most of the time. Browsers send different http accept
header when image is clicked vs hotlinked on img tag. imgur looks at the
header and redirect the image to the image page when clicked on the direct
link.
~~~
gsaga
It is possible:
[https://imgur.com/gallery/8zv0AJ7](https://imgur.com/gallery/8zv0AJ7)
[https://i.imgur.com/vjdfNOe.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/vjdfNOe.jpg)
~~~
miyuru
that is possible too, even though they don't encourage it.
what I meant was when you click on the last link, sometimes it redirects to
[https://imgur.com/vjdfNOe](https://imgur.com/vjdfNOe) making the direct link
pointless.
------
nyolfen
imgur becoming somehow more bloated and less usable in every way over time is
perhaps rivaled only by skype's trajectory
------
LandR
If the dev doesn't use a hundred different javascript frameworks what on earth
are they going to put on their CV!
------
2sk21
Maybe there is a potential revenue model lurking here - pay extra to get the
lighter version of a page? (half joking)
~~~
rasz
You could offer hotlinking with a twist - instead of original file you get
modified one with Ad encoded into upper 20% portion of image.
~~~
slig
Bundle it with a URL shortener that sticks the usual Analytics tracking crap
(utm_source, etc) and a QR-Code and you're golden!
------
anon4242
And then when Leftpad-Azer removes his packages the next time the image won't
load at all...
------
345218435
alright, i‘ll make an exception and ask for constructive „criticism“:
what better alternatives are out there?
~~~
capableweb
Anywhere where you can directly link to a image without the hoster doing any
funky redirects.
Usually, the image hosts starts being like ^ while then slowly transitioning
to more and more user-hostile patterns.
Only way I found to avoid this is to setup my own Hetzner box (unlimited
traffic) running nginx to serve images. Use `scp` to upload them.
~~~
csande17
> Usually, the image hosts starts being like ^ while then slowly transitioning
> to more and more user-hostile patterns.
Hilariously, Imgur itself followed this trajectory: it started out as a super-
simple image hosting site whose creator was fed up with all the nonsense that
other image-hosting sites did[1]. Now, though, Imgur has become the website
everyone complains about!
[1]:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090227183112/http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apply HN: Trely – Outsourcing on Demand for Latam - luisguzman
Trely is a outsourcing platform that offer on-demand services for Latam made by curated freelancers.<p>Initially we are working with design and copywriting services.<p>For every task generated we take between 20-30% of the money.<p>Trely solves two problems of the current outsourcing space for latam. And in consequence of solving that 2 problems we offer 3 great improvements.<p>Problems:<p>1. Freelancers usually take more work than they should. And we get it. It's hard for a freelancer say no to a contract/work/gig because is the way they make a living.
But this often end in a big workload and then delayed deliveries of their tasks.<p>2. Companies/entrepreneurs spend a good amount of time looking for a good freelance when they have to outsource some work. Checking the portafolio, the references, the reviews, the background. And then, the conversation between freelancer-company can have between 8-15 emails before the work is begun. Next depending on the work size the delivery in no less than a week.<p>Solutions that trely offers:<p>1. We look, interview, and vet the freelancers before we accept them in our platform. We look in their resumes, portafolio, background, and references. Then we make them 3 test and the result is that we work only with 15% of the initial candidates.<p>2. Companies only need to fill a detailed form of their needs and a freelancer can take the job. They can select a time frame of delivery. If the clients are in a rush the price increase.<p>3. As consequence of #1 and #2 the freelancers only take and work one task at a time. Our platafform only allow freelancers to take one job and delivered fast mantaining top quality. This allowed us to offer services on-demand (24 hours or less depending on the task).<p>http://trely.co<p>https://youtu.be/olBBWpDOiiU (spanish)<p>PD: Sorry if my text have typos. I'm working hard on improve my english :)
======
bestattack
Oh "Latam" = Latin America, correct?
Are you taking on any jobs yourself, or sending every task to a freelancer?
How do you maintain the quality of the work?
~~~
luisguzman
Correct, our initial target would be Latin America.
We've taken freelance jobs but no the ones that comes through Trely. Just
recommendations from our old clients.
And we take just the necessary for paying the bills.
We are really betting on this startup :)
For the quality thing. We have a system that for every job made by the
freelancers the client can vote between 1-5 "stars". If the job review is
below 3 we personally check the requirement and the work and we made a
decision at this point. The client can get a refund or we explain why we
believe the job was done correctly and the freelance gets paid.
------
gpsgay
Hello, Interesting, do you have any customers / freelancers yet? The site does
not seem to be working correctly.
~~~
luisguzman
Yes. We are currently working with 10 selected customers. At this moment our
logistic is working with third party apps like slack, typeform and internal
tools developed by us that allow us launch the services in a mvp.
Our final platform is currently at 70% and should be finished and launch soon
:) In the case of freelancers, we have associate 84 designers and 19 writers.
All of them from Latam
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Khan Academy on Bitcoin - ricksta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-w7SnQWwVA&feature=youtube_gdata_player
======
tawsdsnl
That's informative...but I wish he didn't have a two-minute introduction that
doesn't actually tell you anything...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
MIT scholar surprised by Amazon’s hostile response to her face-recognition work - johnshades
https://www.fastcompany.com/90334982/mit-researcher-surprised-by-amazons-hostile-reaction-to-her-face-recognition-work
======
greenyoda
Extensive discussion yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19660917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19660917)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Long Road to Mongo's Durability - craigkerstiens
https://brandur.org/fragments/mongo-durability
======
JoachimSchipper
Indeed, MongoDB (with very careful configuration) has recently passed a round
of Jepsen test, although patches were necessary after -rc3; see
[https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3](https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3).
------
Joeri
How does mongodb benchmark against other db products when you configure it for
durability. Is it still faster?
~~~
brandur
I haven't run any numbers, but here's how I understand it.
Because of the way its journaling is implemented with sync interval, when
you've configured durability with `writeConcern` `j` set to `true`, any write
will have to wait for the next sync interval to commit. This wait will be in
the range of 0 to the configured interval (~100 ms) and that makes the worst
case quite bad.
You can work around it by configuring a lower sync interval and thus less
average wait time, but I doubt you ever reach the level of databases that were
designed to prefer durability by default, and which have heavily optimized
that write path.
~~~
magnetic
Well doesn't that depend on what metric you use to define speed? It sounds
like you are measuring latency... but if you were to measure throughput you
may be getting a different answer. The 100 ms flush may not do much good for
latency, but it can allow some good batching on writes, which would most
likely increase throughput vs having a write flush at every transaction
commit. And it's actually more complex than this, because it depends on the
hardware you have, its cache size and whether you have a BBU with a battery
that will last long enough to flush the contents of the cache to "permanent
and durable storage" in case of power outage. In other words: YMMV
~~~
diziet
Indeed, choice of metrics matte.r To add to what you're saying, there are even
more metrics than that!
Consider latency as an example. There's average latency and nth percentile
latency (and a similar metric of % of requests above certain latency). You can
plot the latency as a CDF (Cumulative distribution function) to visualize it
differently. The amount of time you run the benchmark affects things, as
performance is typically better 5 seconds in compared to 5 hours in.
Performance consistency within a closely bounded temporal interval matters a
lot too, as too spiky performance can be detrimental.
Is the same workload being performed? Are the machines configured similarly,
or is one a replica cluster while another one is a slower NAS? Are the indexes
similar? What is the read workload during that time, as no reads vs high reads
affect write latency rate.
And we're just talking about one metric for a database. There are other
related metrics -- like iops, cpu taken, memory taken, disk taken, disk
writes, disk amplification (io per op), etc, that all 'matter'.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Nicehash down – rumors of $60M in Bitcoin stolen - greg7mdp
https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7hxxp3/hicehash_hacked/
======
sundvor
Confirmed. Posting this here rather than a new thread...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/7i0s6o/official_press_release_statement_by_nicehash/)
They owed me (edit: was myself) ~USD100 , being a week or so away from payout.
I'm only mining to an external address - so that's only lost if they go out of
business then I guess? Didn't like the thought of mining to their own wallets
after trying it once before.
I hope they recover. I really like their software.
~~~
antiphase
They owed _me_ , unless you are them.
~~~
sundvor
Cheers. Whilst entirely off topic, as a Norwegian expat in an English speaking
country I do appreciate the correction. :) I found
[https://writingexplained.org/me-vs-myself-
difference](https://writingexplained.org/me-vs-myself-difference) which was a
nice explanation.
------
cjlars
It seems as though Bitcoin is the least secure of all the 'stores of value'. I
can find few examples, outside of military operations, with more than $10M in
gold lost to a heist, yet it happens multiple times a year with Bitcoin. And
it's not like someone is logging into your Fidelity account and taking all
those APPL shares.
~~~
spiorf
It's not like in 1800 news of stolen gold was instantly broadcasted to the
whole world.
~~~
cjlars
Yes, but even the largest known gold heists are, for the most part, smaller
than what we're seeing in bitcoin.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NYC Subway Trains Might Start Moving Faster - daegloe
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/nyregion/new-york-subway-delay.html
======
gen220
I remember reading the article linked in this one, from the Village Voice, at
the beginning of this year. Strongly recommend reading it for you armchair MTA
critics: it has a lot of tinder for your tirades.
[https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/13/the-trains-are-
slowe...](https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03/13/the-trains-are-slower-
because-they-slowed-the-trains-down/)
If my memory serves me well, it made a pretty convincing argument that the MTA
was deliberately and publicly misconstruing the "slow train problem" as a
result of "congestion", effectively blaming the success of the city for the
failure of its public transportation. The Voice article rendered this
commonly-touted line of defense not just misleading, but flagrantly incorrect.
From my perspective, it seems that the reversal of policy reported now, only
came into existence because of the line of investigative reporting that began
with the Village Voice piece.
Credit for your commute's speedup probably belongs, at least in part, to the
Voice's fantastic investigative reporting (a full 2 months before the linked
NYT piece). Even more reason to support your local journalists! :)
~~~
yostrovs
Too late for the Village Voice. It has been effectively shut down. Will there
be any real reporting left once Google and Facebook are finished organizing
the world's information?
------
melling
“Over the summer, Mr. Byford created a new “speed unit” — a three-person team
that traveled every mile of track on the system in an empty train to find
areas where trains could safely move faster. The team identified 130 locations
where the speed limit should be increased. So far, a safety committee at the
transit agency has approved 34 locations for speed increases.”
There are almost 100 other possible locations.
------
mabbo
> Workers recently started to change speed limit signs on the first segment on
> the Fourth Avenue line in Brooklyn between 36th Street and 59th Street.
> Overall, officials plan to change the speed limits at 100 locations by the
> spring.
The real problem here, as I see it, is that humans are still involved in
running the trains. We need speed signs for them to read, we need to hope they
follow the rules, we need them to control the train as best a human can.
Plenty of cities in the world are running autonomous trains. It's not easy to
do, but it is doable. Retrofitting existing trains would be a difficult
project, I imagine, but worth the cost.
How much more efficiency could we gain just by shaving those half seconds (or
more) at every single start, stop, door open, door close, etc?
I don't even think we need to fire the operators (I'm certain their union
would object anyway) so much as change their role to one of managing the
autonomous train, providing first aid when needed, keeping a human watch on
things.
~~~
sotojuan
MTA's union is heavily opposed to anything that will result in less jobs. Even
with the CBTC system that is mostly automated they put two people in the train
instead of just one.
I'm pro union and worker's right but the MTA definitely fits lot of the
negative stereotypes of unions.
~~~
isostatic
London's Central Line is automated, however there's still a driver, who
presses "go" and opens/closes the doors. More importantly they're also there
for if something bad happens or they need to take over.
Is the MTA different?
------
hamilton
This New Yorker piece on Andy Byford provides a lot more context for why the
MTA is the way that it is:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-
byfor...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-byford-save-
the-subways)
~~~
stuxnet79
Andy did a great job with the Toronto transit. I feel like his work is cut out
for him in NYC as MTA looks like a complete shit show from both a political
and fiscal standpoint (relative to TTC). I wish him good luck.
------
snissn
My armchair / layperson issue with the subway infrastructure is that a lot of
the issues around delays and especially the L train upgrades are related to
antiquated signaling systems that seem to not at all acknowledge all of the
updates to telecommunications that have been developed in the last 100 years.
~~~
yostrovs
I attribute the highly expensive nature of NYC subway to politics, since
similar services don't have overall cost anywhere near what New Yorkers pay in
fees and taxes. The new chief of the MTA is asking for $40 billion to upgrade
the system. They should be able to build three new New York subway systems
from scratch with that kind of money.
~~~
Wowfunhappy
I would be very interested to see an analysis of exactly why laying track in
NYC is more expensive than in other cities/countries. "Politics" is a very
nebulous reason—if that is indeed the cause—I'd love to see more detail on
_where_ in our political system, and why, etc.
I'm sure part of the problem is that subway workers in NYC are well-paid, but
that's probably not all of it.
~~~
hapless
Fraud, waste, and the worlds worst purchasing work.
NYCT workers are well paid, but that is only an explanation for high operating
expense, not obscene capital expenses.
Operating expense is really fairly well managed, albeit with unusually high
wages. It is a small, small part of the subway’s problems.
~~~
vkou
The unusually high wages can also be attributed to a city with an incredibly
high cost of living, and large number of overtime hours.
Train conductor base pay is $23-30 an hour - the six-figure salaries that you
read about are for people doing >40h/week, including night shift/holiday/on-
call work.
I generally think that it's reasonable that people who do more work get paid
more then people who do less work... Or that people doing the same work during
hardship hours get paid more then people doing their 9-5.
------
monksy
Sounds like the MTA is slowing down due to poor maintenance and a lack of
active management.
------
dajohnson89
Can't read TFA b/c paywall.
A low maximum speed is not what's responsible for the MTA's deteriorating
service levels. The problems are mainly signal issues and train
malfunctions[0]. To a lesser extent, track fires. This begets the question --
what good is a marginal top speed increase, if so many trains arent reaching
their top speed anyways? At least 30% of the time during my rush-hour MTA
commute, my train is crawling through the tunnel, well under its current
maximum speed. Think tortoise and hare.
Also -- higher max speed might mean harder stops. [0]
[https://ny.curbed.com/2018/9/17/17869218/nyc-subway-
signal-p...](https://ny.curbed.com/2018/9/17/17869218/nyc-subway-signal-
problems-delays-riders-alliance)
~~~
calebegg
The change isn't to the top speed, it's to mis-configured time signals that
forced trains to slow to a crawl unnecessarily.
In this article (which you probably also won't be able to read, sorry; try
incognito?), the Times explains why some mis-configured time signals are the
cause of many delays, with compelling evidence to back up the claim.
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subway-
crisis-mta-decisions-signals-rules.html)
~~~
cimmanom
Right. Plus how often is an entire line backed up because the operator _didn
't_ crawl slowly enough past that misconfigured signal, so the emergency brake
got triggered and additional action had to be taken to get the train moving
again (release from dispatch? crew sent out?), causing thousands of people
systemwide to be "delayed because of a signal problem at 14th St" or whatever?
------
kevin_thibedeau
I've been suspicious that MTA has being keeping the speeds down as a cost
savings means to reduce energy consumption. Same with "Sandy repairs" causing
service reductions that they won't compensate for on parallel lines.
Their other favorite BS excuse it that delays are caused by people holding
doors open. But that doesn't hold water either when uncrowded trains still
have the doors malfunction and reopen multiple times.
Pre-Byford management seems to have been controlling their burn rate with
these shenanigans. Otherwise the system should be able to handle 1948
ridership levels.
~~~
iooi
This article explains the slow speeds pretty well:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subw...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/09/nyregion/subway-
crisis-mta-decisions-signals-rules.html)
Basically, it boils down to heavy consequences for operators that go too fast
coupled with systems that measure speed inconsistently.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
'Viking sunstone' found in shipwreck? - cwan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21693140#TWEET647219
======
SiVal
The BBC article mentioned refraction, but Iceland Spar makes it possible to
see the direction of polarization of skylight, which means it could be used on
small, clear patches of sky on an otherwise overcast day to find the direction
to the sun. This is another way it could act as a "sunstone" for navigation.
Whether it actually was used this way is unfortunately not known.
------
Gustomaximus
I love when believed 'mythology' is shown to be fact. We write off our
ancestors too often and they were great hackers in their own right.
Now the Mythbusters just need to get Archimedes mirror working one day!
~~~
martey
I do not think that this paper proves anything about _Viking_ navigation.
While the researchers seem to have been able to prove that the found crystal
is Iceland spar, it was recovered from a Elizabethan shipwreck in the English
channel from 1592, centuries after the magnetic compass started being used in
Europe. While other articles on the topic claim that they suggest that
sunstones would have been destroyed in Viking burials, I think that the lack
of similar crystals from known Viking ruins is troublesome.
~~~
contingencies
Fair concerns. An interesting and not entirely unrelated tangent is that of
the nearby Basques. In _Salt: A World History_ , Mark Kurlansky presents a
theory that the Basques preserved their ancient and linguistically
disconnected culture by bartering salt-preserved fish gained from the vast
stocks on the Atlantic coast as protein stocks to neighbouring peoples during
the European winters. Evidence of such tools may lend some further support to
this theory.
(Edit: I just noticed he has also written _The Basque History of the World:
The Story of a Nation_... that's definitely on my list now!)
~~~
rodelrod
Even if you concede that the basques did have an early start on exploiting the
Newfoundland fisheries, that would have given them an edge for a few centuries
after the year 1000 (more like 1400 if you wait for the necessary navigation
technology). By the 3rd century AD, all of Iberia except for the Basque was
speaking a romance language.
So, this theory -- very poorly documented in itself -- fails to explain at the
very least these mere 7 to 10 centuries of preservation of Basque identity.
EDIT: by the way, I totally buy that Europeans were fishing for cod in
Newfoundland before Columbus, and that at least some of those were basques.
15th century Portuguese maps calling those waters "Mare Baccalearum" are proof
enough for me.
------
Luc
In the book 'Emergency Navigation' by David Burch (
[http://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Navigation-Improvised-No-
Ins...](http://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Navigation-Improvised-No-Instrument-
Methods/dp/0071481842) ), the method is explained more clearly. With a clear
Iceland spar crystal 1 to 2 inches on a side, the direction of the sun can be
pinpointed to within a few degrees. You can also get the same effect using a
piece of cellophane and the lens of a pair op polarized sunglasses. You do
need a patch of clear sky at a 90 degrees angle from the sun direction to
observe the change in intensity.
------
qwertzlcoatl
This is kind of old news. This Ouest-France article from November 5th, 2011
even has two pictures of the 'Viking sunstone'
[http://www.ouest-france.fr/actu/actuLocale_-Des-
physiciens-p...](http://www.ouest-france.fr/actu/actuLocale_-Des-physiciens-
percent-le-secret-des-Vikings-_-2007955------35238-aud_actu.Htm)
~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yeah, the op was lame - a picture of some sailing ship, and not the sunstone.
Why do bloggers to that?
Your link also does not seem to have a picture?
~~~
anthonyb
page 2
------
rexreed
Exactly how would this work when the sun has set?
~~~
defrost
The sun below the horizon is still a source of diffuse light, the crystal is
used to find the angle to a source of light and in northern latitudes with
long twilights the sun produces a glow long after it has set.
See: [http://www.livescience.com/16831-viking-sunstone-crystal-
com...](http://www.livescience.com/16831-viking-sunstone-crystal-compass.html)
~~~
contingencies
Nice. First 3D-printed replica wins my vote as a teaching aid and generally
cool retro hack. We need more of this offline tech stuff.
Combine a compass and other navigational tools, and I see an interesting
evolution as a sort of retro, creative-commons, git-forkable hacker-army
object.
~~~
jff
When you figure out how to 3d print a birefringent material, let me know. In
fact, when you get a hobby-grade 3d printer to print something you can
actually see through, let me know.
~~~
contingencies
Sure. Obviously not everything comes from a machine. One can probably rely on
people finding some crystal separately and/or if feasible order bulk-printed
3D transparent material (no idea of light properties of those, though I know
they exist... just saw some this morning!).
~~~
jff
If you find the crystal separately, there's nothing left to print. The tool is
fully functional as nothing more than a lump of crystal.
~~~
contingencies
My understanding from the image is that the operation is based upon the
combination of two directional light beams through holes driven by an opaque
piece with a rotating disc. Whether this was used at the time or not, it still
seems a clear way to demonstrate the concepts.
At the very least the operation could perhaps be usefully modelled three
dimensionally using raytracing, perhaps also with the capacity to vary basic
optical properties of the transparent crystal feature such as reflectiveness,
refractiveness and average opacity, as well as atmospheric conditions
encountered in the seas ancient European seafaring peoples are known to have
sailed.
------
k2enemy
A little off topic, but Iceland Spar features prominently in Pynchon's
"Against the Day"[1]. It is a pretty amazing book that might appeal to this
audience.
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Day#Doubling>
------
koala_advert
And of course, no image is available.
------
eford1
I can't wait to evolve my Sunkern!
------
sampsonjs
This sounds like the MacGuffin from a video game.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Grab a color palette for your next project - hasukimchi
https://www.colourhunt.com/
======
hasukimchi
Good day everyone! The last few weeks I was working on a small color
community.
As a designer you can share your favorite color palettes and as a developer
you can grab some for your next project.
On most sites I was missing a feature to easy grab them. I always have to
manually copy and paste hex values or even make a screenshot and grab the
colors out of sketch.
Thats why I wanted something more smooth and build Colour Hunt. With CSS +
Preprocessor export and soon with Sketch export.
~~~
wjr
As a non-designer, I like seeing sites like this for inspiration, but I lack
the imagination of how it would actually look like in actual implementation.
Something I'd suggest would be if it's possible to create a simple wireframe
based web interface (form, CTA, background) that uses the currently selected
color pallet, as a way to have a live preview of the individual color palette.
~~~
hasukimchi
Oh thats a really cool idea. I like it.
Could be however a bit tricky. Because the color palettes can have anything
between 2 and 5 colors and not every palette can be translated 1:1 into a
website.
But this is definitely something I will be looking into!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Amazon's Response to Botnet Incident - lmacvittie
http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/12/18/amazon-response-zeus-botnet-privacy-security-cloud-computing.aspx
======
ShabbyDoo
Doesn't Amazon have to protect the "cleanliness" of the IP addresses in its
pool? I worked a bit in the past on email deliverability issues and recall
that mail originating from IPs that have behaved badly in the past was much
more likely to get tagged as spam. I'd hate to be the guy whose EC2 instance
received one of these IPs. Who knows what sorts of filters would be left
around out there.
~~~
hga
I've read ... I think on an AWS forum ... that the EC2 addresses are already
thoroughly tagged as spam. Using EC2 to send out spam is much more obvious
than using it for botnet command and control. At the time they'd just rolled
out a scheme to address this and many EC2 users were already using 3rd party
email services.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is Surveillance without cooperation possible? - sathishmanohar
Google and Facebook has denied government access to servers and backdoors. What are all the possible ways for a Government with big pocket to obtain user data without co-operation of the service providers?<p>May be like, corrupting certificate authorities and being man in the middle.<p>Lets say I'm just curious.<p>So what are the Possible methods for mass surveillance without service provider cooperation?
======
dsl
The NSA has traffic sniffers covering all the major fiber routes. They get a
mole within a tech company that is properly placed to walk out with a copy of
the private key, and all SSL traffic is effectively plain text from that point
forward.
------
e3pi
Here's one, a box in the middle:
NARUS(R U NSA?) -See Clearly Act Quickly(tm)
(Wikipedia)
Narus was founded in 1997 by a team of Israelis led by Ori Cohen and Stas
Khirman, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, which provides real-time
network traffic and analytics software with enterprise class spyware
capabilities.
.Some features of NarusInsight include:
Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the
Internet) High-speed Packet processing performance, which enables it to sift
through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet.
Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user,
element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real-time. That is it
can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g.
web browsers, instant messaging applications, email) and what they are doing
with those applications (e.g. which web sites they have visited, what they
have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities
are connected to each other (e.g. compiling lists of people who visit a
certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their emails).
High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.
NarusInsight's functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity
or IP service such as security lawful intercept or even Skype detection and
blocking.
Compliance with CALEA and ETSI. Certified by Telecommunication Engineering
Center (TEC) in India for lawful intercept and monitoring systems for ISPs.
The intercepted data flows into NarusInsight Intercept Suite. This data is
stored and analyzed for surveillance and forensic analysis purposes.
Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering
of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the
payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner
products, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyze information
collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.
A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum
capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone
modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not
continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight
installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million
broadband users.
According to a year 2007 company press release, the latest version of
NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is "the industry's only network traffic
intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and
reconstruction of webmail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail and
Yahoo! Mail".[11] However, currently most webmail traffic can be HTTPS
encrypted, so the content of messages can only be monitored with the consent
of service providers.
It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening,
in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of
traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as
the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are
being monitored.
........................
I first learned of NARUS in James Bamford's 2008 title "Shadow Factory". Also
mentioned another similar big intel sniffer box. He goes into much more detail
than I recall.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Laravel Myanmar - HeinZawHtet
http://laravelmyanmar.com
======
dbcjjch0r0us
It's a new Myanmar community organized around Laravel web framework and
related stuff. It was started by an attempt to translate Laravel documentation
to Myanamar language. I hope to see the community continue growing in the
future.
~~~
HeinZawHtet
Yeah. we have future plans and funds to drive this community actively.
------
b6
I don't know what this is about, but I find the Burmese script very beautiful.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Universal React with Babel, Browserify - ponyfoo
http://ponyfoo.com/articles/universal-react-babel
======
egauci
Thanks for taking this on and writing about it. I learned several things
already.
One thing I've read in the past is that the React render method should always
produce the same output given the same props and state. However, this line:
<button onClick={this.handleClick.bind(this)}>click me!</button>
breaks that, since it creates a new click handler each time. I've seen people
creating the binding once in the constructor and using that in the render
method.
------
fullstackione
I'd like to know if you are considering to try riotjs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chinese manufacturers turn inward - jonbaer
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002573/pandemic-us-china-trade-war-impact-on-manufacturers/
======
simonblack
Why put the future of your livelihood on the whims of those weird foreigners,
when you can supply the much larger local markets and have a better idea what
local long-term demand will be like?
The whole of the West (5 eyes plus Europe) is a smaller market than just
China.
I know which market I'd be choosing if I was Chinese.
~~~
mytailorisrich
Leaving the current situation aside, it has long been the view of many
economists that the Chinese economy was imbalanced and too export-oriented,
and that the next step of its development ought to be to develop domestic
consumption.
Like you say, that also has the nice benefit of potentially providing a huge
cushion for Chinese companies, and that's already somewhat the case. Cynically
I'd say that's also partly why the US is trying to cut Huawei's supply chain:
Banning them from the US will not hurt them that much, but cutting off their
supply chain will.
~~~
simonblack
Many Americans say "Who will buy from the Chinese if the US doesn't? We have
them over a barrel."
That's a fallacy. The whole of the foreign export market is only about 20% of
the Chinese economy.
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?locations=CN)
The US only makes up about 20% of those exports. So, in fact, the US purchases
make up merely (20% of 20%) or roughly 4% of the Chinese economy.
China could easily lose all of that without damage. Its GDP generally grows
4-6% per year. It might be slightly painful, but other growth in the economy
would replace those losses within roughly 12-18 months.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Import Docker in Python and Run Anything - stephensonsco
http://blog.deepgram.com/import-a-docker-container-in-python/
======
stephensonsco
We made a python module to run complicated non-python code in python (like
stuff that needs ridiculous environmental gymnastics). It's called sidomo
(Simple Docker Module) and it's used to easily make python modules that are
actually docker containers (well, docker images). These containers take an
input, then hit it with the contained code, and send the output back to pure
python.
The hello world:
from sidomo import Container
with Container('ubuntu') as c:
for line in c.run('echo hello from the;echo other side;'):
print(line)
~~~
StavrosK
It's probably a happy coincidence that that means "quick" in Greek.
~~~
reinhardt
<pedantic>"brief" would be a closer translation</pedantic>
~~~
StavrosK
You're the best kind of correct.
------
tetron
Going one step further, using [http://CommonWL.org](http://CommonWL.org) you
can wrap Dockerized command line tools into callable Python functions, and
abstracting all the details of stdin/stdout redirection and getting files into
and out of the container.
~~~
stephensonsco
This is really cool!
------
sciencerobot
I've been looking for something like this. My use case is that I have a bunch
of really old bioinformatics programs that are a pain to install and I want to
run them from a web app. Instead of bundling all of the weird dependencies
with the web app, I want to run them in containers using background workers
(rails/sidekiq in this case).
~~~
noajshu
This is an awesome use case. Back when I was in particle physics we had to use
ROOT ([https://root.cern.ch/](https://root.cern.ch/)) for everything, and
configuring it in a new environment would take at least a day.
What kind of bioinformatics software are you plugging into a webapp?
------
arturhoo
That's a neat way way to tight together both worlds, and I can see it being
useful in cases like testing.
Nonetheless, it is important to distinguish the need to communicate between
programs and the need to programmatically run a piece of software like ffmpeg
and getting its output.
For the seconds case, especially in more complex architectures, where you need
"interact with software written in another language" it makes sense to
explicitly separate this interaction, for example through a broker [0]. In the
end, all you need is a way to communicate from Program A that Program B can do
some sort of job, and this can be a simple string pointing to a raw video file
in a storage like S3, not necessarily the raw file.
[0] [http://www.artur-
rodrigues.com/tech/2015/06/04/beanstalkd-a-...](http://www.artur-
rodrigues.com/tech/2015/06/04/beanstalkd-a-simple-and-reliable-message-
queue.html)
------
ThePhysicist
So if I understand correctly it basically launches the container and pipes the
log output to a generator for consumption through Python?
~~~
noajshu
Yes. Not necessarily log output, but stderr and/or stdout.
------
richardwhiuk
I'm struggling to see the advantage of this? Surely either running the entire
thing in the container and just running the command using subprocess would
achieve the same effect....
~~~
takee
Or, if you have docked installed on a system anyway why not just use docker-py
(docker's python bindings) directly to run stuff in containers?
~~~
noajshu
you can! I found it difficult to work with and decided to make something new
after reading this post: [http://blog.bordage.pro/avoid-docker-
py/](http://blog.bordage.pro/avoid-docker-py/) It's a few years old but I
think docker-py still needs some love for it to really shine.
------
kanzure
Hmm, this could be a good way to use postgresql during unit tests for python
applications, as a cheap alternative to sqlite://:memory: and ramdisks.
Cleanup is just container management task stuff, instead of adding postgresql
package to linux distro.
~~~
noajshu
I feel you on the cleanup side--there was another interesting docker app on HN
today that you may want to look at if you're running a large DB in your
container:
[https://github.com/muthu-r/horcrux](https://github.com/muthu-r/horcrux).
Our Container class is built so that if you use the `with` statement,
container termination is handled automatically even if there's a program
fault.
------
wdawson4
Does this require your Python app to run on a user in the docker group, thus
giving your app Sudo privilege?
~~~
noajshu
Your Python app doesn't have to run in a container at all. If you chose to run
it in a container, and you wanted to use sidomo, you would have two options:
1 The container would need to be privileged so that it could run a docker
daemon and containers (sidomo processes) within itself.
2 (the "right" way) Use the host's docker daemon from within the first
container by binding the docker.sock to the child container. The first
container can start and stop others that run next to it, instead of inside it.
This way there's no recursion, and no containers need root privileges.
------
ciokan
By looking at the code I can't seem to find a way of running the containers
with options such as --net, --dns etc. Am I missing something or it's just not
part of the plan?
~~~
vkjv
Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's just a thin wrapper the `docker`
module, which is a wrapper around the Docker API.
[https://github.com/deepgram/sidomo/blob/7890cde8c5dbf1722311...](https://github.com/deepgram/sidomo/blob/7890cde8c5dbf17223110bf79a2b6894fcfd6d14/sidomo/sidomo.py#L43-L56)
It probably wouldn't be much effort to add an options object that is a direct
pass-thru to the Docker API. That gives you the availability of all options
and helps to future proof it.
I'm not a Python developer, but I've had success doing exactly this in node
with the `dockerode` module.
------
ilovefood
This is so awesome man! I wish I could offer you a beer, it is exactly what I
needed right now! ahhhhh I love the community
~~~
stephensonsco
Glad you like it. We're curious to see what contraptions people come up with.
------
youngbullind
So much for "flat is better than nested"!
~~~
noajshu
map(print, ["ok", "flat is better", "but", "the with statement", "is badass"])
;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Claude E. Shannon – A Goliath Amongst Giants - zw123456
https://www.bell-labs.com/claude-shannon/
======
todd8
A co-worker of mine grew up in Claude Shannon's neighborhood. He was a
childhood friend of one of the Shannon kids and related to me that their
basement was full of projects and inventions that the father built. He said it
was like a mad scientist's laboratory.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
YC Summer '11 - victorp
Do you know the dates for YC's Summer '11 cycle?
======
skowmunk
I believe its the same months every year, that would make it June,11 to August
11 as the months one has to be there in SF for the Summer 2011 cycle.
Regarding the start and end of the application process, assuming it would be
started and ended with the same lead time as the winter 2011 cycle, the start
and end dates would be: Start - Mid Jan 11 End - Mid Mar 11
These are just guesstimates assuming that YC repeats the same pattern every
year. It would wise to keep checking HN to see if they indeed do that.
Good luck. Skowmunk.
------
pg
June through August, like always.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: validator.py -- data/form validation in python - slucidi
http://mansam.github.io/validator.py/
======
soferio
This looks really useful for validating rest endpoint data. Thanks!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rules for Remote Work - JoeCortopassi
https://joecortopassi.com/articles/rules-for-remote-work/
======
6nomads
Interesting rules, thanks for sharing. We've just made an online conference on
remote work and team management with 12 industry experts, you can check out
the recordings as well: [https://6nomads.com/remote-
conf](https://6nomads.com/remote-conf)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Underactuated Rotor for Simple Micro Air Vehicles - command_tab
http://modlabupenn.org/underactuated-rotor/
======
zan2434
This is so clever! Turning mechanical control problems into informational
control problems is critical to the ubiquity of micro air vehicles.
~~~
fasteddie31003
There is a lot of potential in solving mechanical problems with information
systems, rather than using complicated mechanical solutions. For instance,
hydraulic automatic transmissions and differential.
~~~
lumpypua
The mechanical solutions are always really interesting and clever, but digital
systems are much more flexible.
Really cool video on the mechanical ignition timing control in a delorean to
control emissions. Explanation of ignition advance at the end:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge1GwepqtK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge1GwepqtK0)
------
command_tab
This thing is so nimble in the air yet has a fraction of the complexity of a
regular helicopter. I wonder if this method will scale up to "full size"?
~~~
wiredfool
Probably not, for the same reason that a quadcopter doesn't really scale to
full size. The inertia effects of larger rotors make changing the speed of the
rotors within a rotation much harder.
With full sized helis, it takes a long time to spin up the rotors to speed
before the pitch is changed to take off.
~~~
TaylorAlexander
Well the critical difference here is that changing blade speed is not needed
or desired. They just need to change blade torque, which would apparently
immediately cause a change in blade pitch.
I don't see a specific reason why this wouldn't scale. I do wonder what
changes in load do to the system though. If it can't handle changing loads
without messing up the blade dynamics, it would only work for fixed payload
systems like camera platforms.
~~~
erobbins
It won't scale because of inertia. Rapidly changing the speed/torque of a
large combustion engine is nearly impossible.
It's a great solution for reducing mechanical complexity in mini/micro sized
UAVs, though.
~~~
TaylorAlexander
You can use an electric motor. We can easily make extremely high power
electric motors (see: CNC machines and Diesel trains), and power storage will
continue to improve.
The added cost of batteries at even today's prices could be worth it for the
decreased mechanical complexity of the rest.
If all we need to do is change the torque of an electric motor, that can be
done essentially instantaneously even at high power levels.
~~~
lambda
> power storage will continue to improve
Power storage may continue to improve, but it will take a long time before you
hit the energy density of fossil fuels; the difference between batteries and
fossil fuels is something like a factor of 10 (actually greater than that, but
electric motors are more efficient so let's say 10 for the sake of argument),
and it's improving much more slowly than Moore's Law, doubling maybe once
every 10 years. That means if those trends continue (and there's no guarantee
they will), you're looking at 30-40 years before the energy density allows
electric helicopters to be competitive with fossil fuel powered.
For cars, energy density isn't quite as important, as the weight of the car is
not the dominant factor in its efficiency (it does have an effect, but the
aerodynamics, engine efficiency, transmission efficiency, tires, etc. all make
a big difference too). But for a helicopter, every pound you add to the
batteries is another pound you have to lift, so energy density of your power
source is quite important.
So, if trends hold on battery technologies, it will come about eventually; but
I would put money more on the decades timeline than the years timeline.
------
mhandley
This is such a neat idea, but I wonder if it suffers from vibration problems.
Because the blades are mounted on pivots, whenever you've commanding
differential pitch, the high angle-of-attack blade will incur more drag and so
lag slightly more than the low angle-of-attack blade. Thus the blades won't be
exactly opposite each other anymore, creating vibration. Perhaps the blades
are spinning so fast this is not a big deal? Probably would be if you scaled
up though.
~~~
MadManE
Vibration only becomes a problem when the scales of the drag/lag and
rotational frequency are similar. My gut feeling is that this will only happen
when your lift-to-drag ratio is close to 1, so not in any meaningful case.
------
emmanueloga_
Reminds me of PWM [1] on old PC speakers. Many old computers (e.g. of the 286
era) had a speaker that was only able to generate square tones. By controlling
the start and duration of the pulses, programmers could generate sounds that
were a lot more rich than what you would expect from "plain" square waves [2].
In a way this is similar: they start with two actuators that seem very limited
in what they can accomplish: you can only speed them up and down. By
modulating the speed of both motors in sync, they are able to control that
cheap rotor mechanism they came up with, achieving 6DoF [3]
1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-
width_modulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation)
2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSe3ysBrXq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSe3ysBrXq4)
3:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom)
------
alimoeeny
The whole thing looks great and all. But I specially liked their last sentence
that said "for civilian needs".
------
DickingAround
I wonder if this will cause some parts of the motor to heat up more; since the
blade is 1:1 rotations with the motor then driving more torque (power) during
certain phases of the cycle will put more watts on certain coils.
It's a cool idea. Human size helicopters would love to avoid all that blade-
pitch complexity. :)
~~~
theoh
Couldn't that be addressed (if a large enough effect to be a problem) by just
having the body of the vehicle spin at a low rate, like less that 1Hz. With
appropriate sensors this wouldn't be a problem[1]. More to the point, there
shouldn't be any need for sustained constant "cyclic" input anyway, in normal
maneuvering.
[1] an axially-symmetric imaging system could compensate easily, e.g. a
panoramic system.
------
joosters
Very clever! I hadn't fully understood the mechanical complexities involved in
a standard single-rotor helicopter. I just thought that they were hard to fly
manually (which made me very confused to see all the computer-controlled
quadrocopters - why didn't they use just one rotor?)
~~~
TaylorAlexander
Well the issue isn't just that they're hard to fly or that they're
mechanically complex - the issue is that they're both. So you crash often
(when flying models) and crashes are expensive. This makes it a very expensive
hobby.
The issue when flying is that they balance as if they are on a ball. You need
to constantly adjust the controls to stop from "falling off the ball". Go the
wrong direction and you speed up the rate at which it falls. When it is facing
away from you, that's not very hard. When it is facing towards you everything
is backwards. When you are turning, the correct direction to stay balanced is
constantly changing.
Automated systems can do this automatically for you though, so a drone-like
autopilot in a standard helicopter could make them as easy to fly as
quadcopters. Traditional helicopters are still mechanically complex though.
This system looks to fix that. And this would be more efficient than a
multirotor.
------
ww520
At first viewing of the video I didn't understand why the body doesn't spin
around with one rotor and a pair of blades. That was some magic! Then looked
at the picture again and saw another rotor underneath. Pretty neat to have two
rotors counteracting each other.
~~~
vutekst
This always bothered me about Babylon 5 - how/why did the spine of the station
remain stationary while the bulk of the station rotated?
------
aosmith
Now if we could just start printing these parts at home...
~~~
brk
Seriously, why? Injection molding has far lower cost, higher quality, and
you're talking about things that are very cheap and easy to ship. What does 3D
printing bring to this?
~~~
TaylorAlexander
Injection molding is on the order of 10,000x more expensive if you only need a
single part.
I'm currently on a quest to design highly functional robots that can be made
with just a 3D printer and a minimum of external parts - so far only bearings,
motors, drive belts, batteries and electronics are the non-printed parts
needed. I make everything so that it fits together by interlocking or with
minimal use of some coarse printed fasteners.
Since nothing needs to be bought from the store that won't be useful if the
design changes, it is trivial to iterate and build a newer version.
My hope is that with developers worldwide working on improvements, injection
molded versions of the parts would become obsolete before the mold was even
cut.
When it comes to manufacturing, 3D printing is a whole different ballgame. No
other manufacturing technique can make so many complex parts without human
intervention. This means it opens up all new possibilities for how we
manufacture things - like continuous iteration of shipping hardware.
~~~
woah
Seems to me that the worst part of 3d printed stuff is "the grain" is there
any way to fix that?
~~~
durkie
i was about to propose some sort of annealing process like they do with
metals, and it seems like someone has already beaten me to it:
[http://3dprint.com/3388/study-how-to-make-3d-prints-
stronger...](http://3dprint.com/3388/study-how-to-make-3d-prints-stronger/)
as a side note, this looks like kind of a cool way to smooth pla prints, for
which up till now there wasn't really a great option.
~~~
Vendan
that is a horrible article, considering the picture they are using is ripped
off of a reprap blog on smoothing abs prints using acetone vapors.
[http://blog.reprap.org/2013/02/vapor-treating-abs-rp-
parts.h...](http://blog.reprap.org/2013/02/vapor-treating-abs-rp-parts.html).
(I'm actually a member of Fablocker, so I'd seen those squirrels before)
~~~
durkie
well shit. we tried putting some big pla prints in the oven last night and
they definitely just started warping and caving.
~~~
Vendan
on that note though, from my experiments, acetone vapor bath does seem to
strengthen abs prints some, cause it melts the surface together. Not terribly
big effect, but it actually helps a lot for low infill parts and stuff.
------
lotsofmangos
This is really cool. Would be interesting to see a configuration with two of
them front and back, or a conventional tailrotor version.
------
paulftw
Curious to see whether this system is robust enough for unpredictable outdoor
breezes.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A CTO should know what's going on in every startup function - blakenomad
https://www.deekit.com/a-cto-can-wear-many-hats-an-interview-with-kristo-magi/
======
timbuktutim
Cool to see a CTO taking an interest in marketing. The critical aspect of this
is if that input is based on a breadth of learning or just engineer-led
thinking. By that I mean taking on marketing problems from a technical
viewpoint is not always the best idea.
------
chrisshu
I agree that technical co-founders should be working across all functions.
Ultimately, they are co-founders.
IMO there's a difference between being a technical co-founder and a CTO?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Stick with it or get out? - developer786
I am sure most of you will understand my reason to remain anonymous in this post, with that said: I have been offered the following post, and am deliberating on its acceptance, your help would be very much appreciated.<p>Firstly, whoami: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=developer786<p>I am not a born coder, I know that, therefore for the second post, I will be working very very hard. Where I am currently, I am very comfortable.<p>Current Post
- Windows/Linux Administrator / DevOP
- Small Private Healthcare company with good financial backing / profitable.
- Job Security: Medium/High - Environment: Working with a team of 30 2nd and 3rd line support
- No Stock options
- Salary: $63K
- The role: Little development, lots of Linux Admin, training in any sysadmin courses provided once every a years, Ruby training course provided soon.<p>New Post
- Developer(bash/php/ruby/python) / Linux Administrator
- Telecommunications company with investor backing / breaking even.
- Job Security: Low/Medium - Environment: Working From Home
- No Stock options
- Salary: $75K+8K bonus
- The role: Developing bespoke applications in the above languages for a range of customer requirements. Developing and extending Linux based applications.<p>Your help, If I don't get to thank you later, is very much appreciated.
======
ldargin
This is easy: Your salary and skills can use a bump. Take the risk, and save
some of your raise in an emergency fund.
------
nickdoesdesign
Why coast when you can push? Yes, its a risk, but a lot of the time risk pays
off. And, worst case scenario? You come out with more knowledge of yourself
and your skillset, and a lot of businesses look at that fairly favorably.
Unless you're in Silicon Valley, age shouldn't be a factor. The only thing
holding you back is yourself.
------
developer786
Should mention I have a mortgage ($200K) and a family (2 beautiful kids) to
support. I am also 35 so feel it may be too late to take the risk like this?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Project Manager - kabartlett01
I am a seasoned IT/Software Project Manager looking for remote work. If you have any or know of any openings then please let me know and I will send my resume to you. Thanks!
======
tejasm
You might want to check out this link -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829042)
Also, a similar link would be setup for the month of July.
All the best!
Edit: Had the wrong link earlier.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Observations from 10 Months Working at a Small Startup - a-kill-ease
http://www.tortoiseandachilles.com/2007/09/observations-from-10-months-at-startup_03.html
Observations about startup life and manager after working for 10 months at a small venture-capital funded startup.
======
awt
I like the point about keeping cool in tense situations and not making
disparrageing remarks about co-workers. You just can't break that rule.
------
Jd
"The common failing of programming groups today is too little management
control, no too much" -F. Brooks in the mythical man-month
A-kill-ease, Is this still true today? True in your experience? Would it have
been corrected simply by the addition of technically-skilled managers, as you
suggest, or were there too many other things wrong to begin with?
------
dpapathanasiou
1, 7, 9 and 12 are universal.
------
mynameishere
Man that tortoise picture shocked me at first. I won't tell you why.
------
edw519
This situation sounds like a classic example of what happens when someone
throws a bunch of money (and not much else) at a business opportunity.
Unfortunately for most hackers, we don't often get opportunities in startups
like this until AFTER the infusion of cash with all of its inherent problems.
That is, of course, unless you start it yourself.
------
rwebb
what about non-technical offsite CEOs that read lots of non-fiction!?!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chemists Confirm the Existence of New Type of Bond - denzil_correa
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chemists-confirm-the-existence-of-new-type-of-bond/
======
quarterwave
Why is the muonic hydrogen required?
From the Bohr formula the Rydberg energy of the muonic hydrogen would be some
200 times larger than regular hydrogen. Anyone know how that plays a role?
It can't be sqrt(spring/mass) for vibration since the proton is anyway already
some 2000x heavier than the electron. Unless spring somehow depended on the
Rydberg energy, which is possible since the P.E-K.E would depend on mass via
the K.E.
~~~
alhw
The decrease in potential energy upon vdW bond formation in reactions with
typical hydrogen isotopes dominates the negligible gains in vibrational zero-
point energy from reactants to products. With the muonic hydrogen
substitution, the authors claim instead that the driving force for "bond
formation" results from a decrease in zero-point energy which compensates for
the expected losses in potential energy.
~~~
gus_massa
I have a few published articles in quantum chemistry, and I barely can
understand your explanation. It feels right, but I think I need to take 30
minutes to try to understand the details. Can you explain this like I'm a
graduate student with only 3 years in the university, please?
~~~
alhw
The authors of the article in topic provide a more coherent explanation than I
could ever articulate:
>> Conventionally, the formation of chemical bonds is due to a decrease in
potential energy (PE), often accompanied by small increases in vibrational
zero point energy (ZPE). In principle, this basic mechanism can be completely
reversed, wherein chemical bonds may even be formed by an increase in PE if
there is a sufficiently compensating decrease in vibrational ZPE, giving rise
to what has been coined “vibrational bonding” of molecules stabilized at
saddle-point barriers on a potential energy surface (PES), far away from
potential minima.
~~~
gus_massa
Thanks. But I think your previous comment has an interesting point about why
muons are different than electrons. I'm not sure because I hadn't made the
calculations, so any confirmation or refutation is welcome. Let's try:
When two normal molecules, with electrons, are close, they can form different
kind of bonds. The weakest bond is the "van der Waals" bond. It's caused
because the electrons of the molecules change their position slightly due to
the presence of the other molecule.
In this experiment they only replace the electron of a hydrogen atom by a
muon. The muons have much more mass than the electrons, so the radius of the
orbit is much smaller. (They are quantum particles, so they don't have orbits,
but please forgive this technical detail.) As the orbits are smaller, the
displacement caused by the other molecule is smaller, so the van der Walls
force is smaller.
In the normal (electron) case the van der Walls force cause the formation of
the intermediate molecule. In this case (muon) the van der Waals forcé is so
weak that other effects are more important.
[I left out the part about zero point energy. It's also interesting but this
explanation is becoming larger than the article :) .]
~~~
sp332
It's the proton that is replaced, not the electron.
~~~
gus_massa
Ups! :( You are right and now I'm confused.
------
slapresta
> chemists experimenting at a nuclear accelerator in Vancouver observed that a
> reaction between bromine and muonium—a hydrogen isotope—slowed down when
> they increased the temperature
Isn't saying muonium is "a hydrogen isotope" sort of like saying a car is "a
horse isotope"?
~~~
oasisbob
Sounds like more of a pseudo-isotope?
I thought proton equivalency was the fundamental definition of an isotope,
though perhaps that's just a lie you feed chemistry undergrads.
~~~
saalweachter
The antimuon is "proton-like" for a lot of purposes: it has a +1 charge and
it's much heavier than an electron. So you've got a heavy bit with +1 charge
and an electron orbiting it, you call it hydrogen.
~~~
tjradcliffe
It would have been very nice had the article said that, and described what
"muonium" is. I took it to be a proton plus a muon, not an anti-muon plus an
electron.
To describe it as "a hydrogen isotope" is just about the optimal mix of
uninformative and misleading!
~~~
logfromblammo
It's probably as close as you can get to accuracy while still keeping those
who passed their high school chemistry classes in your audience.
For the purposes of explanation, the antimuon-electron pair is chemically
similar enough to a proton-electron pair to call it an isotope. It has a +1
massive center, with a probability distribution for a less-massive -1 charge
cloud.
Deuterium and tritium, two true isotopes of hydrogen, increase the mass of the
center by adding neutrons. An antimuon is, I think, about 10% the mass of a
proton. So muonium would act a lot like extra-light hydrogen for the instant
before it decays.
It would have been clearer to call it an "exotic atom, chemically similar to
hydrogen", though. That wouldn't conflict with the common definition of
isotope as an atom with the same number of protons as the reference atom, but
with a different number of neutrons.
I'm actually not aware of any exotic atoms that are _not_ chemically similar
to hydrogen or antihydrogen, as getting an exotic helium-like atom would
require forming a +2 exotic center and making two -1 charges interact with it
before it decays. That is likely beyond our current capabilities.
------
coldcode
"With a Fleming working on a bond, you could say the atomic interaction is
shaken, not stirred." What a great lol to start the day with.
------
FrankenPC
(With a Fleming working on a bond, you could say the atomic interaction is
shaken, not stirred.)
Ha!
So, does that mean the idiotic idea behind that magic material from The Core
called Unobtanium might actually be real?
------
nsphere
This is charge shift bonding. I did several computational research projects on
this in undergrad. It's nice to finally see this reaching the media.
------
mikexstudios
Link to paper:
[http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201408211](http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201408211)
------
Qwertious
Given that I have absolutely no real understanding of chemistry, what
implications does this have?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Please don’t organize ‘fun’ activities at hackathons - sathishvj
https://medium.com/@sathishvj/please-dont-organize-fun-activities-at-hackathons-a3333f0bbc2c#.d19pnnape
======
yc-kraln
Please don't organize corporate 'hackathons', as they are spec work of the
worst caliber and are exploitative. More info @
[http://www.nospec.com](http://www.nospec.com)
~~~
snowwrestler
Depends on the terms of the hackathon. If the terms clearly state that the
participants fully own all the IP they develop during the contest, then it's
not exploitative spec work.
Why would a company run such a hackathon? To find talent. To make a PR splash
about something. To deliver an audience for a partner. To generate ideas.
There are lots of reasons.
~~~
infogulch
To encourage use of some API that they provide.
------
stuaxo
Remember conversation at {mobile games company} - they were keen to have
people come in and write games on their own time, but only if they owned them.
\- Whats the point I asked, I already know a bunch of artists and programmers
(indeed work with some) - if we can't own the IP ourselves ? - Would be just
doing extra work for someone else.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.