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scaling_mia_the_pile_00_HackerNews

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WinRAR and the infinite 40-day trial [video] - happy-go-lucky https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fTgZRVVr3_Y ====== tradersam The greatest feature of any app, ever.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's timeline of art history - jstrieb http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ ====== pradn I wish I could see examples of art from around the world at the same time period. I'd love to do a comparison of pottery styles and techniques in China and the Americas. There's often surprising commonalities, though the civilizations grew separately. Further, I'd also love to see connections and influences between regions. How did Koran manuscripts influence those of the Bible, and vice versa? How did Chinese ceramic motifs influence those in Persian ceramics? What are the flows of currency in the ancient world? ~~~ CamperBob2 _I wish I could see examples of art from around the world at the same time period._ I've seen exhibits like this. It's somewhat disturbing. I'll leave it to others to discuss, because I don't want to look like I'm defending some controversial ideas. ~~~ rexpop I can't imagine the controversy. ------ mccoyspace You may find it interesting that artists in the timeline also are here in HN.... [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of- art/2002.274a-e/](http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/) ------ hbbio The content is great (caught a few errors such as an item from 4th century BC appearing in -8k-2k), the design too. The UX could be a bit better: The hover states the title and the reference number. For most visitors, the reference number is meaningless. Instead, when filtering by period, the precise period could be shown and when filtering by region (e.g. Africa), the precise region (e.g. Egypt) could be shown. ------ jiblyyyy Fascinating content. Not a great user experience. It would be really cool to have a better, more 'artistic' way of discovering this content. ------ sotojuan Angular 1.x app, if anyone's interested.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hello Opera 12 - Juha http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/hello-opera-12 ====== kevingadd From testing out my demos in Opera Next over the past few months, I've been really impressed with the quality of their JS runtime and the UI. Unfortunately, their hardware-accelerated canvas support doesn't really keep up and their WebGL is outright broken - it looks like they went so far as to disable both by default in 12, a disappointment to be sure - and they still have serious issues with HTML5 audio (to the point of causing hangs/crashes). Given that my only real exposure to Opera is from trying to ensure my stuff runs well in it, it's easy to get the impression that everything about Opera is broken. I wish they had a public bug tracker so it was easier to tell which things are known issues, which things have known workarounds, and which things I should file bugs about. In particular, the audio issues are a point of frustration: At present, if you test the latest builds of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer, Firefox is the _only one_ that actually has low-latency, functioning support for <audio> that doesn't crash or hang. It's ridiculous. Chrome at least has a custom webkit-only API you can use to get working audio, but the rest of the browsers are just flat out broken. And in each browser's case, they've had multiple versions to fix basic issues (limits on how many sounds you can load in a single page context; broken events and APIs; absurdly long playback delays, etc). Oh, and Firefox still doesn't support the loop attribute. :\| ~~~ kombine This is just an indicator that we need a proper native development environment. Devs who embrace new web technologies like WebGL, <audio> or <video> forget that those are just Javascript bindings to the technologies developed in C/C++. Can we please have native code instead, so developer controls the underlying system without having to rely on the wits of browser makers? Google Native Client is a step in the right direction. ~~~ azakai > This is just an indicator that we need a proper native development > environment. Devs who embrace new web technologies like WebGL, <audio> or > <video> forget that those are just Javascript bindings to the technologies > developed in C/C++. That is technically true, but what is the point? The bindings can make things better, or they can make things worse. WebGL, for example, covers over a lot of issues with OpenGL (security and convenience), making the web version very nice to use. > Can we please have native code instead, so developer controls the underlying > system without having to rely on the wits of browser makers? Google Native > Client is a step in the right direction. Native code is by definition non-portable. NaCl in a partial attempt at portability adds bindings of its own to native APIs. Ask people developing for it, like any environment it has bugs and issues. There is no simple solution here. ~~~ kombine > That is technically true, but what is the point? The bindings can make > things better, or they can make things worse. WebGL, for example, covers > over a lot of issues with OpenGL (security and convenience), making the web > version very nice to use. Last time I tried WebGL version of Quake3 on my machine which had the hi-end AMD graphics card at that time, it ran at less than 100FPS. For a game that's 10 years old that is a very poor result. The reason why I said bindings is because I want a language powerful enough to implement any technology I want _in_ that language. > There is no simple solution here. Of course it's not simple. It doesn't mean it's not possible. Microsoft's WinRT is another example of coming closer to the native code apps. ~~~ azakai > Last time I tried WebGL version of Quake3 on my machine which had the hi-end > AMD graphics card at that time, it ran at less than 100FPS. For a game > that's 10 years old that is a very poor result. The Quake II port was extremely unoptimized in how it was performed. It's not a good benchmark of anything. > Microsoft's WinRT is another example of coming closer to the native code > apps. What about just actual Android C++ apps, as an example of native code apps..? ------ ilaksh Why don't they enable WebGL by default? I don't see why more people don't realize, WebGL is a prime Microsoft threat and the key to moving away from the MS Windows monopoly. That's why Microsoft has done so much work to try to scare people away from WebGL (by sponsoring 'security research' and creating FUD content on Wikipedia (seriously, look at the history of that article, the person who created the whole 'security' section on WebGL has an ip that originates right next to Microsoft headquarters, and the 'security research' is done by a Microsoft shop)). What the Opera, Webkit/Safari/Chrome, Mozilla teams should focus on is getting mouse capture and WebGL uniformly supported and turned on across browsers and one or two well-hyped and playable 3d first person games. Any industry player who has money and wants to oppose Microsoft should put money behind big WebGL game releases and hype for such. You get that working across browsers and push that and things like Google Docs, EditGrid, ethercalc, Zoho Creator, LibreOffice etc. and you will see WebGL games starting to take down PC games sales and Office alternatives hurting Windows/Office sales. Anyway, please give the people in charge of those programs and funds a link to this explanation if you know anyone like that. ~~~ daeken For background, I write a _lot_ of WebGL demos, I work for Mozilla on gfx optimizations (WebGL and otherwise) for the Boot2Gecko project. I also worked at Matasano Security previously, doing WebGL security research. As such, I tend to think that I'm pretty unbiased in this regard -- or perhaps biased towards WebGL, since I love it and want to see it everywhere. So with all that said, your characterization of MS's security claims as "FUD" are complete and utter bullshit. WebGL has a substantial attack surface in the browser (large API dealing with many issues from cross-origin restrictions to handling buffer locking and texture sharing, shader verification and translation, not to mention all the code required to actually make this stuff fast, which is what I work on), and it's only the tip of the iceberg that is the 3d stack. Below the browser you have the userland driver components, which do things like further shader verification and initial stages of the compilation, validating index buffers, and simplifying the command stream. Below that you have the kernel components, which largely trust the userspace to have done their job properly, then do things like compile shaders for the specific hardware and put things into the proper form to send it off to the GPU, as well as handling synchronization and locking and all that. Then below that, you have a massively complex piece of hardware that under most circumstances is fully able to touch every single bit of your system memory (thanks, DMA), and _that_ doesn't care one bit about security; it assumes that everything coming from the kernel is 100% safe and intentional. If you tell it to copy memory from point A to B, it will do it without complaining. Meaning if you wanted to, say, write over kernel memory from a buffer in the browser... So let's look at what needs to happen to get ring0 (kernel mode) access from WebGL: 1) get your payload through/around validation in the browser, using available APIs, 2) get through/around userland validation OR attack the optimization/compilation steps that occur at that layer, 3) potentially attack optimization/compilation steps that happen in the kernel component -- optional, since this layer may not be your target, 4) GPU does your work for you. At most, you're talking 3 layers to compromise. Compare to real-world vulnerabilities against other parts of the browser (see also: Pinkie Pie) where you're involving dozens of steps, and suddenly this doesn't look too difficult. The tough part is that it requires a significant amount of domain specific knowledge, but I'm certainly not the only one with it. WebGL, as awesome as it is, _is_ a security risk. It's one caused primarily by the fact that GPU vendors have never had to care about security along these lines before. It will be solved eventually, but it's damn sure not solved now. ~~~ ilaksh How many examples of this type of "just 3 layers" compromise have we actually ever seen being used as an "attack"? How many is that compared to the number of known attacks against browsers using non WebGL-related technologies? Did you actually see the specific 'security' concerns that that MS shop put out? Part of it was a laughable demo of an 'attack' that actually did not compromise anything, and looked like a mock-up that would be used in a movie. Whether there are potential security concerns or not, the actual 'concerns' that MS and that company raised were definitely FUD. ~~~ daeken I haven't seen any real-world attacks using WebGL yet; we probably won't for a couple years, since it's still very new technology and there's a _lot_ to learn to be able to do even basic research there. And have you seen them? [http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2011/06/16/webgl- cons...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2011/06/16/webgl-considered- harmful.aspx) Let's go over the points together: > Browser support for WebGL directly exposes hardware functionality to the web > in a way that we consider to be overly permissive The WebGL API -- outside of bounds checking and shader validation/translation -- is a direct conversion of the EGL API. This makes getting your data (legitimate or not) into the lower levels very easy. That cuts both ways, as I detailed. > Browser support for WebGL security servicing responsibility relies too > heavily on third parties to secure the web experience Read: The security of WebGL depends on GPU driver vendors, who write _terrible_ code. This point is well known by anyone who's worked on enough 3D code, or even just tried to fix graphics bugs in games by doing the driver update dance. > Problematic system DoS scenarios For the vast majority of GPUs, there's no way to set timeouts on rendering or shader execution, so DoSes are just downright trivial. This will be the first thing to get better, with the various robustness extensions that are coming. All in all, I have absolutely no issues with what MS released on the subject. ~~~ ilaksh "This makes getting your data (legitimate or not) into the lower levels very easy." Bullshit. Completely unsubstantiated. The browsers themselves are what are actually being compromised in reality, Microsoft by far more than others. The WebGL exploits are just theoretical. Every browser vendor is a third party. Big fucking deal, somebody makes your browser or system freeze up.. like that is a new thing that you can't do with a browser or with Internet Explorer? Freezing the system isn't that easy to do with WebGL and depends on the specific setup of that machine. That's not a security concern, thats just a potential inconvenience. I don't give a fuck what you dumbasses think, this is obviously Microsoft FUD. But its just another example of the sort of idiotic rationalizations that normally support the status quo. ------ demetris Opera 12 is the first third-party web browser for Windows to offer an official 64-bit version. (Neither Firefox nor Chrome have official 64-bit versions for Windows. And I think Safari for Windows doesn’t have one either.) Does this translate to any substantial improvements in speed? Does anyone here know of any benchmarks? ~~~ rieter 64-bit is not really useful for browsers with multi-process architecture like Chrome. It is very unlikely that a single tab will need 64-bit address space. ~~~ bzbarsky Except once you have enought tabs Chrome starts putting multiple tabs in a single process. The cutoff seems to be somewhere in the low double digits. And at that point, you can in fact start running out of address space (not to be confused with running out of memory) without too much trouble, especially because system libraries on 64-bit OSes have a tendency to be mmap-happy, since they think they have lots of address space to work with. ------ ricksta Kinda off topic, but Opera Mini and Opera Mobile for Android is vastly superior in terms of smoothness compare to all other available browsers. It is very noticeable especially if the page is heavy. A good test is to load this page [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowsers...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/) on your Android in different browser and test the responsiveness. ~~~ Osiris I use Opera Mobile exclusively on Android. Pages load faster and zooming with fit text to screen works really well. My one frustration is that when launching a web page from another app it always opens a new tab so I end up with 10 tabs open and have to close them all every so often. ------ Spittie I really like Opera. I've used it for months, but every time i just come back to Firefox. One big problem (for me) it's their release cycle. I know that many people hate the fast releases of Firefox and Chrome, but this way i get new features sooner than Opera. Another problem are addons. I'm an heavy Scriptish/Stylish user, and there aren't equivalents for those in Opera. I know that i can enable the userscript folder and copy scripts here, but I'm honestly too lazy to do it, and loading CSS through javascript is just not fast enough. Then there are the nitpicks. For example, on Firefox/Chrome "right click > search on google" open a new tab, on Opera it load Google in the current tab. Or, on Firefox/Chrome middle-clicking on the back button open the previous page in a new tab. On Opera this just doesn't work (at least, until Opera 11.64 - I haven't tried Opera 12 yet). And Opera is not opensource. While it's not a so big deal for me, i prefer to use opensource applications when i can. There are also features that i would love to see on Firefox. Tab Stacking is awesome, way better than Panorama. I really like also how Opera put the tab bar on the left, I find it better than Tree Style Tab. I'll try the new version later, but i doubt that the new features will be worth a switch for me. ~~~ Tomis02 > For example, on Firefox/Chrome "right click > search on google" open a new > tab, on Opera it load Google in the current tab. In Opera Ctrl+Click opens a new tab, Ctrl+Shift+Click opens a new tab in the background. It's not a new feature. Learn to play your class. ;) ~~~ adamtulinius Nice trick. I use Opera as well, and didn't know about this. However, i can't think of any other software where modifier keys makes a difference in context-menus, so i really wouldn't blame people for not knowing. ~~~ Tomis02 I'm not blaming people for now knowing, Opera has so many cool features it's hard to become fully aware of them. To be honest I don't remember how I found out about this one. In Opera (and other browsers) you can use modifier keys when clicking links, so it kind of makes sense to use this in context menus as well. Opera is always surprising. Did you know you have mouse gestures (such as 'close') in menus such as preferences? It blew my mind. ------ ishansharma Opera is still not getting some basic features right and that is costing them users. I remember asking for a feature in forums in days of Opera 11.00. The feature was something that every browser has: "Remembering contents of a text field." For example, when I enter my email address once in a website and then come back another day and write first letter of my email id, it is displayed in a dropdown. But Opera outright refused to even consider. Now, they lack a good full screen mode and drag and drop support in GMail, two real deal breakers for me. I tried Opera 12 for less than 12 min and sent it back to dark corners of my HD! Goodbye Opera 12. ~~~ JohannL Opera has an inbuilt IMAP client... which I admittedly never use, but between that and Thunderbird, why would you even want to use webmail? Of course it should still work, even though it's silly, but you also "should" not even notice that it doesn't, is what I'm saying. Certainly if you imply your time is so precious, heh. And what is wrong with F11? ~~~ ishansharma F11: As far as I know, there's no way to make address/tab bar visible in full screen mode. I prefer the way Safari does it. When I take cursor to top, address and tab bar are shown! ~~~ Freaky It's quite possible with .ini editing or some custom buttons: [http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/full-screen-mode-with- toolbar...](http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/full-screen-mode-with-toolbars-in- opera) ------ simonmales No one has mentioned that Opera 12 is the first GA browser (I believe) to support WebRTC. Basically you don't need to flash anymore to access devices such as webcams and microphones. I built a really simple site to see how this all works. It will fall back to flash if you don't have WebRTC support which includes Google Chrome Canary and now Opera 12. <http://gotcaption.com/p/39> ------ nuttendorfer They really improved the responsiveness, it feels as responsive as Chrome now. Here's more if you are interested: [http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/06/14/twelve- under...](http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2012/06/14/twelve-under-the- hood-improvements-in-opera-12) ------ dsirijus I extensively test my webs manually on basically all relevant browsers, up to few old versions, and on different OS' and devices. My conclusion is that Chrome on Windows 7 is by far the most 'snappy' and Firefox on any OS most 'dev friendly' (even though Chrome is coming along that way very nicely). That being said, Opera on mobile is very fine, but I still prefer using whatever stock browser is on particular device. Everything else is a little buggy. What I found lacking in any of the browsers is the developer friendliness on mobile devices. Anyone has any recommendations on that? ~~~ maggit Unfortunately, I cannot claim that I have tried it, but I know Opera supports remote debugging. You get to run Dragonfly on your desktop and debug whatever's running in Opera Mobile on your device. There seems to be documentation here: <http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/> ------ samstokes One reason this is a big deal: Opera now supports CORS [1]. Until now, it was the only significant browser that didn't. (Even IE did, albeit - of course - in its own special way.) [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing> \- secure cross-domain AJAX without hacks like JSONP, so you can do POST requests, set headers, etc. ------ cmelbye I don't know why I would ever switch from Chrome or Safari to Opera. On a Mac, Opera still has text rendering issues (<http://imgur.com/a/9bK1j>), scrolling stutters, and there's a noticeable difference in page load speed (Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer). ~~~ ernesth > Opera is much slower than Chrome, at least on my computer It is the contrary on my computer: chrome is painfully slow, whereas firefox is OK and opera is faster. I guess opera is not the best for everyone. ~~~ aw3c2 same here, I would also be very unhappy without opera's instant backward/forward navigation. ~~~ Osiris Awesome feature. I hate that other browsers ask you to resubmit a form when navigating back. Opera just shows you the cached page that it bad before. Combining that with the mouse flip gesture, browsing is a breeze. In Chrome you have to click BACK or use BACKSPACE (or a mouse with a dedicated nav button). In Opera, I click the right then the left mouse buttons and I'm back at the previous page. Alternate to go back forward. ------ arkitaip A word of warning: this update erased the persistent storage data for all sites. So if you're using plugins or if a particular site is using persistent storage, this will cause issues. ------ zxzwa I'm a opera user and I was excited to see this news! So I've downloaded the 12th version and went on to test it in the shining page. But it says that my browser is not supported? <http://www.shinydemos.com/touch-tracker/> \-- Your browser doesn’t support all required features: Touch Events. Anyone has the same issue? ~~~ Tomis02 If I'm not mistaken, "touch events" is a feature for tablets or mobiles. <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Touch_events> It will probably not be included soon for the desktop version of Opera. ------ kidproquo Anyone else having issues with iGoogle? I had it working in 11.6 by identifying as IE, since it would just show a blank page when identifying as Opera/Firefox. Now, with 12.0, identifying as Opera/Firefox still shows a blank page and identifying as IE just shows the widget headers and no feeds. ------ rolleiflex I just wish they'd forgo the use of that cramped sans-serif header typeface. It looks like somebody just outlined and compressed it horizontally in Illustrator—awful. ------ alanh My connection sucks. Have they fixed this? <http://jsfiddle.net/alanhogan/twCXt/> ~~~ rplnt Not sure what you mean now? I'm still on older Opera (11.61) and the checkbox is resized. ~~~ alanh But it does not look checked, right? One should be checked. Also, clicking it has no (visual) effect (though it will toggle the checked attribute in the DOM). It’s a truly terrible bug, and a strong argument that Opera should not use -webkit- properties like transform until it can actually handle them. I reported it a couple months ago and have not received any follow-up at all. ~~~ rplnt It is checked and checking it works as well (11.64 at home now). But as other comment pointed out, it looks ugly. I tried FF 9 - same as Opera - works and is ugly. In Chrome 19 it does not work at all (i.e. the checkbox is small). So it got fixed. And I don't think they do follow-up unless they need you to reproduce the bug or something. ~~~ alanh Are you on Windows? I eventually tried in Opera 12 and it does not seem to be fixed. Now I’m not sure why you say it doesn’t work in Chrome at all. Because at least on my platform (OS X), it does, and it looks beautiful and hi-res. ------ siodine For me, the most important missing feature is tab lazy loading -- without that my usecase is impossible (hundreds of tabs). ~~~ rplnt I only use about hundred tabs (not hundreds) but I find Opera best in this regard - mostly because memory usage, stability (as opposed to chrome) and capability of the UI to handle that many tabs while being usable. The thing is, I don't turn the browser off. Maybe once a month to install Windows updates. There's an ugly workaround though - start Opera without internet connection and then reload tabs as needed. ~~~ siodine FF has lazy loading. Options->General->Don't load tabs until selected. ------ kakaroto_BR I cant use Opera in home because the lack of a xmarks addon to sync my bookmarks with my firefox at work, it's a pity. ~~~ rplnt Use Opera at work as well :) ------ philippK I'm disappointed that they still don't seem to support the file API in JS :/ ------ ekianjo Still no ARM version available, by the way ? Or has this changed? ------ ekianjo So now Opera also features extensions ? ~~~ grotos Extensions were introduced in 11 version almost two years ago. Now Opera is ditching widgets and unite to focus on extenions. ~~~ ekianjo I just read that on their main page. Are they getting a lot of support from developpers for extensions ? ~~~ Tomis02 Pretty much. What do you need? ------ hmans Hello. ~~~ nosse My reaction exactly. Just installed it like always before and no fuss about anything. ------ gcb The scroll/codex analogy is cute but doesn't hold up. Sure hope the page based css goes to the limbo. ------ halayli Anybody home?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ZeroTurnaround's 2014 Decision Maker's Guide to Java Web Frameworks - Sharlin http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/the-2014-decision-makers-guide-to-java-web-frameworks ====== Sharlin Full disclosure: I work at Vaadin.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
England first country to mandate programming in primary and secondary schools - juliangamble http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10410036/Teaching-our-children-to-code-a-quiet-revolution.html ====== NAFV_P _Many teachers will have to re-train, and some schools are likely to struggle to provide the computing resources needed to deliver the new curriculum._ This is what I first thought when I started reading the article. If a teacher has trouble, it is likely that one of the students would step in. From what I know, most OSes in English schools are Windows. I don't think it is the best system for programming.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
(Virtually) No one should own an Echo or any other “voice assistant” product - walterbell https://boingboing.net/2017/12/06/can-you-hear-me-now.html ====== blacksmith_tb Dupe - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15852773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15852773) ------ colek42 I don't understand why this is such a big deal to people. Unless Amazon gets a supeana they are not going to offer up anything to the feds. If you do something that would warrant a supeana maybe you should keep Alexa out of your home, and stop using your phone. ~~~ hlfcoding Subpoena? ------ whoisjuan It baffles me that people think their conversations about soup, traffic and The Bachelor are worthy of protection. ~~~ Spivak It baffles me that people think they shouldn't be protected by default. ~~~ colek42 In the US they are. The 4th amendment protects citizens from information like this from being disclosed without a court order. It is in Amazon's best interest to protect their users information, unless a court order tells them to disclose it. ~~~ bfuller Secret courts? Gag orders? I really want to believe	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Self-Driving Cars Have a Problem: Safer Human-Driven Ones - Bostonian https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-cars-have-a-problem-safer-human-driven-ones-11560571203?mod=rsswn ====== ChicagoBoy11 As a private pilot it astounds me how the self-driving car industry has seemingly taken every lesson we've learned from automation in aviation and chucked it out the window in these systems. There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot. The ML aspect of self-driving cars generally make it a lot less easy to reason about and predict. That's problem 1. Problem 2 is then speed; Even in the airline world, there are published minimums at which pilots need to be absolute certain that the AP is doing the right thing before they commit to land, even in cases where the autopilot is responsible for the entire landing (Autoland is a capability that a lot of airliners have had for many decades). What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land. Not only that, but we bend over backwards ensuring that there is all kinds of redundancy and procedures in place to ensure the accuracy of the system: Multiple instruments using different kinds of technologies confirming one another, greater separation between aircraft to guarantee ILS radio beacon accuracy, etc. Conversely, in the self-driving world, we're having these ML algorithms make split-second decisions with no real way of informing the driver what it is basing it on in an environment that is far less predictable and constantly-changing with someone who is not a professional behind the wheel. ~~~ JamesBarney Autonomous car's don't have to be nearly as safe as airplanes because existing cars are orders of magnitude less safe than airplanes. ~~~ jandrese Isn't that one of the problems autonomous cars are trying to solve? ~~~ kemitche The point is that cars don't need to make an immediate jump from "current levels of safety" to "plane levels of safety." Anything that moves the needle noticeably closer to "plane levels" is a solid improvement in terms of reducing unnecessary deaths. ~~~ perl4ever Why do you think that autonomous cars will start by replacing the worst drivers, rather than replacing professional drivers, who are much better than the average person? Isn't the biggest potential initial demand for autonomous cars people who don't own cars and currently must choose between bus and taxi? ------ IgorPartola Here is my proposal for self driving cars: forget trying to make them drive on local roads at first. Add transponders to all interstate tarmac that can be used to detect location and lane position. Then use a much cheaper LIDAR just to map where the other cars are. Boom: you have made long haul driving autonomous. You can then slowly expand this to smaller roads. But why try to recreate human drivers when machines can use much better sensors than us, but can process visual info much slower, and gather it with worse fidelity? ~~~ agildehaus Because yours is a ludicrous proposal. It'd be well more expensive to modify infrastructure than to build a computerized driver. Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen. Your proposal also lacks reliability. What if one of these "transponders" fails? We can build redundancy into a self-driving car quite easily (a second computer, never relying on just one sensor). Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ... a much larger problem. ~~~ briatx You could easily convert HOV lanes into Automated Driving lanes. And if we have the ability to fund HOV lanes, we could also fund Automated Driving lanes. Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401. I predict self driving will not fully succeed until we build infrastructure to support it into the roads. ~~~ agildehaus > Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings > such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it > has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401. A Tesla is not a self-driving car and they won't become one with that approach. Waymo vehicles have virtual maps that include the lines (along with a LOT of other data) so they are not affected by fading lines as they always know where the lines are supposed to be. Basically Waymo is building the infrastructure you all want, but in a virtual sense instead of the extremely expensive and impossible physical one. ~~~ briatx > Waymo vehicles have virtual maps ... You only need one reality <-> virtual desync to cause a crash. ~~~ agildehaus Well no, it's not like the map is the only thing used. ------ pjc50 A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately. It's just that a _mostly_ self- driving system erodes human attentiveness. And we're not going to get to a system that's so much safer as to render human attention irrelevant without a much more solid and theoretically sound approach to safety engineering. ~~~ Recurecur "A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately." No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad. Example: (1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode. (2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks! I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial. The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system. ~~~ radcon > I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the > combination of human and computer You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes. My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident. This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives. ~~~ Recurecur "You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes." No, but I'll unequivocally assert that the human false alarm rate is much higher than that of computers. "My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident." Does it have a readout indicating what it "thought"? It seems possible that the car in the other lane drifted, and the computer thought it was changing lanes into the Acura. Braking was appropriate in that circumstance. "This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives." That may be, and I suspect a fix will be forthcoming which will address every Honda/Acura on the road (or new models, worst case). Meanwhile, humans will continue to look down at a text, hamburger, or whatever, and then panic when a few seconds later they look up and think they're in trouble. Not to mention driving tired, drunk, high, angry, or stupid. ------ mcguire " _ultra-detailed, centimeter-accurate maps of much of the U.S. highway system_ " Is this a joke? _The roads_ aren't centimeter-accurate from day to day. ------ seibelj The industry’s PR team starting to place stories about why self driving cars will take longer than they promised their investors. Tens of billions of dollars invested and it’s still decades away. I guess we blame other drivers now(?) ~~~ Recurecur "Tens of billions of dollars invested and it’s still decades away." "Decades away"? LOL Fully autonomous vehicles are already on the road in large numbers. See Waymo in AZ and Voyage in Florida... The economic and safety incentives are huge. I predict by 2030 over half of new vehicles sold will have L5 autonomy. ~~~ glogla Also see Uber where they killed a woman, faked evidence (with purposefully making the video look darker) and got away with it. ~~~ mdorazio I must have missed the part of vehicular accident law where people hit while jaywalking at night aren't at fault for the accidents. By your logic, the 1000+ jaywalking fatalities every year must all result in human drivers "getting away with it". Uber messed up big time in multiple ways, but legally it's pretty clear that the pedestrian was at fault in this case, not Uber. ------ seqastian human vs human road interaction is mostly based on trust, and it usually works out because most humans are sane and healthy while driving. the same thing can not work with machines cause they are bad at detecting when humans are not all right and humans are bad at trusting machines. as soon as we just accept that the save way to operate in close proximity of others, is to do it at way slower speeds. we will have very save roads with humans and robots behind the wheel. ~~~ ocdtrekkie Speed is not the issue, difference in speed is the issue. Road safety actually improves when you raise the speed limit to the speed most drivers are actually driving. ~~~ AdamHede This is only true in a very theoretical sense. Going 180 km/h will 9/10 be more dangerous than going 120 km/h. Reaktion time, brake time, requirements to equipment, everything is tougher at higher speeds. ~~~ dsfyu404ed If by "theoretical sense" you mean "doesn't fit your personal world view" then sure. The safest speed limit being one that the overwhelming majority of people would naturally follow were it not posted is basically considered fact in the civil engineering world. There is study upon study backing it up. The desire to minimize the speed at which crashes happen literally costs lives when applied in the real world because reducing the frequency of crashes is the superior option. ~~~ SketchySeaBeast > The desire to minimize the speed at which crashes happen literally costs > lives when applied in the real world because reducing the frequency of > crashes is the superior option. While I understand that minimizing crashes is important, I'd rather be faced with scenarios where we crash in a manner where people survive more often - any accidents that do happen at the higher speed is going to skyrocket the chances of a fatality. ------ mannykannot This is an odd way of looking at it. Far from being a problem for self-driving cars, the development of ever-more capable assistance and warning technologies is the rational way to go about refining the technologies that will be needed for fully self-driving cars. This situation is only a problem for those manufacturers who want to pass off partial autonomy as the real thing. ~~~ adrianmonk I basically agree with you, but after some head scratching, I think I follow their argument, which seems to be this: 1\. Lack of higher reasoning is a disadvantage that self-driving cars won't escape any time soon. 2\. But SDCs can more than make up for that by making fewer dumb mistakes, giving them a better _overall_ safety. 3\. However, if you use machines to take away the dumb mistakes from humans, you change that equation, and the overall stats could go the other direction. In reality, I don't think it's that simple. When ABS was newer, they studied it ([https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811182)) and found that ABS improved overall safety, but safety paradoxically got worse in slick conditions (rain, snow, ice). The effects of safety improvements aren't always what you'd expect, so theorizing doesn't tell you much. ------ YeGoblynQueenne >> Initially, all fully self-driving vehicles will be Level 4—that is, they have to be in geographically constrained areas, and will only operate in good weather, as does Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vans that it is testing in Phoenix. Truly autonomous, aka Level 5, cars are still science fiction. Nobody has actually created a level 4 system yet, not even a prototype, let alone one ready for production. So level 4, too, is still science fiction. The same goes for level 3, actually. It's science fiction. And so are claims like the following: >> Researchers at Cleveland State University estimate that only 10 to 30 percent of all vehicles will be fully self driving by 2030. 2030 is in ten years from now. In ten years from now, we'll reach "full self- driving"? Waymo was founded ten years ago and its cars are still in level 2 (allegedly, trying to "jump over" level 3 and go straight to level 4). How are we going to be suddendly, magickally transported from level 2 to level 5 in the next ten years, when we haven't budged from level 2 in the last ten? ------ vikramkr If fully self driving is ever going to be fully safer than humans, which I think is almost a given, then this is not a problem as much as it is a great new way to monetize that tech en route to full self driving cars. If it isnt going to be better than self driving tech + a human at the wheel, then oops. ~~~ simion314 The self driving tech would still be used for driver assist functions, if today would be possible to replace all the cars in the world with new models that include all the safety features and a system to detect a drunk or sleepy driver I think we would get better statistics then Tesla or Google AI(for the same driving conditions) ------ rexgallorum2 Just a few points: 1\. Addressing (and reducing) major causes of road accidents and fatalities such as impaired and/or distracted driving (alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, inattentiveness, fiddling with phones, radios, touch screens, etc.) would make a tremendous difference, and automated driving systems and sensors could potentially intervene in such situations without necessarily being online all the time. 2\. Inattentiveness and distraction caused by (over)dependence on automated systems (as in jets with autopilot) could become a major hazard. This is already a problem with road designs that minimise driver engagement by removing obstacles to traffic and designing roadways entirely for cars (compare European style traffic calming to US style widening of lanes and rounding of corners). 3\. As mentioned above, infrastructure and urban planning practices are major issues, both in terms of maintenance and design. Automating passenger cars may improve safety in some respects, but perpetuating the dominance of individual motor vehicles (and the vast infrastructure outlay they require) as the dominant mode of transport is probably the wrong approach. Gradually transforming urban planning and design to promote mass transit, reduce commuting, and accommodate bicycle and pedestrian traffic would generally reduce the need to use cars in the first place. One difference between traffic death statistics in countries like Germany and the US is that virtually everybody has to drive long distances on a daily basis in much of the US, with few if any alternatives, and urban sprawl encourages lengthy detours to travel trivial distances between fully separated residential/commercial/industrial zones, whereas e.g. in urban Germany, there are many alternatives, and driving is not a necessity (compare death rates per capita vs. per km driven). In Germany and much of Europe, driving is and has always been a privilege, and one that requires a degree of skill to earn, whereas in the US driving is viewed more or less as a right, something everyone does and has to do on a daily basis, i.e. it's easy to get a license and you only lose it for serious infractions, and even then penalties for driving without a license (as many people do!) are comparatively minor. What I am getting at is that the best way to tackle road safety and environmental problems is to gradually abandon the passenger car as the dominant mode of transportation. Hybrid automated/human-operated vehicles could be a great improvement in the short term, but using bikes would be better in the long term. Freight transport might be another matter though. ------ dejaime Automatic emergency breaking and other "safer human-driven" cars is not making the human-driven aspect any safer, but rather putting the working and stable parts of autonomous vehicles as a tool for unsafe human-driven vehicles. That said, it will obviously fare better than _fully_ autonomous vehicles, but it is still just a part of autonomous vehicles in general. In this sense, these cars are not "a problem self-driving cars have" as the title implies, they are actually a stepping stone for self-driving cars. ------ torpfactory I suggest everyone take a look at the most recent available NHTSA data to help create informed opinions on the topic of car safety with respect to fatal accident causes: [https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812580) My personal takeaways: 1) The sum of speeding + alcohol is 55% of the total number of fatalities. Self driving cars won't get drunk (we hope) and speeding is something which could certainly be limited in software. Lots of reasons to believe self driving will make a significant impact here, whenever it finally arrives. On the other hand, you don't really need self driving to prevent these. You could force all vehicles to have a breathalizer interlock before driving (assuming these devices could be made to be very accurate and not spoofable, I believe these are both technically feasible goals). Or just enforce the living daylights out of it - driving drunk, lose your license for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. Speeding is a similar story. Why not put a GPS device in every car (I think this may already be the case) and geo-fence speed limits? Technically very feasible. Some people will claim you need to speed sometimes but I believe these arguments to be total bullshit. Ambulances may need to speed sometimes. Or again just enforce the living daylights out of it. Speeding over 5MPH above the speed limit, license gone for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. We probably won't do any of the non-self driving things I mentioned above because they are politically untenable in America. Death on the roads is such a normalized facet of modern life that most people don't really consider the alternative: limited loss of freedom with many fewer deaths and injuries. 2) The wearing of seat-belts seems to still be a big problem for some people. 44% of motor vehicle occupants who died were not wearing one. No self driving needed here. In fact, this problem is somewhat orthogonal to self-driving. You would still want to be restrained in a self driving car. It would be easy enough to create an occupant sensor and seat belt interlock to operate the car. The car already beeps at you if you're not wearing it. Why not take the beeping a step further. 3) Running into cyclists (both motorized and human-powered) is also a reasonably large problem. Self driving will almost certainly help here (uber's incident not withstanding) but there are non technological solutions to consider. What about increasing the liability for drivers who injure or kill cyclists? What about steep criminal penalties for hitting a cyclist? 4) There isn't even a category for "mechanical failure". Cars don't really crash due to problems with the car per-se. Or at least not a rates that matter compared to the others. 5) Rural driving seems pretty dangerous - 50% of fatalities but only 19% of the population lives there. I don't think they dig into the details here but I'd be interested to see the cause breakdown for rural users. Growing up in Wisconsin, driving home drunk from rural bars was basically ubiquitous. I always advise to stay off the roads around bar time if possible. It is important to consider that our roads are unsafe mostly because of the system of policies we have set up governing them. We still aren't serious enough about drunk driving. The debate around safety and speeding is hardly even happening. Hitting and killing non-automobile road users is often just a traffic citation. The licensing system is a joke. In what other safety- critical certification system can you take one exam at age 16 and then renew your certification for the rest of your life without any kind of additional training or examination? There is a ton we _could_ be doing outside of self- driving technology to make the roads safer. Personal preferences on the above discussion: FOR self driving cars, even ones that are only marginally safer than humans. FOR geo-fenced speed limits. FOR breathlizers in all vehicles. FOR steep penalties for drunk driving, speeding, and killing non-automobile road users. FOR much more stringent licensing requirements. Death on the roads ought not be a feature of modern life. ~~~ rexgallorum2 A major problem with your idea about self-limiting vehicle speeds is that speed limits are usually safe driving speeds under ideal conditions only. Speed itself isn't really the problem, but rather poor judgement and unsafe driving habits (often including speeding). Speed is also an interesting topic in that speed limits are often kept artificially low in order to generate revenue. Any automated system to force cars to respect limits would likely meet resistance from municipalities that are dependent on traffic fines for revenue. High speeds are allowed on highways in Germany, but only in certain areas, and German drivers are extremely disciplined with regards to lane changing and the 'hierarchy' of the road. However, traffic deaths are lower than the US, even when adjusted to reflect deaths per km traveled. Driver discipline and skill undoubtedly play a role here, but infrastructure quality and maintenance (and urban planning!) is also a big issue. US roads are comparatively poorly designed and maintained, and outdated engineering and planning practices are still widespread (widening streets and removing barriers instead of using traffic calming--perhaps counter-intuitively, the former causes more serious accidents by encouraging speeding and disengaged driving). I tend to think that at least in urban areas of the US, ditching zoning and onerous anti-alcohol laws (i.e. putting pubs within easy walking distance of where people live) would drastically cut down on drunk driving. Rural areas are of course different. Just my two cents ------ happppy I DO NOT FEAR MACHINES!!!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech companies are helping bosses monitor everything you do at work - jrepinc https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/tech-companies-bosses-monitoring-surveillance-workers-technology ====== planetzero 15+ years ago, I was working on my first development job out of college and I noticed that there was a strange process running on my work computer that couldn't be killed. I traced it to a specific port and host and used telnet to connect to it directly (I thought it was malware and got curious). Little did I know that my manager was watching our every move and when I connected to the host/port (sending no data), it crashed their viewers (the software was crap). I was brought in then next day to my manager's office and they told me they saw what I did and asked me to explain. I did and didn't get fired. My coworker got fired that day because the whole purpose was to watch his computer. He was spending the majority of his time on online poker sites and working on his own projects on company time. I also remember my manager casually bringing up topics that I talked about over IM with a friend over my lunch break..which was creepy (this was before I knew he was watching us and never let on the reasons he was bringing up these topics). We were forced to sign a contract the next day that stated that the company has a right to monitor our computers and we were to only be working on company-related work on company computers. I left that company a few months later. One reason being that I hated the idea of someone watching me 24/7. It was a great decision because they cut 25% of the workforce shortly after I left. Almost all of my ex-coworkers were let go or left within a year. ------ maerF0x0 I have always mentored more junior folks to consider every key stroke on company property to be viewed in the most unfavorable light and to be subsequently "owned" by the company. ~~~ a_e_k Not just that: I think it's also wise to assume that a data breach may someday make one's e-mail and Slack messages public. Or they may get subpoenaed in a suit. ------ babycake Wow, I didn't know they had "sound sensors" at some sites like Walmart. Like the article mentioned, it can be used to stamp out workers organizing early on.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Movable Type vs Wordpress? - alexknight I've been contemplating for a while now moving my blog from Tumblr to my own hosted solution. I've been doing some research on both Wordpress and Movable Type, and they both look like excellent solutions.<p>What I can't seem to come to a conclusion though is the pros/cons weighed out in detail for both platforms. I'm pretty familiar with their history, but haven't used them in depth.<p>Can anyone recommend one or the other and state some convincing arguments as to why I may want to choose one of the other? Thanks so much. ====== maguay While I've never used Movable Type, I feel confident recommending WordPress hands-down. It works great, is amazingly flexible, and has a marvelous community. Themes, extensions, tutorials, and more all make WordPress one of the best platforms to work with. Plus, if you've gotten used to the variety of post types in Tumblr, there are quite a few good Tumblr-style microblog themes for WordPress from Woothemes and others. They might ease the transition and keep your blog working more like you're used to. You might even be able to tweak a WordPress microblog theme to look like your existing Tumblr theme... Finally, with the changes going on at Six Apart right now, it's hard to say what the future will hold for Movable Type. Could get better, could get worse, but right now it's in limbo of sorts. WordPress.org (and Automattic) are doing great, and I can't imagine that changing anytime soon. ------ jaap_w Wordpress might be the better solution. It is easier to learn and has a larger user community. Besides that Six Apart (the company behind Movable Type) has been acquired. Although they state that they will be supporting the bloggingplatforms in the future, the new company is aimed at advertising. Is the Movable Type will get the attention it deserves, can be questioned. ------ alexknight Wow thanks everyone for the great feedback. It sounds like Wordpress is probably going to be the safer more well supported option. Really appreciate the thoughtful comments. ~~~ maguay Sounds like a good move :) If you need to learn more about WordPress and want to tweak it as you need, I highly recommend the ebook Digging into WordPress. I recently reviewed it on Techinch.com if you're interested. Feel free to give us a shout out if you need more help! ------ buckpost WordPress in a heartbeat. More developer support, it's free and you can self- host. Mark ------ owrange from a tech dodo's point of view, i go for wordpress. i find movable type too cluttered.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Swarm robots can learn by simply observing - chwolfe https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160830083653.htm ====== phren0logy Obligatory: "I learned it by watching YOU!"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What is the true price of Rwanda's recovery? - gruseom http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8593734.stm ====== selflessGene I am a part owner of a business in West Africa, and I'll say that I'm an enthusiastic supporter of Kagame's leadership and hope to see similar leaders rise in Africa. The West and this documentary makes the erroneous assumption that full democracy and unfettered freedom of speech are axiomatic components of a society. Not so. I see these as goals to aspire to, not starting points. Singapore's rise from one of the poorest countries in Asia to now being wealthier than Britain on a per capita basis was not founded in full democracy. Even Europe had to go through a long evolution from the autocratic Roman Empire, to monarchies, to feudalism, aristocracies, and eventually democracy trickled in. If what Kagame is doing is working, then let it work for his people, The country is now peaceful and has an inviting and reponsible environment for private enterprise to play a role in developing the country. The west needs to stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes. ~~~ heresy I cannot agree with you more. Rule of law and stable government are necessary to create an environment in which the economy can develop and circumstances for the people improve. Democracy in an ethnically heterogeneous country does not make this easier, not when the ethnicities in question have simmering feuds and vendettas. That the US became somewhat ethnically diverse after a stable core was established does not change the fact that African countries have a substantially more difficult task ahead of them in trying to establish governmental and legal frameworks in the midst of competing tribalist agendas. So, if it works for Rwanda, leave well enough alone. Results are what matter in Africa right now, not whether a country complies 100% with a Western definition of democracy while citizens are starving in droves. The first human right is the right to life, and at least some form of security. Free speech comes significantly later. Democracies in the West work (somewhat) because of shared values established over centuries. Policies of one particular political party compared to another are differences in degree, the parties do not question the underlying foundations of the nation, and one party getting voted into power is hardly the beginning of a purge or dictatorship. You cannot expect a full-fledged, functioning democracy to grow overnight when not a decade ago people were being killed in their thousands. ------ pasbesoin Interestingly, I just met a well-educated Rwandan expat yesterday evening. Expat out of necessity as much or more so than choice. He's sure that if he returned, he would be killed. I don't have other sources to back this up, but he described the continuing situation of very large numbers of refugees living, often "in the forests", in neighboring countries. As the violence subsided, other populations from neighboring countries flowed in to take advantage of the resulting vacancy, and they now control the government. There is a strong Western (e.g. U.S.) presence, but in his opinion it is there for the purpose of facilitating resource extraction from neighboring countries, e.g. the Congo. I hope to learn more about this; I'm merely repeating here what was said. He may have his own biases, but I know him through friends whom I know pretty well and trust, and what he said leaves me with the impression that Western news sources are providing much less than the full story. ~~~ pasbesoin Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ et al.) has a daily hour-long world news show, "Worldview". It specialized in interviewing experts and specialists on topics both big and small. The listener receives MUCH more information, both in detail and in expertise, than is available through much of the (U.S.) mainstream media. Today, the second "half" (more or less) of the show discussed the situation in Rwanda. Much of the information appears to be similar to what I heard the other month and described in my parent comment, above. Worldview archive page for the program: <http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV.aspx?episode=41595> Worldview page for the particular segment: <http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV_Segment.aspx?segmentID=41596> Worldview podcast page (note that MP3's that have fallen off the podcast listing due to age are still available through the site's archive pages) <http://podcasts.chicagopublicradio.org/cprworldviewpodcast> I wasn't monitoring the clock exactly, but I think the segment will begin somewhere between minutes 20 and 25 of the podcast (probably around minute 23). If the podcast includes the lead in BBC news summary, add 6 or 7 minutes to my guestimate start time for the segment.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SpaceX CRS-5 launch aborted, next attempt Friday - kid0m4n https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacex/2015/01/06/actuator-issue-triggered-abort/ ====== ceejayoz [https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/552432830912151552](https://twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/status/552432830912151552) > Launch scrubs reassure me. It means that the powerful desire to GO has been > tempered by the necessity to be truly ready. Cool heads @SpaceX ~~~ pjscott The launch abort was automated, so heads didn't need to be cool. I'm not sure if that makes it more reassuring or less. ~~~ ceejayoz My understanding is that while the abort was automated, it was triggered because the engineers manually held the countdown and the launch window was only one second. Humans set the automatic limits, anyways. ------ jccooper For fun, here's the part probably in question: [http://jasc-controls.com/jasc-industry-listing/space/space-a...](http://jasc- controls.com/jasc-industry-listing/space/space-actuators/thrust-vector- control-actuator-part-101424-5/) A servo-controlled hydraulic linear actuator with redundant coils in the servomotor. Probably runs using the RP-1 fuel as hydraulic fluid. ------ xgbi I listened to the last minutes of the stream, and I was impressed at how speedy their voices were. I don't recall hearing such haste in Nasa's launches; it was a bit weird and exciting at the same time. ~~~ Nogwater It reminds me a lot of listening to air traffic control somewhere busy. ------ winslow What is an 'actuator drift' problem? My google fu only returned stories about this aborted launch and this article ([http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/other- technologies/truth-abo...](http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/other- technologies/truth-about-problem-valves)). Is my understanding correct that a valve/piston was moving when it wasn't suppose to? What type of dangers could this impose of the rocket/vehicle? ~~~ BrandonMarc /r/spacex tipped me off to this 4-year-old video, which shows off what a Thrust Vector Control test stand does, and how testing of actuators, etc is related to sensing engine / control-surface anomalies. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pigsq5rt- mY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pigsq5rt-mY) Heh, and it turns out it's a SpaceX video. ~~~ winslow Awesome! Thanks for the video. The frequency in which it changes position is really interesting. Didn't realize the movement involved. ------ TheCraiggers This makes me wonder just how many sensors they have devoted entirely to detecting problems before, during, and after lift-off. ~~~ tomschlick My guess would be (2 x the number of critical mechanisms) 1, primary sensor and 1 backup to make sure that one doesn't provide a false positive	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Deck of Cards – A playing card API - crobertsbmw http://deckofcardsapi.com ====== aarondf Hey, you did a thing and told people [0]! Good for you. Is it perfect? No idea, but from reading the comments here a lot of people don't think so. Who cares though [1]! You're so far ahead of so many people because you actually did something. Next time maybe all your GETs will be RESTful, maybe not. Either way, you've done a thing, put it out there, and are presumably learning a lot by doing so. Great work. [0] [http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html](http://carl.flax.ie/dothingstellpeople.html) [1] [http://www.garann.com/dev/2013/how-to-blog-about-code-and- gi...](http://www.garann.com/dev/2013/how-to-blog-about-code-and-give-zero- fucks/) ~~~ gooseus I'm seeing a lot more discussion and debate, rather than criticism. So good job for that too... I think this Deck of Cards API would make a great case study for analyzing and discussing the varying takes on how a RESTful interface should handle certain situations which aren't as straightforward as the typical blog or todo list examples. ~~~ amouat A lot of the time it doesn't feel like that to me. People release things they have worked long and hard on, only to get a bunch of negative comments picking on holes and mistakes. The weird thing is they are the lucky ones; it's pretty damn hard to make it onto the front-page of HN now, regardless of the quality of the content. (Don't believe me? Take a look at how many times some articles have been reposted and the disparity in number of votes.) Getting feedback should be great, but not many of us are good at it. Generally, we only comment on things we care about or find interesting (ignoring the stuff that is so bad it deserves harsh criticism like storing passwords in plain-text), but we forget to say that in the comment and only mention the minor flaw we saw. I don't have a solution to this, other than to tell posters to be prepared for criticism and to take each up-vote as a major token of respect in what you've built. ------ hartror Nice one! Good on you for building a thing and putting it out there. A few comments/suggestions: * You have DEBUG = True in your production Django config. (eg. [http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/](http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/)) * You are mutating state with HTTP GET, this is an anti-pattern for a number of reasons. The common one I use with people I coach is that browsers/proxies will happily cache GET requests unless told not to, but there are a number of other reasons if you read up on REST [1]. * Being a public API in a well known domain this is a good opportunity to make the API self documenting & navigable with a hypermedia format. (eg HAL, Siren, JSON-LD) [2] [1] [http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...](http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html) [2] [http://sookocheff.com/posts/2014-03-11-on-choosing-a- hyperme...](http://sookocheff.com/posts/2014-03-11-on-choosing-a-hypermedia- format/) ~~~ Kiro > You are mutating state with HTTP GET I agree. However, this is the first API I've seen where a mutable GET actually makes sense. Drawing a card is definitely a GET. How would you do it instead? ~~~ xnxn > Drawing a card is definitely a GET. I see where you're coming from ("I'm drawing / taking / GETting some cards"), but drawing cards is not an idempotent action. I would implement it as a POST. ~~~ ryan-allen I think it's more of a terminology thing, rather than 'GET me a card' you could 'POST remove 2 cards from the deck' and the side effect is the response tells you which cards were deleted. But this kind of bike shedding drives me mad because oh my lord who gives a crap just build software and document it properly. ~~~ Confusion I give a crap, because when I see an API, I expect a GET to be idempotent. If a coworker implemented this, there would be words. ~~~ whyaduck Same here. Working on a large codebase where people "just build software and document it properly" without following standards is not fun. Not to mention that frequently people end up shortening that to "just build software". It's better to get in the habit of following good standards even on small projects before bad habits form. ------ alangpierce While this looks to me like a pretty clean and straightforward API, it's definitely not a REST API (not that it claims to be): * The API doesn't really follow HTTP. It allows GET for state-modifying actions, which breaks assumptions that could be made by browsers, client libraries, caches, and proxies. Also, the "success" field seems fishy; a 200 response code is the usual HTTP way to indicate success. * The API is not resource-oriented; the URLs "shuffle" and "draw" are verbs that describe the action to take. In a "real" REST API, URLs define conceptual resources (nouns), and you interact with the API by interacting with those resources. * The API does not use hypermedia. Hypermedia and HTTP compliance are discussed elsewhere in this thread, but I wonder if others have an opinion on the fact that the API isn't resource- oriented. This "resource-oriented" rule has always bugged me about REST APIs. My impression has been that REST advocates claim that pretty much every API can and should be implemented with a CRUD-like interface (where the entire API consists of performing GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE on a conceptual set of resources), but it seems like that would be really awkward for this "deck of cards" use case. Is there value in trying to use resources here? What might it look like? ~~~ hartror Resource oriented and its implication of nouns as opposed to verbs doesn't have to equal CRUD. I can see a case for bending the nouns rule of thumb in this domain, for example I might have an api like so: POST /decks : returns a url to a new deck GET /decks/<id> : returns a deck POST /decks/<id>/draw : returns a url to a card POST /decks/<id>/shuffle : returns a url to the deck GET /cards/<id> : returns a card drawn from a deck The draw/shuffle verbs arguably could be implemented like this: POST /cards : returns a url to a card (post body having deck id) POST /shuffles : returns a url to the deck (post body having deck id) The cards POST makes a lot of sense, now that I look at it I think I would use that interface. And you could argue that the shuffles resource makes sense as at some point you may want to record and share when someone shuffles the deck. ~~~ vladharbuz Some of these don't really make sense. POST /decks/<id>/draw : returns a url to a card POST /decks/<id>/shuffle : returns a url to the deck Are you adding a "draw" to deck <id>? POST /cards : returns a url to a card (post body having deck id) POST /shuffles : returns a url to the deck (post body having deck id) Are you creating a card or a shuffle? Here's how things should be, in my opinion: DELETE /deckCard/<deckId> This removes a card from an abstract entity representing the relation between decks and cards. Thus, it draws a card and returns it, sort of like popping something off a stack. PUT /decks/<id> with body {shuffle: true} This edits the abstract "shuffle" attribute of deck <id>, shuffling the deck. This is indeed odd, but I'm afraid it's the best you can do for a mutating request. I would recommend a non-mutating request that makes a new deck out of an old deck, perhaps using "source" as an abstract attribute. POST /decks with body {source: <oldId>} It just goes to show that while REST is a good standard for CRUD operations, and is surprisingly extensible for non-CRUD operations, it can get confusing and become a real pain. Should one just deal with it or move to e.g. RPC? I haven't figured this out. ~~~ hartror Just because a thing, such as a draw or a shuffle isn't a physical thing doesn't mean it cannot exist as resource. Programming is all about creating abstractions, so why cannot I create a shuffle or a draw resource? I could even record them and share them on their own endpoints for clients to view. Commenting directly on you suggestions: DELETE /deckCard/<deckId> This means each DELETE on this url would result in a different deck state which isn't idempotent as DELETE is mean to be. PUT /decks/<id> with body {shuffle: true} Same with this, the resource would end up in a new state each time making it unsafe to do repeatedly as the HTTP spec says. I think the issue is REST is taught with a CRUD view point and people have difficulty thinking about it in other ways. Also the English meanings of the HTTP verbs get confused with their HTTP meanings which doesn't help. I liked this blog post which talks about the concept of "REST without PUT". [http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/rest-api-design- re...](http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/rest-api-design-resource- modeling) edit: you've edited you comment since I started my reply: I like your idea of replacing shuffle with a new deck: POST /decks with body {source: <oldId>} You could then do things like lock the source deck which would make it easier to implement a multi-client system where you cannot draw from a deck until you have been informed it has been shuffled. ~~~ vladharbuz I agree with your comments and take them as evidence that REST is exceedingly difficult and complex for these use cases. You can create new resources, just as I have, it just doesn't make sense to "POST /cards" when you're not making a new card at all. ------ flashman I'm not sure what this file does: [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/list....](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/list.txt) ~~~ ctekin Also unfortunate : [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/fb02c09b9bc4...](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/fb02c09b9bc48ba8ccaf4a872df8edd650c08cf6/spades/settings.py) ~~~ crobertsbmw I've changed the secret key that I am using in production. I wanted the settings.py to be there so it works out of the box if anyone forks it. ------ voltagex_ I wonder if returning SVG would be possible - [https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing- cards/](https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-cards/) Edit: Could be an excellent idea - 8 of Clubs is: * 28kb as a PNG. * 14kb as an SVG * 4kb as a gzipped SVG ~~~ Everlag Thought about that as soon as I saw it returning rasters. SVG would be best offered alongside as an option; it requires more effort to use than just a png. Perhaps a 'vector' to accompany each 'image'? ~~~ voltagex_ Accept: headers. Default to image/png ------ soup10 I like the website design but shuffling cards is extremely trivial to code. Also cards are mostly used for gambling games and it's a huge security hole to use a third party api for that unless it's from a very trustworthy source. One maybe useful thing about this api is the card images, but there are also probably plenty of decks in the public domain. ~~~ nly > Also cards are mostly used for gambling games and it's a huge security hole > to use a third party api Depends. If you're writing a game you wanted the player to trust you might want to use an external shuffling service so you can easily show proof-of-deck after the game is over. Of course, you could do this simply by giving the player a cryptographic hash of the shuffled deck beforehand, e.g. SHA-256(5H,4D,AS...) ~~~ ivanche I've worked as a developer for online gambling games for 6 years. We _never_ shuffled the deck of cards. Instead, as player requests another card(s), they are generated using hardware RNG and returned to player. Deck only knows which cards are left in it, but their order is undefined until that call to RNG. ~~~ sesquipedalian If I'm not mistaken, this sounds like an incremental fisher-yates shuffle. ~~~ ivanche You are correct. As the matter of fact, a bunch of games in majority of cases needed only the next card from the deck, that's why in our heads we almost always thought of "not shuffling at all". ------ packetized Is something new with this project? I believe this same thing was posted 10 days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9462184) Would be interesting to hear if some of the issues raised in the previous submission were fixed or updated. ------ spdustin Has anyone noticed that it's on Github, and thus it wouldn't be too tough to submit an Issue or, even, a PR? ~~~ jessaustin This thread is yet more evidence of the Bikeshed Phenomenon. ~~~ Retra It's not bike-shedding when there's nothing else to talk about. This is basically a forum about bike shed painting. ------ javajosh Ha, nice. Your choice of images is...interesting :) [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/stati...](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/static/img/JACKSPADES.png) ~~~ crobertsbmw I just stole all the images off wikipedia. I wanted to make sure I wouldn't get sued. ~~~ lectrick [https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing- cards/](https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-cards/) ------ jwcrux Neat! Possible typo: > After two weeks, if actions have been made on the deck then we throw it > away. Might be "if no actions"? ~~~ crobertsbmw fixed. Good catch. ------ xxbondsxx Pretty cool! Love that theres no authentication and I can start straight from curl. Nit: drawing from an empty deck does not throw an error: > curl [http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/draw/i763hn8lcg0e/](http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/draw/i763hn8lcg0e/) {"remaining": 0, "cards": [], "deck_id": "i763hn8lcg0e", "success": true} As does drawing a comically large number of cards: > [http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/draw/vzlem7q4jhna/?count=10000...](http://deckofcardsapi.com/api/draw/vzlem7q4jhna/?count=100000;) (...) "success": true}\n ------ jonobird1 I'm just getting a "400 Bad Request" for the home page (from Brisbane, Australia) ~~~ bt3 Seconded. US here. ~~~ crobertsbmw Sorry about that. Should be fixed now. ------ evan_ If it supported the idea of multiple players, keeping track of what cards each player has, and facilitating passing cards between players; it could be a cool backend for lots of different card games. ~~~ sirclueless I wonder if you could do most of this cryptographically. If you did, you could make a client that could do all of this peer-to-peer. I think you would just need the following to make a wide range of games (many popular ones, perhaps most?): 1\. Client can produce a signature that it drew the k'th card from the deck for any k. 2\. Client can produce a signature that the k'th card is X if it drew the k'th card. 3\. Client can produce a signature that card X came from any arbitrary set of card indices containing k if it drew the k'th card. (This is the hardest one.) If it's easier, you could get most of this even restricting it to sets of cards that the client has drawn. With just that, I bet you could make a protocol for most card games where no one can cheat, where the central server's role is only to give out information about k'th card one and only one time. Certainly it's enough for blackjack, most forms of poker, hearts, and go fish. Anyone have a game that would be difficult? Maybe one where hidden cards get passed from player to player. ~~~ lann You can! [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker) ------ Navarr There are so many things a good API would have to do... Different types of decks, handling of a discard, shuffling a card into the deck, shuffling the discard pile into the deck, handling _hands_ , milling a card from the deck, multiple decks acting as one... Though the simplicity of this api currently just having a deck that you take cards from is neat. ------ adanto6840 What's being used for RNG? ~~~ sirclueless Appears to be python's random module, so not very secure if that's what you're after but it's probably correctly pseudorandom: [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/deck/...](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/deck/models.py#L33) ------ tjbiddle Neat! Nice work! Some are definitely criticizing, but hey - you'll always have critics. Unless they're following through with a pull-request, don't mind them. Great job on putting the project out there! An idea: Multiple options for deck images - obviously would take time on the artwork, but you could set this in your initial call for a deck (Or maybe even make it so you can change it whenever - if someone would have a need for that for some reason). May be fun. Great work! ~~~ nicobn The absence of a pull request does not negate the validity of a criticism. Hacker News is one of the most tech-savvy, intelligent and experienced audience you can find on the web. Everyone sucks, myself included. With that kind of attitude, I would never have learned anything. Shielding yourself from criticism using an arbitrary criteria only perpetuates ignorance. ------ carrotleads Sounds straightforward and simple. Well done. Would like an option to set parameters of a deck. Some card games use only 8 cards from a set and not the whole 13. ------ comrh Adding and subtracting from the starting deck would very useful. Adding Jokers, playing with only 1-10 (scopa), ect ------ bloodspatter504 Can someone show or explain: 1\. An example of how this could be used. 2\. How to do something other than just shuffling the cards. ~~~ d0m I think it was just a fun side project. But as to how it could be used.. just a few weeks ago we were at a hackathon and built a quick poker texas holdem game. A library like that (arguably a bit more comprehensive) would have saved us a few hours. ~~~ MeghdeepRay Was it just a texas hold em ? Or a variation of it ? I assume being a hackathon it wasn't a vanilla texas hold em. Could you provide some more details and maybe the code ? After seeing this I'm interested to know what else you've done. ~~~ d0m So we wanted to learn/play with react native. The project idea was to play a hand of poker online randomly against someone in less than 30 seconds. The fun part is you can only fold or go all-in : ) ------ gabemart This seems like a really cool project! But how are you shuffling the cards, and how are you identifying unique shuffled decks? It looks like the deck_id is 12 characters, numbers or lower-case letters. That gives a range of 36^12 or around 4.7 * 10^18. The total range of a physical deck of shuffled cards is 52! or around 8 * 10^67. It's possible I have misunderstood what deck_id is for. ~~~ kornish Looks like deck_id references a persisted model: [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/deck/...](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/blob/master/deck/models.py#L23) The model stores the state of the deck, including things like order and remaining cards and how many "decks" of 52 cards are in play. ------ brettkc Saw something similar demoed at Microsoft's Build event. Looks nice. ------ listic What's it good for, if it doesn't visualize my cards? ------ drinchev Wow. I never thought this could be an API. Really good work. I remember I spent a lot of time developing a class that deals with a deck of cards, shuffle and associate the card with a png. I would use this API in the future. ------ blt OP: what was your motivation for this project? ~~~ crobertsbmw Thanks for asking. I wanted to build a very simple API, and document it that my year ago self could understand it and actually figure out how to use the whole thing. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but I spent more time documenting/designing the single doc page then I did writing the actual API. I also thought the idea was unique enough that it was worth sharing. The reason for GET and POST is that it was easier for my year ago self to copy and paste a GET url into chrome and hit Enter and see what happens. ------ hurin Seriously, why wouldn't you just use a local RNG? Do you realize it's actually less work than reading API documentation? ~~~ crobertsbmw Consider it a bad Rube Goldberg Machine. ------ jaideepsingh Kudos! Simple and to the point. ------ murbard2 Cute, but an implementation of the mental poker protocol would be far more valuable. ~~~ crobertsbmw I think I'll do that next. ------ mattkenefick Looks good. ------ recursive HTTP errors as a service ~~~ crobertsbmw Fixed. ------ leovander -people to spam - [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/commit/2b5675df52...](https://github.com/crobertsbmw/deckofcards/commit/2b5675df526ea146c20bcfcee40b134b8a8bf222)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN purchasing a new laptop. - levicampbell Around the 16th or so, my laptop quit booting, and while it's being looked at by my best friend, I’m looking for a new laptop. I have two problems that will make affording a new laptop hard;<p>1. I take home around $670 a month. (SSI, because it’s next to impossible to find private health insurance for my medical condition, panhypopituitarism, so I’m on adult Medicaid.) 2. I have no credit. (My credit’s not bad, I really don’t have credit.)<p>Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank you for your consideration. ====== HedgeMage If a desktop will do what you need, looking for your local freegeek.org or similar computer recycling program is a great strategy. They offer systems free or cheap to those who couldn't otherwise afford them. ------ jpmc With your situation your best bet might be looking for a gently used laptop or trading services.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Current Article Popularity Trends on Hacker News - Cieplak http://hn.metamx.com/ ====== bravura I believe that the note on the bottom, about machine learning, is not germane to the graph displayed. The graph is a straight visualization of hacker news post rank. The machine learning discusses this earlier blog post: <http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news-headlines/> I don't understand why the authors combined boosting with stochastic-gradient descent. Boosting means you do greedy, forward-selection of features. You add one feature at a time, the one that has the largest gradient with respect to the loss. i.e. you pick the feature that looks like it will fit the data the best, given what the model currently knows, and then add the feature to the model. You can then choose the optimal weight for the feature using a line search. Why is SGD necessary in this scenario? After you picked your features, did you go back and re-adjust the weights? I'm not sure why this is necessary. If you are going to do SGD over many features with strong normalization, why not do it over the _entire_ feature vector and see which features disappear? ------ allardschip Beautiful graph. The notes with the graph are TC;DNG for me (too complicated; did not get). Sounded impressive though.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Unfair advantages grow from irrational habits - llambda http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2012/01/unfair-advantages-grow-from-irrational-habits/ ====== beefman It may not be evil but it is really stupid, because it means Google results no longer give insight into the structure of the web (things like normalized google distance can't be trusted, for one). What they could have done instead is personalized Gmail's spam filters, so that I could actually train the thing. But no, lots of false positives that don't respond to training. (Personalized spam filters are the only way to beat spam, since a dedicated attacker can't test against the filter with dummy accounts.) ------ andreadallera Honestly, no. Not here in Italy, at least. "once you’re 10 years into your startup career, as he is, you have access to all the same incredible resources" - what is going to give you those "incredible resources" you're talking about? Time? I've seen too much to believe that you can be a successful startupper without some kind of external help. And that external help, at least here, it's not something you can gain - it's something you're born with. It's your family, it's the friends of your family, it's the connections your family has, it's the connection you were able to build because you went to an expensive school, paid by your rich family. Again, I'm not saying that in the US things work the same way. In Italy they certainly do - Startup Chile is/was kind of a failure for the same exact reasons. The commenter has its rights to complain about those guys who had a huge headstart if they act like they didn't. ~~~ danielharan Then why are you still in Italy? Entrepreneurs don't whine about how things can't change, they figure out how. ~~~ andreadallera I'm not an enterpreneur and I don't want to be one.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Spreeder: Learn to Speed Read. - mustapha http://www.spreeder.com/ ====== cinitriqs Excellent to quickly read some articles online, copy paste, set speed to what u like, n go!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Browser Cold War - mrsebastian http://www.extremetech.com/computing/109127-the-browser-cold-war ====== RyanMcGreal If the browsers are going to battle each other by parsing javascript faster, rendering styles more correctly and driving adoption of the newest version, the 'collateral damage' will be a better web for everyone. ~~~ mmahemoff Yes, but only if they don't try to compete on exclusive APIs. Compatible standards are key for all these browsers to stay relevant and a viable alternative to native apps. ~~~ billybob True, but as long as no browser is really dominant, few sites will be coded to use browser-specific APIs. You don't want to cut out 2/3 of your users, after all. ------ crikli Off-topic: I would like to find the person that made the decision to implement that POS "mobile friendly" theme and beat them to death with a shovel. These themes are crap on both my iPad and my Touchpad running Android. ~~~ billybob "A graphic designer was violently murdered today by someone who had used her web site. The killer reportedly said that he 'didn't like the layout' and that this alone was enough to prompt him to bludgeon the designer to death. She leaves behind a husband and two children." ~~~ crikli Well that just makes me sound like a psychopath. Oh, wait, my original post did that. Carry on. ------ zipdog "the only way to gain ground is through propaganda, FUD, and sleazy underhanded maneuvers" Really? Browsers don't have to be neutral platforms that simply server a site's content to the best of their ability. FF long ago showed that with extentions. RockMelt did a good job of reimagining the browser experience from scratch. What about a browser that analysed your link history to recommend content? I think we're just scratching the surface for what browsers can be like. The machine OS might be pretty much done for a lot of people - its just a platform to host the browser. But with the browsers as the new OS, the ability to provide additional features* in a coherent, tailored and fast way will make a huge difference. *features that enhance, not just features for features' sake ------ DanBC I loathe this chart. I find it impenetrable and hard to understand. Am I right, or is it useful and good? ~~~ mrsebastian Seems understandable enough, if you click to zoom in. ------ eiji I find it interesting that Safari is not picking up with all the success they have recently. And these plots should start to show more clearly what's going on in the mobile and desktop browser-space. I assume this plot (page 2) does not show mobile at all. ~~~ mrsebastian It's irritating -- there's surprisingly little data on how Mobile factors into the worldwide browser market share. NetMarketShare breaks it down by Desktop and Mobile/Tablet [1] -- but it's impossible to see them both on the same graph. StatCounter has a bit more info [2], though. [1] <http://www.netmarketshare.com/> [2] [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-2010...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-201011-201111) ------ billybob I don't think "Cold War" is a good description. They are actively fighting for market share, not sitting still, threatening to fight.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
27000 errors in the Tizen operating system - matthewwarren https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0519/ ====== edejong This sounds so familiar. Some 6 years ago, I joined a team of engineers developing a large (1.5M LOC) classic java/spring/hibernate application for administration in higher education. The software was buggy and loads of time was wasted on bug-fixing, so I introduced the Findbugs static analysis package. Result: >6000 (suspected) bugs. It took a couple of days of blunt perseverance of the whole team to clean up the mess and bring it back to normal proportions, but the result was a stable, well-functioning system. If you have static analysis tools available and you're writing a larger application (more than 10k LOC), and intend to maintain it for longer than a couple of months, it is definitely worth the initial investment. Better than static analysis, is static typing in a language with an expressive type- system, such as Scala. You simply cannot have NPEs with Option types. tldr; Used static analysis on 1.5M LOC codebase to reduce bugginess tremendously. Use of static analysis and statically typed languages is adviced. ~~~ blub The first time we ran static analysis on the C++ code base of a specific project, it found ~20 minor issues and a couple of medium severity ones which were mitigated by other checks. However, we also used 3rd-party open source C libraries, where it found thousands of problems. I'm talking about serious issues, memory leaks, invalid memory access, etc. P.S: I hope Scala implemented optional types better than Java, where the optional types themselves are nullable :) ~~~ edejong Well, technically you could write `val opt: Option[Int] = null`, but I've never seen it used and would seriously consider sending the author back to a course Scala for Dummies. It's interesting how many bugs can be found by static analysis. The problem with C and C++ is that the domain of 'normal' operations is much larger than Java, leading to more false positives in static analysis and/or less true positives. ------ sliken With Samsung's android record, why would anyone want more Samsung written code on their phone? I had a nexus 5, reliable, reasonably fast, snappy under most normal usage patterns. I wanted a SD card and wireless charging so I upgraded to a note 4. 50% more ram, faster cpu, faster GPU etc. Felt way slower, and crashed fairly often. Annoyingly the home button was quite sluggish. Even more annoying is despite 50% more ram it was very aggressive in killing background apps, making multitasking almost useless. So whenever you switched apps it would have to restart the app, MUCH more so than my nexus 5. I tracked it down and apparently it's some benchmark optimization. Android updates (security or otherwise) were quite rare and was about a year behind on the android releases. I switched the note 4 to cyanogen. The phone was much snappier, much more consistent (no random lag), and stopped crashing. Oh and the home button was much quicker as well. ~~~ matthberg I had a similar experience with a Samsung Galaxy S4, which would run out of battery life in under 5 hours on any given day, and which was dropped for major updates after two versions. Switching to Cyanogenmod, even the _nightly_ version extended battery life to ~9 hours, and greatly improved performance. It also allowed access to the next version of Android, and native skinning and easy customization (with a literal toggle in the dev settings for root). In short, I highly recommend upgrading any old hardware you have to Lineage OS (Cyanogenmod continued). ------ geofft Every time I see a PVS-Studio article I wonder how many errors are caught by the compiler itself. In my experience, things like the same expression on both sides of a less-than sign, returned pointers to local variables, are caught by -Wall -Wextra in GCC or LLVM. If they're not building with -Wall -Wextra -Werror, are they really going to make use of PVS-Studio's output? (Also, as a member of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, I am obligated to point out that a lot of errors PVS-Studio catches are just straight-up not possible in Rust. In order to avoid getting too off-topic here, here's a comment I made on Reddit on a similar post from PVS-Studio about two years ago: [https://www.reddit.com/comments/3aehq5//cscj2w5/](https://www.reddit.com/comments/3aehq5//cscj2w5/)) ~~~ AndreyKarpov > If they're not building with -Wall -Wextra -Werror, are they really going to > make use of PVS-Studio's output? This is very likely. Do not forget that the static analyzer is not just a warning. This is also the infrastructure. For example, PVS-Studio is: \- Saving and loading analysis results allow doing overnight checks - during the night the analyzer does the scanning and provides you with the results in the morning. \- Interactive filtering of the analysis results (the log file) in the PVS- Studio window: by the diagnostic number, file name, the keyword in the text of the diagnostic. \- BlameNotifier utility. The tool allows you to send e-mail notifications to the developers about bugs that PVS-Studio found during a night run. \- Mass Suppression - ability to suppress all old messages raised for the legacy code, so that the analyzer reports 0 warnings. You can always go back to the suppressed messages later. This feature allows you to seamlessly integrate PVS-Studio into your development process and focus on errors found in new code only. Details: [https://www.viva64.com/en/m/0032/](https://www.viva64.com/en/m/0032/) \- Relative paths in report files to view them on different machines. \- CLMonitoring feature allows analyzing the projects that have no Visual Studio files (.sln/.vcxproj); in case the CLMonitoring functionality is not enough, there is a possibility to integrate PVS-Studio in a Makefile-based build system manually. \- pvs-studio-analyzer - a utility similar to CLMonitoring, but working under Linux. \- Possibility to exclude files from the analysis by name, folder or mask; to run the analysis on the files modified during the last N days. \- Integration with SonarQube. It is an open source platform, designed for continuous analysis and measurement of code quality. \- and so on ~~~ virtualized I don't remember reading about any of that even though I am a regular reader of your "checked projects" series. All of the relevant information on your web site is hidden in some wall of text. Please consider hiring someone who knows how to sell something. ~~~ JdeBP It isn't hidden, really. I followed the hyperlink at the top to the main page of the site, and the bullet-point list that you are responding to is right there, on that very first page. It is under a heading entitled _Main Features of PVS-Studio_. * [https://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio/](https://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio/) ~~~ virtualized "Main Features of PVS-Studio" is one of those walls of text that I meant. ------ coldtea Relevant: [http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/04/05/researcher- calls-s...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/04/05/researcher-calls- samsungs-tizen-os-the-worst-code-ive-ever-seen) [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/samsungs-tizen-is- ri...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/samsungs-tizen-is-riddled-with- security-flaws-amateurishly-written/) ------ kronos29296 The number of errors seem like pylint giving me errors. Some of them were like a is not a valid variable name. Maybe the numbers are like that. (Pylint that is not configured sanely/with default config really gives you thousands of errors and warnings for a fairly large code base and some of them were not errors but coding style.) The numbers here may also be something like that. Nice blog post, may even make developers adopt something like cppcheck but most guys won't buy this. ~~~ loeg It's a lot like that. PVS-Studio ran against FreeBSD and produced a ton of false positives. ~~~ jotux Running any sufficiently advanced static analyzer on any large codebase will generate a ton of false positives. ~~~ loeg So what? Qualitatively, it feels like PVS-Studio's false positive rate is higher than Coverity. And far higher than a modern free compiler's -Wall. To describe the 27,000 detections as errors is a little misleading, and I think that's what the grandparent post is discussing. ~~~ AndreyKarpov This is not the way you think and it is not nice to mislead people. It all depends on the project. I've heard people who said that Coverity gives many false positives and Cppcheck gives few. I've heard the opposite, that it is impossible to use Cppcheck because of the huge number of false positives, but Coverity is doing great. I heard that Coverity gives more false positives than PVS-Studio. And vice versa. And so on and so forth. What is the reason for such differences? Projects have their certain styles of writing and different kinds of macros. These are macros and peculiarities of style that become the main source of false positives. This is why the first impression of using the analyzers of code depends on luck, and not on the coolness of the analyzer. If the analyzer doesn’t like a self-made my_assert() it will issue 10000 false positives. So there is no point in talking abstractly about the number of false positives. Yes, you can not get lucky and there can be a lot of false positives. However, the static code analyzers allow you to configure them. In articles I have showed many times that the simplest configuration of the analyzer can greatly reduce the number of false positives. Example: [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0496/#ID0ENNAC](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0496/#ID0ENNAC) ------ wyldfire > As you can see, the calculations are absolutely fair and transparent. ...if you can grant them the premise that the 3.3% sampled represents the project as a whole so that the ratio will project out to 27k overall. ~~~ ChrisLomont Sampling 3.3% of lines in a 72 million line codebase, especially across so many sub projects, is statistically significant enough to make claims like this with decent certainty. That's a few million sample lines tested. ~~~ ordu Oh... We can ask about way sub projects were selected, and are they can be called a representative sample. Nevertheless I agree with you: there are no obvious way to do a better estimation, so words "fair" and "transparent" seem right in place there. Of course only if Karpov does not try to mislead his readers deliberately by choosing sub projects by some criterion that correlates with error rate. ------ lvillani The mere mention of EFL brought this article back to my mind: [https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened](https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened) The author makes no names but ends the article with "[...] did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?". I don't know whether EFL is still the base for all applications on Tizen (I think they changed technologies several times, they are now on .NET?) but that, plus the SDK churn and Samsung reputation of generally low software quality and severe security issues don't really instill confidence in the platform. ~~~ gue5t I've read a lot of Tizen code, and EFL is by far one of the more professional and well-engineered components. And this is realizing that in relation to many open-source libs EFL is rather a goofy oddball. 95% of Tizen is a huge hairball of needless nested and overlapping indirections (custom IPC layers, serialization formats, "management" daemons, libraries to interface with them, etc.) implemented in varying (except for the pervasive messiness and broken english) C styles; deep beneath all this you have the open-source libraries doing the actual useful work. You could try to make some similar claims about Android, but the percentage would be much lower and the code quality is much higher. I wish I had some real metric to point at (maybe this article suffices?) but the code in Tizen is truly awful. Also they don't give a shit about their bug tracker; I've had system-breaking bugs, with patches, in "new" status for over a year. Because I don't work at Samsung, I can't contribute. ------ irundebian I'm dreaming of a language which prevents bugs a priori so that there is no need for static analysis. I know Rust is out there, but I'm not sure if all state of the art knowledge is getting into the language specification. Is there some programming language geek here which could confirm that this is the case and all safety features (except these with non-optional run-time trade offs) of Ada are included? ------ exabrial Samsung doesn't have a brilliant track record for security... ~~~ tw04 And yet they want to be the go-to IOT company... kind of scary. ~~~ ethbro Security is invisible. ------ AndreyKarpov Continue. Exploring Microoptimizations Using Tizen Code as an Example - [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0520/](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0520/) ------ chris_wot Those alloca issues are a real concern! Especially given the fact that there's no way of knowing with any certainty that it has failed, as if it fails then it's not specified what behaviour will occur. ~~~ syncsynchalt The first alloca (alloc in a loop) is in a test, which makes it less concerning IME. The second (free() of a stack pointer), oof. Depending on the malloc implementation, you'll get a noop, a crash, an abort, a warning to stderr, or worst of all silent munge of stack vars. ~~~ chris_wot Yeah, but you also don't want to allocate too many of these and smash the stack. ------ joshmarinacci I will never buy a Samsung product that includes software written by them. They simply don't care about quality. ~~~ chambo622 Do any Samsung products not contain software written by them? ------ AndreyKarpov Tizen: Summing Up - [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0522/](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0522/) ------ HillaryBriss are there similar security analyses of android OS source? ------ based2 [https://sonarcloud.io/projects?sort=-analysis_date](https://sonarcloud.io/projects?sort=-analysis_date) ------ analogmemory It's on my "smart TV" and there's a 50/50 chance that when I turn on the TV it crashes. On the plus side it's helping me stop watching so much TV. ~~~ rsynnott This sort of thing is exactly why I'm very unwilling to buy a smart tv. It's getting harder to find decent dumb ones, though. ~~~ vanderZwan Why not just get a big computer screen? ~~~ rsynnott Nobody makes an acceptably priced 40-50" computer screen that I can put in my living room. ~~~ hengheng Dunno, Iiyama has a decent 40" 4k for 400-500€ that does the job for me. ~~~ ProAm I need almost double that size unless I want to watch TV like a peasant.... ------ adekok We can PVS-Studio against FreeRADIUS. It found things which were missed by Coverity, clang analyzer, and cppcheck. Sadly, they don't respond to my queries about _paying_ for it. [http://freeradius.org/security/pvs- studio.html](http://freeradius.org/security/pvs-studio.html) ------ virtualized Yes, PVS-Studio is very good and useful for avoiding bugs. No, companies don't really care about avoiding bugs. No one at Samsung will risk delaying the release of the next plastic crap product by fixing any problems. Why would they? Defects will even encourage customers to buy a new device because they are used to getting no bug fix updates. This is the worst possible company for Viva64 to go to. It seems like C++ developers either don't give a shit about code quality or they do, and don't make many mistakes anymore. Either way there is little demand for a static analyzer. It won't get easier for Viva64 in the future. A few years ago, Compilers and IDEs started providing similar warnings as PVS- Studio, although not quite as sophisticated yet. Code-level testing begins to be a thing in proprietary software. Clang offers valgrind-like sanitizers for different classes of bugs that even PVS-Studio cannot detect. TIL that Viva64 has over 20 employees. The passive-aggressive blog posts always made it look like one or two people running PVS-Studio as a side project or so. I read those posts regularly, but I don't remember them announcing any new features or improvements in PVS-Studio itself. Why do I have to pay annually if they don't spend the money on improving the product? I am not even sure if PVS-Studio is worth the money. They don't have prices on the web site and defend their business decisions in the FAQ ([https://www.viva64.com/en/order-faq/](https://www.viva64.com/en/order-faq/)) in a very unprofessional way. After reading that it feels like I might get ripped off. ~~~ AndreyKarpov > They don't have prices on the web site This is standard practice. PVS-Studio is a B2B solution. There are many details to be discussed. For individual developers we propose the following: "How to use PVS-Studio for Free" \- [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0457/](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0457/) And "Handing out PVS-Studio Analyzer Licenses to Security Experts" \- [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0510/](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0510/) ~~~ virtualized "How to use PVS-Studio for Free" is ridiculous. "Handing out PVS-Studio Analyzer Licenses to Security Experts" \- sorry, tl;dr	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Grantland and the Surprising Future of Publishing - ghosh https://stratechery.com/2015/grantland-and-the-surprising-future-of-publishing/ ====== danso Good piece, the OP sums up why even as analytics show that a diminishing number of users visit news site homepages, I still will type in the URLs to domains such as Grantland, NYT, and the New Yorker...and only ever visit places like BuzzFeed and Vox through Twitter or HN: the sites in the former category still have front pages in which the majority of content is original...the sites in the latter, you have to _work_ to get to the good stuff. I liked reading the linked-to Deadspin piece about Simmons and Grantland [1], which contains a lot of detail about the site's size and cost (linking to a NYT report [2] of Simmons earning $5M)...also, I didn't know Simmons conceived of "30 for 30"...that alone explains his worth to me (in terms of ESPN video content). [1] [http://deadspin.com/how-to-employ-bill- simmons-1703224603](http://deadspin.com/how-to-employ-bill-simmons-1703224603) [2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/sports/bill-simmonss- retur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/sports/bill-simmonss-return-sets- intrigue-in-motion-at-espn.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Greasemonkey script to remove iPad stories from HN - tomh- For convinience I also included the keywords "lisp" and "clojure" in the recommended version:<p>http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2196687/ybs-lisp.user.js<p>or you can download the ipad only version at:<p>http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2196687/ybs.user.js<p>Have fun! ====== devin As annoying as all of the iPad stuff has been, no one seemed to have any problem with the pure rumor stories that poured all over HN in the days preceding the announcement. And actually, as someone who first thought "Oh god, this thing sucks..." -- some of the commentary I've read has been quite enlightening and now has me considering an iPad for my girlfriend's mother. The quality of the stories on iPads that are being submitted are not in question IMO. I will not be filtering them. Finally, I will _certainly_ not be filtering lisp or Clojure. If you want to keep your mind closed off to things you don't know much about, be my guest. If you've made up your mind on something and never want to think about it again, then again, be my guest. Not for me. ~~~ narag First, I take this and other no-more-ipad stories a little tongue-in-cheek and guess others do the same. In fact I'm reading both the linked articles and the comments of most submissions. I'd even buy one of those things if I could. That said, I do question the quality of the stories, specially the misguided arguments and the tone that they're delivered with. A lot of the writers seems to think that the critics are saying that the iPad won't sell or that nobody will like the device. And they think that's because critics are asocial geeks that have no clue on how the real world works, and should be educated to dismiss such superfluous luxury as freedom to install programs, connect to a printer or download movies, luxuries that _normal people_ doesn't want or care about. That's annoying and the most annoying thing is saying that a system like the app store is actually good and "revolutionary" and that whoever doesn't like it is because he doesn't "get it". All right, I believe that this device could sell very well and be a big hit among very diverse people, with technical background or otherwise, mainly because the well designed multitouch interface. But that doesn't make the whole thing _desirable_ or needed, The device seems great. It sucks that it's so closed. ------ zaph0d Why Lisp and Clojure, of all the things? ~~~ kristiandupont I for one love HN but have no interest in Lisp or Clojure. ------ petercooper On Safari, your script messes up the layout of the front page. All items compress into each other. Anyway, if you want to make it really good, get it to put a little textbox at the bottom where we can type in a regex. That would be more generally useful and isn't hard to do. I might give it a go even.. :-) (Plug: I recently wrote a GM script to change new style RTs into old style ones on Twitter - <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/66951>) ------ elblanco Settle down, it'll all be over soon enough. ~~~ jamesbritt That's right. --- sent from my iPad(tm) ------ Zev How about one for Erlang? Seriously though, the iPad is just the shiny new thing of the day, it won't be nearly as big news in a few days. Not worth worrying about. ------ ScottWhigham Why not just use Xichekolas's script at <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039> ? It is very flexible and does a bit more. ------ nick007 would the script remove this story? ------ darien Don't tempt me! ------ msahil great.......i like this one.....	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hulu a consumer success but still a small business: Est. $12.5-25mm net revs - fromedome http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/hulu-a-consumer-success-but-still-a-small-business ====== JimEngland They need to 1) includes ads into small clips (3-5 min) and 2) vary the advertising on full television episodes. Seeing the same Toyota ad seven times isn't helpful to the consumer. ~~~ SwellJoe _Seeing the same Toyota ad seven times isn't helpful to the consumer._ But it's helpful to the marketer. It takes at least that many impressions to even register. This is actually why I'm surprised by how little money online advertising makes. It would be possible for an advertiser to buy several impressions with the same user--or a series of ads being shown to the same user. Everything I've ever read about marketing tells me this would be more effective than an ad shown to five different people only once. _They need to 1) includes ads into small clips (3-5 min)_ I recently built an HTPC with Media Center. When I first fired it up, I browsed to the "watch TV online" thing...clicked on the first popular clip. 30 second ad. 45 second clip. Never again will I browse to that option on my HTPC. Ever. Anything less than 5 minutes with an ad is gonna piss me off. But, I do love Hulu. The quality isn't as good as I'd like for most of the shows and movies (that HTPC is hooked up to a 46" 1080p TV), and I had to hit bittorrent to catch up on Battlestar Galactica this season when I missed the first couple--they only have the last three or four episodes on Hulu and scifi.com--but I still like being able to catch up on shows at my convenience. ------ webwright 12-25 million in revenue is staggeringly good for their age. Private beta in Oct 07. Launch in March 08. Assuming growth (which I think they have), I'd call that a pretty amazing success. ~~~ akd It's a bit different when you're an NBC / News Corp joint venture. The whole issue of getting your name out there, networking, etc. is not really an issue -- the CEO makes 10 phone calls and has all his content lined up. Also the amount of free publicity was massive since NBC and News Corp together control a number of different media outlets, and other news organizations jumped on the bandwagon. ~~~ alaskamiller I have yet seen any reference to Hulu on the networks. In fact, Fox prior to this month were still telling people to go to fox.com and use the horrible media player to watch shows on demand. Having the access to that huge library of content, though, makes it pretty darn hard for other companies to play in the field. ~~~ j2d2 I'd guess they're still building out the library. Much better to make a huge splash than be _another youtube_. ~~~ alaskamiller I'm sure there's lots of legal wrangling involved. ------ dominik I used Hulu to keep track of Battlestar Galatica for the early half of this past season. Originally, Hulu posted episodes the day after they aired and didn't include any commercials. However, as the end of the season approached, Hulu -- without warning or advance notice -- delayed posting episodes until 8 days after they aired. Only after folks complained did they put up a schedule of airdates. I also had the chance to watch several movies on Hulu; once again I found the service started excellent and got progressively worse. Early on, movies downloaded quickly and had no ads. Towards the end of May, however, Hulu started interrupting movies with ads in seemingly random places -- not in natural transition points but right in the middle of an actor's words. Furthermore, as they apparently hadn't secured advertising yet, these "ads" were just 15 seconds of static white text on a black screen that read: "Brought to you by Hulu's advertisers" or some such. I found these pointless since they didn't even name the advertisers or feature their logos. Disgusted with these pointless interruptions, I've since swore off Hulu. In short: They had a good thing going at the start, but have proceeded to muck it up. ------ vaksel 25mm in revenues is small? I mean sure its not Google but its hardly on the same level as Joe's Corner Store, Mike's Landscaper Services and Paul's Video Store. ~~~ SwellJoe _25mm in revenues is small?_ Yep. $12.5-25 million will only support about 100-200 employees. Maybe more, if they're not high end people (but I suspect Hulu does not have a lot of positions that don't require some sort of high end expertise--very little call for consumer sales or tech support in a business like that). 100-200 people is still a pretty small business in modern terms. Google employs 35,000 (or something like that). Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and Intel probably dwarf Googles numbers. ~~~ LogicHoleFlaw I've been struggling with this one myself. My current company will have grown from 50 people in January '07 to 300+ in January '09. And the larger we get, the longer it seems to take to get anything done. I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue. ~~~ SwellJoe _I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue._ I don't have any real good answers for you there. We're still pretty much a two man shop, though we've just hired a part-time support and documentation person (five hours per week--extremely part-time, but enough to free me and Jamie up a bit from support roles so we can focus on other revenue-generating tasks). I may have gone in an abnormal direction by hiring someone really experienced for the support role, rather than hiring someone really cheap and training them. He costs more, but we don't have to train him and I've got great confidence in the support he provides. He's a technology jack of all trades that happens to fit our business very well, and I believe he'll provide far more value to our customers than he costs us to keep him working. We're torn on the "stay small" vs. "go big" question, as well. We know we're going after huge revenues...we're just trying to figure out how to maximize those opportunities without bogging down the company with a lot of unnecessary head count. I think the key is to boil it down to your core business. Our thinking is: "Why do people pay us?" And the answers are: Powerful software that gets better all the time, great personal support via our website, less painful licensing processes than our competitors. So, those are the things we need to spend money on (plus marketing and advertising in order to let people know those are the things we provide). Everything else is not our job--we'll outsource it. In the next week or two I'm planning to hire a part-time bookkeeper to come in once per week to clean out my inbox, pay bills, and enter our accounting data into the accounting system, etc. But, then again, that still doesn't answer your question, and doesn't solve the problem--at some point, if you have success, you have to hire more people. Full time legal, accounting, sales, support, etc. It just happens...but I do think it's worth fighting a few aspects of that. Hierarchy can be a problem, and should be fought against pretty strongly...I've seen an organization that brought in a new CEO, and she looked around at the general messiness and inefficiency of the organization (a ~60 person non-profit with a few tens of millions in managed money), and decided that what the company needed was more C-levels. Last I heard they had seven C-levels. That's less than ten employees per C-level, for those keeping count at home. I'm pretty confident this did not improve the efficiency of the organization. I get the distinct impression from people I know who work at Google that they have a similar problem. MBAs look at the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around... ------ coglethorpe How much revenue do they "need?" I know sites cost less and less to operate, and a small team of developers can do a lot. ------ pchristensen Small for the companies that run it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Uber without Internet - natiginfo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.nicapp&ref=producthunt ====== natiginfo Why I built this? I travel often, and I don't have internet access in every country. If we consider internet prices are higher than SMS prices while you're in roaming, this is much better for me. Moreover, I'm active user of Uber. Moreover, if we can see that most of the people doesn't have access to the Internet. However, they have access to 2G network, which is enough to send and receive SMS messages. My app already have active users from countries such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, etc. The next goal is to give internet access to internet-restricted countries! Let's connect the world.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
iTerm2: Please disable 'Perform DNS lookups to check if URLs are valid' - grhmc https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/6050 ====== gnachman Given the level of concern, I will change the default and release a new version right away. ~~~ gnachman This is done. A summary of the issue and apology can be found here: [https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/dnslookupissue](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/dnslookupissue) ~~~ teddyh Why didn’t you do this two years ago, when the first bug report about this was made? ([https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/3688](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/3688)) Or a year ago, when a second report was made? ([https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5303](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5303)) Note that the first bug report _explicitly mentions_ the leaking of passwords. Was it really all about the “ _level of concern_ ”, as you say, and you wouldn’t have changed this without the exposure? ~~~ yanokwa This is a deeply unkind thing to say to someone who donates their free time to provide a public good. George apologized for his oversight and fixed the problem. Take him at his word and thank him. ~~~ woof Please don't call this "oversight". He was (made) aware of the problem and _chose_ to keep the default. ------ tlb It's horrifying to watch your own DNS traffic. All sorts of mysterious domains show up. (On a typical macbook on WiFi, this will do it:) sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 5000 -n port 53 On mine, these get resolved every 30 seconds (probably some Adobe updater): scss-prod-ue1-notif-39.adobesc.com. Several servers get lookups of names long enough to be exfiltrating data: r3---sn-nvopjoxu-25ve.gvt1.com. (Google) gzunified-ecselast-1isehuisml2g4-663788831.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. (???) kube-nimbus-471965604.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. (BitDefender) If you hit a popular commercial site without AdBlock enabled, the list is loooong and sketchy-looking. ~~~ exikyut That Google one uses a similar naming scheme to the servers used for video data for YouTube etc. You just made me realize something, though. The Google and AWS examples you gave won't be able to do this, but if you set up wildcard DNS and tell DNS that you have your own nameserver via CNAME aliasing, you could make your software do a lookup for eg something like "bm9ib2R5IHdpbGwgZXZlciBub3RpY2UgaWYgSSB0cmFuc21pdCBkYXRhIGxpa2UgdGhpcyEKCg.example.com" and exfiltrate data via DNS request in the process. The server could then return 127.0.53.53 to mean "ACK; data received OK", whereas NXDOMAIN or any other error would mean to try again. Hmmmmm. Wondering if I should delete this... (I realize this is exactly how the Iodine DNS tunnel works. FWIW, freedns.afraid.org's free options are perfectly capable to get iodine working, I was very pleased to discover.) ~~~ cyphar I know several people who use these sorts of techniques to exfiltrate data from a network where you don't have outbound TCP but you can leak information through DNS. As you mentioned, Iodine lets you do this (though by default it tries to use VOID DNS responses that are blocked by a lot of networks). It's pretty cool being able to do an rsync-over-DNS. ~~~ exikyut > _VOID DNS responses that are blocked by a lot of networks_ For ages I've been meaning to [figure out how to] report this to the iodine dev, but I actually set up iodine specifically to get a working network while I knew I'd briefly be visiting a hospital. I discovered to my amusement that the (public!) hospital's IT infra is _really, really good_ ; I was trying to SSH directly on top of the iodine tunnel, and while the first few DNS requests associated with the connection setup would work and I'd get as far as getting a shell prompt, but everything would rapidly screech to a halt and jam up pretty much instantly after that; maybe I'd get a single character typed, then it would completely die. I figured I was looking at a remarkably well-put-together leaky-bucket implementation. So I tried hacking usleep()s into likely-looking spots in the code, but that didn't seem to slow it down enough. iodine is a rather _interesting_ program internally, and a quick overview while distractedly sitting in a waiting area wasn't entirely sufficient to figure out why I didn't seem to be slowing it down enough to be a problem. Before this "production" test, I previously verified that iodine was working by running the client on an AWS box. IIRC, ping ran over the link for quite some time (less than an hour; many minutes) without a single hitch. On another note, I found that iodine seemed utterly incapable of setting up a correctly-configured tunnel on my Arch (receiving/server) box; I always had to ifconfig the tunnel (I forget exactly) to make it work. Problem with that was, my ifconfig-ing only routed one specific IP address, iodine wanted to give connections their own discrete IPs, and old sessions that locked up would take a while to time out. So I made a gigantic hack-script that would repeatedly kill iodine over and over every 1.5 minutes if it didn't see an authenicated SSH login. Would be nice for everything to just work properly... ------ kator I hardly go a day without using iTerm2. Don't worry George your responsiveness more than makes up for an honest mistake. To everyone else: I would highly recommend if you make money on a daily basis using iTerm2 that you support his efforts: [https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/posts](https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/posts) Before you ask, yes I'm a patreon for George, his work inspires me. ~~~ sgt I recently switched back to Terminal.app due to poor performance in iTerm 2. Keystrokes were lagging to the point it got frustrating. Then a few days ago someone pointed out that I should try the iTerm 2 nightly build, and sure enough the lag is gone, so I'm now back on iTerm 2 again. ------ jakobegger It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise intelligent people think it‘s a good idea to send unencrypted user data to random servers on the internet in the background. ~~~ JadeNB It makes me scared to be an iTerm2 user, frankly. Because I am an idiot, it never occurred to me that I'd have to wonder about the security implications of my choice of terminal emulator. Does it otherwise have a good reputation for security? ~~~ problems Just ditch it - clearly the author has no regard for privacy. I cringe just thinking about implementing something like that. ~~~ mw6621 iTerm2 is great and George is absolutely responsive with any issue I've ever brought up. I am personally going to give him the benefit of the doubt here, I'm sure he'll fix things ASAP. ~~~ derimagia Yep was already fixed: [https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/dnslookupissue](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/wikis/dnslookupissue) ------ hannob Reminded me immediately about this whatsapp-issue, which is also very problematic: [https://twitter.com/mulander/status/874370124932943874](https://twitter.com/mulander/status/874370124932943874) ~~~ exikyut Also affects FB Messenger (scroll down the thread for a while) and Telegram. A WA crash was also presented. Well that was a very interesting thread... ------ geofft One of the nice things about GitLab instead of GitHub is that there isn't a flood of low-information, high-anger comments once a thread makes the HN front page. ~~~ davidgerard No, that's because the server is melting and giving 500 errors ;-) ------ pishpash What's more interesting to me is that some people are okay with a lookup on click but not a lookup on hover. It seems a difference in affirmative intent exists between hover and click; and more generally perhaps categories of user actions should be formalized into degrees of affirmation that could mitigate errors like this. ~~~ justinclift Hovering can be a part of the everyday copy-n-paste action though, for selecting the text to copy. ~~~ EnigmaticLion If i use iTerm's autocopy feature (e.g. that the selected text automatically goes to the clipboard) and rarely press CMD+C then i'm safe? Or should i start changing my passwords? Since i usually generate passwords with `pwgen`, then copy with double click. ~~~ justinclift Sorry, no idea personally. I don't use iTerm, I was just pointing out that hovering is a common user action (due to cut-n-paste). :) ------ csours Wow, this reminds me of how Cisco routers automatically try to SSH to anything that isn't a recognized command. (I may be mis-remembering part of this) ~~~ icedchai I remember it being telnet, not SSH. I started working with Cisco routers in the early 90's, before SSH was even a thing. ~~~ csours Yup, that's right. ------ JosephRedfern I've submitted a PR to change the default behaviour: [https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/332](https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2/pull/332) ------ JadeNB Since I didn't see it on a quick skim, it seems that the way to do this is Preferences > Advanced > Semantic history. ~~~ chadlavi Or if you're lazy like me, Preferences > Advanced > type "DNS" (the search field gets autofocus on the Advanced prefs pane). ~~~ whoisjohnkid lol this is exactly what I did. Worked like a charm. ------ NelsonMinar It's a shame DNS traffic isn't at least encrypted. That doesn't solve the whole problem (you're still sending data to a potentially untrusted DNS server) but it'd help a little. ------ cnst CVE-2015-9231 has been assigned to this issue. [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-9231](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-9231) [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-9231](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-9231) ------ _of I just upgraded. Is there any way to turn off the new Iterm2-specific MacBook touch-bar buttons? ------ stiangrindvoll Makes you wonder how your own port 53 traffic looks like... ------ clairity a local firewall (hands off & little snitch are handy commercial ones for mac) will help you catch these kinds of info leaks (i caught this one a long time ago because of mine). it does come with a time cost however--little popups every time you launch a new application or connect to a new service that you have to evaluate and handle, since you haven't set rules for them already. ~~~ duskwuff A local firewall probably wouldn't have helped here -- the DNS lookups would be performed by mDNSResponder, not by iTerm itself. ~~~ clairity you might be right about the DNS lookup. but i do distinctly remember getting alerts for this and being annoyed enough to go figure out how to disable the feature in iterm2 (it was at least a couple years ago, so my memory is hazy). maybe someone with more recent experience can clear up the mystery for us. =) ~~~ ThisIs_MyName I don't think this "feature" existed a couple of years ago. ------ trapperkeeper74 In general, dnscrypt can help defend against DNS privacy loss for situations like these. ~~~ Habbie You said it right - can _help_ defend. On the other end of your dnscrypt tunnel, the queries will still go out unencrypted. They will just be harder to correlate to you specifically. ------ knodi Is gitlab throwing a 500 for anyone else? ~~~ sytse It was but it was fixed, see [https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/910274484992663552](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/910274484992663552) ------ Azkar Fantastic response. ~4 hours from report to release. ~~~ cnst 4 hours? More like 2 years! And at least 3 separate bug reports, roughly one year apart each! [https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/3688](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/3688) [https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5303](https://gitlab.com/gnachman/iterm2/issues/5303) Unless you are into alternative facts, of course, then, yeah, very prompt release engineering and vulnerability fixing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NYC’s tech boom will turn it into a ghost town - pointillistic https://nypost.com/2019/11/02/why-new-york-citys-tech-boom-will-turn-it-into-a-ghost-town/ ====== gshdg Yeah, that’s just the Post doing it’s usual scaremongering. Yes, what it says about the character of the city is true. No, it has nothing to do with the startup scene taking root here. The difference between NY and SF is that — while, yes, NY isn’t building enough housing — not only could NY absorb the entire startup-employed population of SF without it making a visible change to our population numbers or housing pressure, we actually have vaguely sane zoning laws and have a whole lot of housing (tho not nearly enough) being added every year.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Senate’s new anti-encryption bill is even worse than EARN IT - DiabloD3 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/senates-new-anti-encryption-bill-even-worse-earn-it-and-thats-saying-something ====== abecedarius Longer discussion at [https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-n...](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-now- even-worse-anti-encryption-bill-earn-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-make-earn-it-bill-ok) ------ perl4ever "require that manufacturers of encrypted devices and operating systems, communications providers, and many others must have the ability to decrypt data upon request" Would the unintended effect be maybe just to eliminate _commercial_ encryption software and force everyone to use open source? ~~~ abecedarius From the link I posted in another comment: > The bill is so broadly worded that I think it _might_ apply to individual > contributors to open-source projects, such as, say, the Linux kernel, but > I’m not sure and I don’t want to scare everybody. But the bigger picture is that this bill is part of a strategy. It's meant to make EARN IT look less unreasonable by comparison. A unified strategy needs a unified response. ------ personjerry More digestible version I made: [https://thinkerapp.com/shared/MessyRadiantCaracal](https://thinkerapp.com/shared/MessyRadiantCaracal) Context: This is a highlighted summary generated with an app I built to help myself approach all the drier HN links I was opening. I appreciate any feedback from the HN community on this project! ~~~ hrishios > More digestible version I made: > [https://thinkerapp.com/shared/MessyRadiantCaracal](https://thinkerapp.com/shared/MessyRadiantCaracal) > Context: This is a highlighted summary generated with an app I built to help > myself approach all the drier HN links I was opening. I appreciate any > feedback from the HN community on this project! Nicely done! Small suggestion I have is to add the expand functionality to tapping on the passage. It feels more natural and doesn't currently do anything. ~~~ personjerry Thanks for the suggestion! Did you intuitively feel that the text was clickable? ------ 8organicbits > Instead, the government can require the system to be redesigned. No thanks. ~~~ Nasrudith Yeah I wonder legally what is in place precisely to stop someone from just telling the secret court to go fuck themselves or pleading the 13th? The secrecy they claim as a pretense would be ruined if cryptographers go missing. Whoops operation compromised from the start. Revealing what was obvious from the start that it is a fucking fascist tool of abuse by minds incapable of comprehending irony. These are same the dumb fucks who would fire people for being gay out of fear that they would be blackmailed disregarding that their policy is the source of blackmailability. ------ someguy7839e Does this affect open source? PGP, cryptsetup, veracrypt and more? How do they factor in?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What headless CMS do you recommend? - somtum ====== feistypharit I like forestry.io. it's not API based, so you just use stock Hugo backed by git. The change you make get committed back to git. So the nice thing is you're not tied to them. If they go away, you still have Hugo and can generate manually. You can host at netlify or AWS. Most the other static CMS are API based, so all your data is with them. If the go away, aodoes your site maintainability. ------ vr46 I have been using [https://getmesh.io/](https://getmesh.io/) for a while now, the developers are very helpful, the features are excellent, the underlying architecture and frameworks are great, and documentation excellent. Thumbs up. ~~~ rebugheliz What is even better: You can host it yourself and it is free. [https://github.com/gentics/mesh](https://github.com/gentics/mesh) [https://getmesh.io/docs/beta/administration- guide.html#_lice...](https://getmesh.io/docs/beta/administration- guide.html#_license) ------ digisocialnet I use Cockpit or FeathersJS.. sometimes even Wordpress WP-JSON :-/ I'm looking for something better, but not really into using a SaaS. [https://getcockpit.com](https://getcockpit.com) ------ francois2 I would recommend Prismic.io. They have what I have searched for on anothers services: slices. This allows you to have different block and empower people to use them as they want to create landing pages for instance. ~~~ brunobriante that slice feature remind me of how [http://www.webhook.com](http://www.webhook.com) do the admin area. it is nice that someone else is doing that as webhook is "dead" for some time. ------ EnderMB On the .NET side, I've had a lot of success with Umbraco, using it as a headless CMS to provide content for a Node/Express application. [https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS](https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco- CMS) [https://github.com/umbraco/UmbracoRestApi](https://github.com/umbraco/UmbracoRestApi) ------ rayascott Can we assume you’re already familiar with [https://headlesscms.org](https://headlesscms.org)? ------ darkseid I'm using Contentful's ([https://contentful.com](https://contentful.com)) free plan to power the docs and blog for my website ([https://resurfaceapp.com/docs/](https://resurfaceapp.com/docs/)) ------ digitalbase I've been asking me the same question to switch a static site to basic CMS. Contentful.com seems to be the leader. Graphcms looks nice, GraphQL is a promising technology to only fetch the content/relations you need to render that page. I was thinking about using Airtable for even a simpler MVP ~~~ tuananh using Airtable as backend sounds interesting. ------ blemming if you are looking for an open source self hosteable option, there is directus ([https://github.com/directus/directus](https://github.com/directus/directus)) or cockpit([https://github.com/agentejo/cockpit](https://github.com/agentejo/cockpit)) ~~~ neeksHN What's unfortunate about Directus and Cockpit, is they still have a hard dependency on a PHP. If I'm going headless, the last thing I want to do is setup a PHP stack. ~~~ brianmurphy I don't know what is hard about setting up a PHP stack. "yum install" and you're on your way. It's certainly no more work than setting up nodejs, ruby, python, a go compiler, etc.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017? - gatsby ====== mgos 1\. The power of a positive no 2\. Black box thinking 3\. Difficult conversations 4\. Transcending loss 5\. Braving the wilderness 6\. Motherless daughters 7\. The happy medium 8\. Deep work 9\. The golden sayings of Epictetus 10\. The best interface is no interface 11\. 101 essays that will change the way you think 12\. Leaders eat last Will keep adding more as I remember. Hope this helps :) ------ SirLJ The best book published in 2017 for me is this one: "A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market" by Edward O. Thorp [http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all- markets/](http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/) ------ drakonka 1) The Stories of Ibis by Hiroshi Yamamoto (my almost-annual re-reading) 2) The Collapsing Empire - John Scalzi 3) The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood I have a feeling the book I am reading now - Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith might have been on this list if I had finished it (and might still be tomorrow). ~~~ roryisok If you read most of it in 2017 I say it still counts. Nice to see some fiction on here, these lists are almost always non fiction and make me feel uneducated because I read almost exclusively fiction ------ jamesk14022 1) De Vita Beata ("On the Happy Life") - Seneca 2) Shoe Dog - Phil Knight 3) Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman No. 1 is a bit of a tricky read but completely worth it in my opinion, never have I read anything that has changed my everyday mindset so much. ------ matchmike1313 1) Shoe Dog - Phil Knight 2) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson 3) Start with Why - Simon Sinek ------ theSage 1\. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand 2\. Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan 3\. Idea Factory - Jon Gertner 4\. Why I am an atheist - Bhagat Singh ------ andrei_says_ Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley, founder of ideo. Changed my definition of and relationship with creativity. ------ notdang The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan It was magical for me. ------ giaour Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. ------ migueh Foundation series by Isaac Asimov ------ nukeop In 2017, I discovered that books are becoming increasingly obsolete as a medium of sharing knowledge. I've found that more condensed and/or interactive forms are much more useful to me and enable me to learn at an increased pace. ~~~ csnewb I think this generally applies to self-help style books, where the majority of the book is fluff with very little useful content. Those books can definitely be condensed into short blogs posts. However blogs and random tutorials don't do technical topics justice. If I'm learning how to reverse engineer a piece of malware or how to create a blockchain application, textbooks are the best resource to guide me. ~~~ notdang To be fair a vast amount of technical books have the same problems, going over the same things again and again. A couple of years ago, here o HN, an author shared his experience about collaborating with a publishing house. Apparently the publishers have very specific requirements about the required number of pages and the author has to conform.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Government to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year 84 percent jump from last year - gscott http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-spending-debt-analysis-20180203-story.html ====== seba_dos1 US government, in case you're like me and start with reading the comments before checking out the article. ~~~ GunlogAlm Thanks. My first question was "Government? _Which_ government?" ~~~ lifeformed At this point I just assume any news article is based on the US by default, unless stated otherwise. ~~~ ghostly_s Both the city of Chicago and state of Illinois have their own well-publicized debt problems, so I certainly assumed it was regarding one of those considering the source. ------ jhiska So much for the lie that Trump would "end big gov". More like end having a sustainable budget. ~~~ dragonwriter > So much for the lie that Trump would "end big gov". The Republicans like to talk about fiscal responsibility to attack “tax and spend” Democrats, but when the Republicans are in power they are much more inclined to cut taxes than spending (they certainly _redirect_ spending, but they never cut as much as they cut taxes.) ~~~ fencepost I believe "looting" may be the word you're looking for. ------ jimrandomh The word "borrow" is not entirely accurate. Exactly what happens when the US federal government has a deficit is complicated, but it's closer to issuing new money than it is to taking out a loan. ~~~ tryptophan Not really - What I assume you are thinking about is the Fed buying the treasuries(with their money printing skills) that are issued in their QE program. However QE is winding down, and a larger and larger % of that borrowed money comes from private investors using their own money. While after the recession the fed was responsible for buying more than half of the treasuries for years, those days are over. ~~~ jganetsk Yes really. It's called modern money theory. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDL4c8fMODk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDL4c8fMODk) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax- cuts-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts- trump.html) The US federal government pays for things by crediting bank accounts (hence money creation). The fact that the federal government also issues Treasury securities is a political constraint, not strictly required from a technical standpoint. The Federal Reserve then uses Treasures as a reserve drain when they are trying to hit their overnight interest rate targets. ~~~ tryptophan The way I understand it is that the fed has to(maybe not in law, but in practice) sell securities to accomplish its mandate of maintaining a stable currency. If they did not then it would cause lots of inflation. Is that correct? ~~~ jganetsk [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_market_operation#United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_market_operation#United_States) They are mainly trying to control the size of bank reserves by buying and selling securities, with the goal of hitting a target interest rate. When they are worried about inflation, they increase interest rates. ------ tbronchain It still amazes me how governments manage to keep borrowing money while being in constant growing deficit. Is there such thing as a real trust in the future possibility of paying the debt back? Or is it a hope of taking as much money as possible while there are inflation opportunities? - then generating more and more inflation. The first option is interesting, the second one quite scary and I can't help thinking Ponzi. Anyone with a better understanding of economics could help seeing a little bit better through this? ~~~ MarkMc The US government has a long history of repaying it's debts. I'd say that can continue indefinitely, so long as the debt-to-GDP ratio remains manageable. ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 > I'd say that can continue indefinitely, so long as the debt-to-GDP ratio > remains manageable. What's the quote about "To believe you can have infinite exponential growth in a finite world means you are either crazy, or an economist." ~~~ MarkMc Actually my statement doesn't depend on exponential growth. If in future GDP were to switch from exponential to logarithmic growth, debt would still be serviceable as long as it also switched to logarithmic growth. ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 Come on, that's silly. At some point, for all intents and purposes in the real world, logarithmic growth would essentially mean "no growth". Splitting hairs between the continuous math and the math to a reasonable level of precision doesn't add clarity to your statement. ~~~ MarkMc OK maybe over hundreds of years US GDP will go from exponential growth to linear growth, to logarithmic growth, to eventually "no growth". If total debt mirrors this trajectory, can't the US government continue repaying its debts over this period, even at the "no growth" stage? ------ dandare Funny thing I learned recently - the US federal budget deficit has little to do with how much the government borrows: federal institutions can borrow money on their own, that is why for instance the US government debt can grow faster this year even if the deficit is lower than the previous year. ------ Gustomaximus I've can't understand why this isn't more of a concern; \- The rate of increase is taking this debt rapidly to somewhere unsustainable. \- With the fractured politics this becomes so much more dangerous/likely to be an issue. \- Interest rates are pushing up adding to the servicing costs, currently about 500 billion/yr and probably likely to become the single largest payment line on the federal budget. \- Pension funds are going to be increasingly liquidating treasuries as boomers retire and they hit their own funding issues. \- Countries like China are selling off holdings. \- The debt is going to be an increasing drag on the economy to grow or safely inflate out of it. \- I cant see the political parties reducing military or social security costs of any significance to reduce the growing pressure. The only positives seem; \- The amazing strength and scope of the US economy. \- Trump once proposed a one-time wealth levy/tax to pay this down, so if this happened it would be a game changer. So I do believe the US is capable of sorting this out if the political will/intelligence was there. But I dont see this mood and feel people like to kick the can down the road these days. Time will tell. ~~~ jganetsk There are a lot of misconceptions about the nature of national debt. You should read about Modern Money Theory. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDL4c8fMODk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDL4c8fMODk) [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax- cuts-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts- trump.html) Remember, the US is monetarily sovereign. The government has the ability to create and destroy US dollars. Things you don't need to worry about: \- Default. If it happens, it would be a purely political move, not an economic or financial one. The US federal government can always afford payments. A check from the federal government never bounces. They can always just credit bank accounts. In fact, the government can abolish the debt instantly. They can simply redeem all Treasuries with bank reserves. \- Interest rates. The Federal reserve controls short-term interest rates. And the supply of long-term Treasuries doesn't impact interest rates: increased government deficits lead to an increase in the size of bank reserves which lead to an increase in demand in Treasury bonds that matches the increased supply, since banks want to swap low-paying reserves with higher-paying debt instruments. \- China. Treasuries are like a savings account, while bank reserves are like a checking account. If China or pension funds (or anyone) sell off their Treasuries, it's akin to transferring money from a savings account to a checking account. What's the harm in that? And why would they do that? That would decrease their interest income. Here are real concerns about ballooning national debt: \- Inflation. This can happen since the government is stimulating aggregate demand, in a classical Keynesian way. But it hasn't happened for a while, and if it does, the government can raise taxes. That shrinks the debt and decreases aggregate demand. \- Foreign exchange. With all the new USD floating around (because government spending = money creation and taxation = money destruction), there's a risk of a weaker dollar. But that has its upsides. And China's currency peg at least keeps the prices of Chinese goods fixed. \- Spending it unwisely. The government can't buy everone a pony. There aren't enough ponies in the world, and it would wreck the pony market. ~~~ Gustomaximus Thanks for the comprehensive answer. From some of your points I see it differently; NYT article: This comes from an economist that loves to push MMT. I actually studied economies under the guy that coined this term. He's a super smart guy but I dont agree with it in the theory probably works in a bubble. It seems a classic case of academia vs reality. Very unusual for economists haha. I'd suggest you read some criticisms of MMT if you haven't before you push it as a truism. \- Default: This attitude is cant happen to a monetarily sovereign nation is a little ignorant of history. Sure US can print/credit but then inflation. And being the worlds reserve currency give a bunch of leeway but this isnt a fixed variable, and is increasingly under threat. End of the day it's a confidence point and the US can lose this creating a run domestically and/or internationally. \- Interest rates are only under control while the market has confidence they will be repaid. Sure some FI's are held to a certain level of treasuries but plenty of existing market demand can leave, taking with it the Feds ability to control rates. At the end of the day if the risk/reward ratio get outta whack the fed will lose their ability to control rates at any scale and especially when they attempt to recycle existing debt. \- China. I dont understand your logic here. It's a supply and demand market. If its (do I understanding you?) as easy as the Feb buying up any excess demand that is a limited game. The FED probably did well with QE but that's a limited tool, needs to unwind at some point, and we wont truly know the effect for some time. Inflation: Possibly. What if we hit stagflation? And US has a strong resistance to tax increases. There is a possibility for US to inflate their way out of this debt. It would need to be well managed for many decades which seems low probability with the current political management. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying default will happen. We'd needs some serious events to trigger this. I do feel it is a possibility and am amazed some people feel it's in the risk likelihood of a meteor strike. ~~~ jganetsk \- Default: Yes it can happen, but it's voluntary and done politically. It's not a technical requirement. The US government can always service the debt. Here's an article from the Economist, "Countries rarely default on their debt" [https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/2173280...](https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21732808-venezuela-exception-rule-countries-rarely-default-their- debts) \- Interest rates: the Fed controls overnight interest rates, afaik. But what happens with long-term rates is that the Fed uses those bonds as a "reserve drain". [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/08/why-treasury- bonds-d...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/08/why-treasury-bonds-do-not- fund-our-federal-deficit.html) Long term interest rates have been going down for decades, despite the size of the debt consistently going up. \- China: the point is that they already have over $1 trillion in Treasuries, what is the difference between holding Treasuries vs holding cash? It's just two different kinds of bank account at the Federal Reserve. And the former pays interest, so why convert to the latter? They would only do so to spend it. Which either means a trade surplus for the USA (a boon for the economy) or converting their holdings into another currency, which just means transferring ownership of the Treasuries to someone else. In both cases, inflation and foreign exchange rate are the biggest risk. Do you think there is interest rate risk here? As for the Fed, I don't see limits to their powers. \- Inflation: I see the causality in reverse. Increased government debt leads to inflation (because government debt is money, money supply has gone up, and aggregate demand through government spending has gone up) rather than the government trying to inflate to pay off the debt. Stagflation in the 70s was caused by a supply shock (oil prices). If inflation happens because of the money supply, then the government can fix that problem by shrinking the money supply. If it happens for other reasons, then the government needs to address those issues. What is the problem with the debt then? How is that a concern? ------ ohiovr Intentionally slashing revenue for political gain has consequences. ------ bedhead We live beyond our means, have unsustainable quality of life. Gonna catch up one day. ~~~ adventured Fortunately we don't have an unsustainable quality of life. It's pretty simple mathematically. Not so simple politically. You slash $250 billion off the US military. You slash $100 billion in local+state+federal spending off of all the activities related to the war on drugs. You very lightly cut entitlements. You raise taxes on the top 10% by quite a bit. You raise taxes on the next quarter by a modest amount. Your budget is now close to break-even. You haven't impacted the standard of living of ~95% of Americans at all. Quite the opposite, you just dramatically boosted the long-term prospects of the quality of life for the average American. Hundreds of billions in wasted revenue can now flow into highly productive use over time, whether healthcare or transportation/infrastructure (or just not running up debt interest by exceeding the budget). Just by not running up that debt interest, you'll save trillions of dollars over time. If you really wanted to dramatically boost the US standard of living, you'd squeeze the healthcare cost monster to death. The monetary benefit of that system overwhelmingly flows to the top quarter of Americans, who are already doing extraordinarily well. We have a ton of room to work with in that area, that could improve our situation by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It's not even necessary to get creative, all we have to do is begin copying any number of several highly function systems from around the world. Cutting the military etc. will harm the economy you might say? Except that's obviously wrong. It'll further unleash the economy, releasing that money to far superior productive, compounding use. Most US military spending is for soldiers, who are contributing very little to the US economy as is versus their peers, their labor is low productivity and low innovation. They make nothing, they're nearly strictly consumption engines. No other prosperous developed economies have the need to spend on such things at such a high rate, neither does the US. It merely requires that the US accept that it's not the world police and doesn't need to be. ~~~ d--b Definitely agree with all that. Yet this is all quite unpopular. I can't help thinking that all economic woes are self inflicted because of bad culture. ------ hkmurakami More relevant would probably be the net increase in the cost to service the debt? ~~~ Gustomaximus A good measure is Debt to GDP to allow for economic growth etc. [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government- debt-t...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp) A common rule of thumb is 120% means debt is in serious trouble. Here is a comparison of the G20: [https://tradingeconomics.com/country- list/government-debt-to...](https://tradingeconomics.com/country- list/government-debt-to-gdp?continent=g20) ------ jaequery What will come first guys, the San Andreas fault letting go or the American stock market bubble? Both been steadily developing for quite some time now. ------ mythrwy [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have- lin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-lingered-for- more-than-100-years-2013-3) The US is (or was as of 2013) still making payments to children of Civil War veterans. Granted it's only 2 of them and less than a grand a year apiece but still. ------ geggam The question I have is if the govt is truly printing our currency who is the govt borrowing money from. If the govt was truly making more money then it would simply balance the books by making enough money. When you start talking about the Federal reserve as a non govt entity people call you crazy. Yet I have not heard why the govt borrows money from the govt. ~~~ wavefunction The GOP offers tax cuts to the wealthy, inducing a higher debt-load for the US. The wealthy turn around and buy US government bonds. The rest of us pay the wealthy bond interest and pay taxes against the debt accrued by offering tax cuts to the wealthy so they could buy US bonds. ------ ramzyo Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16300892) ------ Zigurd I thought we would get stagflation after 2008. Then I thought Janet Yellen was going to actually unwind qe without inflation or high interest rates. And now a goofball pseudo president could screw it all up. ------ rokhayakebe Geniune question: Instead of printing new money, would it be a good idea for the government to launch a cryptocurrency and raise the money that way? This would be a gov backed coin. Thoughts. ~~~ knieveltech Beyond providing employment for a few folks involved in implementation and systems maintenance, in what way does launching a government-backed cryptocurrency benefit over the existing state-backed currency?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: My company is about to get acquired, how do I best manage this money? - crcme Hello.<p>I work for an Australian company based in Sydney. I'm not a founder, I'm just an early employee (engineer #2). I've been here since the start and we've been running for about 8 years. We are in data analysis area, providing analytics service. I've been given some shares when I joined over a vesting period, which is now well over.<p>Now, it looks like our company is going to be bought by a larger company in the near future. I don't really know the details. But if everything goes well, I might be able to cash in my shares.<p>Let's say, I will be in possession of $2M (a complete arbitrary number).<p>My main question is, what is the best way for me to manage this money? Where do I put it? What should I invest in? How will the tax (the Aussie tax system that is) affect me?<p>I heard that I should create a trust fund, but how does that work? Is there anyone I should talk to?<p>What should I prepare for? Are there any unexpected things that I should know about when you're all of a sudden given a large chunk of money?<p>(And how do the answers to my question change if the money becomes larger than $2M)?<p>Thanks for all your comments. ====== MalcolmDiggs My honest advice is to do absolutely nothing with it for a few months. Don't move it, don't spend it, don't invest it, don't loan it to friends...and most importantly don't tell anybody about it. Just give yourself some time to cool off and get over the adrenaline-pumping feeling of "holy shit, look at all that money". This will likely take a while to wear off. Only once you're calm about it should you trust yourself making decisions. ------ seainvest I was in a similar position a couple years ago, and I can pass on the advice that I was given from financial planners/etc. Much of the advice that can be given is dependent on what you want to do with your windfall. If you do bring in $1 MM or more, you theoretically will have enough to live out the rest of your life in a 4/5-star hotel on a beach somewhere. You could travel for a while, or just hang out, or you could try to turn that cash into something much larger. Personally, I've done all three, with different levels of personal satisfaction from each. Depending on your age (are you closer to your 20s than to your 60s?), most financial planners will advise putting roughly 50% into higher risk investments (startups, riskier stocks, Forex baskets), and 50% into more conventional assets (real estate, investment funds, etc), with higher allocations to lower risk as you grow older. I would definitely try to invest a large part of your wealth into assets that pay regular, well defined returns. The most conventional of these are real estate and dividend producing stocks. In real estate, there's small apartment complexes, rental houses, small office buildings, and other commercial properties. Generally, you can purchase these types of assets with a 10% down payment and will see a return of 7-9% over the long term. Generally, you should be able to secure a 30 year mortgage on a property with interest of roughly 3-4%. There are other types of conventional investments that also perform regularly, such as purchasing under-performing small businesses like small tool-and-die shops, or other small manufacturing concerns. Much of it depends on your taste for risk. For instance, energy and commodity stocks, which can usually pay out good dividends are in freefall at the moment (due to the low price of oil). However that freefall won't last -- a well- timed purchase or sale could mean a 20% gain in a relatively short span. Additionally, Forex baskets are showing extremely great growth at the moment, with the right split between currencies. If you start monitoring these markets, you'll start to get a feel for when the peaks/valleys occur, and can invest accordingly. Generally, it is wise to spread out your higher risk investments into smaller baskets that can be easily changed/converted into other assets. Also, be wary of any investment managers who claim they can beat the market. They likely can't, and if they did before, it was due to a combination of luck, timing, and being in the right place at the right time. I have yet to meet someone who can reliably outwit the market. If you have a taste for riskier investments, and since you have an engineering background (and are a short plane flight away from most of South East Asia), you might consider joining a small investment fund (or VC firm) that focuses on technology in SEA. There continues to be huge growth all over SEA (Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc). Many startups require very small investments ($50,000-$100,000), and you could theoretically invest in 5 or 10 at the same time, with the intention of later selling one at 15-20x and the others either returning less than the investment or roughly breaking even. Attend one of the regional tech conferences as an investor, and find some teams/products that you have confidence in and invest! If you have an idea for a product or service in any business sector, I would highly suggest starting your own company and "giving it a go." In my experience, these types of ventures tend to have far better returns than any other, so long as you are judicious with your spending, and keep your company small and lean enough until it is able to narrow down on the right product/market segment fit. Once you have found the right product, then you scale like mad. Remember: there's no reward without risk. ~~~ lingua_franca after taxes he will take home just $1+mm, far from enough to live out the rest of hist life in a 4/5-star hotel on a beach somewhere. u need at least $10mm for that ~~~ notahacker If you scratch 4/5 star hotel and replace it with "fairly nice property" there's plenty of parts of Asia where he could live well off the interest on $1m for the foreseeable future. ------ cegascon Honestly if you are talking about considerable amount of money you should seek out to first and accountant (He will save you more money that he will charge) he will figure those things out cause even if you research on that a lot, my personal feeling is that you might do mistake that will catch up to you in the future. For the were to invest it, well no one can answer that for you it depends on your attitude towards risk and where you are in your life. If you 25 no family and looking to risk more to (hopefully) earn more then invest back in yourself and start your own but if you have a family and looking to work in o a more steady environment, wait a bit because with over 100K in your bank account, you will get calls from portfolio managers! : ) Those guys will know who to invest your $$ better and at a risk level your will be comfortable with. An personal opinion, fix everything with an accountant an then relaxe a take the time to answer those questions they will affect a lot how you will live your futur! ~~~ a5seo I'd hire a therapist first because the greatest threat to your money is you. A lot of issues will crop up about your values, relationships, and life goals. Think of the therapist as someone who can help you know yourself, design your life, and above all, use your fortune as a tool to get what you really want. I say this having sold my first co at 32 and banked $10M. ------ chatmasta You don't want an accountant for this amount of money; you want a financial planner. Find someone who's an expert at managing wealth to grow it safely and conservatively. He/she will work with you to devise a plan, based on your life goals, to make the best use of that money. Also, don't spend any of it for at least a month. ------ jenkstom Reduce expenses first, cover cash flow requirements then increase revenues without more risk than you can accept. Begin by paying off highest interest debt and continue until you run out of money or have paid off all your debt. You always get rid of debt because debt costs you money on an ongoing basis. Better is to make money - which is not just a little better, it's double better. You get to keep cash you would have lost due to interest PLUS you get to make more money by investing. Next you need to try and make sure you have enough cash flow to continue meeting recurring expenses, or make purchases that eliminate or reduce recurring debt. Buy a house instead of renting, that sort of thing. After that the general rule of thumb is to invest in the highest-return investments you can find that provide an acceptable level of risk. If you are 40 years from retirement and can accept a very large amount of risk, then you might want to invest part of it in another startup that you think has a good chance of a very high rate of return. You might put part of it in stocks (high to medium risk), bonds (medium to low risk) or money market items like certificates of deposit (low risk, but some of these tie up your money for longer periods of time than others). ------ cylinder First issue is, do you have to cash out your shares? Or can you exchange them for shares in the parent company? If shares, you may want to defer cashing everything, you can slowly sell shares as you need them, keeping yourself in a lower tax bracket (capital gains taxed as normal income in Aus). Or you can borrow against them. You need a professional financial and tax advisor. Always go independent (not affiliated with a large bank/institution) and fee-based (not commission). ------ alain94040 It really depends on which stage in life you are at. Do you currently have a comfortable life (make good income, no major debt)? Then don't change anything, just place your money safely. Piece of trivia: the first thing people in your situation buy is a new bed. ------ jbrad7354 You're going to pay 50% in tax. No way around that. $2M in Sydney doesn't go that far these days, but if you want hassle free investment, put it into Vanguard. Otherwise just throw it into a high interest savings account for zero risk. ------ thret IANA expert but: [http://australiangovernmentbonds.gov.au/etbs/list-of- etbs/](http://australiangovernmentbonds.gov.au/etbs/list-of-etbs/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
U.S Justice Dept Reversal on Online Gambling Tracked Memo from Adelson Lobbyists - petethomas https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-departments-reversal-on-online-gambling-tracked-memo-from-adelson-lobbyists-11547854137 ====== pseingatl Doncha just love the rule of law?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Maps that show how much time Americans spend sleeping, grooming, and thinking - ilamont http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/06/20/ten-maps-that-show-how-much-time-americans-spend-grooming-eating-thinking-and-praying/?hpid=z8 ====== chatmasta What about exercise?? Seems like a glaringly missing piece of data. ------ jqm Neat map. It appears religious activities to some extent correlate with TV watching and negatively correlate with reading. I'm sure there are other interesting correlations that can be pulled as well. ~~~ Kroem3r That was the point that I stopped reading. I started out looking forward to the map regarding "thinking" but it seemed a foregone conclusion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vuzix to build 'Smart Glasses' with transparent displays - AharonH http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/6/2686410/vuzix-nokia-smart-glasses-transparent-display-hud ====== dkersten Head mounted displays with both transparent and opaque displays have existed for a long time, but have so far been both expensive and low resolution. High resolution ones exist too, but have typically been extremely expensive. Opaque 720p ones were about $1500 last time I checked and really high res panoramic industrial/military ones were about $100K a few years back. Transparent ones were typically more than opaque ones. I haven't looked into whats available in a couple of years, so I imagine they've come down in price a bit, but I can't help but wonder what resolution and price the ones in the article will be. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised, as I have a few applications for HMD's that I'd love to try, but just have not found any that are cheap/high-res enough yet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Building a video distribution network in 48 hours - jon_dahl http://railspikes.com/2009/8/28/buiding-a-video-distribution-in-48-hours ====== nopal It's a slick site, but the lack of streaming from the CDN would be a deal breaker if I were looking for a Web video hosting solution. ~~~ brandonarbini Another developer here. I think you may be referring to an actual Flash streaming server. We're currently using Amazon CloudFront that doesn't support it. We're taking a good look at Limelight and others that do support Flash streaming for the future. Thanks for your feedback. ~~~ nopal Yes, that's what I meant. Quicktime streaming, too. Basically providing a way to jump around in a video, even if the video hasn't been been buffered to the point you want to play. Again, nice looking site and service! ------ qeorge Great looking site, and a neat app. From the title I expected that the service would push the video to YouTube, Myspace, Vimeo, etc. (i.e. superdistribution), which would be more useful to me. Are there a lot of content producers who don't want their videos to spread? Congrats on finishing a cool app in 2 days, and best of luck in the competition! ~~~ jon_dahl Good suggestions. Definitely worthy of the backlog. ------ jawngee But this is built on top of your zencoder product? So this really wasn't done in 48 hours? ~~~ Heff It's actually built on FlixCloud, which is built on Zencoder. <http://www.flixcloud.com/> In the Rails Rumble you can build your app using any external services available to everyone. Half the apps were built on the Twitter API.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Future Plans for Compelling Science Fiction - mojoe http://compellingsciencefiction.com/blog/blog.html ====== mojoe I've posted about my science fiction magazine side project here before, and you all have given me great feedback: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469135](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469135) I just started a blog for the magazine, to keep readers informed about future plans and to eventually give some 'behind the scenes' stories about the making of the magazine. As always, please let me know what you think! ~~~ nurmara As a long time HN lurker, I created this account just to directly thank you for the amazing work you've put into the first issue. I loved it so much and I'm going to recommend it to all my friends who read sci-fi. I loved the fact that you are so reachable via HN and e-mail, and I loved the positive discussions about the first issue on HN. The blog and the 'behind the scenes' posts are a really great idea. I sincerely hope the magazine grows and becomes self sustaining. Quick question: if I subscribed to the magazine by e-mail, would I automatically receive notifications of new blog posts, or do I manually have to check your blog from time to time? I searched for a subscribe button for the blog but couldn't find any. Thanks a lot! EDIT: I forgot to mention that I absolutely love the podcast idea! Can't wait for the next issue! ~~~ mojoe I really appreciate the kind words! Google analytics can only tell me how many people are reading -- feedback like yours is the only way that I can tell how much real impact the magazine is creating. Right now there's just the one email list, and I'll send out updates to that list for all issue releases and blog posts. The frequency of posts is low enough that I don't feel like it warrants a new list. That could change in the future, but I'll definitely be vocal about changes when they occur. ~~~ nurmara Perfect! Thanks for the clarification ------ anotherevan I recommend adding an RSS feed to your blog. Some people still use them! :-) ~~~ mojoe Thank you, that's definitely on our list -- it will probably not get done for a while, but eventually it will get done!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
15 Incredibly Creative Resumes - onosendai http://www.demilked.com/creative-resumes/ ====== SenorWilson If I were an employer these would make me laugh and annoy me. ------ mnicole Most of these do more to underscore the lack of creativity in the candidate than it does to emphasize it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Decentralization Dilemma - molus https://www.molus.org/blog/decentralization-dilemma/ ====== gojomo An important extra dimension is whether, within a certain system, the natural tendency towards centralization-for-convenience also generates centralization lock-in. If there's a dependence on canonical global registries or fixed network locations in the manner of addressing people/content, that becomes the case. Centralization occurs via a one-way ratchet – sought for ease but then practically irreversible due to high switching costs. "Federated" systems usually still have this centralization problem. Systems based on cryptographically-derived names (for content or identities) offer a potential escape route. While you might choose certain centralized/dominant providers for a quick-and-easy start, retaining one's own stable crypto identity ensures absolute portability and location/provider indifference. Such an architecturally-enforced right-of-exit can also make higher levels of centralization tolerable, before centralized power becomes a problem. The _potential_ for choosing other arrangements, rapidly and with minimum disruption, deters abusive acts by larger proprietors. ------ ocdtrekkie Given what I just posted about Mastodon a couple hours ago, I definitely recognize the challenge of recentralization tendencies: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16765156) I think the biggest issue is our home connections. I'd rather have a box in my house, but the need for the connection to not suck means I can't, which means there's added hosting costs, I have to trust someone to manage it, etc. If we had good symmetrical-speed Internet, I'd say a box with some reasonable defaults you plug in at home would be the way to go, and it wouldn't make sense to recentralize, because you aren't just switching hosts, you're leaving your house. ~~~ CaptSpify > I'd rather have a box in my house, but the need for the connection to not > suck means I can't I agree with you to some extent, but I also think it's far more feasible than most people realize. I run a bunch of services (mail, website, repos, etc...) out of my house, and it's super rare that I have any problems with it. I know it wouldn't work for everyone, I'm just lucky enough to live in a city that has decent internet, but I think it is entirely doable for a lot more people than we realize. ~~~ Steltek Doesn't email have a lot of problems with residential IPs? Either they're blacklisted out the wazoo or the provider blocks SMTP? It's not just about having "decent Internet". ~~~ CaptSpify Not that I've ever experienced. The provider may block it, but IME that's as easy as sending them an email to open the port (which I would consider under the umbrella of "decent internet"). I can't say I've ever had my IP blacklisted that I know of, and I've never had delivery problems. ------ hathawsh IMHO there is a simple solution that will likely lead to mass adoption of decentralized services: create a wi-fi router that lets home users install server apps on the router. Make it easy for users to install server apps and create an open marketplace for server apps. Historically, decentralized services don't get mass adoption because computers or mobile devices are off or unavailable most of the time. They are also behind NAT. The wireless router is in a unique position. It's always on, it's a first- class citizen on the Internet, it's not very expensive, its ownership is clear and simple, and it often has significant unused computing power. It looks like a major, unexploited opportunity to me. I'm waiting for some company to take advantage of this opportunity. Think of what this could do for decentralized social networking, file storage, currency exchange, etc. It's quite easy to think of possible server apps; just think of any centralized service and consider how valuable it would be to decentralize it. I would do it myself if I weren't already involved in trying to build a possibly huge business or two. :-) ~~~ carussell I used to think so, too. Over the winter, though, someone here on HN pointed me towards Beaker Browser and Dat. (For a completely unrelated problem. Turns out, it works pretty well as a solution to this problem, too.) It seems likelier that a P2P web based on Dat (or something like it) will gain adoption in the large before getting embedded devices manufacturers (a) to willingly take on the role required here, and (b) to get it right, which are each big asks on their own. There's also the hidden third problem (c): getting the masses to actually go out and upgrade a piece of hardware that would actually support this kind of thing. It's a lot easier to just download a new browser (or an update for their current browser) and sign up for a service that will act as an always-on peer on your behalf—for exactly the same reason that the centralization of the Web happened in the first place. ~~~ hathawsh Thanks for the pointer! Dat looks very powerful. I will study more. ------ tw1010 This is a great great point. The higher the derivative of the learning curve, the higher the adoption rate. It's as if the product sweeps into the population and the magnitude of the derivative acts as a friction or an accelerant. It could also be noted that beyond this piece of the puzzle is also the incentive structure that surrounds the entire network, like an invisible fluid that you only notice when you take a step back. If demand is high and the market is ready for the idea, it'll flow as easily as through water. But if no demand is there to push it like a carrot in front of a horse, then the learning rate won't matter one iota, because the incentive structure is as dense as jello. Decentralized social networks are an example where this is the case. They're easy enough to learn, but without a demand for it, it won't propogate. ------ kienankb Maybe the key to improving incentive is to bind the acts of participating in and supporting a decentralized service so that simply using it helps construct the network itself, i.e. every client is itself a federated server. The tradeoff is that the service has to be robust enough to support a certain percentage of clients being offline at any moment, and it certainly takes more effort to construct a client that includes what would normally be delegated to a server. (I'm sure someone's already thought of/worked with this idea before, though.) ~~~ Ralz I remember hearing in a podcast that openbazaar.org tried this approach but because of unreliable clients parts of the network would be completely unaccessible. They then went with a partially decentralized solution with a few main nodes always supporting the system. I'm not sure what has changed in the design since that podcast episode though. ~~~ tylersmith I'm not sure which podcast that was. Currently content is served by others that have viewed that content, but new content gets pushed to a few configurable nodes to store that content before anybody has viewed it. This allows vendors to make changes and shutdown the software immediately instead of needing to wait until somebody has viewed their change. ------ marknadal Yes, this why federated systems (Mastodon, Matrix), etc. will just repeat history like with email centralizing into gmail. However, IPFS, Scuttlebutt, GUN (full disclosure: mine -> [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ), Beaker, etc. don't have this problem. Most of these, though, are tools for building decentralized apps, not necessarily the apps themselves - so there is plenty of love that we all need to have for enticing designers to build easy and beautiful apps. ZeroNet seemed pretty easy though and well designed, so I'm not sure about the author's grievances against that one. Although it is more of an app (or app store) than a library/tool. ~~~ pspeter3 Have you seen people setting up GUN instances? ~~~ marknadal Yupe! It is super easy (like, 1 click deploy buttons) and lots of people in the community run one. Most people use them for their own project though, not necessarily as a collective network. Several people have said we should switch it to automatically connect to other peers, so that we can create a decentralized network, which I think is a good idea to try. I just originally didn't want to put random outbound network calls in the code because that seemed malware/"call home"/suspicious. :P ------ tomcooks I agree 101% with the author but I fail to understand how this case is different from anything else in the world. From pizza to operating systems, from orgasms to entertainment, people tend to be lazy and opt for the simpler, low stress alternative - no? ~~~ sewercake When the usability of a the service (device, whatever) depends on, or is proportional to the number of other people using it, then adoption rate becomes very important not only for the success of the service, but it's usefulness too. i.e: There can be a sewing kit that has a high learning curve, but would result in faster production / better products. While this may result in the the kit not being (economically) successful, it would still be just as useful to each individual who bought it, and learned to use it properly. ------ kodablah Depends on how centralization is framed. Common CPU company (e.g. Intel)? Common cloud company (e.g. AWS)? Common website company(e.g. Facebook)? If we can separate these terms, I think people are asking to not have a common DB store maintained by a common website company. Framed in that way, we should strive to allow people to store things on their desktop computers and treat them as home servers. For nomadic or not-always-on desktop type, a monetization approach for these decentralized networks would be to resell/affiliate with hosting providers (where the user owns and has the AWS account, not you) and do one-click provisions and what not. People might re-centralize for discovery, but shouldn't need to for storage or other conveniences. And centralized discovery is not that bad of a problem. ------ VikingCoder There's a Law, what's it called? The virality of a signal is related to the simplest pipe it will pass through. Dang it, I hate when I can't remember names like this. ------ tCfD Not the most in depth HN comment, but my user ID - tCfD - stands for The Center For Decentralization, an intentional oxymoron which I sometimes use in casual conversation to call attention to the fundamentally paradoxical (and the closer you get, the more they confound) premises of this subject. ------ remir Most people outside the "tech bubble" don't care about decentralization or open source software. These ideals are not enough to convince them to use a new platform. At this stage, I don't see how a new decentralized social network could realistically compete against the big guys. ------ danbruc What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization? The list of problems I can think of and for which the best solution is decentralization, is a rather short list. End in the realm of mass market consumer products it gets even shorter and could very well be empty. ~~~ molus > What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization? If you are following the rise of "dapps" or blockchain applications (circa 2017) then I would answer your question with "almost anything Internet- related". Some examples: * Decentralized Storage (IPFS) * Decentralized Computation (Golem) * Decentralized Professional Networking (Indorse) There are many other examples, but a lot of them are vaporware and not worth mentioning. ~~~ danbruc That are solutions, what are the problems they tried to solve? What is wrong with storing your files on Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3? What is the advantage of IPFS? ~~~ fenwick67 [https://ipfs.io/#uses](https://ipfs.io/#uses) ~~~ danbruc Those points are neither specific to IPFS nor to a decentralized solution and they do not really highlight any advantage of IPFS over something like Dropbox to begin with. The best point is probably saving bandwidth due to its peer-to- peer nature. There are certainly more traditional solutions where you can save bandwidth if you can convince other people to provide it for you, for example classical FTP mirrors, but this is certainly a valid use case for a distributed solution. It however is more to the benefit of the service provider and not the user and it really hinges on the popularity of that data you want distribute, if it is not really popular just using a file server will most likely provide a better user experience as compared to depending on a few potentially low bandwidth peers. ------ coldacid Good article, but I think the adoption rate/learning curve graph is a bit too generous. By the time you've hit 10 on the learning curve, adoption's probably already down to 10%. People are exceptionally lazy. ------ jasode You brought up good points for discussion. _> 1\. The relative difficulty of running your own as an absolute beginner_ The ease-of-use is brought up several times as a barrier to decentralization but I don't think this is really the fundamental issue. Yes, it _appears_ to be the problem but it really isn't. If hackers invent a super simple UI, or hypothetical set-and-forget "IPFS/Sandstorm appliance", or an auto-configuring node... it still won't help widespread adoption for decentralization. I was an expert for installing SMTP email servers but I don't bother with running a "decentralized" home email server anymore. Many sysadmin experts have abandoned the idea of running home email servers. If decentralization is the ideal, why do hackers like us not follow it? We're certainly not waiting for beginner-friendly email server software. (My previous comment about this.[1]) Also, any attempt to bake the "ease-of-use" into an idiot-proof software package or hardware appliance becomes its own vector for an attack on the unwitting homeowner. (Previous comment.[2]) _> 2\. The eventual centralization on top of the most well-run versions (like Matrix)_ Yes, this is the most unsolved problem by far: _costs_. One can write or decree that a _protocol specification_ to be distributed but it doesn't change the fact that the _real-world implementation_ of that protocol always costs real money and the _money spent is not distributed_. That leads to centralization. (Previous comments.[3][4]) I've been studying the decentralization space for years and have read every whitepaper about Diaspora, IPFS, Filecoin, Sandstorm, Mastodon, bitcoin, etc and nobody has figured this out. (Suggestion to HN readers... every time you see a proposal for a new decentralized protocol, do a Ctrl+F for "costs" and "money". It's a very under discussed topic.) Real _costs of hardware_ such as cpu+disk+bandwidth and _costs of human labor_ such as trust+maintenance are inescapable and it is the #1 puzzle to decentralization. E.g. Mastodon was recently suggested in various HN threads about "alternative to Facebook". Hmmmm.... if cpu+disk are not free... who's paying for the mastodon servers?!? Well, I see that several volunteers run Patreon crowdfunding to keep the lights on.[5] That's very noble but that funding model is also not scalable. That recreates how many BBS (bulletin board systems) were run in the 1980s with dial up modems. Only a small group of enthusiasts were users on each server. [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526089) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11861683) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125730) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15878668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15878668) [5] [https://www.google.com/search?q=mastadon+patreon](https://www.google.com/search?q=mastadon+patreon) ~~~ zzzcpan Yeah, ease of use really isn't a problem at all. Bitcoin and bittorrent are the prime examples of that. But it's not exactly about the costs either, but rather about incentives. Right incentives can drive funding into adoption of the technology. I mean people being able to profit from other people using the technology is what can bring funding, promotion of the technology and adoption. ------ mitjak I don't see centralization of a federated solution as a problem. If the popular service becomes for whatever reason unappealing, the solution allows for another provider to step in. ~~~ _greim_ You can maybe ratchet your way out of this POV, like so: Would there ever be a centralized provider without there being an incentive for it? Would such an incentive ever exist without an accompanying incentive to leverage your dominance to keep competing providers out? ~~~ mitjak As in the case of Google Talk/Meet? ------ jchanimal The answer is for the server to be your phone. ~~~ ocdtrekkie What happens when you lose your phone? Something you take out and about and that someone can easily steal or can easily be damaged or lost is not a good server. ~~~ jacquesm Yes, but you should have a backup anyway. The bigger problem will be connectivity and bandwidth costs in case one of your posts gets hit by a site like HN. ------ munificent I think one of the fundamental problems with even federated systems is that your identity is tied to your server. If I decide to leave mstdn.io in favor of some other Mastadon server, as far as I know, I lose all of my followers. Even email has this problem. It's virtually impossible to change email providers unless you happen to own your own domain that you use for email instead of "@gmail.com" or "@yahoo.com" like most people do. Having your own domain works, but then you have the burden of dealing with the server that responds to that domain. Strangely, one system _has_ solved this, and they solved it decades after initial deployment: phones. Used to be, if you moved or switched phone provider, you had to get a new phone number. These days, you can "keep your phone number" when you switch providers. The technology behind that is called Local Number Portability and is managed by the Number Portability Administration Center [1]. That's a private organization, but I think has some federabal obligations for fairness [2]. That sounds a little similar to how domain name registration and ISBN numbers are managed [3]. There's probably a lesson here. Maybe part of the solution for federation and privacy is a single authoritative registrar for root identifiers (i.e. the "@blah" part of your identity). And then all of the federated systems sit on top of that. The individual user owns that identifier instead of the server. I think you need _some_ kind of level of indirection like these, so that a user's identity isn't directly bound to the federated server they happen to be using today. Basically a mutable map that users control where they can map a logical identity to the current server they are using. So, if your, say, Mastodon ID was "munificent@muni_root", Mastodon would ask muni_root, "What's the current Mastodon server ID for user munificent". If I move from one Mastodon server to another, I just update that one record and everything keeps working. We could, I suppose, use domain names for this. But in practice (1) that space is already getting used up and (2) the usability is low and the overhead and costs high because that's not what it was designed for. [1]: [https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp- works](https://www.npac.com/number-portability/how-lnp-works) [2]: [https://www.npac.com/the-npac/about/neutrality](https://www.npac.com/the- npac/about/neutrality) [3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number#How_ISBNs_are_issued)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AES.png - galapago http://thepiratebay.se/aes.png ====== nailer So... what is this? ~~~ millzlane [https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-domain-back-online- wavin...](https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-domain-back-online-waving-a- pirate-flag-141221/) ~~~ nailer I've read that, but what specifically is this key? ~~~ galapago We don't know. There are some people [1] [2] trying to guess it. [1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/thepiratebay/comments/2q23mm/the_ke...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thepiratebay/comments/2q23mm/the_key_is_an_aes_key/) [2]: [https://titanpad.com/SzytivYwys](https://titanpad.com/SzytivYwys)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Compile Ruby into WebAssembly - pmontra https://github.com/jasoncharnes/run.rb ====== _hardwaregeek I'm a little confused by this. Did someone manage to write a YARV to WASM compiler? I kind of doubt this is a wholly new Ruby to WASM compiler, so my best guess would be a YARV to WASM compiler. Except...even that would be tricky since Ruby has a notoriously complicated runtime. Just looking at this though, it looks like they just compiled an existing Ruby implementation to WASM via Emscripten. But that's not really compiling Ruby to WASM then... ~~~ mcpherrinm Yeah, look like it is compiling Ruby (the interpreter, aka MRI or CRuby), not programs written in the language Ruby. ~~~ paradoxparalax So , the maximum you can get from it is the console log text return of the script you paste there. right? Or you can glue your script with anything like webgl or canvas there to do anything? ~~~ thefounder WASM doesn't provide DOM access so you can't use anything useful on the web unless you callback through a bunch of JS. ~~~ ericb I imagine that is some sort of intentional sandboxing? I didn't know about that and find myself surprised. In principal I'm not sure why it wouldn't be able to provide direct DOM access. I'd love to hear more background on this if you know it. ~~~ markdog12 It's coming: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/host- bindings/blob/master/pro...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/host- bindings/blob/master/proposals/host-bindings/Overview.md) ------ trzeci I'm proud that this project's Dockerfile bases on mine :D Didn't expect it will be used widely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Some Sessions from the Python Language Summit - lukastyrychtr https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/821412/9fbb4093d7945bdb/ ====== miohtama Nice points about the mobile Python. My old company ported Python to Symbian operating system (Nokia phones) around 2008. The problem for Python in mobile is the same as for JavaScript / React Native: The startup time is slow because modules cannot be imported or statically loaded fast. Even though mobile phones have gotten fast, this is an severe issue with React Native apps. And Facebook is pouring in a lot of engineering to tackle it. But the progress is incremental at the best. As a result some code gets rewritten in C++ because of this issue (see e.g. Trust Wallet). Even though I love Python as a programming language I would not recommend it for consumer grade mobile application development and I feel it is unlikely to get there ever unless some breakthrough happens in runtime development. ~~~ jventura I have an Android app on the Play Store which uses Python and can confirm that the startup time is slow because of the imports. I think one possible solution could be to invoke the start of the interpreter outside the UI thread, at least it could give the illusion of a faster app start. Unfortunatelly the app gives me ~5€/month so it is not profitable enough for me to care. I opened source the idea at [https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge](https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge) The thing that makes this different from a pure android python project is that I only use Python as a kind of mobile RPC backend. The UI is completely native in Java/Kotlin. As a side note, today I’ve open sourced the same technique, but for iOS ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23335704](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23335704)). I’m able to share all the python code but adapt the UI using the native tools.. ------ jkingsbery > One of the problems that CPython has struggled with over the years is its C > API for extensions. Honest question: is there an example of a language that does C extensions well? As a professional programmer, I have worked at different times with C extensions in Node.js, Java, R, and Erlang, (in addition to Python). Erlang and Node.js were maybe ok, but had their own challenges. ~~~ flohofwoe I found Lua <=> C interop very easy to use, I guess because Lua has been designed as an extension language for otherwise native projects (but it works just as well in the other direction, extending Lua projects with native code). The same is most likely true for other "scripting languages" where the main purpose is to add a scripting API to otherwise native applications (like Wren: [https://github.com/wren-lang/wren](https://github.com/wren-lang/wren)) ~~~ laurencerowe LuaJIT's FFI inspired the PyPy team's CFFI (which also works with CPython.) [https://cffi.readthedocs.io](https://cffi.readthedocs.io) ------ Ozzie_osman Curious for people who have tried Hypothesis, what did you think? Is it worth using if you've been using standard unit tests? ~~~ nhgiang For instance, in traditional tests you may need two test cases for some behaviour. One is for usual inputs and one for some edge case. With Hypothesis, you can combine those two tests into one, by letting Hypothesis generate the inputs for you. Hypothesis is pretty smart to find edge cases that you usually don't think of. Overall, it reduce my time to write tests by at least half, maybe 75% even. The caveats are: 1/ Tests may take visibly longer to run. 2/ If you have setup/teardown or fixtures that you want to repeat each generated input, you have to do this manually. This is imo the biggest weak point of Hypothesis right now. ~~~ andreareina I like pytest for the ergonomics of its static setup/teardown/fixtures (plus not having to stuff everything into a unittest.TestCase). Unless you mean using generated input in those bits? In which case yeah, not ideal. At $dayjob we do some chonky processing; generating new input for each property we're testing is just barely ok right now, but that's probably not going to hold for very long. [1] [https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest-subtests](https://github.com/pytest- dev/pytest-subtests) ~~~ nhgiang Sorry for not being clear. This is what I was talking about: [https://github.com/pytest-dev/pytest/issues/916](https://github.com/pytest- dev/pytest/issues/916) It is a known issue. Basically your fixture/setup/teardown, which you expect should run for every example generated by Hypothesis, actually only run once. ~~~ andreareina Oh yeah I remember that. Hasn't been an issue for me, thankfully.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Haskell: mistakes I made (and how to fix them) - 0xmohit https://jaspervdj.be/posts/2016-04-11-haskell-mistakes-i-made.html ====== 0xmohit Link to slides: [https://github.com/meiersi/HaskellerZ/blob/a19f6c28cd999efda...](https://github.com/meiersi/HaskellerZ/blob/a19f6c28cd999efdae86d38b1871378cbc3c0645/meetups/20160331-Haskell_Mistakes/slides.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Big Mac Prices Just Went Up 26% in Argentina - mattobrien http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/13/big_mac_prices_soar_26_in_argentina.html ====== jstalin Argentina is the very definition of economic schizophrenia. People are put in jail for reporting the actual inflation rate (instead of the "official" inflation rate). The Economist magazine recently published a story that they are no longer going to lie to their readers and report the official rate and instead will report unofficial, private estimates. Argentina's real inflation rate has been running at about 25% per year. ~~~ pmtarantino Argentina keeps the official rate down because pays interest to USA according to it. If the official rate is low, Argentina pay less, which is great. ~~~ dguaraglia Exactly! This is why a lot of people, like say my father, who hate the government policies otherwise kind of agrees with them on this: "hey, we got fucked by the IMF 20 times already, let them get fucked for once!" ~~~ pelle I'm sorry but Argentina got f'ed by the IMF because the country keeps voting in incompetent yet flamboyant idiots who buy votes with money they don't have. ~~~ dguaraglia Not really, most of the governments were led by competent people. Unfortunately, they also happened to be either extremely corrupt (Carlos Menem) or blinded by their own ideologies (Carlos De La Rua). The current government sits somewhere there in the middle. Things have gotten better for most people in Argentina, but at the cost of another of those 'boom for 10 years, then bust' cycles we are so used to. You can't argue inflation is rampant, I still recall the first time I came back from Brazil a pizza was about AR$10. Today the same pizza (maybe with a fancier name) starts at AR$40. But then, 'eating out' doesn't reflect the real inflation. In that period, pizzas increased 400% in value, alfajores (a local sweet) had a similar increase from (AR$1 to AR$5), while a coffee at any bar in Buenos Aires increased around 1000% (from anywhere around AR$2 to a starting value of AR$17, most commonly AR$20+). Nice wines on the supermarket only increased about 200% in that period. Buy the same wine in a bar and you'd think you are at some fancy spot in San Francisco, they are so expensive. So it's all over the freaking shop (no pun intended). ~~~ pelle Intelligence and competence are two very different things. You have to go back probably 100 years to find a relatively competent government. The current government is at least as incompetent from an economic point of view as the policies of both Peron and the generals that came after him. Cristina is only in power because her husband died. It is very rarely I have seen anyone even in Latin America as incompetent as her. While I'm not Argentinian, I truly love the country and it's people. It saddens me no end to see it and to see very intelligent people talk conspiracy theories and spew idiotic economic theories that the rest of the world got rid of decades ago. ~~~ euccastro "It saddens me no end to see it and to see very intelligent people talk conspiracy theories and spew idiotic economic theories that the rest of the world got rid of decades ago." How's that working for the rest of the world? If you have the time, some food for thought. This is a Greek documentary on the Argentinian crisis and recovery: 1/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gys83fazwOo> 2/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP1Sm4KijY0> 3/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCBQM2EuEKg> 4/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6mwXQG1MBg> 5/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDgARm2owLs> 6/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqblekF3Qg> 7/7: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-__Msw4kUSc> ------ heyrhett I love that the Argentinian government was worrying about their (mostly) tongue-in-cheek ranking in the Economist's big-mac index. It makes me feel like they're run by the Bluths from Arrested Development or something. ------ mayneack I guess this will make the "big mac index" go up an insane amount this year instead of "slowly" over several years. ~~~ callmeed It's a burger bubble. You don't want to be around when it pops. ~~~ molmalo The biggest burger bubbles I've ever seen are in Mc Donnald's ads. But then... you see their thin burger patty's (at least here) and that bubble plops. Lol! ------ spiredigital Wow. Did anyone else read this and think: 'I wonder why the 27" iMacs are more expensive in Argentina?" Nope? No one? I guess if you can't spot the sucker.... ------ wslh This is just because the index (big mac) was artificially low and McDonalds needed a real upgrade ~~~ pshc I was just in Hong Kong and the Big Mac there is noticeably cheaper than every other meal at McDonald's. I was wondering if it might be to manipulate the index? ------ planetguy The Big Mac index as of January: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily- chart-3) Argentina was already close to the top, with a Big Mac going for $US4.94, not entirely crazy by any means. (On the other hand, given that you can get a full three-course steak dinner with wine in a nice restaurant for $US20 in Argentina I wonder who is eating these Big Macs). A 25% increase will take it up to something like $6.25, a little above Sweden. The fact that the official exchange rate is 4.2 pesos to the dollar but Argentinians are willing to give you at least five pesos to the dollar in informal exchanges seems like a pretty bad sign. The other interesting thing about that Big Mac index is that Argentina is one of the world's largest beef producers. So are Uruguay, Brazil and Australia, all clustered up there in overpriced burger land. ~~~ molmalo > I wonder who is eating these Big Macs Something you may not realize from there. Surprisingly, in Argentina, Mc Donnalds is not targeted to the lower classes, - a cheap lunch in a fast food. It's targeted to the middle and higher classes (mainly teenagers and young office workers). I've been in Spain, England, France, and a few other countries, and I noted that their target there was certainly different. My explanation for this (I belive), is that here, teenagers just LOVE Brands (to the point that I think is crass). Maybe an aftertaste of the nineties and the neoliberal movement. ~~~ sardonicbryan Anecdotally, in Taiwan the quality of McDonald's is significantly higher than in the US. The quality of the meat and materials in particular. ------ lipponlabang Who in their right mind eats a Big Mac anyway? They're disgusting. ~~~ Codhisattva I can't figure out how this story made it to HN.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How iTunes crushed music sales - mshafrir http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/itunes-music-decline/ ====== mikestew The source for the chart is the RIAA (lower left, tiny gray print)? The data may be accurate, they may not, but I'll consider the source. The full article sounds a lot like a puff piece for the poor, beleaguered RIAA. Singles are killing the industry, except that singles drove a lot of the industry for decades. This is briefly mentioned in the article, followed by "but the music industry wised up in the '70s". And wise up they did. Slap a couple of singles on an album, populate the remainder with filler, charge more, profit. "...musicians will have to increasingly rely on touring, merchandise sales and endorsement deals to make up for lost album sales." Yes, yes they will, just like they've always done because of how RIAA members take the large part of the profits from record sales. Again, the only ones for whom anything changes are RIAA members. I just don't see how a shift wouldn't have happened one way or another. Blame iTunes all you want, but it's a hell of a lot better for profits than torrenting. At 99 cents I won't even bother starting the bit torrent client. At $15US for a CD that consists of the two songs I want, and the rest crap, you can bet I'll look at alternatives. And I have disposable income and am not afraid to spend it. You can forget about extracting money from the teenage market at $15US a pop, which will just torrent it when faced with the choice. There's a buggy whip analogy here somewhere, but I'm not going to try. It's the way things are, and it's not going to change no matter how many members of congress the RIAA tries to buy. ~~~ mynameishere _but the music industry wised up in the '70s". And wise up they did. Slap a couple of singles on an album, populate the remainder with filler, charge more_ No, that was the model they used in the 50s and early 60s--singles were much more expensive than today's 99 cents, and very profitable, and the albums were intentionally designed to get a few more bucks out of a few hits. By the 70s, the decent groups didn't really try to write singles--it was all album- oriented music. ~~~ LaSombra Progressive rock and conceptual albums would probably not exist if today's iTunes model existed in the 60s and 70s. I can't imagine a Thick as a Brick or The Wall in an iTunes pay-by-the-song world. ~~~ guard-of-terra I have a pet theory that progressive rock happened when there was a top number of educated young people in USA and UK. People who this music targets. People who actually bought music in numbers. After that population started to age, and now music has to target your mom (and also teenage girls and boys who "consume" music now), and chances your mom doesn't want to dive into conceptual albums. That kind of made music stupid. ------ jacobquick If that were sales for your own company's product would you really come to the conclusion that iTunes caused CD sales to drop? Seriously, imagine for a moment it's your business on the line so you'd damn well better get the analysis right: it looks like "my product's" sales dropped off at close to the same rate before and after iTunes even existed. How did iTunes kill music sales if the downward trend started before iTunes was even available (which is plainly on that chart)? What would an honest trendline from the CD sales peak to the trough say about iTunes' impact? iTunes charges a dollar per song, about the same cost/song as Walmart used to charge for a CD in Nebraska back when everyone got in trouble for price gouging, and iTunes takes less of a % than Walmart ever did. If that chart is even close to accurate, Steve Jobs is about 90% of the reason the music industry still exists. Every time I follow a link to CNN I get more convinced that they've given up, and I'm starting to wonder why people bother linking back to these news organizations at all. ------ makeramen >> _When adjusted for inflation, revenue has been more than halved since Apple launched the iTunes Music Store._ Whose revenue? RIAA? What about the artists revenue? It'd be interesting to see that broken down. Here's an interesting infographic showing how much artists make from various sources: [http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do- music...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music- artists-earn-online/) iTunes is actually less profitable than retail, but only if you're on a label that takes a lions share of what's left after Apple. It'd be interesting to see what independent artists' revenues on iTunes are like. ~~~ unreal37 Also, they're talking "inflation adjusted revenue", not profit. The music industry is as profitable as it ever was. They just don't need to spend money creating CD's and shipping them all over the world. Direct to consumer (or through a service like Apple) is the future. And more artists won't need a record label at all. Like Macklemore. ~~~ simba-hiiipower as much as i'd love that to be true, i just don't see it. macklemore (and ryan lewis! - no love for the production, ever!) are the exception, not the norm, and i don't think represent the beginning of larger some trend.. i think the music industry is very analogous to startups in the tech space.. most fail, some make it alright, and some make it big. the difference between them usually comes-down to the right combination of talent, luck, and external support (from people who know the industry, have capital, and have been there before). in the startup world vc fills the support gap, in the music one it’s the labels.. _as an aside: i genuinely do wish it were true though.. i could easily put together a really good case study charting the composition of a growing artist’s fanbase before and after signing to a major label. in the case of hip-hop, i’ve encountered countless data points where sentiment among an artist’s early fans takes a sharp nosedive down once signed and under the pressure from labels; this usually tracks song quality very closely and is a perfect inverse of trendlines for radio plays and itunes sales.._ ------ onemorepassword So you create a graph that maps all music distribution methods until, say, 1999, and then you ignore everything else that happened except iTunes, and blame iTunes. Sure. Remove iTunes from the graph, and what you'll see is a big gaping hole where the next generation music industry product should have been. But more importantly, it shows that said next gen product should have already been in place well before piracy even became a factor and iTunes was just Steve Jobs' wet dream. If anything, it illustrates the utter failure of an industry coasting on the unprecedented success of the CD when everyone else could see that physical carriers were already on the way out. The industry had the time, means and opportunity to shape the download culture. Instead Napster and iTunes did. Not because technology moved so fast, but because the industry stopped moving. ------ jdp23 The chart shows a steep decline in CD sales starting in 2000 -- several years _before_ iTunes. So "iTunes crushed sales" like seems a real stretch. A different way of looking at it is that there's a pattern of format changes: vinyl to cassettes to CDs to digital. With the move to digital, unlike the others, there was sigificant downward pressure on prices. So more music is being consumed (on the units chart) at a cheaper prices. From a consumer perspective, this looks like market economics doing what they should :) ~~~ mrtksn they can say it's napster(read piracy) ------ roc They're the ones who built their industry to revolve around hyper-promoted singles. All iTunes did, was let people easily and economically acquire only the tracks they cared about. That those people turned out to not be interested in the 'other 8 songs' or the CD single b-sides is hardly iTunes fault. If the industry promoted _albums_ and _bands_ , maybe they'd get different results. ------ DannoHung It's almost like... people don't like shitty garbage that fills most albums... ------ jdangu Candid question: Volumes doubled and overall revenue got divided by 3 in 10 years. Is music 6 times cheaper than it was back then? ~~~ BenoitEssiambre I think it is a lot cheaper, especially if you consider that you are not forced to buy the tracks you don't want (which is the point of the article). However, a lot of the cost reductions come from increased efficiency. Apart from the fact that record companies don't have to produce and ship physical goods, which is huge in itself, we also got rid of the need for humans to search, pick and curate new artists. Artists or their managers can now publish directly in the digital stores and a ranking algorithm is all that is needed to decide if it becomes visible or not. In the past, the human curators kind of ended up in a position of natural monopoly where they would get to pick winners and pocket most of the profits at the expense of artists who were forced to sign unfavorable contracts to get visibility. The fact that there is less money and lower 'sales numbers' in certain parts of the industry might be a sign of success of its most innovative side, the ability to provide more music at lower prices. What would be interesting to see is the effect on artists in all of this. When I buy music I would like to not be paying for a huge and inefficient, production, distribution, curation and marketing layer. I want the money to go as much as possible to the artist. ~~~ anigbrowl _When I buy music I would like to not be paying for a huge and inefficient, production, distribution, curation and marketing layer. I want the money to go as much as possible to the artist._ Wait, who are you to pronounce on the efficiency of this layer? Do you think that production and marketing don't create value? Several of the artists that pioneered the 'pay what you want' approach have come to the conclusion that they were better off with that stuff in place: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what- you...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/4054634/musics-pay-what-you-want- pioneers-sour-on-giving-away-songs) ------ jrs235 I would like to see a few different charts: 1\. Total number of distinct songs sold. and 2\. Total length of distinct music tracks. If we assume that a CD consists of ten 3 minute songs (30 minutes) we can see how much effort the "artists" put in to recording their songs [that were sold, due to being included on the CDs] to the revenue generated vs single tracks. I wonder this because if artists could focus on playing gigs, finding the popular songs and only spending effort and time recording those songs and digitizing them for sale, then the revenue per hour of effort could result in a drastically better "hourly rate" for recording. (There's nothing like "doing work" just to do work and have it "thrown away". Many developers know this feeling.) EDIT: I hope you can see where I am trying to go. I want to compare distinct songs sold to sales and aggregated distinct song length to sales. Perhaps someone can elaborate and better communicate what I'm trying to say. ------ tpowell I'd love to see arrows indicating dates when Napster, Kazaa, and Pirate Bay all began to achieve strong adoption rates. My music purchasing behavioral changes had nothing to do with iTunes.. I was a very happy Lala user until Apple killed it, and am now happy to pay $10/month to Spotify. ------ Steko Already clearly peaked and in decline 4 years before itunes launched, presumably due to piracy. ------ jessriedel So, most people agree that the point of music copyrights is to incentivize the creation of music.[1] Has there been a steep decline in the amount of music created since 2005 compared to the heyday of CDs, 1995-2005? Putting aside arguments along the lines of "pop music these days is so much worse than pop music when I was a teenager", is there any serious argument that music is of lower quality? If not, shouldn't this be an argument for a reduction in copyright strength? [1] Occasionally people argue that copyright protects the artists _moral_ rights to the music, regardless of societal impact, but let's ignore that minority opinion. ------ unreal37 This article is pretty funny when you look at all the subtle statements and think about what they actually mean. "The smaller, cheaper "45" record dominated music in the 1950s and '60s, but the music industry wised up in the '70s." This means, 45's were very popular and then the record industry purposely killed them to sell consumers more expensive full albums just to get a copy of the same song. So the music industry were ripping people off, and the advent of piracy/digital downloads means they can do longer do that. Interesting biased article. Needs a proper translation though from RIAA-speak to real English. ~~~ anigbrowl Another way to read it is that labels put more capital and effort into developing artists that could produce albums instead of chasing single- oriented bands that tended to flame out quickly. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were trailblazers in this area because they were able to produce 8 or 10 good songs that people would pay money for in the form of an album. I'm no fan of the RIAA, but amount of cognitive bias on this thread is ridiculous. The record industry didn't kill singles at all, I bought plenty of them growing up. ------ intrazoo This chart could use some piracy (and online streaming) data as well, though I am not sure what it would look like. Also, make sure to sort by sales too. ------ Zimahl I'd like to point out that this curve seems to follow the economy almost perfectly with a climb until the late 90s, and then the economic slowdown of the 00s into the 'Great Recession'. So, as we always say 'correlation doesn't mean causation'. iTunes probably isn't the cause, the severe decline in disposable income was the most likely factor. ------ JohnBooty The article is fairly insane. The "sales" chart (the chart defaults to "units") clearly shows sales peaking several years before iTunes was released, and the decline continues (but slows slightly) after iTunes was released. How does one look at that and conclude that iTunes "crushed music sales?" ------ tnuc Only iTunes? Might be missing a few other changes in revenue. What percentage of a CD sale went to the artist? It's not really about a change in format but a change in a distribution model. Anything that reduces the amount of middle men is good for the consumer and the artist. ------ vy8vWJlco (As I've said before...) To paraphrase Jack Valenti: the future is to the past as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone, with the windows open, listening to her favorite DRM-free digital audio files. Don't blame iTunes for successfully serving the market. ------ MarkMc Why did the music industry allow iTunes to sell singles instead of entire albums? If illegal torrents forced them to do it, wouldn't a better title be, "How Illegal Downloads Crushed Music Sales"? ------ caycep well...it IS a chart by Time Warner...that comes directly from RIAA ------ guard-of-terra Why do musicians keep churning out albums where listeners don't care about most of tracks? Even when that clearly doesn't work? That's stupid. Most music I care about comes in albums where most of tracks fit my tastes and touch my soul. I wonder how the album:single chart will look like if we subtract "whatever plays on radio" from it. ------ adventured Leaving out live events, streaming, satellite, etc makes this a joke of a chart. Spending has shifted, and how people enjoy music has shifted. It'd be like claiming the VHS killed the drive-in movie business. That'd be wildly confusing what was actually going on in the market at the time by ignoring a lot of other data points. Tell Madonna her album sales have been decimated. Oh wait, she's busy making tens of millions per tour with $150 tickets. This chart pretends none of that spending is occurring. People have a finite budget for music, as with anything. ~~~ simba-hiiipower i don't think that's really comparable, and especially so given the unique structure (some may say _fuckedupedness_ ) of the music industry.. you may be right in that growth in other revenue streams (touring, merch, royalties, ...) potentially offset, or maybe even exceed, the decline in media sales when looking at the space in aggregate. however, that shift has major implications for different players in the space, and that shouldn't be ignored. things may be working out better for superstars like madonna (and that’s not necessarily true; i really don’t know) given their ability to draw massive crowds willing to pay-up for the experience; smaller artists however lose out, as do the record companies.. historically, record companies took the lion share of media sales and artists (frankly speaking) got fucked. while the model has evolved, slowly, that’s still largely the same today, though things have now flipped - where the media sales, that the record companies depend on, have collapsed, and the other streams artists mainly depend on have taken-off.. love em or hate em (likely the latter), record companies do provide real value and remain an essential player in the space, helping discover and get good music out and supporting pre-madonna-level artists early-on, and their losses shouldn't be viewed as a win for the little guy, as it most certainty not. i'd say this long-standing disconnect in the industry is why it’s taken nearly two decades to adjust to a disruption (digital formats, internet, file sharing) in the market; a ridiculously long amount of time if you think about it.. ~~~ guard-of-terra Smaller artists have it better than ever: there is a new generation of distributors like cdbaby, magnatune and the orchard. They carry a magnitude more different releases than majors/record shops ever could. If you play something, you can now reach all the audience in the world. But of course listeners become very thin. With such enormous choice, every single artist isn't going to have more than several thousand fans on average. But it's just numbers at work. I think that aggregators are going to surpass majors and then we'll live in a new and interesting world. I think this is coming to Europe first. ------ theltrj i guess in 2013 iTunes overtook piracy in crushing the music industry because I see one of those articles every year, what exactly isn't crushing the music industry? ------ danso Interesting how sales revenue is reportedly down so much that vinyl, which is a fraction of a percent by 2000, grows to a visible percentage point or so by today. Cassettes, alas, never had a revival ~~~ anigbrowl Good point. Vinyl has seen a slight resurgence in popularity because it's hip, but the long-term decline is easily understood when you consider that pressing plants continue to close down. [http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/the-truth-about- recor...](http://www.attackmagazine.com/features/the-truth-about-record-store- day/) I don't know why you'd want to bring back cassettes - total pain in the ass. I still like them for recording because analog tape distorts in a pleasing fashion. But for listening, nope.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Right Response to the Libra Threat - hhs https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/regulating-private-money-facebook-libra-by-katharina-pistor-and-co-pierre-georg-2019-08 ====== kashaiahyah85 Those seem like scenarios that would necessarily involve this crypto currency actually being successful. That in itself is terribly unlikely. At best, it'll end up being a Facebook-only token that inevitably becomes cash. Unless Facebook and Amazon had a demonic love-child beast of a system... Perish the thought. ------ heyoni Is there a reason why Libra might upend bitcoin? If not, then why worry at all? ------ chovy Crypto.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PDFKit - A PDF generation library for Node.js. - jenhsun http://pdfkit.org/ ====== jashkenas The source code is a nice read, and quite illuminating, if you've ever wanted to dig under the hood of a PDF: <https://github.com/devongovett/pdfkit/tree/master/lib> _edit:_ In particular, some of this TTF font handling stuff is pretty fun: [https://github.com/devongovett/pdfkit/blob/master/lib/font.c...](https://github.com/devongovett/pdfkit/blob/master/lib/font.coffee) You get bonus style points for embedding PostScript in a heredoc. ~~~ devongovett Thanks Jeremy! You just made my day. :) ------ keeran Not\|soon to be confused with the Ruby gem, PDFKit. <https://github.com/jdpace/PDFKit> ~~~ Argorak Apple also has a Framework called PDFKit. [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Graphi...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/PDFKitGuide/PDFKit_Prog_Intro/PDFKit_Prog_Intro.html) ------ dspillett Very nice little library: I used it to make a 5-year planner for my mother (who is one of the few who still uses such things: you can't buy them anywhere any more, presumably everyone else plans online now) this year. Some things seem locked to integer multiples of 1/72th of an inch (so A4 comes out at 8.3x11.7 rather than 8.27x11.69 and laying out lines and text more precisely than that doesn't work) though I didn't delve into it to see if this could be rectified (by using using a smaller unit perhaps) as I didn't need more precision (which I'm guessing most people don't either). Line drawing widths and such take non-integer values fine, just not the line start/end coordinates. Nice library though, I'll be using it again in future and may even be able to contribute. It may even be my impetus to play with CoffeeScript properly. ------ silverlight I recently switched to using this for a web app from Prawn. The main app is in Ruby, but this was so much nicer (simpler API, much, much faster PDF generation) than Prawn for our particular use case (PDFs with lots of exact positioning of text and images) that I actually set up an entire Node server just to use PDFKit. Give it a shot if you generate a lot of PDFs. ------ nodesocket Would be awesome to be able to pass in simple text HTML like: <p>Paragraph <i>here</i>.</p><p>Second paragraph <strong>here</strong>.</p>. ------ superted I can vouch for the quality of PDFKit, it is highly pleasant to work with ------ fenprace Looks good and mark it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: An app that models a self-driving car intersection - Kamogo https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/self-driving-car-simulator/id956632055?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 ====== Kamogo Gifs: [http://imgur.com/a/h1RZT](http://imgur.com/a/h1RZT) Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nealagarwa...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nealagarwal.automaticintersection.android) I'd be happy to answer any questions.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SQL for NoSQL: Couchbase N1QL Tutorial - porker http://query.pub.couchbase.com/tutorial/#1 ====== jchrisa This is an interactive step by step introduction to our new SQL style query language.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How I made $40K in 16 days with a technical eBook - DVassallo https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1216175468681940992 ====== Nicksil This has been submitted a number of times in the last ~24 hours: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22024794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22024794) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22026089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22026089) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028225) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031634) ~~~ Nicksil Edit: It's much more than that, it seems: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22024794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22024794) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028225) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031634) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22034394) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037443) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888049) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21944090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21944090) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971195) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984824) ~~~ gus_massa [I mostly agree, but you have some repeated links in your list. I count only 5.] ------ ehutch79 Spoiler: there is a lot of up-front work before those 16 days started.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gulf Seasfood Deformities Raise Questions Among Scientists and Fisherman - wtvanhest http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/gulf-seafood-deformities-raise-questions_n_1434268.html ====== wtvanhest I'm interested to see if other people think this may be over blown or not. In any case it is interesting.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Solving Nim, a mísere game - peter_l_downs http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-games4 ====== Tipzntrix Your link to the rules of Nim is down. ([http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/home.pacbell.net/fran...](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/home.pacbell.net/fransg/nim.htm))	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Developer Book Club - turingbook https://henrikwarne.com/2016/11/08/developer-book-club/ ====== cableshaft We didn't introduce books to read at our company, but we did start what we call 'dev learning sessions'. Once a week, one of the developers (it cycles by name) has to prepare and present about a topic approved by an architect (pretty much as long as it might be used somehow at work, it's approved). Then everyone spends about an hour learning about something. Sometimes it's something internal, but often it's a deeper dive into a particular topic regarding database, language, or sql features. We've been doing it for about a year now, and it's getting harder to come up with new topics, but overall it's worked out pretty well. It ends up that you have to give a presentation about once every three or four months. Personally I've learned quite a bit that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, even when I was the one giving the presentations. When it's your turn it can take up to a full day to research and prepare the presentation though, especially if you want to have working source code and it's about a topic you're not too familiar with. ------ Cpoll I've started one of these, a few months ago. It worked pretty well until we picked ng-book, and interest tapered off. My observation is that if the book is too relevant to the day-job, people will just end up talking about work problems, and enthusiasm will wane. It's also possible that purely language/framework books don't work as well. Code Complete is good because it gets people talking about architecture, general best-practices, and career mastery. ng-book only gets people talking about the framework. To revive ours, we've discussed reading relevant articles rather than entire books. ~~~ swanson > It's also possible that purely language/framework books That has been my experience. The best book club discussions (we do probably 10 different groups a year for 5+ years at this point) have been for books like The Pragmatic Programmer, Rework, Lean Startup, etc -- ones that focus more on a methodology or have room for discussion about trade-offs. Framework/language specific books tend towards the reference material side of things and don't have much room for discussion. One exception is the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks book -- we would work the exercises on our own and then meet together to discuss and share our solutions. ------ snug The company I work for offers a few chapters from one of the books on the list, "Building Microservices." Not trying to promote (most people probably know NGINX and you can ask not to be contacted about our commercial product), but it's a great book, just started here 2 months ago and it was a great book to help with here, as a lot of discussions we have are moving to MicroServices. Here's a link. [https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free- ebook...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/building-microservices-free-ebook- oreilly-nginx/) ------ Jtsummers Anyone here have suggestions for introducing this sort of concept into an office with bosses that get stingy with company time? We're too geographically distributed to do this effectively in our off hours, unfortunately. ------ techman9 My old team used to do this. We were an SRE/Ops focused team so we were making our way through the Google SRE book, trying to see which practices or lessons we could apply to our team and company. I found it a super positive experience, as we had a chance to reflect on our team in the context of "established" best practices and look at what aspects of their process made sense to apply to our organization. Also, that book is quite good and it was fun to have some pressure to read a couple sections every week. ------ tbirrell Nice idea. If there was an online version of this, I would participate. I can't be bothered to take more time out of my day to physically go somewhere though. ------ markwaldron This would be great if they could be quickly downloaded in a specific format. I'd love to have a lot of these on my Kindle. Thank you for uploading this ------ Chris2048 Howabout a meetup, no need to restrict to work right? ~~~ kzisme I can see some people being opposed to spending time outside of work - talking about tech/work stuff though. (I'm not included in this group).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How should I set up an online script review service? - Artifex Hey HN, I'm hoping someone out there will be willing to guide me in the right direction.<p>I'm gearing up to launch a new screenwriting-related website soon. I'll be publishing many articles, but I will also be setting up a script review service, where I ask readers to upload their own scripts, attach their e-mail and pay with paypal. I'll then read and review their scripts, e-mailing their review back to them upon completion.<p>So my question to you is this: What's the best way to accomplish this? (This being: fill out a user form, upload a file, send all the information to my e-mail, and have them pay). Are there any services out there that could handle the backend?<p>I'm brand new to this kind of commerce stuff, so I'd be very grateful for any advice you could give. Thanks much. ====== ScottWhigham I can't help except to maybe suggest you change the title. I clicked the link thinking you had a javascript, etc code review idea :) I suspect others did as well. ~~~ Artifex Ah, yes, the density of programmers on HN... Sorry for the confusion. ------ Artifex If anyone is interested, I found a service that fits my needs at Wufoo.com. Gravity Forms for Wordpress almost won out (and probably will eventually, once they get their paypal solution up and running).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
C.S. Lewis on Writing - taylorbuley http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-writing.html ====== danso >> _In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."_ My high school journalism teacher (and I'm sure many others) phrased this as "Show, don't tell". I wish all writing/journalism classes devoted a week to this precept. ~~~ jonnathanson It's funny; my fourth-grade English teacher had a sign on her wall that read "Eschew prolixity." It's a safe bet that no fourth grader, no matter how extraordinary, has come across those two words by that point in his life. So, of course, everyone in the class was puzzled by them. The phrase might as well have been some ancient, Latin dictum -- and, for all we knew, it was. Finally, one day, someone mustered the courage to ask her what the words meant. "It's a rule for good writing," she said. "When you understand what it means, you're already in danger of breaking it." ~~~ davesims Or the self-contradictory, "Eschew obfuscation." ~~~ gruseom Hey. Eschew is a perfectly good word. ~~~ taylorbuley Gesundheit. Here's a nice list of common phases that can be eschewed without worry: [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__oMEOi1B6Rc/TDxuvGxYfeI/AAAAAAAAAA...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/__oMEOi1B6Rc/TDxuvGxYfeI/AAAAAAAAAAw/AMrFQiPi98k/s640/Avoid.JPG) ~~~ gruseom You're preaching to the choir, believe me (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3794092>). And "eschew" is a perfectly good word. It's different from "avoid" and "shun", etc., and when it's the right word, it's just right. "Obfuscation" is too, for that matter, but I don't want to ask for too much here :) ~~~ Gormo Funny thing about words: each has its own peculiar niche, even the exceptionally arcane ones. ~~~ gruseom Totally agree! And what you said is far from obvious. ------ ctdonath "5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." This is why I object to most usage of cursing in writing (see recent threads on the subject). Using the most extreme language for relatively mundane situations leaves you nothing to work with when extreme language is warranted. Ex.: using the phrasing "go the f^@& home" (see thread of same name) in a mundane discussion about work hours really is pretty pathetic insofar as it wastes & deflates extreme language better used where more appropriate, such as describing the feeling of having your rib cage pried open with a car jack (been there, done that, f^@& applies). (Some of us suffer net-nannies, so pardon the veiling.) ~~~ JDShu On the one hand it makes sense, but on the other hand isn't it agreed that cursing brings a certain context or atmosphere? How would the advice here apply to, say, a Quentin Tarantino movie? ~~~ bdunbar Most - perhaps all - of the situations a Tarantino character would find himself in _are_ extreme situations. Most of us don't find ourselves in places like that on a frequent basis. This might be true of most action movies. If you're shooting it out with a band of Euro-trash criminals in a skyscraper, a 'yipi-ki-yay-mother-f%%ker' is appropriate. Probably not so much picking up ice cream, milk and yogurt. ~~~ nosse I really like what you just ended up calling appropriate... I'm seriously laughing here! ------ shin_lao One of the best books you can find on the topic has been written by Stephen King and is called "On Writing". The first part is a small auto-biography as he states that "to understand writing you must understand what happens in the life of a writer". The second part is full of clever and useful advices, including ones close to the one in this article. Even if you don't like the author, you should really read this book if you're serious about writing. <http://www.amazon.com/On-Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967> ~~~ ctdonath Great book for the aspiring writer. Most of it is filler material, but the ~16 pages of real writing advice is worth at least the cover price. One recommendation that stuck with me is to avoid words ending in "ly". I now make that effort, and the results are an improvement. ~~~ dvdhsu > _One recommendation that stuck with me is to avoid words ending in "ly". I > now make that effort, and the results are an improvement._ For those who are wondering at the rationale behind this: many adverbs end in -ly. "The brown fox quickly ran", "she urgently asked", "he mercilessly ate his salad", etc. Adverbs should be avoided, because, as danso notes, you must "show, not tell". When the brown fox "quickly" runs, you're telling the reader what happened. Similarly, when she "urgently" asks, you're not showing the reader what's going on. Instead, you can describe what's happening with better verbs: "the brown fox sprinted after his dinner", "she pleaded for the answer key", "he attacked the tomato in his salad". That's just one way to do it, of course. You can also describe the action in detail: "After skewering his tomato, Jessie brought it up to his mouth, where it tumbled into his esophagus". ------ eavc Lewis was an amazing man. A more serious scholar and thinker than most who know about him today would probably expect, a brilliant writer, and he did things like respond to all of his fan mail and give away the lion's share (pardon the pun) of his works' profits. ~~~ wyclif He gave away most of his book royalty income for several reasons: 1. He was a Christian. 2. For most of his life he was a bachelor and didn't need much to live on. 3. Magdalen College, Oxford (and later Cambridge University) provided him accomodations as well as a scholarly income from his professorship. ------ stcredzero Contrast with Heinlein on writing: "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." ~~~ tygorius Actually, that's one of Heinlein's characters commenting on writing. Occasionally Heinlein would have to remind people that his characters spoke for themselves, not for him. I can't remember a case where he spoke or wrote about writing in a similar fashion to what C.S. Lewis wrote in his letter, but his 5 rules of writing[1] have been influential for many writers. Once, in an Annapolis address, he explained that the rules were simple (1. You must write. 2. You must finish what you write. ...) but only 1 in 10 would follow each step. This was how you could get from half of the adult US population wanting to be a writer to less than a thousand actually being members of the writing guild he belonged to. [1] <http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm> ------ adriand My four-year-old says "I amn't". I correct him with "I'm not" but I've long felt his usage made logical sense. But I never realized it was at some place and time an accepted usage! Amazing how the brain acquires language and independently applies its rules. ------ karlalopez CS Lewis was quite effective in his CRM. That's just awesome. ~~~ bgilroy26 What do you mean "CRM"? ~~~ karlalopez Customer relationship managing. "(...)it's no real surprise that C. S. Lewis received thousands of letters from youngsters during his career. What's admirable is that he attempted to reply to each and every one of those pieces of fan mail, and not just with a generic, impersonal line or two." ~~~ bgilroy26 That was what CRM usually means to me and I still didn't make the connection, that's a really cool thought! I really like it when we can tie modern techy/businessy practices back to how someone would do things before the jargon those practices are often built on came into usage. I think it strengthens both the long term viability of the practice and our understanding of people who lived in the past. I think your idea shows how CRM can be down-home and warm, which is a real drawback to the way it's generally approached. If relationships can be approached within a framework that makes it easier to manage them more productively without the "systemitization" swelling into the foreground, that's a win for everybody. I'm sure that's a big concern for SalesForce researchers. ------ azarias Read the 5 points again, except now imagine he is talking about writing code. A lot of it makes sense...In fact, I say Tim Peters lifted half of the Zen of Python from Lewis :) ------ grepherder _> > 3\. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."_ Am I the only one that doesn't agree with this, at least in general? I mean, the idea behind the advice is of course sound, just a basic form of keep it simple stupid. But in this case, why? This isn't engineering, it's about communication of thoughts. And thoughts _can be_ abstract. I find I can think more efficiently and also more rationally when using abstractions, especially ones I'm familiar with. Just like chunking in memory, there is data I have ready when you speak of mortality, instead of trying to explain to me in plain words that people die. That said, it might just be me (or people like me). I have to constantly make a conscious effort of writing and speaking less abstractly, just to not annoy people. It might have to do with the fact that English is not my native tongue, and as I don't use it in my daily life, I lack _the touch_ for concreteness to make sense to me that easily. ~~~ AerieC Thoughts can be abstract, but when you're trying to paint a picture with words, abstractions can make your "picture" weaker. "Mortality rose" is a confusing statement. What does it mean? Did more people die, or did humanity's inherent mortality somehow increase? If you meant "more people died", then say it. You're not talking about the abstract concept of mortality, you're talking about people dying. In the time it took your reader to figure out what you meant, you may have already lost him or her. Often it's a case of writers trying to be overly clever with their wordplay. For example, you wouldn't want to say something like, "her posterior condition was greatly exaggerated," when what you meant was, "she has a big ass". Sure, the first sentence is "clever", but it's not very clear. The second sentence is right to the point; there's no mistaking the meaning, and it paints a better picture in one's mind. It's similar to active voice vs. passive voice. "Dan hit the ball," is clear and to the point. "The ball was hit by Dan," paints a weaker picture, even if it says the same thing. Why is "ball" the subject of the sentence. Are we supposed to care about this ball? Aren't we talking about Dan here? Clarity in writing is important. Readers don't like to be confused. Anything that breaks the "flow" should be avoided, unless that is your goal (e.g. to stop the reader and make them think). ------ nikcub Point 1 is not the worst point Point 2 could be additionally descriptive Point 3 -peaked- (piqued!) my interest Point 4 was awesome Point 5 should be universally implemented ps. related: <http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit> ~~~ bmelton I supposed you're being downvoted for being so terse, but I generally agree with your comment, so it got my upvote. Yes, I am aware of how tacky it is to discuss voting, or making meta-comments in general. I think that, in my opinion at least, these instructions apply VERY well to journalism, or perhaps certain types of fiction, but not fiction on the whole. One of my recently favorite authors is Elmore Leonard, who breaks most of these rules with great ferocity, and is a fantastic writer on the whole. He has his own rules on writing, but the first is: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." In contrast to CS Lewis' writings, this leads to much more believable dialog, but that doesn't necessarily conform to any of Lewis' rules. Characters are seldom terse when they could instead be interesting. Characters are seldom cautious to take care that the reader can fully understand what they're saying. Characters are seldom as specific as you might like them to be. I find this to be much more natural, and feels much less "like writing" than most other authors and for that, I appreciate him immensely. ~~~ nikcub my intention wasn't to be terse - more a meta commentary as every one of my points contradicts the respective point in OP ------ GiraffeNecktie This is one of my favorite sites and always the first thing I read when I see there's something new in my RSS feeds. Kurt Vonnegut's letter on book burning published last week was also great <http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am- very-real.html> ------ grn His 4th point reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ and Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_. Both made a great impression on me. When discussing them with my wife she observed that they didn't give you what you ought to think and feel. They just showed you and your feelings and thoughts were your own and not of the writer. ------ evincarofautumn #4 could be summed up as “show, don’t tell”. It’s much easier to say what you mean than to convey it in an interesting way. “Creating Short Fiction” by Damon Knight mentions this as well, and goes into great detail about the difficulties of fiction writing and how to surmount them. I thoroughly recommend it. ------ gregorymichael I have too many educated friends who write by maxim "Never use a short word when a polysyllabic one will do". ------ ams6110 Nobody's mentioned _The Elements of Style_ , a great little handbook on how to write clearly. ~~~ andolanra Because it's not all that great. It's the _C Programming Language_ of linguistic style guides—well-respected and historically relevant, but not necessarily the best resource. For example, _The Elements of Style_ tells you to avoid the passive voice, on the grounds that sentences like "The sandwich was eaten by me," are much more awkward than "I ate the sandwich." It gives three sentences in support of this: "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground," "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had," and "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired." None of these sentences actually contain a passive: the first is an existential sentence, the second is a simple copula, and the third uses the copula with an adjective, not a participle.[1] All of which is to say—Strunk and White did not know what a passive was. The actual advice they meant to give is something along the lines of, "Don't be vague about agency," but that is a different proscription. There _are_ places where you should avoid the passive, and there are also places where you should employ the passive, because _it is clearer than the alternative_. For example, if your documentation says, "Our software product is used to [blah]", you should not change it to, "People use our software product to [blah]," because _those people do not matter_. By avoiding the passive, you have made your writing less clear by introducing unnecessary information. Strunk and White have a lot of advice which is merely harmless, but it is not a spectacular writing guide, except for the simplest, least elaborate kinds of writing. Truly great writing is not writing which follows those rules, but writing that knows _when_ to follow such rules. For example, Orwell and Churchill, both quite excellent writers, use the passive significantly _more_ than journalists of the time[2]. [1]: The _passive_ transforms sentences of the form "{noun1} {verb} {noun2}" into "{noun2} {be} {verb}ed [by {noun1}]"; it is (or should be) clear that these sentences cannot be transformed from the latter pattern into the former. [2]: [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003414.html) ~~~ bgilroy26 Isn't the usual advice to keep software as the subject of the sentence but rewrite the verb? Like: "Our software manages your source code revisions" rather than "Our software is used to manage source code revisions?". (I totally agree that the "no passive voice" rule is oversubscribed btw.) ~~~ andolanra I usually come across people who don't actually know what a passive is[1] or who are completely and rabidly anti-passive, but I don't doubt that such advice is common among more reasonable grammarians. Still, there are sentences that are difficult if not impossible to rewrite in such a way because of context or lack of vocabulary, e.g. "... and the network interface is written in C," is difficult to rewrite because the old information (the software) comes first, the new information comes at the end, the unnecessary agent is omitted, and no active verbs come to mind. [1]: <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3884> ------ sampsonjs How about some advice from a better writer? Like "Politics and the English Lagnuage": <http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm> "(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent." Like saying "orthogonal" when you mean "unrelated". ------ username3 v. nice practical writing advice ------ wmdmark Good stuff.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Updating Secure Boot dbx with fwupd and the LVFS - ohazi https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2020/08/17/updating-secure-boot-dbx-with-fwupd-and-the-lvfs/ ====== ohazi BootHole woke a lot of people up to the fact that we don't have a a well- tested approach to updating the UEFI revocation list on Linux systems that doesn't involve crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. My experience with fwupd and LVFS for handling Lenovo firmware on Thinkpads without a Windows partition has been fairly positive, so I'm hopeful that this experiment will have good results.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Fundamental Laws of Sofware Engineering: A Satirical Short Paper - pedrodelfino https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07818 ====== pedrodelfino Best part: "Take these two examples of desired universal laws of software engineering: FU: every system, big and small, should have provisions that allow it to be FIXED and UPDATED either from within or outside the system proper; CK: every system, big and small, should have provisions that allow it to acquire and make use of CONTEXTUAL KNOWLEDGEto decide whether it is functioning properly or not. The combination of the two laws gives us the FUCK property: A system that obeys both the FU and CK laws can verify the conditions of its operating environment and decide whether its actions are coherent or not with the current context of that environment. Furthermore, if it decides they are not, the system can fix itself, ask for an external fix or be fixed, forcibly, by some sort of external agent.Think cells and cellular systems. They are obviously a FUCK system"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Like Button Ruined the Internet - jgrahamc https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-the-internet/519795/?single_page=true ====== na85 Up- and downvotes did some damage, too. I'm convinced that the best way to encourage creative and engaging content is anonymity. Let the content compete on its own merits, not the popularity of the username posting it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Prefer being tracked and seeing ads, or pay small subscription? - elamje I am curious, after seeing so many consumer tech companies in the news about data collection, if you would rather pay a small fee, (something like $1 a month) for all of the big tech companies you use that are currently "free" thanks to ad-revenue?<p>Instead of a company tracking you, you would pay them about $1 a month to not track you and show you ads. Assume the economics of all of the web services you use for free is such that, they are incentivized for you to pay $1 rather than try to get $1 from you with ad revenue. ====== madamelic God no. I'd much rather pay like $15, $20, $30... $1 isn't going to cover it. $1 is maybe 1 or 2 really good CPC. I am not going to attempt to use all of the acronyms but $1 is still within the range of still needing more revenue. I'd much rather pay a large amount and have a definite "this money will make us not sell your data" than a "a $1 donation means we won't show you ads". All of that said, I am extremely doubtful any large company would abide. Most would take the $15+ and continue doing what they're doing. In my opinion, it's not about needing to cover costs and make a tidy profit. It's a complete failure of how tech companies are valued. They are expected to "eat the world" and therefore, their revenues have to continually climb. There is a dearth of "good enough" in tech companies. ~~~ elamje It's not so much a question about would they honor your subscription contract or not. Assuming they would, would you rather pay explicitly, or just continue with the current "free" model. ------ potta_coffee I prefer neither. I enjoyed the web better before the big sites took all the traffic away from small forums and passion-project, personal websites. ~~~ elamje Given the current situation, which would you choose? I understand the desire for the web to be like it was in the late 90's and early 00's, but we are here now, and some of the services are incredibly great compared to the previous generation of websites. ~~~ sarcasmatwork Neither. Anonymous browsing? Why should we have to accept being tracked or paying $$ when its NEVER been like that? It's not their data, its mine. How about these companies pay me to use my info? I choose to sell how much and what. They dont like it? Well, you have a poor business model. ~~~ elamje Just to add onto what someone else said, if all users did what you do, the companies would shut down or have to work off of donations ~~~ rolph if all users did what S_at Work , and I do we would actually be back to the internet the way it used to be with those of capability hosting thier sites and BBS's and everyone having a jolly good time for free. I feel sorry for those who have never even experienced the real internet and think the web and facebook are the internet. ~~~ potta_coffee That's how I feel about it. The crazy thing is, communities I used to go for information have died, the forums are still there but they're essentially dead. Some users went to Facebook, some to Reddit, but I can't go to those places and actually get the information I want, like I used to be able to do. The current corporate internet gobbled up everything without giving us anything in return, and now they want to complain about not making enough money. Boo hoo. ------ rchaud I would not pay a fee to Big Tech, since that's not how their business model works. They wouldn't be billion dollar companies if they started off by offering email for $1/month or whatever. They would have turned away 90%+ of their users the second they asked for your credit card information. Why do you think SV companies are measured on the basis of 'user growth/engagement' rather than actual cash? It's because the value of the company is based on the size of their userbase, not the actual quality of their product. Once network effects are established and switching costs have increased, that's when you can really start to compromise on the product to start meeting business objectives. ------ shanecleveland No. I pay and donate to some, but they tend to be niche sites where ad revenue wouldn't be high enough. I get so much value out of ad-supported sites and could never afford to pay enough for all of them. Ads can be done well. I commonly back out of sites with intrusive ads that significantly degrade the experience. And I completely avoid most social medial, including Facebook. ------ rolph I would choose none of the above, i would go to a nonindexed site and find the information i want for free, and let them link to my site for free. actually this is what i do already my site is in excess of 20 TB and uses mesh technology as well as providing a gateway to the common internet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NYC scientist fired after raising questions about a DNA test gets $1M settlement - ekovarski https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/nyregion/dna-testing-nyc-medical-examiner.html ====== sophacles The people who criticized her and fired her need to be removed from their positions and barred from working in the public sector ever again. Further any action they've taken in the name of "the public" needs to be validated by an independent group. It's a hard-line stance I know. Anything less tho is just externalizing the damage done by these fools and their "win at all costs" mentality. It's easy to have that mentality when the "costs" to the actor are - at worst - keeping ill gotten gains and some slap on the wrist, while the real consequences are borne by people who are effectively collateral damage. Sure I'm a crazy hippie, but the fact that this woman got a settlement does nothing to help the real problem. If anything, it makes it worse - the people are distracted by the bread and circuses of a person getting a pile of money, while the NY medical examiner's office gets to purge a person fighting for actual correctness. I'm sure her absence will make it easier for prosecutors to "win" more, since there are fewer people arguing to do silly things like trying to follow the prinicple of "prosecute the actual offender". ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 Before pulling out the pitchforks, I'd encourage you to investigate with more than just one article. It may very well be everything you recommend is warranted, but be aware that once reporters decide on the narrative for a story, they pull out quotes and data in a manner that specifically supports that narrative. I know I've been burned in the past by just reading one side of the story and getting angry before understanding the entirety of what happened. ~~~ jrockway I typically read both the NYT and the WSJ, and they very often agree on news stories. When I subscribed to the WSJ, I was expecting to be blown away at how the NYT was sticking me in some sort of liberal media bubble. But it turns out, they both pick the same topics and both relay the same facts. Even the opinion columns are the same -- "I support the position of the political party to which I am aligned, no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT." ~~~ michaelbuckbee With respect to the NYT/WSJ having a similar point of view, I've heard it described as a "cosmopolitan bias". That the professional journalists are mostly college educated, live in a large city, have a sense of professional ethics, are exposed to people from a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities and all sorts of other markers of class and socio-economic background. I grew up in a tiny rural town in Ohio where that certainly isn't the case and currently live in the suburbs of Virginia where that urban lifestyle feels very far removed. This is less a political description and more of the urban/rural divide in viewpoint. Case in point: I've had multiple conversations with people locally who reacted with horror at the idea of taking a Lyft/Uber ("Don't do that you'll get killed.") ~~~ newswriter99 "mostly college educated, live in a large city, have a sense of professional ethics, are exposed to people from a variety of backgrounds and ethnicities" You're making "cosmopolitan bias" look good, when it's not. It's still bias. Having a better education and being exposed to more cultures than the average person does not guarantee that you won't be a closed-minded, fundamentalist, holier-than-thou jerk. Source: country-raised metropolitan-educated journalist ~~~ crushcrashcrush It doesn't guarantee it, but it makes it more likely. ~~~ whenchamenia I will assert the opposite, based on decades of living in both major metros and backwater towns. Your biased comment just drives the point home. ~~~ barrkel Major metros will make you colder and slower to trust strangers, but you'll know a lot more about the world. There's simply more variance in cities. Living your life in a backwater town won't disabuse you of being trusting and friendly, but your preconceptions about the rest of the world won't be tested either. Travel to other countries is better than either to broaden perspectives. Seeing the world from multiple points of view (sometimes literally) is the best way to eliminate bias. ~~~ rsj_hn I strongly disagree that metros will make you know "more about the world." They will let you know more about a specific bubble that is just as narrow as the bubble in any small town. You can travel the world and run into people who believe in exactly the same things you do and have read the same books and seen the same movies. In fact, it's hard not to. I remember when I was a grad student, they would pair me up with a different foreign student each year. They were all cookie cutters of each other. One from Germany, one from the UK, one from Spain. They all immediately came here and complained about U.S. gun control and how the U.S. was too religious (Bible belters!) and the same tired old things that someone from Boston or NY would complain about. It got so bad I wrote down all their complaints on an index card and just handed it over when they started with their monoculture rants. It doesn't matter which nation in the west you are from, the elites form one gray goop of groupthink. I do recommend travel, but go into the countryside or talk to people with different life values from your own, not just different stamps on their passport. Talk to a mormon. Talk to a devout Catholic. Talk to a rural minority from China. Talk to someone without a college degree from Spain. Go visit the a traditional village in Japan. Hang out with the cabbies in Holland who play chess all the time. There you will see diversity. Flying from Paris to London to Berlin and visiting hip coffee shops or tech seminars -- you might as well just stay in San Francisco and go out to a bar. ------ jniedrauer So the city claimed that a study had been done but refused to release it. When pressed to release it, they fired those involved. How is this not career ending for anyone who knew the study didn't exist but claimed it did? ~~~ 4ntonius8lock Look up a book called Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure It's produced by the Federal Government as a way to show people the 'grave consequences' of misbehaving as a government employee. I'm not a government employee, but it was recommended to me and it floored me. The amount of shit you can get away with if you are a government employee is mind boggling. I think this book should be read by every school child so they know the type of double standard and corruption that is rampant in government. ~~~ vkou > I think this book should be read by every school child so they know the type > of double standard and corruption that is rampant in government. As anyone who has ever spent any time working in a private sector job knows, corruption and double standards are the status quo in life. Unlike with the government, you rarely have any recourse when your manager, your director, your landlord, your bank, your utility, your grocery store, your accounting firm, or any of the other organizations that have power over you succumb to it. (You can sue them, but you can also sue the government.) ~~~ sdenton4 Damn straight. Thirty years of moving things out of government because of perceived inefficiency has put us in a place where our lives are governed by systems which are both inefficient and unaccountable, or - worse - efficient at the /wrong things/ and unaccountable. ------ duxup > a novel form of DNA testing being used in criminal cases I feel like any "novel form of" really shouldn't be evidence until it's proven. Granted I also recognize how courts really struggle understanding the magical world of what science is proven and what isn't. I do worry that it's up to each defendant to effectively fight these fights that are big topics and would be crazy expensive to "disprove" something the government says is proven, but isn't. ~~~ sametmax > Granted I also recognize how courts really struggle understanding the > magical world of what science is proven and what isn't. I don't understand how. Aren't you suppose to study logic to be a a judge ? Surely laws and argumentation are a central topic, and they all require a brain. How somebody unable to understand simple concept like probabilities can be judge ? ~~~ testvox Judges in many parts of the United States are elected, so there is no particular guarantee they have studied anything. ~~~ cm2012 Ones that aren't elected are appointed. Typically they're appointed because they're related or friends with the elected officials doing the appointing (My dad is a court officer in NY state - he's seen over and over again that nepotism is absolutely the norm and not the exception for all appointed positions). Any merit judges have compared to a baseline lawyer is basically accidental. ~~~ duxup I feel like citing that it's just nepotism is not entirely accurate. Judges are lawyers, but the approval process and performance of judges who are willing to follow the rule of law and rule in ways that aren't simply in line with "nepotism" is significant. Even existing supreme court justices appointed have not taken actions that the folks who appointed / approved them might wish... that's a good thing. ------ busterarm How many times are we going to let junk science poison our judicial system? ~~~ HeWhoLurksLate How much longer until we start investigating prosecutors for potential misconduct by an outside source that's not tied to their organization? Edit: formatting. ~~~ jrockway We are trying to add state-level oversight in New York. Prosecutors believe that oversight is “marred by constitutional defects.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/nyregion/ny- prosecutors-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/nyregion/ny-prosecutors- cuomo.html) ------ DiseasedBadger Give her a medal! We need to get serious about celebrating whistleblowers. ------ JamesWebb Are they still using the test she questioned? ~~~ hn_throwaway_99 No ------ osrec Headline reads like Daily Mail clickbait. Edit: thanks for updating the title. ~~~ stevezsa8 Nah... Daily Mail headline would be 'foreigner taking away our DNA tests' ------ dontbenebby >The city and the Office of Chief Medical Examiner said Monday that the settlement did not mean that Ms. Stajic was treated inappropriately. Weird - I thought the lottery was run at the state level.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Dali – A pure-Nim indie assembler for Android dex and apk files - akavel https://forum.nim-lang.org/t/4840 ====== dom96 Fun off-topic fact: the Nim forum that this announcement is hosted on is written in Nim and completely open source, give it a go: [https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum](https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum) ~~~ the_pwner224 Interestingly the same seems to be true for D, another language in a somewhat similar space to Nim. [https://forum.dlang.org](https://forum.dlang.org) has source code hosted at [https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed) ~~~ dom96 Another thing to note: you will not find any JavaScript in Nim's repo. That's because Nim compiles to JS, I'm actually using an SPA framework written in Nim for most of the forum. ------ xrd Looking over Nim, it says it is a statically typed language, compiles to C/C++/JavaScript. Is this interesting for Android developers, i.e. would I have a good reason to consider this over Kotlin or Java? When I see things like Phoenix/Elixir the language makes me consider evaluating it for usage instead of React/JavaScript. But, I don't immediately see the reason I would invest in this language. What am I not seeing? ~~~ captainbland I think the following kind of sums up its appeal to me: * Compiled language, sits in a similar kind of language category to Go where it compiles to a native binary but also has a GC, so it sits in that kind of performance ballpark * But has generics * A powerful AST based macro system, which gives it a kind of lisp-like meta-programmability. This means you can create DSLs and other tools which compile down to native code. * Python-like syntax But yeah, this is like one of the first steps that you really need to do effective development on Android. It's an impressive project, but it's not going to bring Android developers flocking from Java/Kotlin. However, it is quite cool for existing Nim developers who'd like to try targetting Android. ~~~ giancarlostoro Go has certain things out of the box that I think attributed to it's success: Built-In libraries out of the box for web and other things which are useful. The out of the box web server isn't Django, but it works, and it's clear what it's doing under the hood. Also all the code is documented as well. I think if Nim could have a usable web server in the std lib (same with Rust and D) it would be a game changer. It doesn't have to be ultra fast, just good enough to be production ready (SSL and other secure things, and make setting up a static directory easy, numerous static directories). The first thing I test when I try any language is the web frameworks, it tells me how expressive / powerful the language can be. This is why I always loved CherryPy from Python, because I can mentally map classes, objects, and methods to http routes without too much mental overhead. If I need to get crazier I can pull in a routing library as well. ~~~ dom96 > Go has certain things out of the box that I think attributed to it's > success: Yes, Google's backing. :) > I think if Nim could have a usable web server in the std lib (same with Rust > and D) it would be a game changer. Nim does have an HTTP server in its stdlib[1], but I wouldn't go as far as to say that this is a game changer. > The first thing I test when I try any language is the web frameworks You should give my web framework, Jester[2], a try :) 1 - [https://nim-lang.org/docs/asynchttpserver.html](https://nim- lang.org/docs/asynchttpserver.html) 2 - [https://github.com/dom96/jester](https://github.com/dom96/jester) ~~~ giancarlostoro I may have to, now that I'm at a new job where I only do Java, I feel like I can experiment with other languages more since I dont have to keep juggling between front-end and back-end code. Does it handle sessions and such? Also not familiar with database driver support for Nim. ------ carapace (Blank page with JS disabled.) ~~~ dom96 yeah, sorry. On our todo: [https://github.com/nim- lang/nimforum/issues/141](https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum/issues/141) ~~~ carapace Cheers! (Really, just a <noscript> saying "Hey, turn on JS for us." would be more than enough to make me happy, FWIW.)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
High Performance SBC Alternative to the Raspi3: Running Linux on Khadas VIM2 - wolframio https://medium.com/@tomac/from-tv-box-to-high-performance-single-board-computer-running-linux-on-the-khadas-vim2-max-5c00f6e95aa4 ====== azurit It runs an Amlogic CPU, Amlogic made a move for mainlinux support and GPU support last year. These guys have been really doing the major push on that front and the mainline support is linux kernel tree.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why is Markdown so difficult to work with? - libeclipse I find it's inconsistent across services at best, and a complete pain at worst.<p>Github is one of the few places that render it beautifully. There are a few services that do this, but they never work with each other. They all decided to add their own niche things to it, completely breaking compatibility.<p>Also, has anyone ever tried to export markdown to a more portable format? If you're extremely lucky, your PDF will have only a few rendering faults and your HTML, nah allow talking about the HTML.<p>I mean it's a really elegant thing in itself, I just wish it'd play well outside of Github's walled garden.<p>Has anyone else come across any of these problems? How did you solve them? ====== enkiv2 Markdown was intended to be simple enough that everybody could roll their own code to translate to their "real" markup language of choice. Everyone did, but because markdown was a hack in the first place, the quality of implementations is pretty inconsistent. (Which is fine, because rolling your own markdown -> html translator is easy -- much easier than writing your own html -> anything translator -- and well within the reach of even beginner programmers.) I avoid markdown because I don't like markup in general (and because I think styling of text is rarely useful), but if I need to work with it, I will whip something up to do the translation. A couple lines of sed is sufficient for handling whatever tiny subset of markdown is actually present. ------ davelnewton If you restrict yourself to the original ... "spec" then it generally works fine. There are efforts afoot to standardize, but until everyone settles on the one true markdown, there are a bunch of options. The easiest solution is to move away from Markdown, of course, and pick something that's been formalized. Which leads to the opposite issue, of course. Tools like Pandoc can eliminate some of those issues.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech Startup Founder Says Women Are Like Men, Only Cheaper - tokenadult http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-22/tech-start-up-founder-says-women-are-like-men-only-cheaper ====== steanne not only stupid from an illegal point of view and from an offending-his-own- employees point of view, but if his talk convinces many other companies to do the same thing, he loses that competitive advantage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What will Y Combinator look like in three years? - dwynings http://areallybadidea.com/what-will-y-combinator-look-like-in-three-yea ====== aristus Someone asked this question 4 years ago today. PG joked about getting Trevor to build him a robot: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554> ------ Samuel_Michon Not to sound luddite, but I hope it won't have changed much. Same for Hacker News. IMHO, it's perfect as is. EDIT: the first time around, I couldn't read the linked article, as the server was HN'ed. Now, having read the article, I wholeheartedly agree. I do hope, that if YC scales much further, it will expand to Europe. I feel I shouldn't have to move to the valley to create a successful startup. For instance, my hometown is a sister city to Palo Alto, surely there's some opportunity to share the love. ~~~ pauldisneyiv Not to come across as a downer; but there is nothing to say that you can't create a successful startup where you're at. You simply cannot be part of the Y Combinator program. Have faith and get coding! ------ jerf That's an aggressive answer to give to that question in this foru.... oh, it's the domain name. Carry on. ------ JacobAldridge pg's personal time may face a law of diminishing returns, but the alumni network will scale up in a comparative way. At least, in the 3 year timeframe discussed here. ------ tomrod I originally got a 404 error and thought it was some kind of prank. ~~~ jerf Now I'm getting binary gibberish that doesn't seem to be any encoding I can divine? Going straight to <http://areallybadidea.com/> has it on the front page, for now. ------ geuis Its just random broken text. I don't get the joke.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Quantum Bogosort - __hudson__ http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/Issues/mn11103/QuantumBogoSort.php ====== JeffBain I'm suprised to see that popping up everywhere. I was one of the editors of that campus paper when that was written.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Boil the Perfect Egg - Kaibeezy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/dining/how-to-hard-boil-eggs.html ====== Kaibeezy tldr: steam 11 minutes ~~~ madacoo Which apparently yields a boiled egg with not too tough whites that has a relatively easy shell to peel.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Zuckerberg claims top spot Vanity Fair 100, followed by Steve Jobs - tyng http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/the-vf-100-201010?currentPage=all ====== tyng Digital/Web entrepreneurs really are the new cool, claiming 6 of the top 10 spots on Vanity Fair 100. Warren Buffet is only No. 11	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reflections on trusting SGX - darkmighty https://www.sigarch.org/reflections-on-trusting-sgx/ ====== Boulth I wonder what effect does it have on Signal's Contact Discovery [0] (is this in production yet?). [0]: [https://signal.org/blog/private-contact- discovery/](https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TLDR pages: Simplified and community-driven man pages - signa11 http://tldr.sh/ ====== JdeBP For more, see * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166257](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166257) * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7308852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7308852) * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797303) * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985449) * [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13071636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13071636)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Agile is a Sham - willvarfar http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/20054342100/agile-is-a-sham ====== plinkplonk I personally think Agile _is_ mostly a scam built around some very small nuggets of common sense wisdom, which has then been propagandized by legions of clueless methodology consultants to mediocre teams and management, and spun into mediocre books and conferenceware. Just my personal opinion, ymmv etc. That said, _this_ is a badly written article which doesn't convey much useful information or convincing argument. I am surprised it is on the HN front page,leave alone being the top ranked article (at the time of writing this comment). Agile and TDD have been exhaustively discussed before on HN and an HNSearch will bring up much better arguments, both pro and con, from people who can clearly explain their viewpoints. ~~~ equalarrow True, the article is basically a rant, but I tend to agree. I've felt like the agile train left my station long ago and it wasn't for trying. After being invited to attend a free 'workshop' from one of the holiest purveyors of agile out there, I left with the feeling that it definitely was all for those who did not know how to actually 'do the work'. The trends I've been seeing and trying to do are as follows: * full stack responsibility. You own the task front (js/html) to back (db), including testing. * no f-ing standups. Communicate normally with your colleagues, no prescribed check in with them. * no iterations. Release whenever; it may sound crazy but kanban style release whenever you're ready to push features out, in my mind, is the way to go. * engineers, again, run the company. This in my mind is the biggest thing - having those 'with power' also be engineers and the product being the most important product. All the above are the opposite of what I've seen with the agile movement. Keep teams small, keep them close and your product will reflect that. Another huge, HUGE thing is to get the fucking mba management types out of the office. Can't stress this enough: if you can't code, you don't belong. You're making a tech company but you don't understand the basics of how the product is made.. So, you own a furniture making company and you don't understand what glue, oak, and lathes are..? Fail. That's my real life experience and opinions regarding agile. I've tossed away all the agile stuff for a new project I'm doing and like the poster says, it's all based on common sense. You can run your company or project any way you want. I have friends that have millions in revenue every year with their small shops and they don't do any agile stuff. Yet they're one of the leaders in their space and when my friend, the engineer ceo, told me "we have no iterations or deadlines except when it has to be done by", that was a big wakeup. I was thinking "THAT'S how I want to do things". So, it _can_ be done. Good luck. :) ~~~ ArtB > full stack responsibility. You own the task front (js/html) to back (db), > including testing. Unless you are 1337 with all of those you end up with silos instead of properly defined layers and reusable code. > Another huge, HUGE thing is to get the fucking mba management types out of > the office. Can't stress this enough: if you can't code, you don't belong. Awesome, I'll get around to telling my boss that, the very same one that hired me. ------ cletus I'm surprised no one has brought up Steve Yegge's _Good Agile, Bad Agile_ [1], which speaks well to both Google culture and scaling (good) Agile. One of the comments on that post mentions it. It's worth reading (and being Yegge, that'll take awhile). Agile is like anything else: some well-meaning (and arguably useful) principles that get warped by bad managers and bad companies. The natural evolution for any such idea is to turn it into an industry and there are any number of people who are willing to sell you training, lectures, books and programs for Agile (with a capital-A). You need to separate the industry from the idea. [1]: [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad- agile...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad- agile_27.html) ~~~ davesims Exactly. And note the date: 6 years ago. I think the collective wisdom has been acquired. The IT community needs to name it in a way that makes these lessons learned common enough that the next time someone is burned by Bad Agile, they won't rewrite one more iteration of this same post. ------ mseebach It's useful to distinguish big-A and small-A agile. Big-A Agile is a management buzzword, something you can become certified in and certainly a scam. Small-a agile is a number of mostly common sense principles on how to approach process. It is emphatically not the process itself. While it cannot be meaningfully certified, it can be taught and learned. Someone else linked to the agile manifesto. I'm just gonna go out on a limb and paste the punchline: _Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan_ ~~~ MrKurtHaeusler I haven't heard that argument before. Interesting. For me, big-A Agile refers to the Agile Manifesto for Software Development, and is the Agile that people are talking about in posts like this. It may be a software development buzzword, and yes there are certifications and they are scams, but I find the values and principles in the Agile Manifesto to be fairly sound and relevant within the context they were first produced in, as basically a reaction to waterfall in larger companies developing business software with average developers. Small a agile is an English word meaning quick or flexible or something. I am not saying I am right and you are wrong, just that is how I have usually thought about it. ~~~ mseebach You can't "be" big-A Agile, it's a tool set or a check-list - but you can (and should what to) be small-a agile as a development organisation. The reason I make the distinction is that big-A is the quantifiable bit, but you can tick all the boxes and still essentially do waterfall. Conversely, you can be small-a agile without ticking the boxes - agile isn't, and can't be, prescriptive. If the team feels they don't need daily stand-ups, or if they want to sit down (the horror!), there is nothing about being agile that should keep them from doing that. Same goes for tests: You can worship the test coverage number obsessively, but if your assertions are pointless or missing, you won't reap the benefits. Conversely, an agile team can decide to forego tests if that's the right thing. ------ hpaavola The problem with these "only good programmers will create good products so stop with the Scrum already" rants is that in real life we have more than enough mediocre engineers and we just have to come up with best possible products with those. I work as a quality assurance consultant. Usually companies buy my services when everything is messed up. Now if I try to solve their problems by saying "hire better engineers", nothing gets fixed. Nothing gets fixed because there is only so many good engineers available and the company usually don't have enough money to hire him/her. But if I teach them to follow Scrum, it is really easy to add code reviews, testing (unit and functional), planned releases, etc. It could be argued that one does not need Scrum to get those done or that it does not matter since team of better engineers will at some point do better job. But have problems in our hands right now and those must be fixed yesterday. So until some other methodology than Scrum get popular enough, we'll use that. So in real life Scrum makes getting the best out of normal team so much easier. Sure there are always rockstars who don't need any process, but in reality you, me and most of us, are all pretty dumb and just have to live with the fact. ~~~ brazzy The other problem is that the people who write those rants are probably not half as good as they think they are. ------ S_A_P In the last few companies I have worked for, Agile was not lightweight, and became a significant hindrance to productivity. In fact, there was an "Agile consultant" brought in to make us more agile at one company I worked for. He ended up making our process 3-4x more convoluted and process intensive. He also succeeded in making the work not fun anymore. In my last job, "Scrum" meetings could take 30 minutes or more on many occasions, and our "sprints" would regularly change scope or be canceled mid way through. I know that isnt Agile, but the problem is that many managers(and apparently consultants) think that _is_ the way to do it. In my opinion, work getting done is not because you implement a process or methodology. Work gets done when you have a good team in place and trust them to do their job. Many companies seem to think that they can promote a non technical person to manage a development team. The problem with this is that they have no idea how software is built so implementing a methodology that promises consistent results no matter what the inputs are seems reasonable to them. I am by no means representative of anyone other than myself, but I find I am most productive when a) I know the problem domain inside and out b) I am given some leeway with architecture and design c) I am not bogged down in process. As projects get larger, its not as easy to allow for those conditions, so getting smart people on board is imperative. Agile should allow for managers to get some transparency and a view into the process, but little more... ------ sambeau Agile and Scrum have some good things going for them. They teach developers that building things is always an iterative process. A well designed product will still require incremental on-the-fly improvements to get it right just as code does. Sometimes a design will require a refactor just as code does. Needing a 'complete' design doc before building a product is a fallacy. They teach project managers that if they just let the designers and developers get on with it they can usually self-organise and manage their time better than if done top-down by a non-technical outsider. They teach producers and 'product owners' that constant interference can be detrimental to a production process. Developers should be allowed to develop. Best of all if done right they allow everyone scope to make mistakes yet still fix them and good mistakes that they can try out and keep. However, there are downsides: scrum has no role for designers in the day-to- day production. Either they are pushed to the role of product manager or they have to work independently a sprint ahead. An ideal system would put the designers into the heart of the scrum team. Top-down scrum is where it all goes badly wrong: producers and managers insisting that designs are complete before a line of code is created, managers taking the role of scrum-master, sprints being nothing more than waterfall milestones etc. ------ creigh Let me say this. I have found scrum in particular to be used as a management tool (report back tool), and not a developer tool. It doesn't matter where i go. It starts with the greatest of intentions, and ends up where management are sticking there fingers in the pie half way through. And by that I mean they don't use priorities on the backlog to manage the process. They use the standup meetings as a moan session when things don't go there way. To me scrum in its purest form is where the developer drives the process. Most projects will perform better if they just let them do that. ~~~ rbanffy Agile _is_ a management tool. It helps manage developer time, feature bloat, organizational blocks, communication overheads and user expectations. It also helps you measure performance and identify bottlenecks in your own process. Like other comment said, it helps getting a couple things done instead of having a huge pile of stuff half done. ~~~ creigh Look at what Agile is promising to fix. The development process not the management process. Semantics aside, I like everything you said, except to say that either the line manager is doing those things, or 'it' (scrum) is doing those things. ~~~ rbanffy Managing the things I mentioned fixes a lot of problems common to broken development processes. [Insert your agile method here] provides a useful framework upon which to build a working development process. ------ peteretep This is a terrible, polemic and content-free post. Please stop submitting stuff like this. ~~~ zedshaw So is your comment, please stop making them. ------ rickmb This kind of somewhat understandable but ultimately clueless ranting just tells me one thing: no way in hell I'm ever going to trust a programmer who cannot (or can not be bothered to) distinguish between marketing bullshit and the real thing. This kind of attitude will show up in other matters, most importantly understanding what actually needs to be developed, what the priorities are and why they are important. I'm surprised how many people here seem to be ignorant of Agile. Take for instance the certification scam accusation that is liberally thrown about: only Scrum has certification, and even that has always been controversial. As far as I know, no other Agile flavor tries to sell certification. But even so, Red Hat sells certification, does that make Red Hat Linux a scam? There are scammers and greedy consultants in every area of IT. None of that has fuck all to do with Agile in particular. So why are people so hell bent on using this against Agile? ------ roguecoder How well a team works together depends on far more than how smart the component engineers are. One clever engineer may be sufficient for a Suduku problem, but it is a matter of scale. This fellow is basically arguing that we don't need government because people get along just fine on their own. Which is absolutely true on an individual scale, and not at all true as soon as two people live next door to one another. In my experience 90% of software problems are social problems. He seems to care only about technical problems, and assumes those are solved by the magic of intelligence. I believe that if you can not explain to someone else how to do what you do, you aren't actually a master of your craft. Appeals to hire smarter coders sound incredibly hollow unless they are accompanied by techniques to make the average coder smarter. There are much better critiques of Agile out there, mostly having to do with how it has been sold. I'm not sure what he thinks he is contributing to the discussion. Any process can be harmful. It can also be incredibly useful, and the lack of process is at least as harmful as process applied badly. I recommend the book "The Checklist Manifestos" for examples. It proposes that the goal of process is to handle routine complexity and make cooperation routine, leaving human attention and effort free to focus on the actual hard problems. ------ bitwize No. Process is important; it's necessary. There are at least two prongs to this problem: one is you can't manage what you don't measure, and process gives you a way of tracking functionality implemented, defects, defects resolved, etc. There's nothing inherent to programming that gives your manager or your team any sort of knowledge about how far along you are, or just as importantly, when you will be done. You can hack all you like and -- even if your code is visible to all -- there's no way of guessing how far along you are, or if that needs-to-be-fixed-yesterday bug is close to resolution. The other prong to this problem is you can't remember what you don't record. Well, _you_ may have an eidetic memory, but unless the _company_ generates deliverables besides code that explain what the code does or is supposed to do, a change in team X years down the line may mean the company forgets why Joe wrote the widget wrangler in the way that he did, and accordingly the widget wrangling module becomes an unmaintainable black box. Generating these deliverables is a part of the software process, whether Agile or otherwise. And there will _always_ be a process. This arises simply as a consequence of the fact that management needs to know how well you're doing, and if you're performing in a cost-effective manner, to many decimal places of precision. And if the process isn't agile, it could be something far less pleasant. Agile Processes (big A) may sound scammy to you, like their proponents are trying to sell back to you shit you already know. But you only know that shit because you're a software developer. Management can't do what you do, and they're the target audience of Agile Processes like Scrum and XP. It gives them a ready-made Industry Best Practice that they can decide with confidence to adopt company-wide, with little perceived risk because it's so proven and widespread. Compare and contrast with the success of the "open source" meme in convincing companies to adopt, and participate in, free software. ~~~ super_mario No, it's even worse. You can't manage what you can't measure. And so far no one has found a metric to measure creative output like painting, writing poetry or writing software. Whatever metric you choose to measure and evaluate your team, and esp. what ever metric you reward is going to lead your team optimizing their performance for that metric. You want to measure LOC, programmers WILL write more lines. Want to measure and reward less defects, programmers WILL create less defects etc. But will your software be sexy, appealing to users, creative, innovative, trend setting solution to old/new problem? ~~~ SideburnsOfDoom > And so far no one has found a metric to measure ... writing software How about ... * Number of new features delivered per week (and size of said features) * Number of new users per week * Number of page views per day They're fuzzy metrics at best, but saying "writing software can't be measured" is just defeatism. It's not fine art, it's not a Jackson Pollock painting, it's a craft. It has utility. We can get a grasp on that. Even the pretty bits are ultimately there to make it more useful to people. ~~~ super_mario That's even more nebulous. Yes, those things are perfectly measurable, but how do you translate x number of new users per week into code? Isn't that what software development is all about. It's about collapsing this cloud of uncertainty into concrete deterministic expression a.k.a code, which only solves the problem as you understand it. If software development were that measurable, software developers would be as well paid as CEOs or sales people. But we are not. Because there is no way to demonstrate almost any relationship between what we do on daily basis (stare at screen and type on the keyboard as management often sees it) and sales and revenue. Some places go as far as to think of their development organization as overhead, a cost center. ------ vannevar _Process is, actually, just tax. If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your project._ Discipline is just a tax. If you need to structure and test your code, then you're a mediocre coder at best, and so is your work and project. Just write whatever you feel like, it'll turn out ok. You're awesome, how could you possibly code anything less than exactly what the client wants? Nonsense. Agile is a discipline, just like properly structuring your code and testing it. It's discipline at a macro scale, on the team, rather than the individual programmer. You might argue over whether its specific practices are better or worse than other methods, but arguing against _any_ development process at all is absurd. ------ lmkg The problem with Agile development is the same problem that has affected many modern revolutions: The revolution _against_ the current ruling class gets co- opted _by_ the current ruling class[1]. The revolution then ends up changing nothing more meaningful than the colors on the flag. Agile was supposed to help developers escape the obstacles of poor management and poor managers. It's really about developers owning the development of the software, and being given more creative authority. Non-developers play a support role, if they're present at all. That part is all fine and dandy, and it's The Good Part® of agile. Let the guys who make software be responsible for making software. Brilliant! Managers, of course, don't want to get marginalized. If they see a movement towards Agile, they would rather bring it in themselves, so that they can control how it's implemented. And they implement it in a way that a) fits their existing biases about software development b) doesn't marginalize themselves[2]. Both of those goals are met by taking the agile process, and turning into The Agile Process (engraved on stone tablets, up on a pedestal). Agile should be _less process_ , but when the transition is implemented by _process guys_ , it just ends up being _different process_ rather than less. And naturally, the one role in agile that ex-managers can step into (aforementioned support role) is more important in this set-up, because it's about owning and managing the process. So the revolution happens, and nothing changes. Instead of developers having more freedom, the old managers just have a new title. That title still comes with the authority to make developers fall in line, except that "in line" now refers to a different set-in-stone collection of steps and rules. tl;dr Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. [1] I'd rather not derail this thread into history and politics so I'm avoiding details. [2] b) is actually a subset of a). One of management's existing biases is that management and process is an important part of software development. This isn't a knock of managers; everyone thinks the same about themselves. Hell, Agile itself basically originates from developers having the same bias. They just happen to be more correct ;). ------ benohear "Agile is not a silver bullet" is more to the point, and applying it dogmatically can counterproductive. But regular communication, short, well defined sprints and a prioritized backlog available to all can do wonders in terms of getting a small amount of stuff done rather than a large amount half done. ~~~ crudolph Agree with this 100%. Transparency and communication are key when you have more than one or two people on a team. ------ PaulHoule Well, agile and TDD (not necessarily together) are good for two kinds of projects. (1) If you're building simple web apps for small town clients in a framework like RoR, you can break things into little tasks and estimate with laser-like accuracy. This fits in great with an agile methodology (2) If you're writing security-sensitive string parsing code or any algorithms with tricky components, TDD is a big win. When I was in grad school I converted a very slow program for solving a quantum system (worked for N=5) into a very fast program (worked for N=64) by building very detailed test scaffolding. I don't know if I could have built the fast but complicated app without the tests. Now, I've got another app where I almost want to use TDD but I'd wind up building a whole Potempkin village of mock objects and I just can't bear the line count I'd need to first write it all, find bugs in, and then maintain. ~~~ Xylakant You're wrong on both accounts: (1) Being able to estimate with laser-like accuracy is not part of what's agile. Estimation is not part of the agile manifesto at all - Kanban for example can be done without a single estimate. It just limits the number of tasks that you have in parallel. Scrum on the other hand does deal with estimates, but it mainly postulates that you can't estimate large chunks of work at all and small chunks not necessarily correct. So there are all kinds of observed correction metrics built in that help you to get a better estimate - no one vouches for a correct one though. (2) If you can't use TDD because you have to build a whole set of mock object you might have a tightly coupled system. Writing a test is not dead line count, it helps to formulate boundary conditions and expected behavior. It's certainly not useful for all kinds of project but it's certainly not limited to security sensitive or tricky algorithms. If the behavior is simple, then the test is simple as well. If the behavior is complicated, then the test will be as well - but at least you'll think about how it is supposed to be. ~~~ PaulHoule My own "agile" process for certain kinds of development involves breaking down all tasks to less than an hour and estimating time to 10 minute granularity and planning on weekly releases. For boring web apps built on the right framework I find this keeps everybody very happy. Devs aren't chasing their tails, you can make and keep promises to the client, etc. Of course you've got to be building the kind of app where there aren't surprises, but those exist. As for the other project, the whole thing is a machine where you put a 600 million fact knowledge base in one end and it manufactures 'potempkin villages' (little knowledge bubbles about particular domains w.r.t a point of view) on the other end. Once it's done, I could use it to generate micro test cases for the rest of the system, but in the short term that doesn't bring in revenue or delight customers. ------ ilaksh I dunno. In a way I think he is right in some ways in that most of the times people say they are doing agile or scrum it is a sham and they are not really doing agile and also it generally doesn't tell you much about how well they work. Also I think that process can very easily get in the way. I was actually thinking maybe things would work better for small teams if you just handled everything in a group chat room with a history like campfire. But I still have hope that someday I'm actually going to use TDD for a project and then have way fewer regressions to deal with. Still haven't had the discipline I guess to really learn and apply TDD after all these years although I have sort of done it a little a few times. And also a few other things like short iterations and getting the simplest useful software going which I always thought were part of agile, those things help. Although it has always been a battle for me to get managers or even users to stop adding features and do an initial release so I haven't been very successful in that aspect. I don't know if the quality the individuals on the team is everything but it is a good point that it is probably more important than anything. I also would really like to believe that having a real QA team as part of the process would improve things, although I have never had that luxury either so it may be a false hope. But that would be something in the process category. ------ elmomalmo An agile process isn't just there to manage the developers, it's there to engage and manage the customer as well. In my experience, customers rarely know exactly what they want out of a software project, large or small. Complicated documents, produced up front get ignored because of TL;DR and projects start on faulty specifications that describe a solution to illusory requirements. So, inevitably, there will be a disparity between documented requirements and the desired outcome. Iterative delivery - a key feature of agile as I have experienced it - gives the customer multiple chances to try-out and feedback on working software along the way. Furthermore, by making the customer part of the solution early they are as instrumental as the implementers in ensuring the validity of the software and - therefore - the success of the project. Incidentally, I think this is why many customers (internal and external) are suspicious of and hesitant to engage in a truly agile process. That is, they would become equally liable for the success of the project because of the decisions they are required to make. They are part of the solution and therefore potentially party to the blame for any failures. It's much safer for them to be more likely to fail and avoid the blame than it is to risk complicity in a failure, however less likely that failure might be as a result of the process. What agile does that the author missed (or at least declined to mention) is that it gives a name to and formalises an approach that attempts to manage the customer as well as the implementers. It compensates for the fact that customers can't always be expected to fully understand their own requirements and for the inevitability that they change their minds. ------ DanielBMarkham [Obligatory plug and disclaimer: Agile professional who wrote an earlier rant "Agile Ruined my Life" [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile- ruined-...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/09/agile-ruined- my.php) Also I am writing some practical how-to Agile e-books trying to undo some of the damage: <http://tiny-giant-books.com/scrummaster.htm> ] Just differentiate between what Agile is and how people are pushing Agile on you. Different things entirely. Agile is best practices around iterative and incremental development. Period. Yes, there's a manifesto and there's Scrum and all sorts of other things, but at the end of the day Agile is a marketing term. A place to go find out what people are trying in order to get better. Two secrets here. One, team success is about 90% dependent on who is on the team. Good teams do well. Bad teams do poorly. But if you're going to have more than one team, you need some way to measure and talk about what they are doing, so you have to have _something_. Agile -- when done correctly -- is just the minimum amount of _something_ you need to get your work done. It is the minimum amount of process. After all, it's not like you can have no process at all. Whatever you're doing already is a process. I've seen hundreds of teams struggle with Agile, and to me the problem is that we do a really bad job of balancing the difference between "here's a best practice that worked awesome for about 80% of the teams that tried it" and "These are the rules. You must do this." In many shops, Agile is just another way of micro-managing teams, sadly. I can't help that. I also can't help the fact that lots of folks are out to make a buck on certifications and such. I don't think that makes Agile bad. Heck, I'm not even against certifications, although I'd never get one. I just think we take things too far. I like the idea of having a marketing blurb "Agile" where I can go to find out what kinds of new stuff is being done. It helps me pick better reading material. The second secret is that most teams, frankly, are not that good. So you need some kind of way to demonstrate that as well. Making things incrementally and in small iterations lets you see how bad teams are early on. You fail early and often. Then at least you have a bit of a shot at trying to help. But believe me, I feel your pain. Sounds to me like you are a lot more upset at modern marketing and management attitudes than Agile. Remember that we technical folks have a way of over-doing whatever we get into, as I was writing in my blog before your post appeared! (It's still very strange to me watching HN how the same topic comes from multiple writers at the same time) [http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/agile-means-stop-focusing-o...](http://tiny- giant-books.com/blog/agile-means-stop-focusing-on-the-wrong-thing/) ~~~ wpietri Exactly. And this shit makes me furious. I got involved with this stuff before the term "Agile" existed. At the beginning, it was a bunch of professionals (mostly developers) sincerely trying to find better ways of working. Extreme Programming, for example, came to be because the developers were really interested to experiment with how their team got stuff done. It breaks my heart that in the ensuing decade it has turned into exactly the kind of bullshit, top-down, PHB-fluffing idiocy that early agilists were trying to get away from. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, the focus is supposed to be on a) people, b) shipping working software, c) collaboration, and d) being adaptable. That is sure not what it has become. In my view, we made a crucial mistake: we didn't think about money and power enough. Now the Agile industry is 98% selling idiotic certifications and homeopathic doses of process improvement to organizations that don't really want to change anything at all. Mad. It makes me mad. Sorry we screwed it up, everybody. ~~~ __abc The only people that screwed it up are the ones that monetized it. They made it a) rigid based on their definition b) defined themselves as experts in making teams agile based on their rigid definition c) charged for it PS. These same guys, once they couldn't squeeze anymore blood out of the Agile stone, moved onto a new marketing term, "craftsmanship". They now charge the same clients, even more money, to teach them this "new way of doing it ..... right". Plus, they make a mint on the books they hastily write and push out. I eagerly anticipate that successor to Craftsmanship. ~~~ wpietri Depends on who you're talking about here. Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to make the field better. I'm not sure about who's cropped up lately, though. Also, it's very, very rare for somebody to make a mint on a software book. I've talked with a number of authors, and their universal view is that writing code pays much better than writing a book. You do it because you have something to say, not because you want to get rich. ~~~ Silhouette > Bob Martin one of the craftsmanship people, is very sincere in his desire to > make the field better. Unfortunately, you can be totally sincere in your good intentions, and yet still repeatedly be wrong. When you are a high profile figure who presumes to advise others on the best ways to do their job, that makes you a liability. It's a shame. Some of Bob Martin's earlier work exploring OO and the SOLID principles was quite decent stuff. But I think it's obvious at this point that he and several of his colleagues at Object Mentor have collectively lost the plot. ~~~ wpietri Could be. I guess I'm not aware of the repeated wrongness on ObjectMentor's part. Got links? The big problems I saw, though, came from people who weren't particularly sincere. They were happy to sell whatever large companies were buying. E.g., two-day "Scrum Master" courses and a splash of Agile holy water to bless whatever top-down idiocy a company was already engaging in. ~~~ Silhouette At this point, a comprehensive critique of Object Mentor would be more a case of writing a book than posting a few links. However, in the interests of not attacking them completely without justification: \- Object Mentor are big advocates of XP. The _fundamental principle_ of XP is that a certain practice is good, then doing more of it must be better. There is no logic in that position at all, and it doesn't stand up to even cursory criticism. Moreover, if XP is as superior to other processes as the typical advocacy quotes and statistics imply, how come organisations using XP aren't consistently reporting dramatically better measurable results and how come so few software development groups have chosen to adopt it? Sooner or later, people notice that the emperor has no clothes. (I suspect this is why we now have Software Craftsmanship: it's a new positive-sounding but conveniently meaningless marketing term to pitch to clients.) \- Bob Martin has repeatedly stated that anyone who doesn't do TDD is unprofessional. Safety-critical software is typically not developed using TDD; in fact, formal methods, BUFD, and other very much not Agile processes are often used in such fields. \- Michael Feathers redefined the term "legacy code" in terms of unit tests. There are decades of research studying what actually causes a project to decay to the point that it is difficult to maintain and update. To my knowledge, a lack of unit tests has not yet been cited as a causal factor by any paper on the subject. (FWIW, I do think Feathers' book on the subject offered some interesting and worthwhile ideas, I just don't accept his premise that having unit tests is what defines whether code is legacy or not for practical maintenance/project management purposes. I think when you try to co-opt an ill-defined but commonly understood term and give it a formal definition that is very different to the mainstream concept, you lose some credibility.) \- Brett Schuchert, a man writing a book on C++, managed to make "Hello, world" take five source files and a makefile totalling nearly 100 lines, using TDD of course. \- Ron Jeffries. Sudoku. Probably enough said. TDD is not an alternative to understanding the problem and how you're going to solve it. \- From a post on the Object Mentor blog, Brett Schuchert apparently advocates pair programming based on a 1975 study of something involving two-person teams, a ten-year-old study of university students, and a couple of links to secondary sources. The original research for almost every one of the primary sources he appeals to either directly or indirectly is no longer available at the cited links less than 18 months later. \- Bob Martin thinks there are no more new kinds of programming language left to find. That's roughly on par with equating Haskell and Brainfuck because they're both Turing complete, and shows a complete lack of awareness of the state of the art. \- When it comes to the amount of up-front design and formal architecture that makes sense for a project, the amount of retconning in recent comments from the TDD guys is laughable. There was a particular interview featuring Bob Martin and Jim Coplien a couple of years back that was almost painful to watch. I could go on, but if that lot doesn't paint a clear enough picture for anyone reading this, I don't have a powerful enough Kool-Aid antidote to help them. I do agree with you about the insincerity. That's worse in theory, but unfortunately it's probably no less damaging in practice. Edit: Here are few links to support some of the points above. <http://www.infoq.com/interviews/coplien-martin-tdd> [http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/bobs-last- lang...](http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/bobs-last-language) [http://ravimohan.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/learning-from- sudoku...](http://ravimohan.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku- solvers.html) <http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/Tdd.HelloWorld.Cpp> [http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2010/11/09/info- please...](http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2010/11/09/info-please-tdd- and-pair-programming) ~~~ wpietri You start out with a giant misunderstanding, which makes it hard for me to take the rest of your complaints seriously. Extreme Programming is not an arbitrary desire to turn all the knobs you can find to 11. It started as a question: what happens if we take certain practices that are good and do them more intensely? E.g. if some testing is good, what if we test pretty much everything? That team found that they really liked turning particular practices way up. But you can't turn all the knobs up, so you are implicitly turning others down. E.g., if you turn up iteration speed, then you are turning down the sort of heavyweight waterfall requirements process ubiquitous at the time. So the "extreme" was a way to explore the space of possible processes, not any sort of fundamental principle. Teams trying XP are explicitly encouraged to experiment similarly. I sure have; the process we use is derived from XP but departs from it in a number of areas. I think a lot of the rest of your points are similar misunderstandings along with some cherry picking. E.g., the OM blog post on pairing. He said that people sometimes asked him for basic background materials, so he posted some links. To go from that to "Brett Schuchert apparently advocates pair programming based on.." is either very poor reading comprehension or the act of somebody with an axe to grind. As to not doing TDD being unprofessional, I'd generally agree. I tried TDD first in 2001, and have worked on a number of code bases since. For any significant code base that's meant to last and be maintainable, I think it's irresponsible to not have a good unit test suite. I also think there's no more efficient way to get a solid suite than TDD. If you (or anybody) wants to discuss this further, probably better to email me; that's easy to find from my profile. ~~~ Silhouette _Extreme Programming is not an arbitrary desire to turn all the knobs you can find to 11. It started as a question: what happens if we take certain practices that are good and do them more intensely? E.g. if some testing is good, what if we test pretty much everything? That team found that they really liked turning particular practices way up._ Well, of course they're entitled to their opinion, but that's all it is: an opinion. An argument that if some testing is good then test-driving everything must be better, or that if code review is good then full-time review via pair programming must be better, has no basis in logic. And those kinds of arguments go right back to the original book by Kent Beck, and they have been propagated by the XP consultancy crowd from the top right on down ever since. IMHO, if a trainer is going to go around telling people that if they don't program a certain way then they are _unprofessional_ , then that trainer had better have rock solid empirical data to back up his position. Maybe as you say, I do have a giant misunderstanding, and in fact Object Mentor do make their case based on robust evidence rather than the sort of illogical arguments I've mentioned. In that case, I assume you can cite plenty of examples of this evidence-based approach in their published work, so we can all see it for ourselves. Go ahead; I'll wait. _I think a lot of the rest of your points are similar misunderstandings along with some cherry picking. E.g., the OM blog post on pairing. He said that people sometimes asked him for basic background materials, so he posted some links. To go from that to "Brett Schuchert apparently advocates pair programming based on.." is either very poor reading comprehension or the act of somebody with an axe to grind._ This is a consultant who presumes to tell others how to do their job, openly posting asking for any source material from others to back up his predetermined position, and then claiming in almost the very next sentence to favour material based on research or experience. He says that the links he gave (the ones where much of the original research is either clearly based on flawed-at-best methodologies or simply not there at all any more) are things he often cites. And he gives no indication, either in that post or anywhere else that I have seen, of having any library of other links to reports of properly conducted studies that support his position. I don't think criticism based on this kind of post is cherry-picking at all, but of course if it is then again you should have no difficulty citing lots of other material from the same consultant that is of better quality and supported by more robust evidence, to demonstrate how the post I picked on was an outlier. The same goes for any of my other points. If you think I'm cherry-picking, all you have to do to prove it is give a few other examples that refute my point and show that the case I picked on was the exception and not the rule. If you can't do that -- and whether or not you choose to continue the debate here, _you_ know whether you can do that -- then I think you have to accept that I'm not really cherry-picking at all. _As to not doing TDD being unprofessional, I'd generally agree. I tried TDD first in 2001, and have worked on a number of code bases since. For any significant code base that's meant to last and be maintainable, I think it's irresponsible to not have a good unit test suite. I also think there's no more efficient way to get a solid suite than TDD._ Please note that I'm not disputing that an automated unit test suite can be a useful tool. On the contrary, in many contexts I think unit testing is valuable, and I _have_ seen plenty of research that support such a conclusion more widely than my inevitably limited personal experience. On the other hand, I don't accept your premise about TDD. For one thing, TDD implies a lot more than merely the creation of unit tests. Among other things, I've worked on projects where bugs really could result in very bad things happening. You don't build that sort of software by trial and error. You have a very clear statement of requirements before you start, and you have a rigorous change request process if those requirements need to be updated over time. You might have formal models of your entire system, in which case you analyse your requirements and determine how to meet them at that level before you even start writing code. At the very least, you probably have your data structures and algorithms worked out in advance, and you get them peer reviewed, possibly by several reviewers looking from different perspectives. Your quality processes probably do involve some sort of formal code review and/or active walkthrough after the code is done, too. If you came into an environment like that, and claimed that the only "professional" thing to do was to skip all that formal specification and up- front design and systematic modelling and structured peer review, and instead to make up a few test cases as you went along and trust that your code was OK as long as it passed them all, you would be laughed out of the building five minutes later. If you suggested that working in real time with one other developer was a substitute for independent peer review at a distance, they'd just chuck you right out the window to save time. TDD is not an alternative to understanding the underlying problem you're trying to solve and knowing how to solve it. A test suite is not a substitute for a specification. Pair programming is not a substitute for formal peer review. They never have been, and they never can be. I haven't gone into it here, but of course there are other areas where TDD simply doesn't work either. Unit testing is at its best when you're working with pure code and discrete inputs and outputs. It's much harder to TDD an algorithm with a continuous input and/or output space. Tell me, how would you test-drive a medical rendering system, which accepts data from a scanner and is required to display a 3D visualisation of parts of a human body based on the readings? Even if this particular example weren't potentially safety- critical, how would you even start to test-drive code where the input consists of thousands of data points, the processing consists of running complex algorithms to compute many more pieces of data, and the observable output is a visualisation of that computed data that varies in real time as the operator moves their "camera" around? _If you (or anybody) wants to discuss this further, probably better to email me; that's easy to find from my profile._ I appreciate the offer, but I prefer to keep debates that start on a public forum out in the open. That way everyone reading can examine any evidence provided for themselves and draw their own conclusions about which positions stand up to scrutiny. ~~~ wpietri _An argument that if some testing is good then test-driving everything must be better, or that if code review is good then full-time review via pair programming must be better, has no basis in logic._ That's not the argument at all. That is, as I just said, the reason they decided to _try_ that. Their reasons for continuing to do it and further to recommend it are entirely different. _[...] better have rock solid empirical data [...]_ You do realize that almost everything that goes on in the industry is not based on rock-solid empirical evidence, right? And also, that you're privileging an arbitrary historical accident by saying that new thing X has to have evidence when the common practice doesn't? _If you came into an environment like that, and only "professional" thing to do was to [...] make up a few test cases as you went along and trust that your code was OK [...]_ That is not something I have ever heard any Object Mentor person say, and it's not something I said. It's so far from what I've ever heard somebody like Bob Martin or Kent Beck say that your misunderstanding is so dramatic that I have a hard time believing it's not willful. _I prefer to keep debates that start on a public forum out in the open._ Well, I'm not trying to have a debate. If you'd like to have one, you'll have to do it without me. ~~~ Silhouette _Their reasons for continuing to do it and further to recommend it are entirely different._ So you keep saying. The problem is, almost everything Object Mentor advocate does seem to be based on some combination of their personal experience and pure faith. I object to someone telling me that my colleagues and I are "unprofessional" because we happen to believe differently, particularly when we _do_ have measurable data that shows our performance is significantly better than the industry average. _You do realize that almost everything that goes on in the industry is not based on rock-solid empirical evidence, right?_ That may be so, but most people in the industry aren't telling me how to do my job, and insulting me for not believing the same things they do. _That is not something I have ever heard any Object Mentor person say, and it's not something I said._ Good for you. XP consultants have been making essentially that argument, in public, for many years. TDD without any planning ahead is inherently a trial- and-error approach, which fails spectacularly in the absence of understanding as Jeffries so wonderfully demonstrated. Plenty of consultants -- including some of those from Object Mentor -- have given various arbitrary amounts of time they think you should spend on forward planning before you dive into TDD and writing real code, and often those periods have been as short as half an hour. You may choose not to believe that if you wish. I'm not sure even they really believe it any more, as they've backpeddled and weasel-worded and retconned that whole issue repeatedly in their recent work. But I've read the articles and watched the videos and sat in the conference presentations and heard them make an argument with literally no more substance than what I wrote there. You keep saying that I'm misunderstanding or cherry-picking evidence. Perhaps that is so and I really am missing something important in this whole discussion. However, as far as I can see, throughout this entire thread you haven't actually provided a single counterexample or alternative interpretation of the advice that consultants like those at Object Mentor routinely and publicly give. You're just saying I'm wrong, because, and there's not really anything I can say to answer that. ~~~ wpietri That's because you're trying to have a debate with the Object Mentor guys rather than a discussion with me. Your problem with them isn't my problem, and neither are your misunderstandings. It is not my job to argue you into a better understanding of something you clearly can't stand. ------ kevinpet Just because something doesn't have a name and isn't written down anywhere doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you don't like agile, it doesn't mean you have no process. It just means you are following another process. Assuming you have a project that actually involves interacting with multiple programmers, your ability to interact with them is a key part of getting the job done. If you're a lone cowboy doing it all alone, then good for you, but please state that upfront in your blog posts about how the software world is doing it wrong so we know you are evaluating things from a very unusual position. If you aren't a sole programmer, then you've got a process. Maybe it's better than agile processes. If so, please, tell us what that process it. This whole article reads like a racecar driver dismissing automotive technology because the only thing that matters is the skill of the driver. ------ mattdeboard The world is full of mediocre programmers, and in each cluster of mediocre programmers you'll find that they're surrounding much better programmers. Ergo, since mediocre programmers exist, agile isn't a sham, and is necessary. QED ~~~ hack_edu The notion that some 'good,' 'quality,' or 'talented' programmer is somehow entirely autonomous is entirely a fallacy. I'd trust a team of 'mediocre' programmers that follow process and get it done than place blind trust in a couple cowboys or post-docs who have some claim to genius in a prior life. Sure, some are better than others. But to those who somehow believe that Great Programmers can do anything, get over yourselves. They (read: you) probably aren't nearly as good as you think. ~~~ mattdeboard So aggressive! I'll be the first to proudly proclaim that I know practically nothing, and am a terrible programmer. But I'm not mediocre. Mediocrity == doesn't know how to ask questions, decompose problems, troubleshoot or research. Calm down bud. ------ gnaffle Relevant article: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html> Of course, you need process if you really want to consistently create defect- free software: <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html> ------ shadowmint Direct quote: "Process is, actually, just tax. If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your project." No. Read some history; you'll see the same arguments back years ago about processes being stupid then (80's, 90's) too. I'm willing to accept that perhaps Agile isn't a perfect process, and that agile projects don't always work out. However, process just means that you have a repeatable set of steps for generating a repeatable outcome. It's an absolutely vital part of every industry, from manufacturing to farming to, yes, programming. Everything is a process; TDD is process, writing a plan for your code is process, hell, even just sitting down and hacking away and keeping everything you need in your head is a process. When you have a team that is larger than one person, organizing that team relies on having expectations from each group in the team, and from each person in the group. That's _formalized_ process, and that's what agile is. Summary: Opinion piece, unsubstantiated, no background context. Bleh. ------ talkingtab Thinking is hard. It seems like the cycle is a) someone thinks b) people follow without thinking c) someone realizes that unthinkingly following some process doesn't work so they debunk the theory without thinking. So the question you have to ask yourself before you participate in b) or c) is do you have any idea _why_ or _how_ agile is supposed to help? ------ nefasti Just wasted 5 minutes of my life reading this. save your time. Just a rant with no direct point or constructive thinking. ------ marknutter I view Agile the same way I do P90X, which if you swapped one term for the other this post would probably be just as valid. Yet, I use P90X and get good results. Is it dependent on my motivation and physical abilities? Yes, of course. Will it help an unmotivated person become fit? No, of course not. But what it does give some people is a road map to follow and a process for following it. Much like Agile does. My team is using Agile and it's effective. It's not a silver bullet, but it keeps us on the same page for the most part and it gives the business team goal posts for getting features designed and queued up. If us developers sucked, it probably wouldn't help that. But since we're all decent, motivated workers, it has been going pretty well. So is Agile a sham? Sure, whatever. So is P90X. I'll keep using both, thanks. ------ fredwu I disagree with the author's opinion on processes, and I have put some of my thoughts in a separate entry here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3765693> ------ guynamedloren _See, the thing is, the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow. The success of the non-coding part of a project is dependent on the calibre of your sales/management and how they interact with the customer. If you are trying to prescribe some rigid process, however lean, in order to make that interaction effective, then you have a customer interface problem and process isn’t going to help it._ Couldn't agree more. The only thing I'd like to add is that there also must be a solid interface between sales/management and engineers. Thanks for this. ~~~ vannevar _[T]he success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow._ And the success of an NFL team has nothing to do with process either. It's all the players. That's why they never hold practices or review footage with the coaches. Who needs set plays? Tom Brady just tells Wes Welker to go deep and get open. You guys up front block. That's it. Super Bowl. Process is for losers. ~~~ guynamedloren Programming != football. ~~~ vannevar True, but the argument in favor of process applies equally well to both. ------ Aloisius I've been using scrum for about ten years at several companies. Each time I do it, I explain to everyone that the process has nothing to do with getting people to be more efficient or work harder. It has everything to do with helping me estimate when stuff will get done so that I can let all the dependent parts of the company know well ahead of time. If the work being done doesn't get re-prioritized, I can pretty accurately judge about 3 months out and very accurately judge a month out. That lets the rest of the company plan fundraising, PR, sales, etc. This is where I disagree with the author. You do get fairly predictable output out of a group of engineers _regardless_ of their ability as long as they are consistent in their estimates for how long something will take (it doesn't matter if they over or underestimate, just that they do it consistently). You just won't like the results if they are mediocre. I really want to stress how important the whole self-learning and re- adjustment part of the process is (if someone doesn't scream at least once during a retrospective, they're probably just going through the motions.) While I've run "scrum" for 10 years, the details of how each worked were pretty different depending on the teams involved. That said, I tend to hire self-managing, self-learning engineers which scrum works beautifully for. I also am completely comfortable with delegating away large amounts of authority especially given the type of people I hire. ------ davesims Must be Wednesday. TODO next week: Go collect all of the blog post cycles of "Agile Sucks" -> "No, agile in theory is fine, it's just marketing and implementation that sucks." It's a full-fledged meme at this point. And I think if you distilled all of these posts down to their essence, you'd have a really solid critique and we could build some lessons learned, and the next time someone gets burned by a bad implementation of s/Agile\|XP\|Scrum/ maybe the narrative will change a bit from "Agile sucks" to something more productive, something closer to "there's that Agile execution thing again, and here's what I did about it." Everything OP says is true, Agile is misapplied, overmarketed and badly executed, and much suffering in the name of "Agile" has happened. But we need to change the story now. This same cycle of "sucks" -> "yeah but" is generating more heat than light. Time to reset and redirect our expectations to something productive. "In time there will be a new movement which paints Agile as broken, inefficient and bad and we’ll get a new brand. That’s the kind of iterative development I’m looking forward to; a new target for our collective disdain ;)" Here we've hit on something. On common refrain in anti-Agile screeds is "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." And it's true, but instead of cynically setting us up for some other jaded iteration of Good Process Idea -> Marketing Scam/Bad Implementation -> Backlash, let's distill the lessons learned into something a little more focused and circumspect. Let's not cycle through this again, please. Let's set Agile in its proper place, good stuff, bad stuff, the whole thing. And let's tell the right story that might help us stop looking to things like Agile as the One Best Way to do software and see it as the limited tool it is, dependent on many other concerns, such as quality of developer, product focus, political environment, etc. Agile was a great insight in its time, and I think the time is come for a large-scale retrospective by the community to state the lessons learned. One iteration I would really like to see end is "Agile Sucks" -> "But Not Really". Time to move on to the next level, one that acknowledges Agile's failings but doesn't involve a wholesale scrapping of Agile's important insights. ~~~ willvarfar (blog author) +1 ~~~ davesims Nice, thanks William. ------ darylteo I like to say to people: "Software Engineering is an attempt of turning an art into science". Let's be honest. Software development is an art form. Just like people form groups from quartets to orchestras to make music, so do people form groups of differing skillsets to develop software. That doesn't mean an art is shooting from the hip. There is still tons of practice to be done, and the various skill levels of each individual determines the possibility for success. The problem, then, is that there are not enough Bubles, Joshua Bells, Ashkenazys, etc. around to make all the software in the world. Most companies have to make do with large concentrations of amateurs led by the occasional Bieber/Gaga. So what are all these processes then? They're essentially what companies wish to use to artificially increase their chances of success... However, manufacturing art leads to potential stagnation and also the possibility that every project that follows the same process have the same flaws (like how all pop music nowadays all sound the same). Sadly, it'll take an extremely brave company to get artists to develop their software nowadays. Nowadays, the artists stick to developing their own products =) ~~~ brazzy Let's be honest. Software development is _not_ an art form. That's pretentious bullshit. It may have some creative aspects, but far fewer than it has aspects of craft and, yes, engineering. ~~~ darylteo To each his own =) ------ kevindmorgan Maybe you should go and read this again: <http://agilemanifesto.org/> ------ drewolson _A fun anecdote is to consider the belief the TDD crowd entertained that, by creating tests for a problem you couldn’t solve, you could somehow evolve a code that passed the tests and therefore solved the problem!_ I'm all for a healthy debate of TDD, but the above statement seems ridiculous to me. For me, TDD helps with two main things: \- I specify the behavior I'm adding/changing before I implement it. This helps document the change I believe I'm making. \- I feel more confident when making changes to a large codebase. TDD works for some and not for others. There are very interesting arguments to be had about the subject. However, can we please stop acting as though TDD advocates view their tests as having psuedo-mystical powers to solve problems automatically? ------ pbiggar Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Looking at the collection of things that people refer to as "Agile", some of the practices work for certain teams at certain times. Saying "its all a sham" is as much bullshit as calling Agile a silver bullet that will solve all your woes. (Just because it's not one extreme, doesn't put it at the other). The OP calls out two practices, Scrum and TDD. I've tried "Scrum" at 3 different places, where by "Scrum" they meant "have a stand up meeting". Never worked. For that project! However, TDD has actually been a silver bullet __for some tasks __. And on other tasks it killed my productivity. Basically, stop thinking there are silver bullets, and figure out what works for your team and project. ------ jonstjohn We use agile at my company w/ about 15 employees. We introduced it about two years ago to help focus our development process. Although I know there are some issues with agile, we've fully embraced agile by modifying our process along the way to suit our style. It has worked really well and I wouldn't change it for anything else right now. Does it produce high quality software? I agree that depends on the engineers, but it does produce a predictable process that we all are on board with. That's huge in my eyes. ------ neeleshs To me, agile is essentially common sense. sprints, story cards,scrums are not nonsense, but discipline. I don't care what these are called, but they have served as a good set of tools to bring in discipline to the team. It helps a lot, when your team is not full of self-driven, talented developers. While that may point to an issue in hiring, we all know how difficult it is to hire and retail such people. ------ Uchikoma Not sure where the poster comes from. (The poster seems to confuse Agile in "Agile is a Sham" and the Agile "industry". I can't talk about the Agile "industry" as I'm no part of it or have no contact to it, so I will concentrate on the "Agile is a Sham" part) After introducing Agile/Scrum in 3 companies over the last 10 years, not as a consultant but as a permanent employee, I'd think it has been a success three times. Measuring success with two metrics: Predictable, ongoing results and developer happiness. Developer happiness in agile usually comes from calming down the fury of requirements and wished for features. Sprints do enable developers to focus for 2-3 weeks on one topic instead of being pushed to the most urgent topic of the day by management. Happiness also comes from communicating and working and feeling as a team. I assume the poster has - if he has - a different agile experience. Perhaps he's not a team person or uncomfortable with coordinating and working with others. 10% of the developers I've worked with just don't feel right with agile, it's not their thing. They should not try to adapt to agile from my experience, as it does not work. Better to find a non agile environment that does work for them. From asking developers after agile introductions we had >90% approval rates on the question "Would you like to go back before agile?" and "Would you like to have a different development model?" Scrum in particular is different from, e.g. XP. It focuses on process and - deliberately - says nothing about engineering practices or craftmanship. Coders are free to chose those for themselves. Some struggle on this or think they don't need to have them just because Scrum doesn't prescribe those. Some think Scrum is sh* as it does not talk about engineering practices or developer quality. But this is intentional. Scrum will not make development "work" with bad developers. But it will make good developers work smoother together and make them - if they are team people - more happy from my experience. One final note: Some people here agree that Agile is a Sham and does not work, then citing examples of managers/scrum masters that deliberately did not follow Scrum. Following Aristotelian logic at least this does not make sense. A final final note: I got a very fine and tasty chocolate cake from my current team for birthday, so I might not be doing things that wrong ;-) ------ helmut_hed Agile may well be a sham, but this statement: _the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow._ seems to me obviously untrue, for >3 engineers, and the larger that count gets, the more process you need. As an engineer I find that statement very appealing, but experience suggests it's off base. ------ damian2000 "thats SCRUM and TDD and all the rest; it is all those new ways of managing development projects" TDD is a style of developing and nothing to do with management. Anyone who has worked on something more than a trivial size app knows how useful having a decent set of automated unit tests are. Anyone who dismisses this as a "management scam" is fooling only themself. ~~~ willvarfar I'm glad you parsed the first line... now please read the rest of the article ;) ------ super_mario That should be clear to anyone that has even a little mathematical/computer science training. Anyone that says you can follow some process to ensure success is effectively telling you they have implemented artificial intelligence that simulates a production line designer and to be able to do it by using humans pushing bits of paper around as their computer. ~~~ peteretep > Anyone that says you can follow some process to ensure success I'm going to argue this on both of its implications. Firstly: Agile is not about ensuring success. It's about greatly increasing the chances of success, and minimizing failure from fallout. No amount of process will rescue you from truly dreadful technical team, but so what? Plenty of processes will almost guarantee failure with the best tech team and will in the world. I'm going to go for the assumption that you knew that already, though, and are attacking the idea that a management-related solution can help in the solving of technical-related problems. Take a look at a modern hospital, and you will see layer upon layer of 'management' solutions to support medical problems. Prescriptions are checked by the doctor, checked by the pharmacist, and then checked by the nurse. Do hospitals throw these rules away with sufficiently good doctors? No. Do hospitals do this because they think their doctors are shit? No. Agile can be a highly effective management solution for supporting technical development. I know this because it has been for me, on many occasions, with many different teams, in many different settings. I've also seen it badly implemented to the point where it's an impediment to teams, but ... so what? That's a risk with any process. ~~~ super_mario Agile and other processes go much much further than your contrived example of checks and balances in a typical hospital. It would be like hospital directly interfering into the daily doctor/patient interaction or say stipulating that no surgery can be longer than 2 hours. You want to do 9 hour heart transplant surgery. Sorry, can't do that. Break it up into 2 hour chunks and measure progress after each to make sure you are going in the right direction. This is why agile is like religion. It is so vague and so thinly disguised into general meaningless correct sounding "principles" that it can be anything to anyone. ~~~ Xylakant You're messing up agile and Scrum. Scrum has the restriction that every task has to fit within a single iteration. And even with scrum, that limit is self- proscribed. If you regularly have tasks that dont fit in a single iteration and you can't cut those down to smaller tasks then you're free to choose longer iterations. Scrum just says "make iterations, measure progress during iterations to get an estimate how much you can fit in the next." It's like doctors measuring how long they usually need for heart transplant surgery and applying that knowledge to the operations plan for the next week. I'm sure they do. And I'm sure they limit the time they have in the operation room and won't schedule a non-critical long operation at the end of a packed day. (I actually dated a doctor for 6 years and they surely did - apart from working tons of overtime and other unsensible things) ~~~ super_mario I'm not really confusing the two, I know perfectly well the distinction. However, agile is usually sold exactly like that, as a solution that will improve/solve problems. Generally, few teams in any organization have so much autonomy to choose their own process. If they did and they decided on their own to do some kind of agile, so be it. But agile is usually imposed externally (because it's in currently) but so is any other process. By the way I'm not criticizing agile per se, I'm criticizing the idea of process as solution. ~~~ Xylakant But then your issue is not with "agile" or "scrum", it's about how people abuse the notion of agile or scrum. It's the same with every other tool, programming language or process. They get abused by people pushing their agenda. I've seen organizations that started calling their lack of planning "scrum" because that sounded better than saying "d'oh we just make up our mind on what to do every couple of days." But that's not scrum or agile and it's not the fault of people applying or promoting proper agile techniques. ------ driverdan This quote summarizes how terrible the article is: > If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an > effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your > project. ------ huherto I try to emphasize the agile principles. I think there is a lot of wisdom there. The most important: "Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility" ------ fredwu This blog post offends me a little bit. The post screams hey, I am a cowboy programmer, and it almost implies that if you employ processes then you are stupid. In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not. Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company. Most software projects are done in a team environment - putting a bunch of talented developers and designers together actually isn’t as simple as many seem to think. One example is right out of that original blog post: > Given that I am not a fan of prescribed process as the solution to our > problems, you can infer my opinion of the general quality and effectiveness > of those programmers who teach these courses. From that attitude, I can already see that he is an interesting developer to manage. A team needs to function efficiently as a team. Having one or two ace developers aren’t going to help a lot if they can’t get along with the others. Not to mention that people have spent time and effort proving that techniques such as TDD work for certain projects [1]. As many things in life, there are always people who try to take advantage of others. No doubt there are questionable ‘agile consultants’ who try to make a fortune out of uninformed clients. Just because some people aren’t using agile effectively or even correctly, doesn’t mean agile itself is a sham. Developers constantly make mistakes and write shitty code - should we say all the programming languages out there are a sham? Keep an open mind is important, and a lot of times even necessary. To dismiss agile all together is in my opinion childish, and offensive to others who try to improve things and create more value. [1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/news/features/nagappan-1...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/news/features/nagappan-100609.aspx) Originally posted at <http://fredwu.me/post/20058808238/agile-is-not-a-sham> ------ rduchnik "buzzword-compliant" that's a good one...lol ------ mkramlich I do think think that there's a combo of simple techniques and rules of thumb, that, taken together, yield better results, with less ceremony, than Agile. And certainly far better than Waterfall, in the general case. That combo (in my judgement) includes: iterative development, risk-driven prioritization, KISS/YAGNI, note-taking, scripted automation, CLI bias, FOSS, backups, version control and RDD (README-driven development). And several more, but these are among the biggest. Because you don't necessarily need tests. You don't necessarily need pairs. You don't necessary need cards, or standup meetings. You don't need big upfront design. But you do need to produce working code. You should provide enough documentation to help you remember how things work and why, and bring new team members up to speed and/or project inheritors, and you _ought_ to be flushing out assumptions or minimizing your biggest risks as early as you can, when there's still the most time to fix things, workaround, or abandon an approach entirely. These are rock solid, universal patterns I've seen over the decades. And they apply to small projects and large. Solo rockstars, small teams, large, etc. Independent of tech mix and software types. And yes, ultimately the quality of people you have is the most important. They drive everything else: the choice of technology, tools, architecture, prioritization, morale, pace, resilience, etc.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Human-pig hybrid created in lab to help grow donor organs - hsnewman https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/human-pig-hybrid-chimera-stem-cells-experiment-mouse-rat-a7548001.html ====== ohiovr In 2019, we don't question bioethics in the news. ------ hsnewman Wasn't there a Seinfeld episode on this?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Graveyard Keeper: How the graphics effects are made - thrower123 http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SvyatoslavCherkasov/20181023/329151/Graveyard_Keeper_How_the_graphics_effects_are_made.php ====== gavanwoolery Note on the usage of lookup tables: Color transitions are _hard_ \- their example here looks pretty good but in general tweening between two color spaces in a linear manner can produce unwanted "washing out" or dull in- between states. The problem is not just within the transition of individual colors, but how the relative values of nearby color affect our perception. For example, see this illusion in action: [https://twitter.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/10284735661933158...](https://twitter.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/1028473566193315841) ~~~ pistachiopro Color transitions are hard, and that illusion is pretty trippy. Beyond that, my sense is another big problem most people run into when they try to light pixel art (or any hand-painted asset) is that the asset is almost always "pre- tonemapped" by the artist. By first inverse-tonemapping the asset before applying any lighting, and then re-tonemapping afterwards, you can get pretty good results (assuming you can work out your artist's intuitive tonemapping function). Here's a fun article which explores the idea a bit more: [http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/untonemapping/](http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/untonemapping/) ~~~ garaetjjte I think cause of this article problem is not that textures require some "untonemapping", but that they are typically stored with sRGB gamma, and thus should be converted to linear for lighting, and converted back to sRGB gamma in final pass. (either by explicitly using 2.2 gamma in shaders, or graphics API conversion, eg. in GL using GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8 format and sRGB framebuffer with enabled GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB) ------ city41 I worked on a game with very similar dynamic lighting. I wrote a blog post that goes into more detail code-wise on how I did it if anyone is interested: [http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/dynamic-lighting-and- shado...](http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/dynamic-lighting-and-shadows/) ~~~ JoeMattie Hi there! just wanted to say thanks for your write up. I recently implemented this approach (thanks to your notes) in the Godot engine for a game I'm working on. [https://twitter.com/FlyingBastion/status/1054394571948417024](https://twitter.com/FlyingBastion/status/1054394571948417024) ~~~ city41 Oh nice, you were able to use my post? That's awesome. Your game is looking good, I just followed you guys. ------ degenerate At first I though the approach to dynamic lighting was overdone ("they had to paint light sources manually 4 times?") but then remembered the world is not 3D, so there's no way to do it automatically without drawing defined boundaries among objects. Painting 4 directional light sources and blending them together is super smart. I totally envy pixel artists, especially those from the earlier days of the art. What a different world. ~~~ jweir I got my start as a pixel editor/animator using Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Animator for DOS at Virgin Games. Hand anti-aliasing, selecting your limited palette, and working with the hardware and screen constraints was fun. But, we at the time (early 90s) couldn't wait to have more colors and more resolution and more framerate and more memory. So, folks today get to choose their constraints, which is important to most art, and the results are lovely. ~~~ corysama Just making sure you've already seen Mark Ferrari's GDC talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0) :) ------ bananaoomarang Always surprised by how well effects like this work. Wouldn't expect the wind shader to look as good as it does, for instance. Games (especially older games...) are full of so many elegant hacks! One that I think about a lot is how in order to animate a 'rain' effect, you can actually just spawn randomly positioned 'impacts' on the ground and randomly positioned raindrops that disappear 'behind' the ground. You would think you might need to resolve each raindrop's collision and animate an 'impact' at the right point but it turns out our brain is pretty good at being fooled. ~~~ a_e_k The beginning of "A Link to the Past" went even simpler than that and just looped a transparent rain layer over everything: [https://i.imgur.com/W4fdw19.gif](https://i.imgur.com/W4fdw19.gif) I think what helped sell it, though, was the rain and thunder sound effects. ------ mistercow This is really neat. I was amused by this, though: >I tried to add a skew there, but it turned out to be unnecessary. and then >It should be noted here, by the way, that the sprite is highly distorted vertically (the shadow sprite original looks like a circle). That’s why its rotation looks like not just a simple rotation but also like a distortion. …which, if I recall my affine transforms, would also be called a "skew". I think I get the point though. This let them construct the skew in a more intuitive way than trying to make it an explicit parameter. ------ clarry >The problem “how to find the closest 3 light sources and to calculate the distance and an angle was solved with a script running in the Update() loop. > > Yes, it’s not the quickest way considering how much math is involved. If I programmed it today, I would use that modern Unity Jobs System. But when I did it there was no such thing so I had to optimize regular scripts we had. I wish they'd let you in on a little more. Because my numb mind says this isn't something you should ever need to optimize. How many light sources do they have, dozens at most? And how many sprites? Dozens/hundreds? That is nothing.. what is this heavy math? I figured all they'd need is a vector from light source to object, and the vector's magnitude. ~~~ BugsJustFindMe Indeed. And you don't even need square roots for identifying the three closest, since squared distances are just as good for that. So it's, what, a few instances of very basic arithmetic and then three roots? I don't see the complication either. It would be nice to know which part of their process introduced the difficulty. Was it the update frequency? ~~~ simcop2387 I might even avoid the squares and use a manhattan distance metric instead. No multiplication at all, just absolute value and addition. ------ davedx I started porting my 2D roguelike game to a 2D engine like this one and got so bogged down in lighting difficulties that I gave up and abandoned the project. This is really impressive, and a succinct write up of what can take a very long time to implement successfully. 2D/3D hybrid engines are hard! ------ randyrand Gorgeous. Did you consider doing things in 3d with an isometric camera? ------ billfruit Another recent game 'Brigador', also has earned much praise for its lighting work, and as a game in general. ~~~ patio11 That game got a very interesting review in Japanese which I was compelled to translate: [https://gamedaisukinahito.blog.fc2.com/blog- entry-954.html](https://gamedaisukinahito.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-954.html) [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dja- bHqU0AEYJYe.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dja-bHqU0AEYJYe.jpg:large) ------ johnchristopher Neat. Now I understand why modern "2D" pixel art games still sometimes need some GPU and CPU power. ------ hughes Images have been consistently failing to load on this article for the last few hours. ~~~ a1369209993 Same here; `wget -HkKp` worked, albeit it took about a minute to actually download everything (and also the CSS broke). ------ airstrike What an interesting read. Thanks for finding and sharing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Elon Musk’s New Boring Co. Faced Questions Over SpaceX Financial Ties - adrianscott https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-new-boring-co-faced-questions-over-spacex-financial-ties-11545078371 ====== jonathankoren Whoa. So he's diverting employees and equipment from investor backed SpaceX, to a side venture where he owns _90%_ of the equity? This is sketchy fiduciary duty. Right up there when he bailed out his brother's SolarCity by having Tesla buy it because every car manufacture needs to get into the rooftop solar business. ~~~ gamblor956 You're being voted down by the Tesla brigade, but you are absolutely right. Given the de minimis SpaceX equity in BoringCo, Musk's use of SpaceX resources without compensation by BoringCo is a flagrant violation of his fiduciary duties to SpaceX's investors. That's why it's been so important to him to keep his boards stocked with friends and family--an actual corporate board of directors would have sent him to the curb long ago. ------ woah Could this be tunneling? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_(fraud)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunneling_$fraud$) ------ StudentStuff The Boring Company is on really shaky ground after the entrance cave in back on Dec 5th and construction setbacks. It'll be interesting to see if they survive, they're still in live or die startup mode. ~~~ SECProto _The Boring Company is on really shaky ground after the entrance cave in back on Dec 5th and construction setbacks_ I didn't hear of any cave in, and googling results in nothing. Care to explain what you're talking about? ~~~ StudentStuff Its remained relatively hush hush, but the entrance to the tunnel (not the tunnel itself) experienced some damage from a cave in, delaying the December 10th public opening: [https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-pushes-back-opening- of-b...](https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-pushes-back-opening-of-boring- companys-la-tunnel/) Presumably everything else is on track, but when it comes to geotechnical engineering, stabilizing earth is challenging, and the engineers appear to want to wait more than 3 or 4 days after the cave-in to see if their method of stabilization (whether they used these neat ground screws, thicker walls, or a pairing) is stable and ready for non-employees to be near. ~~~ SECProto _Its remained relatively hush hush, but the entrance to the tunnel (not the tunnel itself) experienced some damage from a cave in, delaying the December 10th public opening:_ [https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-pushes-back- opening-of-b...](https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-pushes-back-opening-of- boring-companys-la-tunnel/) That article mentions absolutely nothing about a cave in. I wasn't disputing the delay thing (definitely an issue with any project of Musk's), but claiming that there was a cave in requires a legitimate source. ~~~ SECProto I did more research and still came up blank - I saw a number of headlines talking about "boring company caves in" \- but they use it as a metaphor for them abandoning plans to extend the tunnel significantly. Not an actual cave in. ------ electriclove I'm glad SpaceX is private. There are legitimate concerns here but let the man build his tunnels! ------ robertAngst I'm somewhat horrified by the constant struggles Musk's companies have with ethics. Why is there a cult following when fraud and employee abuse is common? ~~~ chr1 Because there have not been any serious reports of fraud and abuse, and the things he built are so important for the future of humanity, that even much more serious accusations won't change the total balance to a negative for Musk. ~~~ gamblor956 There have been dozens of articles detailing fraud and abuse at Tesla, quite a few articles about Boring Co's liberties with the truth and its outright lies to the people in the neighborhood where the tunnel is being built. SolarCity's financials were so bad they went through multiple auditing firms before they found one that would sign off on them. All in all, Musk's companies have an above-average incidence of ethics- and truth-related issues. ------ throwawaylalala I mean, its pretty clear he’s building all the tech to colonize Mars. Boring is an important part of that. ~~~ yellowapple Indeed. Underground construction is the most effective way to protect against environmental concerns like meteor strikes and radiation. ------ synaesthesisx On the topic of The Boring Company, is anyone else going to the tunnel unveil event tomorrow? ------ onetimemanytime Wait until Boring Co is bought by another Musk company like Musk did last time with that failing solar company. ------ Eire_Banshee Isnt it a subsidiary of SpaceX though? ~~~ adrianscott Nearly $113M raised, wsj article says it owns only 6% [https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/elon-musks-boring-co- raise...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/elon-musks-boring-co- raises-113-million-to-chase-a-pipe-dream/) [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1737630/000173763018...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1737630/000173763018000001/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml) ------ keyle un-paywall [https://outline.com/RcMRDF](https://outline.com/RcMRDF) ------ m3kw9 I really believe Tesla, Boring and SpaceX is part of a grand strategy that will give Musk almost insurmountable moat. ~~~ jonathankoren Serious question. Do you mean like a physical barrier? Similar to absconding to New Zealand when SHTF and it’s TEOTWAWKI? In a very real sense, Mars is the ultimate gated community. See also [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand- doo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doomsday- preppers/) ------ mr_toad It’s not like Musk hasn’t openly stated that the whole purpose of SpaceX is Martian colonisation. What do they think The Boring Company is really for? And Tesla, and Solar City for that matter. Perhaps if they aren’t smart enough to connect the dots they aren’t smart enough to be investing in high risk private companies. ~~~ gamblor956 _What do they think The Boring Company is really for? And Tesla, and Solar City for that matter._ Uh huh. Sure it is. That would explain why Solar City has thus far failed to account for the significantly reduced amount of solar energy that reaches Mars. Solar cells can't charge EVs fast enough _on Earth_. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV _on Mars._ But as with the hyperloop, Musk has done a great job of getting people to fall for his half-assed fantasies. Somehow though, whenever you actually try to look into his ideas with more scrutiny, they always fall apart like a house of cards. ~~~ SECProto _That would explain why Solar City has thus far failed to account for the significantly reduced amount of solar energy that reaches Mars. Solar cells can 't charge EVs fast enough on Earth. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV on Mars._ What are you talking about? Solar can charge an electric car just fine. Take desired charge rate in kW, divide by nameplate power output of panel, and that's how many panels you need. If you live somewhere with constraints on solar input (eg reduction due to clouds, distance from sun, or night) then you can increase the panel amount, maybe add some stationary batteries to timeshift the input. Edit: not meant as a personal attack at all, but noticed your other comments around the thread are loose enough with the facts. Musk could learn a thing or two :) ~~~ reitzensteinm Your edit is very rude. If you're going to call him out, you should at least take the time to give an example. ~~~ SECProto Their profile says they don't read comment threads after 4 hours, so I didn't think they will see. But my mention of "being loose with the facts" and "Musk could learn a thing or two" was referring to another post of theirs where they said: _There have been [...] quite a few articles about Boring Co 's liberties with the truth and its outright lies to the people in the neighborhood where the tunnel is being built_ \- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704761) I thought this was, itself, misleading - I follow the Boring Co pretty closely, and I only saw one negative article re: the local neighbourhood around the test tunnel - and said article was mostly raising the plight of the locals with the airport/highway/industrial activity in the area. The Boring Company was only attacked as a bit of a bogeyman. Combine that with this sentence in their original post, which I did already call out for being flagrantly misleading: _Solar cells can 't charge EVs fast enough on Earth. With the same panel area, it would take most of a Martian year to charge a single EV on Mars_ The only way I can see that being true is if it's talking only about solar cells on the roof of the vehicle (which no one technically minded should expect to power a car). ~~~ gamblor956 [https://blog.pickmysolar.com/how-many-solar-panels-does- it-t...](https://blog.pickmysolar.com/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-to- fuel-an-electric-car) From a pro-Tesla site. It would take 75 solar panels to charge a single Tesla in a day. Max theoretical efficiency on Mars is roughly 1/15th of Earth norm, not taking into account Martian weather, and assuming you are always somehow directly facing the sun the entire Martian day. Take weather and the day-night cycle into account, and it takes about a Martian year to charge one Tesla. Google is your friend. A single search on Boring Co shows at least a dozen articles about their misrepresentative claims, so I assume the Google personalization filter is effecting both of our search results. ~~~ SECProto Hey, thanks for the detailed response. My original post was calling out your original point: " _Solar cells can 't charge EVs fast enough on Earth_". It seems you now agree with me: " _It would take 75 solar panels to charge a single Tesla in a day._ " So indeed, you can charge EVs with solar panels, you just need more. 75x250W panels can charge a 75kWh model S in one day, on average (equals 135000km/year). Such panels are available at consumer prices of $1/watt including charge controller, so ~$20,000 would buy me the panels I need to fully charge my car daily (4 times as much as I need). _Max theoretical efficiency on Mars is roughly 1 /15th of Earth norm, not taking into account Martian weather, and assuming you are always somehow directly facing the sun the entire Martian day._ These variables (martian weather, facing the sun) are similar to the issues faced on earth with solar panels. And the solutions are the same on mars as on earth: increase panels (aka overprovide) and include power storage, or include an alternate power generation system. Ideally both. Where the weather can have longer impacts (eg dust storms), an alternative power gen system (i.e. nuclear) is likely better from a launch mass point of view, but that isn't clear without doing the detailed math on it. That's before even getting into details on how different a vehicle on another planetary body would be (eg the lunar rovers had an 8.5kWh batteries and lasted multiple days - lack of atmosphere and lower speeds and mass make a car much more efficient) _Take weather and the day-night cycle into account, and it takes about a Martian year to charge one Tesla._ (or half a year if you double the panels, or a day if you have 365x the number of panels, or....) _A single search on Boring Co shows at least a dozen articles about their misrepresentative claims_ If by "misrepresentative claims" you mean missed deadlines and abandoned ideas - I'd agree with that. Tunnel opening delayed, further extension of test tunnel dropped in favour of full network at undefined future date. But that's par for the course with everything SpaceX has done (eg Falcon Heavy delayed 6 years, Dragon Crew delayed years, BFR changing plans every time it's talked about), and shouldn't be even a bit of a surprise for anyone who follows Musk. As a member of the public who couldn't invest in SpaceX or the Boring Co even if I want to, those things really don't affect me in any way - the goals remain the same, and the progress remains ...progressive. _I assume the Google personalization filter is effecting both of our search results._ Agreed. ~~~ gamblor956 We don't agree, but that's probably because I left some assumptions implicit in my earlier comment. At an average size of 65x39 inches, 75 panels is more panels than most residential properties can fit; you would either need a mansion or a commercial-sized property. I should have been clearer on this, but assuming the number of panels that the average house can support (5-10), you're looking at a week or two to charge an EV by solar panel at the typical Southwest residence (longer, outside of the Southwest). Assuming the same solar panel area on Mars gets you to the Martian year. As for Boring Co, I'm not referring to the missed deadlines, but to their claims that they wouldn't be tunneling under people's properties, and that it wasn't a backdoor attempt to avoid environmental review, and their liberties with capacity numbers, costs, and numerous other claims they've made in their short corporate lifespan.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Invisible Labor Economy Behind Pirated Japanese Comics - rockdiesel http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-scanlators ====== Torgo Something that seems to have been overlooked in the article is that in response to ubiquitous piracy and scanlations, Inuysha was released almost simultaneously in English and Japanese. The scanlators decided, the translation wasn't good enough so they released their own anyway. I get it, but the moral argument changed from "I can't buy this in English if I wanted to" to "your product was inferior" which in my opinion is far less defensible. It also doesn't mention the translations that are done completely crowdsourced on 4chan (usually of pornography.) Someone in Japan will post raw scans of comics they got at Comiket; another anonymous person will offer translations in-thread; another anonymous person will clean up the scans and do the lettering with the new translation and post the updated pages. These translations will often go through multiple iterations of people with varying levels of proficiency in Japanese discussing and correcting the translations, and then finally the finished translated and cleaned up pages will be uploaded to a site somewhere ready for consumption. This is often done completely with no one knowing the identity of anyone else in-thread. It is an amazing example of the potential of ubiquitous Internet and low- barrier web technology facilitating sharing culture resulting in a final product that would be superior to any commercial offering, if such a product was even offered for sale which it often is not. Even if from a legal (and arguably moral) standpoint it's pretty indefensible it is an amazing thing to watch.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Heroku Reveals Cross-Region Followers for Disaster Mitigation - estromlund https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/disaster-mitigation#crossregion-followers ====== pvh We haven't announced cross-region followers. When we announce it, there will be an announcement. This is an internal feature we've been using for a while that we thought our customers might appreciate access to under the circumstances. ------ aneth4 Given that there is a significant chance that AWS east will go down today, this _seems_ like a useful feature. However since the platform is still only in that data center, I'm not sure how this will help. How are people on Heroku preparing for the hurricane? ~~~ kungfooguru <https://status.heroku.com/incidents/460>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Forget that tired-old coffee ring effect: “Whiskey webs” are the new hotness - AdmiralAsshat https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/whiskey-webs-serve-as-fingerprints-to-distinguish-between-american-whiskeys/ ====== blaser-waffle Is this that big of a problem? Is China pumping out tons of counterfit whiskey along with knockoff Gucci bags? Cool stuff though.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
House pares NASA's 2013 spending back to 1959 levels, suggests Europa mission - evo_9 http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/05/us-house-pares-nasas-2013-spending-back-to-1959-levels-potentially-forces-nasa-to-explore-europa.ars ====== unreal37 Wow. That article is eye-opening. I had no idea that Congress had so much specific direction over the operations of Nasa. Overall budgets? Yes. But to have Congress mandate that they build a large rocket that no scientist thinks we have use for is insane. For them to increase money for a rocket that nobody wants or needs, and to decrease money for SpaceX and programs that are actually working is equally insane.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Help Wanted: America’s love affair with amateur advice - behoove https://www.weeklystandard.com/caitrin-keiper/asking-for-a-friend-review-help-wanted ====== nimbius As an auto mechanic by trade, ive got a theory about this. People love amateur advice because they cant afford the shop rate. In the US im guessing we like it because the cost in terms of healthcare fees and social stigma is likely a high enough bar to entry that people find amateur help more accessible. Mental health in the US has a sad stigma. men are supposed to be rocks of silence and discipline, women are supposed to be strong and independent, we really leave little room for variance. as for "the shop rate" its exactly why my neighbor asks me about his car when Im picking mint from the herb garden and not while im swinging deadblow hammers in the shop. $70-$120 an hour really puts a damper on your ability to get help any other way. I guess psychiatrists charge way more, but if insurance never chips in, I guess chamomile tea and dear dotty columns are the next best thing. But these arent scientific and they certainly dont help. Just like pouring gallons of engine repair snakeoil in the crank case. Its something, its just not going to fix the problem. It will let you ignore it long enough until it becomes a blown head. or i guess in the case of mental health, a meltdown in a crowded office or something that comes with an assault charge and a rap sheet. ------ DoreenMichele _Q: What qualifies this group for the position of beacon to the masses? A: Not a blessed thing._ If you pay a psychiatrist, you have to worry that they have a conflict of interest. If you really get well, you won't need them anymore. They have an inherent motive to help you only enough to take credit for things going better, not enough to set you free from needing their services. If you turn to family, coworkers, or friends, the odds are very high that you will face similar conflicts of interest. Family inheritance. Family allies (the "favorite" child/sibling/cousin). Etc. It's really hard to find someone to talk to whose personal biases are less problematic than those entrenched ties. A stranger or advice columnist may not give good advice, but they are somewhat less likely to give advice designed to encourage you to cut your own throat for their personal benefit. People like me who like actually being useful and hate that kind of crap are sometimes drawn to giving advice for free in online forums. I read this because the title made me think it would be about that trend. There are endless places on the internet where you can anonymously ask for advice without admitting to your boss that you don't actually know how to do X or admitting to your spouse that you are thinking of leaving, etc. I think a similar article about that in specific would likely be far more interesting. ~~~ criley2 A psychiatrist that behaves as you describe is literally engaging in malpractice. You are a perfect example of what the article describes: your rationalization process for mistrusting experts _seems_ rational at first glance, but upon closer examination it falls apart as quite simply an irrational fear used to rationalize not trusting an expert. The thing about free advice online is that... you didn't go to school for 4-6 years and practice under an established expert for years further to learn how to give good advice the right way. The idea that some jack in an online forum will provide better advice than a licensed psychiatrist simply because you're irrationally afraid that the psychiatrist will engage in malpractice -- frankly it's ludacris! It's literally insane to me. But this is how we end up with an America where multiple doctors diagnose you with cancer but your Facebook Group swears by essential oils and power crystals.... ~~~ DoreenMichele _A psychiatrist that behaves as you describe is literally engaging in malpractice._ Not if he is giving the standard advice everyone in the industry gives. There are lots of conditions where the standard expectation is that "people like you don't really get well" and "symptom management is the name of the game." It would be considered malpractice to even tell people with certain diagnoses that you will shoot for curing them. But if you don't even try to get someone well, if you only shoot for muddling through, don't you think that has bearing on the kind of results you get? If actually getting them well isn't even a goal, no, of course, you won't get them well. ~~~ criley2 _Not if he is giving the standard advice everyone in the industry gives. There are lots of conditions where the standard expectation is that "people like you don't really get well" and "symptom management is the name of the game." It would be considered malpractice to even tell people with certain diagnoses that you will shoot for curing them._ This is not a fair summary of your previous point. You previously implied that a psychiatrist will maliciously give information they know to be against the patient's interests purely to continue a financial relationship. In this second post, you have walked back your irrational and ridiculous claim from "a psychiatrist will give you bad advice so you pay them forever to" "a psychiatrist will offer you evidence and science based advice that doesn't lie to you about your condition or future and instead seeks to give you the best options or advice that evidence teaches us can help" Sure, that sounds great to me. That's why you trust an expert. Now you seem to be mostly upset that a specific mental illness or condition isn't curable and may be permanent as the result of damage or pathology, and are blaming humanity's best experts for not having a panacea for your troubles. ~~~ DoreenMichele I haven't walked anything back. An awful lot of people are woefully misreading what I said in a much more negative light than I intended, then acting like I changed my story when I try to communicate about the issue. It's probably best for me to walk away at this point. Most of the remarks here do not strike me as good faith engagement. ~~~ jestgrade If lots of people are simultaneously misunderstanding you in the exact same way, it's probably not that they're all stupid and malicious. Cf. [https://xkcd.com/1984/](https://xkcd.com/1984/) ~~~ slededit Its a malicious rhetorical tool to use attempts at clarification as evidence of retreat. That's what politicians do. People here are not professional communicators, you can't expect them to say things perfectly the first time. ------ gowld > Sure enough, Savage Love and its equivalents at every conceivable type of > publication are considered “undignified reading material” carrying “a whiff > of shame,” writes Jessica Weisberg An ironic (and unsubstantiated) claim from _amateur_ anthropologist Jessica Weisberg. ~~~ hluska Have you read the book?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is Google+ just one big SEO play? - primesuspect http://www.tmprod.com/blog/2011/is-google-just-one-big-seo-play/ ====== sippndipp I think Google+ is the glue to connect all of google services (next to search). Imagine Mail, Photos, Music, YouTube just tied together in one place. It's not about SEO.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
"If there's gold in them hills..." - gaika http://one.valeski.org/2008/10/if-theres-gold-in-them-hills.html ====== gabrielleydon Thats why you build these things before you build your product.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
After 400 years, mathematicians find a new class of solid shapes - ColinWright http://theconversation.com/after-400-years-mathematicians-find-a-new-class-of-solid-shapes-23217 ====== gus_massa I still don't understand what the new class is. Convex polyhedral with all equal edges? Some additional symmetry? The faces are regular polygons?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How did you meet your cofounders? - mlejva ====== jppope I went solo... It's more likely that you'll succeed	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best Practices for Bringing Devices Through US Customs? - marymkearney Apparently a lot of folks entering the United States are being asked by Customs and Border Protection officials for the passwords to unlock their phones and laptops.<p>If you say yes, and you have the usual apps on your device, then CBP can suck down all your encrypted data in a matter of minutes - search history, contacts, photos, purchases, documents, social media posts, etc. - and store it in their U.S. government database, where they can keep it forever, and inspect it at their leisure.<p>If you say no, your devices can be seized, and you can be detained. Legal or not, this outcome will, at minimum, ruin your day.<p>Various workarounds have been proposed to keep the data on your devices private when entering the United States. These include traveling with -<p>No devices. Temporary devices. Wiped-clean devices (keep data in cloud). Dead-battery devices.<p>Privacy experts argue in favor of doing this, and security experts argue against it, saying it looks more suspicious.<p>Arguments for workarounds: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/ill-never-bring-my-phone-on-an-international-flight-again-neither-should-you-e9289cde0e5f#.wgurjewri<p>Arguments against workarounds: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/stop-fabricating-travel-security-advice-35259bf0e869#.o43h5lbiz<p>What's HN's opinion on the best practices in this situation? ====== byoung2 I just got back from a trip and each time I went through a checkpoint I had the factory reset menu on screen so if asked to unlock I would have just stalled by asking why they needed to see my device while the wipe was in progress. ~~~ amorphid This is brilliant. ------ amorphid My friend just wrote a blog post on the topic: [https://honeypot.net/search-proof-your-devices-when- travelin...](https://honeypot.net/search-proof-your-devices-when-traveling/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Be More Productive: Avoid Task Switching - Kop http://www.not-implemented.com/be-more-productive-avoid-task-switching/ ====== Ensorceled It's called "cognitive drift" and it's was a critical concern when I was working on medical imaging applications, there have been a number of studies on it including this google match <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23189449> This is one of the main reasons I find unit testing productive. You can eliminate cognitive drift triggering startup delays in your unit testing framework easier than in your application. ------ randomsearch As an academic, often I'm running experiments and have to wait for them to finish. Worse still, sometimes I can't touch my machine whilst they're running. For a long time, I tried the "don't switch" mentality. But you just waste a lot of time. Solutions are: 1\. Avoid it by running shorter experiments - requires intellectual effort and is much like the advice in the article. 2\. Do something else, but something _related to what you're doing_. That way, it's not a total cognitive switch. Classic example is working out ideas for how you might best present data whilst an experiment is running, or how you might further automate the process etc. 3\. If you have to switch, then do something that can easily be dropped. Usually I read a (scientific) paper whilst I wait - this could be vaguely related to the experiments I'm waiting on. ~~~ ahmadss Could the university you work for provide you with a second machine whilst the first machine runs experiments? ~~~ JimboOmega Even if so, as the article notes, if you switch to some other, yet still "productive" task, you are still task switching and losing a lot of momentum on the original task. Also there will always be distractions; daydreaming if nothing else. At a previous employer my main work machine was not connected to the Internet (a nightmare for other reasons, like if I was on the Internet-enabled machine, may as well check email...). But even then, when waiting for a test that would take several minutes, I'd find myself reading a print newspaper. These forced delays kill productivity for me like nothing else. Losing the task at hand every couple of minutes to retest or really slows down output. ~~~ randomsearch I agree with you, that the delays are a pain. Recently, though, I've stop listening to most of the "productivity advice" and warnings about multitasking, splitting your time into chunks, and the myriad of other approaches. The best bit of advice I have heard is just to get on with it, work hard, and stop procrastinating about it. Too much meta is not good. ------ jonheller Funny, I run into the exact same problem on the exact same platform. It's what I dislike most about working in .NET. One thing I've found that works fairly well is using the Pomodoro technique, where I force myself for 25 minutes to just work. That means even during those 15-30 seconds of compiling I can't load up Hacker News or Reddit. It helps, but it's also a little tough for me to enforce (on myself). ~~~ thirdtruck Agreed. The technique did wonders for the depth of my productivity once I got into the habit. ------ engtech I find that using a Kindle or Android ebook reader _really_ helps avoiding the task switching, as does dual monitors. Leave your computer on the task you are working on and you won't "lose" the result in a sea of windows. Actually, it's a great habit to use a different machine for surfing the net than the one you use for developing. Then you are very conscious that you aren't working when you are on your "other" machine. I'm almost envious sometimes of secure locations that limit internet access to a single room rather than allowing it to be on every desktop. ------ robheaton I find that doing something related to what you're doing is probably the worst thing you can do. Let's say you run your specs and 5 of them fail. You fix #1 and then re-run the spec, then go and fix #2 whilst waiting to see if your first fix is good. You will end up juggling and trying to fix multiple bugs at once, which is a recipe for failure and sadness. I strongly endorse just staring at the screen whilst waiting. ~~~ j-kidd Or put on your sysadmin hat and ssh into your Gentoo machines and do some maintenance works. Soon you will have more screens to stare at. ------ iterion1 I feel bad that I read this while waiting for tests to run. My tolerance for staring at the screen goes down exponentially as the run time of a task increases. And, I think, even staring at the screen allows my mind to wander and lose some of my momentum. While I agree that it's a problem, reducing waiting is the best solution for me. ------ aviswanathan I bookmark articles I want to read and spend a minute reading (roughly how long my pushes take) during pushes. My full routine is here: <http://adityaviswanathan.com/new/my-nightly-routine/> I think multitasking is very possible, but has to do more with optimizing for the various senses and developing a discipline and habit around repetition (code, push, read, repeat, etc. every 30 min). ------ ne0phyte A full server+client build and JBoss startup and deploy takes around 15 minutes. Of course a full build is only needed every once in a while but single components take 1-3 Minutes to build as well. I usually use the time to get coffee or put together a new playlist (listening to music 99% of the time). ~~~ Evbn How Enterprise. No background compiles? Stable interfaces between classes? ~~~ ne0phyte Well, the client side is compiled by eclipse automatically and the client can be configured for development so that many classes aren't cached so you can test cosmetic changes without a restart. On the server side however if you add new components, services or introduce new fields in existing entities you have to restart the JBoss and build the changed component. It is enterprise, I'm working on the market-leading MES (Manufacturing Execution System) solution for the pharma- and biotech area. Our internal framework alone consists of around 3.700 classes. ------ oyvindeh I do Pomodoro, running tests etc. when I take breaks. And when having breaks, I try to get away from my computer, to just stare out the window, get a fruit, walk around a little, or just lay down for five minutes. ------ bdcravens I'll often give my brain a break with something like a quick Angry Birds round or Bejeweled Blitz (quick 60 second rounds). Or I'll do a bit of cleaning of my desk. ------ mrjava sometimes you are required to do task switching. Multitasking is something, though mostly misused can actually help when problem solving. Sometimes you need to let your 'other side' of the brain figure things out while you continue doing something else ~~~ eru Yes, but then it's good to have a complete switch, and let your body do some work. Go for a walk, or even better, exercise.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
No sessions on Hackernews? - handzhiev Every single time I want to vote or comment here I have to login again even if another browser tab is open and I am logged in there (I use the Clickpass option). Refresh does not help. Anyone else having the same problem? I'm with Chrome on Ubuntu ====== steventruong I had this happen yesterday with Chrome on Mac	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Something Borrowed: Kenneth Goldsmith's Controversial Conceptual Poetry - mrks_ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson ====== willstepp There's something hollow about this kind of art. It's too much of the intellect. I prefer the writing of someone like Cormac McCarthy - done with real craftsmanship and exploring the moral dimensions of life through plain storytelling, with _feeling_. ------ marincounty I sure see a lot of Kenneth Goldmith on HN lately. I wonder if its self- publicity? Or, maybe I,m here too much? ~~~ mrks_ This article was actually my first time hearing about him.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tailwind: style your site without writing any CSS - dankohn1 https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/11/01/tailwind--write-css-without-the-css/ ====== shubhamjain How would have React adoption looked like if it wasn't backed by a tech giant? React propounds a very controversial idea: to put HTML inside Javascript. Of course, once you get the hang of it, it all makes perfect sense: tight coupling and composability. Tailwind, along the same lines, proposes a contrarian idea and it will only make sense once you start working with it. Here's what I have seen happen frequently: As the CSS grows, so does the bloat and repetitiveness of the same basic style. Let's say you want to position elements in the center of a component? "display: flex, align-items: center" easy. But what do you do when you encounter that same requirement again? Creating a utility class and replacing existing once will be a pain, so you add the same styles again. And that's how folks you end up with a megabyte of CSS doing a job that could be done in <100Kb. This pattern is more pervasive than you think. The fundamental problem is that we are not thinking about styling in terms of composability of basic styles. The benefits of utility classes outweigh the cons. You can iterate faster, you don't have to fight the framework, you don't have rethink abstractions at every point ("this style belongs to a component or a utility class") and as CSS becomes more expressive you'll need fewer classes anyways. I hope Tailwind takes off because styling definitely needs to be less painful than it's today. ~~~ jacamat The benefits absolutely do not outweigh the cons. For starters, your CSS can never compile down to a smaller size than component CSS - ever. Because of the nature of compositional classes the plateau of problems expands out almost infinitely, and the resultant inconsistencies necessitate new overrides, more code, more complexity, more misdirection. What size site do you work on? How often do you have to completely change an interface, or move a component from one place to another without it breaking _at all_ , and how well does that work for you with Tailwind? How do you plan to scale this codebase consistently across organizations, teams, potentially platforms? Tailwind and the frameworks like it are absolutely terrible at scale. I've spent years of my life trying to remove functional css from sites trying to scale while it holds them back. ~~~ jonathanreinink Co-author of Tailwind CSS here. Prior to building Tailwind, I followed more traditional approaches to writing CSS, like BEM. In fact, I remember when BEM first came out, and people hated it too. I've worked on small projects, and very large projects. I recently rebuilt a large web app using Tailwind, and my resulting CSS was TINY. I use Tailwind in conjunction with Purge CSS. The resulting filesize was 8.1kb gzipped (42kb). > Tailwind and the frameworks like it are absolutely terrible at scale. My experience has been the opposite. BEM is terrible at scale. You write the CSS, but then never dare change it, because you have no idea of the consequences of those changes. Developers end up duplicating BEM components for their use case, because it's safe. Which just leads to more CSS code. It's also worth noting that we're seeing more and more large companies move to utility based CSS, including GitHub and Heroku. ~~~ TimTheTinker At scale, the priority is isolation of components. This allows things to be composed, moved, etc. without affecting each other. We accomplish this in our web app (over 500 kloc) by simply giving each component’s top-level element a unique, formulaic, memorable CSS class (which is very easy to do with SASS/SCSS). And each component gets its own CSS (or .scss) file, HTML file, JS file(s), and I18n directory. The app loads each component’s CSS when that component is loaded at run time (which could be during startup or later). I just don’t see how one could get more straightforward than this for a large app. We do have some classes that are included in the base-level stylesheets and shared among components, but we only use those when it would result in less code than not, or when necessary for themeing. It may take a lot of effort to build this kind of architecture, but once you’re there it’s a breeze to create, compose, and maintain UI components. ~~~ cbhl The problem with isolation of components is that then the stylesheets are no longer cascading -- each component needs to be re-designed to fit within a design framework, and there's no CSS reuse between components is entirely copy-and-paste. Good luck re-styling anything for "dark mode" without having to hand-visit each component's JavaScript and CSS. Plus, component isolation has really slow polyfills. None of the Google stuff as of late runs on anything other than Chrome for like a year after launch because it's too slow and broken -- everything is being rewritten in Polymer, which relies on browser support for component isolation. ~~~ jacamat Avoiding the cascade is kind of the point, although I'm sure that sounds antithetical. IMO, the cascade should be treated with an "opt-in" approach, where you have a fine degree of control over what, precisely, is cascading and why. In general, with component CSS, you will tend to avoid the cascade, except within your component. This is actually where utility classes have some value - if they're scoped very tightly to the parent, and their effects are well- understood - then your single purpose class can add an easy way to do simple updates. That being said, for my part, and on my own website (doggos.com) we do not use any form of utility classes whatsoever. The entire website depends upon isolation, and through this isolation, I have a degree of control that I've not found in applications that have opted for other methods. In short, it's worked very well for us. As for your dark mode example... you should take a look at how Apple made dark mode a reality with their new Mojave update. I think you will be surprised at the level of isolation their interface demands and, although we're no longer talking about the web here, just how easy it was for them to implement...relatively speaking. In short, I can make a site go dark with components, no problem. ------ armandososa This is not for me. I am very good at, and very comfortable writing CSS since I've been doing it since the CSS Zen Garden days. But I understand the pains this is trying to solve and I think that this is the wrong approach and also the wrong abstraction. \- If you don't like CSS, this will not help you write less CSS, it will only make you write it inline and using a weird syntax. \- If you want to do the sensible thing and compose your styles into components then you'll still have to write CSS with the weird syntax and add a PostCSS to your dev pipeline. Not to mention that you'll still have to have some kind of system for your class naming. \- The order of the clases does not matter, the specificity is decided by the order in which they appear in the source. I can see all kind of untraceable bugs coming from that. I've used BEM and SMACSS and similar before and I think they are useful as a naming convention for teams but I don't think of them as great tools to writing better CSS. In my humble opinion CSS-in-JS solutions are closer to a great abstraction. I quite like both StyledJSX (for react) and .vue files in which you can write plain css and forget about the global aspects of CSS and the cascade for the most part. But I can see why some people will dislike that as fiercely as they dislike tailwind. I think Styled System is a better abstraction than tailwind: [https://github.com/jxnblk/styled-system](https://github.com/jxnblk/styled- system) it's a React library but I can see it's principles could be extracted successfully to plain CSS. ~~~ chrisweekly Tailwind and CSS-in-JS are not mutually exclusive! On the contrary, they're a terrific match! ~~~ nojvek Not really CSS in js is basically applying styles directly to an element, this one declares a small style sheet upfront and classes on elements are looked up to get style information. Css in js is very efficient if you don’t need any css inheritance. Tailwind is just inefficient for the browser to do all those lookups to resolve the final style bag. I’m not sure why I would ever use tailwind. It’s yet another archaic syntax I have to keep in my head. ~~~ chrisweekly Sorry, but, respectfully, you misunderstand tailwind in the context of css-in- js. This post might make a better case than I have time to right now: [https://github.com/jlengstorf/gatsby-tailwind- demo](https://github.com/jlengstorf/gatsby-tailwind-demo) ------ dna113 Lol here we go again. Why does this get people so riled up? I suspect people who immediately dislike this maybe are not using some type of component-based UI. CSS classes are all about code-reuse. If you have the concept of say a "button" in your UI, and you are copying your button markup every where you use that "button" then it certainly makes sense to have a class for your button markup that encapsulates the styles for that button in a style sheet somewhere. If using a button component however, you've already created a place for the concept of your button to exist. At that point if you go on making a class in some style sheet that also represents the concept of your button, now your button concept exists in multiple places, linked together by one or several class names. That seems a lot messier to me than using utility first styles, but I don't think it really makes a huge difference one way or another. ~~~ wishinghand This can easily be accomplished with SASS and a methodology like BEM. And it makes the markup a lot easier to read. ~~~ stefanfisk after doing a project with tailwind I have completely abandoned the idea of BEM. while it was nice having clean classes, having the styles directly in the html is way easier to reason about. ~~~ colonelpopcorn We're back to filling in style attributes on each tag, aren't we? ~~~ nihonde Not quite, because you can still define thematic defaults and change those globally to suit any changes to your style book. ------ SunboX I really don't see the benefit. Sure, you don't write "CSS", but you write a lot of classes that look like CSS. If you write class="bg-white no-underline" you could easily write style="background: white; text-decoration: none;" and every frontend guy will understand it. I don't get the point. ~~~ mattferderer If this article didn't make it click for you, that's understandable. It took me a long time of hearing about this & thinking it was stupid before it made sense. When that happens to me, it's usually a sign of something good. The author of Tailwind suggested I read his best effort at explaining why this makes sense.: [https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation- of-...](https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/) Towards the end of the article it started clicking for me. ~~~ paulsutter Easier just to quote the reason he gives: “With inline styles, there are no constraints on what values you choose... Utilities force you to choose... You can't just pick any value want; you have to choose from a curated list. Instead of 380 text colors, you end up with 10 or 12.” ~~~ jacamat in what way is that consistent tho? ~~~ neurotrace In what way is it not? You'll consistently get 10 or 12 colors instead of getting an inconsistent set of colors, for example. ~~~ jacamat But I only want the element to be the color it IS, not a range of colors it could be. Whats to stop a dev using $concrete when they should be using $cloud? or $linkGray instead of $headerLinkGray? these inconsistencies compound, especially across teams. ~~~ neurotrace Nothing would stop them from choosing to use cloud vs. link gray but it's far easier to identify and fix those cases than it is to have #CCC, lighten(#CCC, 10%), etc. around the codebase. This doesn't fix human error, just reduces it. ------ Raphmedia Sounds to me like the author should simply use SASS + a good autocomplete feature in their IDE. When I write CSS, I use a lot of shortcuts. I simply write "mt5" and then press tab, it then auto completes to "margin-top: 5px;". If I write "tdu"+tab and then it goes "text-decoration: underline;". The IDE also shows me in a drop down all the options that can be used after writing "text-decoration". Changing standards because you do not want to learn or remember something is the perfect example of programmer "laziness". Why remember this super common language when instead I can develop and remember a new obscure abstraction instead? ~~~ mbrock Oh no, laziness! Someone is doing something in an easy and convenient way that somehow doesn't match up with other people's ideals of conceptual purity! :'( ~~~ Raphmedia Bloating your markup with classes is simply a bad habit. It bites you hard in the long run. Even the framework that they are using proposes better alternatives. “ _Tailwind encourages a "utility-first" workflow, where new designs are initially implemented using only utility classes to avoid premature abstraction._ _While we strongly believe you can get a lot further with just utilities than you might initially expect, we don 't believe that a dogmatic utility-only approach is the best way to write CSS._” Read this page: [https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting- components/](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/) A class based rapid prototyping framework is a powerful tool, don't get me wrong. However, like all tools you should only use them when they truly are needed. ~~~ corobo Could you suggest how it's bloating the markup and how it'll bite you in the long run? I understand that maybe adding a bunch of classes for every element will increase the overall size of the page but if it's served with gzip compression doesn't it actually (maybe only technically) work better to have repetitive classes everywhere instead of unique class names? ~~~ Raphmedia Adding some classes is alright. Things like "row", "column-6" are tolerated evils. Look at the button from his article: <a class="text-xl rounded bg-orange pt-1 pb-1 pr-4 pl-4 text-white hover:text- white no-underline leading-loose" href="#">Buy for $10</a> That's way too granular. ~~~ corobo So you're just talking in terms of visual bloat? On this page it documents how you can create component classes [https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting- components/](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/) <button class="btn-blue"> Button </button> Then in your style .btn-blue { @apply bg-blue text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded; } .btn-blue:hover { @apply bg-blue-dark; } ~~~ Raphmedia The problem with granular classes is that you project won't scale in an efficient way. It also makes refactoring almost impossible. On a small one page website, do use them. However in something more complex like an e-commerce website theme or a complex web app, you will regret it quickly. <a class="text-xl rounded bg-orange pt-1 pb-1 pr-4 pl-4 text-white hover:text- white no-underline leading-loose" href="#"> is no better than <a style="font-size:16px; border-radius:5px; background:orange; color: white; text-decoration: none;" href="#"> It is simply a fancy way to use inline styles. One of the selling points of CSS is the ability to scale and refactor very quickly and easily. Class based frameworks remove all those benefits. Extracting components and building sementically is the solution. As I said in my previous comment, that framework they are using supports it. They say it themselves: “While we strongly believe you can get a lot further with just utilities than you might initially expect, we don't believe that a dogmatic utility-only approach is the best way to write CSS.” I have worked on many contracts where the client came to us because their current web agency wanted to charge crazy prices to refresh their website's design (e-commerce websites change at least one a year). Almost every time, those projects are a pain for both the team and the client because the previous developer decided to be lazy and use classes or inline styles everywhere. ------ peeters It's 2018, does CSS supported by modern browsers still lack the basic building blocks of reuse? Why am I being asked to choose between class="resources" (and having to know how to center a div in that resources class) and class="t:center t:wide-margins t:light-bg" (which is basically reintroducing all the harm of style tags). Why can't I, in 2018 and with vanilla CSS, say: .resources { @include .centered @include .wide-margins @include .light-bg } It seems like every one of these styling tools is just polishing a turd that is a turd for no reason. I can't imagine why the above would be difficult, it wouldn't have to change anything about the actual application of CSS rules, it could literally just be a simple preprocessor. Sure give me a library of common ways of doing something. That's great. But the lack of basic code reuse for CSS is staggering. Even if you're doing reuse with SASS you're stuck with the fact that you end up generating a CSS File that's 4-5 times larger than it needs to be. ~~~ err4nt What's wrong with class="centered wide-margins light-bg"? It would do the same as what your .resources class looks like it might do, and it's supported everywhere already. ~~~ peeters Nothing when everything's a one-off and you only have one supported theme. But if CSS is your component model (e.g. a card is always just a div but with a special style) then you'll have "centered wide-margins light-bg dropshadow" on every one of those divs, rather than just class="card". Similarly if you want to have two different themes with the same DOM, you can't do so easily. ~~~ jaydid Nobody who uses Tailwind would suggest copying the same classes over and over again in the example you’re talking about. You would either still create a card component (Tailwind does have the concept of components), or if you were using a framework like Laravel you could create a card blade component that held the tailwind card classes in one place. ~~~ peeters I wasn't talking about Tailwind, I was talking about vanilla HTML and CSS. I assumed the question asked of me ("what's wrong with"...) was asked in that context. ------ ludlu I've been using tailwind for almost a year and I love it. I would not use something else willingly for something new! Its easy/fast to write and in my mind VERY readable, and if you don't know whats what, their docs are really good. And for example in React to build a component with conditional styling I use classNames and use props that correspond to classes. [https://github.com/JedWatson/classnames](https://github.com/JedWatson/classnames) ------ Isofarro It puzzles me why these Atomic CSS based systems use various mnemonic systems instead of plain English which is much more understandable. I'm not a fan of human-powered text compression. ~~~ judofyr It's based on how often you use a helper. For instance, changing letter spacing is verbose ([https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter- spacing](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/letter-spacing)) as it's not something you use that often. Tweaking spacing is _very_ common and "padding- horizontal-2" uses an awful amount of characters. ~~~ Isofarro In what context is this "an awful amount of characters" an issue? GZip compression is fairly standard these days, and languages based on plain english (or similar languages) has a better level of compression than random text because of repetitive nature of sequences of characters. I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable than something closer to a natural language. And with the assumption that code is written for humans first, computers second, what is the point of inventing a language that's less readable than the one it's trying to replace? CSS compresses particularly well, as every Atomic CSS based framework tends to point out on it's landing page! ~~~ judofyr It's an awful amount of characters once you multiply it. For instance, the first example ([https://tailwindcss.com/docs/what-is- tailwind/](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/what-is-tailwind/)) would be twice as big: <img class="block h-16 sm:h-24 rounded-full mx-auto mb-4 sm:mb-0 sm:mr-4 sm:ml-0" <img class="block height-16 small:height-24 rounded-full margin-horizontal-auto margin-bottom-4 small:margin-bottom-0 small:margin-right-4 small:margin-left-0" After spending more than, say, two hours with Tailwind you'll probably read the first line much faster than second one (since there's less to read and you don't need to scroll). Humans are very good at pattern recognition, and you'll quickly read "mb" as a symbol in itself and not as "m[argin] b[ottom]". > I can't believe that mnemonic based languages are easier and more readable > than something closer to a natural language. Well, it's worked out pretty well in mathematics. This is _not_ about file size at all. It's about defining an "alphabet" of common concepts. ~~~ Isofarro Ah, I see your issue: you do know you can have whitespace inside attributes? You don't have to clump all the class names on one line. Scanning vertically is quicker than through the horizontal line-noise of both your examples. <img class=" block height-16 small:height-24 rounded-full margin-horizontal-auto margin-bottom-4 small:margin-bottom-0 small:margin-right-4 small:margin-left-0 "> This also has the benefit too, that if you use version control line-based diffs to see what's changed, it will highlight the specific css class name that changed. Handy if you need to ensure that whenever you change the bottom margin, you can see at a glance whether the small prefixed one has been updated too. On the other hand if you regularly need that many classes to style an element, perhaps it's a good place to refactor commonly occurring class names into a set, and label that set with a meaningful identifier. As for mathematical notation, it's about as understandable to me as my understanding of Hanzi. ------ baxtr Tailwind is really awesome. I switched from bootstrap in some projects and it’s been great. You gain a lot of flexibility in your designs I recommend this post by Adam to anyone who is interested in learning more about utility first CSS. [https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation- of-...](https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/) ------ Heliosmaster I use Bulma (discussed at the end) for all my projects. It's very easy and quick to get started with, but I found myself diverging from this style when I was starting to add new CSS of my own, to get the pages to look exactly how I wanted them. And due to the lack of tooling, it's hard to refactor CSS (removing duplicate code, etc.) so I'm not sure how scalable it is to adhere to what the OP says for a long time. ~~~ mahesh_rm I never tried Tailwind, I landed to Bulma after using Bootstrap, and then Tachyons, for many years, and I really enjoy it. I find myself maintaining an helper.scss file with basic classes that bulma does not support out of the box, but other than that, it definitely saves me time and, overall, improves the outcomes. ~~~ ealhad Tailwind is basically Tachyons + a bunch of features. Last time I migrated a project from Tachyons to Tailwind, it was quick and painless. ------ jacamat Everytime I see Tailwind/Tachyons/Functional CSS at the top of HN I die a little inside. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you actually like this kind of CSS, you probably don't work on large websites. And when you do, the reason people hate it so much will become abundantly clear to you. Functional CSS makes for an unscaleable, inconsistent, unmaintainable dumpster fire of styles that is _objectively_ worse than just writing regular CSS. <sarcasm> But it's convenient, right? So who cares! AirBnB, Facebook, Walmart, Github, and Twitter are all probably wrong anyway. </sarcasm> ~~~ adamwathan GitHub has been switching to functional CSS over the last couple of years: [https://primer.style/](https://primer.style/) I interviewed Diana Mounter who leads their design systems team about this a while back: [http://www.fullstackradio.com/75](http://www.fullstackradio.com/75) ~~~ jacamat I'll definitely respond to this more later. ;) ------ robotmay I've been using Tailwind lately and I really like it. It lets me prototype and iterate quickly, and then when I've settled on a design I can create component classes for those completed styles. It has made doing frontend work slightly more bearable for me. ------ simonswiss Lots of comments in here echo the initial gut reaction we all have when first encountering utility class composition. "What about semantic classnames? Separation of concerns? It looks ugly, is going to be hell to maintain, won't scale.. may as well use inline styles!" I did a conference talk about my own experience moving from BEM to utility- first CSS, you might find it interesting [https://vimeo.com/294976504](https://vimeo.com/294976504) ------ Tade0 _Most (all?) of the classes apply exactly 1 line of CSS._ I see this as an anti-pattern, because to me it looks like inline styles with extra steps. The only thing it avoids is accidental strong specificity. The reason we have CSS is that it's really easy to make HTML unreadable - after all it's essentially a 1D medium(lines of text) trying to describe a 2D space. ~~~ wes-k Inline styles = open ended, while classesrestrict you. Also this is switching things around. Now your html depends on your css classes and not your css depending on your html. No more broken css when a dev modified the html structure and didn’t realize that one of the hundreds of lines of css now doesn’t get applied right. ~~~ Tade0 _No more broken css when a dev modified the html structure and didn’t realize that one of the hundreds of lines of css now doesn’t get applied right._ You can achieve the same, but with much less clutter using BEM. Or even better: BEM + SASS. ------ Zag24 Doesn't this essentially put you back to the bad old days of style attributes? Sure, the "styles" you are using are much more clever and they adapt to screen sizes, etc., but you are still putting the specific style you want an element to have in the element itself and not getting any redirection. Say you have an entire application with a dozen primary pages, plus several dozen modal windows and other sub-pages. If you want to make a global change, like, "Change all the OK buttons in my entire application to have rounded corners and a gray to red gradient" then you have to go back and make a change to every button you have in the application. The whole idea with changing the CSS was that I defined a semantic CSS (e.g. "OKButton") which I used in all the places that had a common meaning, and then I could change the look of the entire application in one place. ------ wolco I have trouble with the following statement. Complete flexibility is a bad thing? If I accept that how is limiting options to 30 not providing too much flexibility? "Limits & standards. With normal CSS, I can make any element any width I want. For me, this is not a good thing! With tailwind, there are only 30ish options for width" ~~~ notjustanymike Actually it is, especially when you're working with a team of developers. Imagine that your designer puts together a design system built on a soft grid. The rules in the design system are what ensure consistency across the site. If you have a team of developers, sooner or later you'll manage a junior dev who interprets the design as a pixel perfect layout, and starts defining widths on elements per their own personal interpretation. Maybe they eyeball it, maybe they measure it, maybe they measure it but don't include the border. You can catch such things through training and code review, but it puts the burden of managing design consistency on a senior engineer. Starting out with a constrained system is one easy way to ensure consistency of design across large projects. ------ smpetrey A neat concept — perhaps two years too late. I fear that many will not prefer attribute bloat in their markup. And many are moving to React, does this sort of toolset matter anymore? Not being negative, genuinely serious. Does this tool make sense for apps going forward? To me it seems Tailwind is for little html things. ~~~ metafunctor If anything, utility CSS frameworks and creating reusable CSS (as opposed to reusable HTML) make more sense when used with something like React. ------ wes-k I was definitely hesitant when I first heard about this. After working in a codebase that uses CSS utilities, I gotta say, this is awesome!! I plan to use tailwind in all future green field projects! Enforces style, kills duplication, speeds up development. Ahh the benefits are huge! ------ poof_he_is_gone I prefer the hybrid approach, having a mix constantly repeated utility styles for things like padding, margin, floats, and colors, and then having custom SCSS/CSS for the rest. ~~~ stefanfisk that's what tailwind does, look into the components docs. essentially utilities vs components are a matter of definition order, such that utilities can always override components. ------ androidgirl I really like these atomic/functional css libraries with any sort of frontend framework or templating system that leverages components. Personally, I have been using Tachyons with React for the past couple months, and it's been a blast. Compared to writing html templates with Emmet and css with Sass, I feel as if I am more productive and like I can reuse more components. It's worth a try if it interests you! ~~~ chrisfrank I've also found Tachyons & React to be an amazing combination. The only trouble I've had is extracting common CSS class strings into tweakable components, e.g. a <Button> whose background color you can easily override, or a <Header> with tweakable font weight. I wrote a tiny (1kb) library to make this easier. For anyone working with React and functional CSS, I hope it's helpful: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/nanostyled](https://www.npmjs.com/package/nanostyled) ~~~ androidgirl Seems like an interesting library! I also encountered this issue, but I ended up just passing in colors/borders/spacing as props. I will have to see how that holds up for complicated UIs. ~~~ chrisfrank Thanks! I started by just passing props too, and I could see that approach working forever. I just got tired of having to always specify <Button bg="blue" border="ba1" />, when 90% of the buttons in the app were blue with a border. ------ leejoramo Be sure to check out the Wizard Zines site they are talk about. It had old school hand drawn zines about topics such as git, debugging, and more. Here is one on tcpdump [https://wizardzines.com/zines/tcpdump/](https://wizardzines.com/zines/tcpdump/) Reminds me of many computer publications in the early days ~~~ wpietri Absolutely. She's really good at making a complex topic approachable and bringing a lot of excitement as she shows you around. It reminds me how incredibly cool I thought these tools were when I first learned them. ------ mfontani Style your site with "only" 291KiB of CSS (24KiB compressed)? ~~~ baxtr Please read this... _> By comparison Tailwind seems really heavy (over 1.5x larger than Bootstrap!), but it turns out that this comparison isn't totally fair._ [https://tailwindcss.com/docs/controlling-file- size/#app](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/controlling-file-size/#app) ~~~ jermaustin1 But couldn't you also do the same to Bootstrap with PurgeCSS and still come out ahead of Tailwind? ~~~ adamwathan Tailwind would come out ahead because there are fewer classes that contain the same declarations, so the total number of style declarations would be less. ------ dpau Here's a single-page cheatsheet I created for Tailwind, good for seeing Tailwind's utility classes at a glance: [https://derekphilipau.github.io/tailwindcss-cheatsheet- singl...](https://derekphilipau.github.io/tailwindcss-cheatsheet-single-page/) ------ jmhnilbog What percentage of software churn is based on developers being reluctant to call out mistakes by other developers on their own teams/in their own companies (while having no problems calling out flaws in internet strangers' code)? 'Curating' what developers are allowed to do has been the focus of the last few jobs I've declined. "The guys at the other office are too dumb to learn (React\|Angular\|CSS\|tech X). Obviously, we need a team to invent something that uses (React\|Angular\|CSS\|tech X) behind the scenes but has a totally different API and no easily searchable documentation or support outside of our company." Tailwind looks like one of those escaping into the world, when telling your devs to pay attention to a style guide would have been the easier solution. Technology does not have a glorious track record in solving cultural issues. ~~~ RyanShook Not sure it totally applies to this situation but agree and think this is a great point. Technology doesn't solve cultural problems and often exacerbates them! ------ trwhite Several people here say "this doesn't scale" but I'd be curious to find out: \- The 'scale' at which they think a framework like this doesn't work (number of users, devs etc). \- The scale of the projects they work on. Who even says a framework needs to be adopted by tech giants or work at 'scale' to have any credibility? A utility-based approach has been adopted at the last 2 companies I've worked for and it's been very effective, often when working with very complex designs on medium-sized sites (that serve less than 100k users/month). Some of my previous colleagues and I work on [https://github.com/friendsthatcode/flavourcss](https://github.com/friendsthatcode/flavourcss), which was inspired but some of the ideas behind Tailwind and our own work. ------ lmm I've been saying for years that, in these days where all HTML is generated, CSS makes no sense and we might as well just style inline. You probably already have a "button" class in your UI framework that contains the HTML for rendering a button; put the styling there too. ~~~ blinky1456 So if you have a large number of buttons or other elements with the same class you will be repeating yourself over and over. With elements with a large number of style rules, you add a lot of very long lines to your html. This would be a nightmare to work on/maintain. ~~~ lmm > So if you have a large number of buttons or other elements with the same > class you will be repeating yourself over and over. In the HTML, sure. But so what? It gets compressed in transport so there won't be significant overhead there (similar to how remote desktop protocols that send images with compression turn out to be just as efficient as those that tried to send intelligent drawing commands), and the browser has to compute the final style for each element anyway so there's no overhead in-memory either. > This would be a nightmare to work on/maintain. HTML is an output format, you don't edit/maintain HTML any more than you edit/maintain binary machine code. And keeping the styles inline allows better encapsulation: the styling for each component lives in that component, you don't have the spooky action at a distance of child selectors. ~~~ icebraining What frameworks treat HTML as an output format, and what is the input? When I see samples of React code, all the HTML (in the form of JSX) is still handwritten, just combined dynamically. ~~~ lmm Sure - you write the html snippets by hand (and those are still very maintainable if you use inline styles). But you don't maintain the final page that might have e.g. twenty buttons, so that's not a case to optimise for. ------ owenmelbz Too much to read xD if anybody gets this far then remember this... 1\. People arguing against this are arguing against utility classes and not arguing against tailwind. 2\. Tailwind is different - it’s a toolset allowing you to build your own framework - you can use the tailwind config to define your variables and use BEM or what ever you want. 3\. Tailwind is utility “first” - so it provides all the utilities you need, YOU decide how to use them, put them all in your HTML if you like, or make components out of them, include them into an existing project, etc. So everybody here who is being negative towards tailwind regarding utilities is wrong - because they haven’t understood tailwind. - your arguments may be valid for utility classes, but this topic is about tailwind, so your spreading misinformation. ------ H1Supreme To address the author's “oh, another bootstrap site” line, Bootstrap offers a "css grid only" option. Which, I've found to be great when you don't want the Bootstrap look, but want a grid system in place to build with. ------ PunchTornado I don't understand how this works. Say you want a div to be a specific width: 135px, how do you make it without writing any CSS? Or you want a specific shade of a colour? Or you want to style things that are not in your html (third party widgets). ~~~ deltron3030 You treat your stylesheet as your style guide, design system, or single source of truth. That's where you define your fonts, colors scales etc. So you actually don't have to think about specific widths while you're building, you reference a width that is already set up in your stylesheet! I find that it improves the design to dev workflow. You experiment with design in a design tool like Sketch, and then translate your final idea or rules into a stylesheet, which is the basis for your live prototyping in editor & browser (wrapping HTML elements and referencing styles in your stylesheet). ------ Lennu These packages are really useful for small to medium sized projects where you need little to no customization! When you do need something greater than what the package can provide then I find it better to use something else because these tend to pollute the namespace and things in my experience get really complicated when you start adding your own stuff with them, or modifying them. Even though they are compact you probably end up having lots of unused CSS code in your website. ------ ukyrgf I've seen Tailwind pop up in some of the JAMstack starter kits, and I could have sworn it was some framework of yesteryear that I just missed that was now largely replaced by Bootstrap/Bulma/etc. Now that I've looked at the GitHub, I see v0.1.0 was released on Nov 1 2017! Some of these recent trends in web design really have me scratching my head, but I guess I'm just getting old. ------ nickthemagicman If you use Sass you get both the benefits of semantic html AND the ability to jam a million classes into an html element with @include and @extend. ------ z3t4 CSS has a bit of a learning curve, the probably most difficult to understand is the C (cascading ) part, and where something more specific over-rides something less specific. It's simple. Yet complex. But it's very powerful to be able to change the look of something, without touching the code that makes up the site/app content. And change theme by replacing the CSS-file. ------ mfbx9da4 [http://basscss.com/](http://basscss.com/) Is another tailwind type ------ projectramo When I make something, I want _all_ and _just_ the relevant pieces of what I am doing in my face, and then I want them gone when I do the next task. So if I were to every try to design a page, I want all the relevant design items there when I am figuring it out, and then when I am done, I don't want to see them again. So if you spend a lot of time designing the html/css then this approach makes sense. I don't want to jump into the css file and then back in the html file. However, if I want a particular look and feel for a site, and then knock out the css, then I want the css in a different file and then I want to focus on the layout and the logic. So my guess is that the original author builds lots of new sites and moves on. My guess is that the original author does not build one large site for a large company that has a consistent look and feel for years (till the rebrand). ------ fiatjaf For people who disagree, the CSS zen garden approach lives on on my blog-theme compilation: [https://classless.alhur.es/](https://classless.alhur.es/) ------ rozhok There is similar project called Tacit — [http://yegor256.github.io/tacit/](http://yegor256.github.io/tacit/) ------ Aeolun I honestly do not see the point in giving each of my css properties a separate class and then sticking those in my HTML. If I wanted to do that I would have used the ‘style’ tag. ------ RyanShook How is tailwind different than bootstrap or the multiple other css frameworks? ~~~ jaydid Well Bootstrap is a not a functional css framework like Tailwind. A better comparison would be Tachyons. ------ de_watcher When your styling tool (CSS) doesn't do what you actually need (layouts). ------ badsavage this is stupid, hard to maintain and ugly as well ------ combatentropy > Web design really isn’t my strong suit [...] for probably like 12 years now > [...] and am making no efforts to improve Is this ignorance common among those for whom functional CSS makes sense, or are there any CSS experts who like it? I'm bewildered by the popularity, as I am by several other fashions. Sometimes I wonder if these choices come from blog-driven development. I used to feel a bit insecure that I didn't go to school for computer science. I tried to make up for that by reading books, many books, cover to cover. Reading a great book cover to cover gives you a coherent understanding of the beginning, middle, and end of a language or tool. Also I read references: the list of core PHP functions, the jQuery API, and the list of CSS attributes. I didn't memorize them. I just tried to understand the gist of each, filed in the back of my mind, enough to prod me to find it in the reference when I needed it. But if you are learning by blog and Stack Overflow, do you ever come to an overall, comfortable understanding of something? I grant you that it will take some time, but so does learning these frameworks. The frameworks seem to fix one problem while planting three more. And Julia Evans is a technically minded person. She has written about Git and the Linux command line. Which is more complicated, Linux or CSS? I had always thought that HTML and CSS were meant to be softballs, for people who are geeky but maybe not full-fledged programmers. HTML and CSS were the first languages I learned, but my coworker stressed to me that they weren't full-on programming languages. > It’s 2018! All websites need to be responsive! I wonder if responsiveness is another cause for this trend. I agree that making pages that shrink and fold for various screens might put some novices over the edge. But looking the simplicity of Julia's website, maybe all she needs is a viewport meta tag. Another advantage I've had is my lifelong interest in graphic design. Before I knew CSS I knew about color, fonts, white space, etc. So I'm sure that made learning CSS easier for me. But for those who aren't into that, why aren't templates and stylesheets from other people enough? They've already chosen fonts and colors and margins and stuff that looks good together. They give classes for various kinds of pages and sections. Maybe you're somewhere in the middle, where you're not adept enough to write your whole CSS from scratch, but you want more customization than just using a general stylesheet. But why can't you tweak it? If you're smart enough to use Tailwind, aren't you smart enough to fiddle with some attributes in a stylesheet, make the corner rounder, make a font bigger, etc.? I truly am interested in understanding, if possible. CSS has a few things that are mildly annoying, but just mildly. Nothing would ever make me want to do something like this. Truly I am bewildered! One more thing: my attention is spread across many complex applications, thousands of lines of code, and I am in charge of the full stack (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Apache, SQL). So it's not like I get to spend all my time focused on the front end. Yet my users have told me that my pages look nice. I'm spread thin, but I've never wanted to use anything but stylesheets, no BEM, no SASS, just good, old-fashioned selectors. ------ PavlovsCat I always liked to mix both, having somewhat "semantic" classes like _.message.error_ , but then also things like .w100 { width: 100%; } .nopad { padding: 0; } etc. to modify the "semantic" classes where needed, in essence creating a mini-framework for every new project.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who “triggered” the biggest stock decline in history? - xichu Something like NatGeo Investigation Report on the Facebook stock decline. ---CR \| \|,, ====== pandasun Didn't Facebook break that record the other day? (Seriously, I could have sworn I read that). ~~~ xichu Twenty Sixth of July but what happened on Twenty Fifth after close. Fan or Not but how? Who triggered it?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Heist (Scheme in Ruby) 0.2 adds proper list support, better documentation - ionfish http://blog.jcoglan.com/2009/04/02/april-fool-area-man-releases-worlds-slowest-scheme-interpreter/ ====== wheels ...running in JRuby in VMWare on an EC2 instance for an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction on an abstraction. ~~~ gills That made my day :) ------ stcredzero Funny, how the more powerful and elegant a language is, the easier it is to implement. ~~~ antiismist True. With scheme, you'd only need to implement the core forms to get started: (LAMBDA, SET!, IF, DEFINE & QUOTE)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Linux Malware “Drovorub” developed by Russian exposed by NSA and FBI - richardowright https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/press-room/Article/2311407/nsa-and-fbi-expose-russian-previously-undisclosed-malware-drovorub-in-cybersecu/ ====== iLemming Note that "drovorub" isn't even a Russian word, "drovosek" is. It means "woodcutter". ~~~ jmt_ Why would a natively Russian speaking team misspell this word? Is it possible this software wasn't developed in Russia/by Fancy Bear or that it's some sort of play on words that I don't understand as an English speaker? ~~~ rsfern The article says it’s a composite of two recovered strings from one of the malicious programs involved. So I wouldn’t read too much into it Edit: sorry, this article, which we on another thread [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/08/nsa-a...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/08/nsa-and-fbi-warn-that-new-linux-malware-threatens-national- security/) ------ alsdkfjkqjwer <quote> Preventative Mitigations NOTE: The mitigations that follow are not meant to protect against the initial access vector. The mitigations are designed to prevent Drovorub’s persistence and hiding technique only. Apply Linux Updates System administrators should continually check for and run the latest version of vendor-supplied software for computer systems in order to take advantage of software advancements and the latest security detection and mitigation safeguards (National Security Agency, 2018). System administrators should update to Linux Kernel 3.7 or later in order to take full advantage of kernel signing enforcement. Prevent Untrusted Kernel Modules System owners are advised to configure systems to load only modules with a valid digital signature making it more difficult for an actor to introduce a malicious kernel module into the system. An adversary could use a malicious kernel module to control the system, hide, or persist across reboots (National Security Agency, 2017). Activating UEFI Secure Boot is necessary to ensure that only signed kernel modules can be loaded. This requires a UEFI-compliant platform configured in UEFI native mode (not legacy or compatibility modes) in Thorough or Full enforcement mode. Once enabled, Secure Boot creates an integrity chain at boot by verifying signatures of firmware, bootloader(s), and Machine Owner Key (MOK). The kernel, initial filesystem, and kernel modules are then verified by this MOK, which is distributed with Secure Boot-ready Linux distributions. Components with untrusted or absent signatures are denied from execution by Secure Boot policy. Enabling Secure Boot may prevent some products from loading, potentially affecting system functionality, and may require custom configuration (National Security Agency, 2017). </quote> ------ svrb > kernel module If you're running a module-enabled kernel then you were already pwned to begin with; nothing to see here. There is absolutely no need for modules except on live cds and the like. Of course, kernel configuration is another huge headache; don't get me wrong. ~~~ renewiltord Can someone explain this? I have DKMS enabled because I use the proprietary nvidia drivers. Also all my drivers are kernel modules. I feel like I'm missing something here, though. ~~~ posix_me_less If you use proprietary binary code in kernel, it runs with high privileges and can be used to provide remote root access to your system. Don't worry much about it, your computer most probably already runs proprietary binary code with such high privileges before your OS boots. ------ Stierlitz ¿Do they seriously expect us to believe this neocon cyber BS?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vampire myths originated with a real blood disorder - finphil https://theconversation.com/vampire-myths-originated-with-a-real-blood-disorder-140830 ====== rurban He should have least mentioned the Carmilla story, which was the origin of the Vampire story. From an porphyria autopsy report from Graz, Austria about a dead noble girl from Eastern Styria, which a horror writer in England caught up by a popular press report from Vienna, and then wrote the erotic/gothic Carmilla novel, about lesbian night creatures longing for blood. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilla) (Btw Wikipedia doesn't know the real background story for this) Which Stoker mixed with the Romanian Vlad Dracul story, who was not blood obsessed, but obsessed with anal torture. But he beat the Turks and therefore he was quite famous.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
China's Google Maps (zoom out for best effect) - pc http://shanghai.edushi.com/ ====== jmatt Looks like SimCity. I think the look adds something to the map. It's a bit easier to parse and understand than satellite images and adds more information than a standard overhead map. For those of us who don't read Chinese - what's the story behind this map? [EDIT: Wording] ~~~ siong1987 This is the real map of Shanghai in 3D. If you noticed the three buttons at the top right of the frame, the first one is for 3D display. Second one is for 2D display. Last one is for satellite pics. These are so much info that I can parse from the map. ~~~ jaaron Just to be clear, the 2D map and the satellite pics are from the _actual_ Google Maps for China: <http://ditu.google.com/> ~~~ jimmybot What? Google makes a custom political map for China? A couple of years ago, they used to claim that they don't make custom products for any market and product rollouts are always worldwide. Compare with: [http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Taiwan&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.724817,66.621094&ie=UTF8&ll=22.71539,121.069336&spn=20.138545,33.310547&z=5) Note that it's not just a matter of translation. First, they list Taiwan next to Hong Kong and Macau as if it's a peripheral part of China (this is surely China's wish, but the reality is that Taiwan is an independent democracy). Then, there's a line in the water to the east of Taiwan and extending elsewhere whose sole purpose is to imply regions to be part of China's territory that are not or are controversial. This line isn't used anywhere else in the world, such as say, in the Caribbean, where the boundaries of different islands might not be clear. I guess Google wants market share in China bad enough that they are willing to proffer multiple versions of truth. ~~~ tutwabee This actually might not be a custom product. The website that is hosting this map could be using the Google Maps API with their own map of China. Would you call the special Google News censorship for China a custom product? ~~~ jimmybot I actually had something specifically in mind. Google Taiwan had to fight to get special options onto the search page that could limit searches to Taiwanese websites ( <http://www.google.com.tw/> ). Otherwise, most Mandarin language searches would be overwhelmed by results from China. The strong resistance they encountered at the time was that Google insisted on products being rolled out worldwide in a single version, minus minor variations like translations. It's also a question of ethics in this case. This is about data that Google is directly providing, not simply a matter of ranking or showing/not showing websites in their results. It's not serving the user a purple background because they like purple. Think about another possible case--would it be right for Google to draw Israel as occupied Palestine in countries where the majority of people might hold that point of view? ------ bd Awesome. And there are plenty more cities linked from the frontpage (just hover over blue links in two rows): <http://edushi.com> For example: <http://beijing.edushi.com> <http://hongkong.edushi.com> Some even have tiny animations - cars, balloons, zeppelins, helicopters, fireworks, flying houses: <http://guangzhou.edushi.com> <http://xiamen.edushi.com> <http://sz.edushi.com> <http://dalian.edushi.com> <http://www.3dyiwu.com> It seems like balloons and zeppelins are actually carrying banner ads (I don't speak Chinese). \------ Edit: I found the company that did it - Aladdin Information & Technology - with some English explanations: _"Aladdin has a dedicated staff of 400 focused on delivering 2D maps to creation of 3D models."_ <http://www.aladdincn.com/en/Cooperation.html> ~~~ mmilo Yeah there are clickable ads within the map, a lot of the billboards seem to be clickable, which is really quite clever if they're selling that ad space. ------ knowtheory Ah Shanghai, the only city i know of that has an elevated high way with roundabouts (check the lower left edge of the map). That and the spiral onramp to the high tension bridge over the river. ~~~ jaytee_clone Oh yeah, I remember those. Traffic bottle neck, prone to accident. A horrible idea probably as a result of laziness. ------ kennyroo Such a beautiful product. Really shows how a web product can be practical and artistic. Very well done. ------ mahmud I have lived in Shanghai, and boy do I want to live in _this_ virtual Shanghai (the real one, only for sentimental reasons.) For me, the best city in China remains Hangzhou, maybe Xiamen :-) the most chill, laid back places in the east of the country (Kunming, Guilin and Hainan Island are all gorgeous) ------ maclifer Fascinating. I have never seen such dense development before. It looks beautiful and perfect, of course, until you start to jam everyone into it. :) ------ jpwagner I like how McDonalds gets its own button ~~~ papersmith That's part of their business model. They also put virtual billboards on prime "real estates". ------ est China's Google Street View: Beijing: <http://bj.city8.com/> Chengdu: <http://cd.city8.com/> etc. ------ winanga Also for Hong Kong - <http://hongkong.edushi.com/> ~~~ jaaron Makes it clear just how dense Hong Kong is, even compared to other Chinese cities. Do you happen to live in Hong Kong? ------ andrewljohnson This is maybe the second-best GMap I've ever seen, next to wunderground.com. And I follow these things closely since I run a GMap website too. ------ ridertech Awesome - I'm going to Shanghai in the fall and this is very fun to pan around. Now if only I could read Chinese. ------ rabidsnail Is it supposed to be alerting my user agent string? I smell XSS! ~~~ mr_justin Easy there, probably just a developer debug message checked into production by mistake. ------ Keyframe so much work and so beautiful to look at! ------ seshagiric what no cars! ------ pbz Beautiful! ------ erlanger Plane crash! Fire! Riot! Tornado! Earthquake! Flood! ~~~ latortuga Tools -> Disable Natural Disasters ~~~ access_denied The cheat: hit F-U-N-D-S to get 10,000$ for free. But after you did this a few times too often, the game engine would activate all desasters after another. Is this just me, or does this remember me of someone at Wall Street? ------ weegee "pfft air one reporting heavy traffic pfft" ~~~ weegee you guys didn't play the original Sim City did you. I used to leave my Mac Plus on all night to grow the population, I could run the game on a single 800k floppy, wow. Amazing how quickly the senior members of YC will vote someone down. Guess it's your way of keeping YC an elite site, and it boosts your morale knowing you're all better than us small-time users. Yawn, how boring is that? ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes You get voted down for not adding value deemed relevant.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Yakovlevian Torque - bookofjoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakovlevian_torque ====== twic What's torquing my brain is that in the diagram, the left is on the right, and the right is on the left! ~~~ Someone Left and right are defined from “1st person’s perspective”, but that’s not how medics typically look at their patients. When a doctor looks a patient in the eye, the left is on the right, and the right is on the left. That’s why many medical illustrations have the left on the right and vice versa (examples: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terminology#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terminology#/media/File%3AAbdominal_Quadrant_Regions.jpg), [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_notation)) ~~~ DaiPlusPlus Isn’t this also why the terms SX and DX are used (from the Latin Sinister and Dexter, for Left and Right) respectively - because they always unambiguously refer to the subject/patient’s left and right? ~~~ twic Same with port and starboard on a ship. ~~~ KC8ZKF Or "stage right" and "stage left." ~~~ harperlee Or rive gauche and rive droite ,at least in french, as you flow in a river. ------ prutschman I was curious whether it ever torques the other direction in individuals, and came across a claimed link between inverted torque and stuttering: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537737/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5537737/) ------ behnamoh I wish the article would talk about the consequences of this. For example, does this make left-handed people more "left-handed"? ~~~ isoprophlex Yes! Tantalising, but short on details. Some more insight into hypothetical causes, and generally much more information: [https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2012.13](https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2012.13) _Recent morphometry studies have consistently found handedness-related effects on the extent of the torque, mainly due to differences in the anatomy of frontal regions._ ------ voldacar What causes the torque? Does it have to do with blood pressure being slightly higher on the heart's side of the body or something like that? ~~~ uj8efdkjfdshf Given that the rostral (head) end of the neural tube literally bends inward (cephalic flexure) as it grows into the enclosed space of the head to later become the brain, and that the tip is also attached to a clump of cells that will become the heart (cardiac anlage) which is also migrating downwards with the tip of the neural tube and to the left side of the chest, it is altogether unsurprising that the brain should be slightly pulled to the left. ~~~ blueprint The articles doesn't indicate if research is sufficiently advanced to have established the time that torquing occurs but given that it's associated strongly with handedness, it seems reasonable to consider it likely that the torquing develops during the stage of increase neural plasticity during normal childhood development. I wonder if the torque balances out if a person later develops ambidextrousness. ------ nouveau0 Is this observed only in humans? I'd like to find out if it's just a human thing or more general like in all mammals ~~~ eindiran I just edited the article to explain that. It is well observed in modern- humans and fossil hominids. There's evidence that it is observed in other primates, including great apes and monkeys, but the evidence is conflicting; so probably it exists in other primates, but to a lesser degree. It is not believed to extend beyond the primates. ------ naringas is this a pathology? the wikipedia article doesn't make it clear. ~~~ tropdrop No. The pathology is if the torque is in the reverse direction (as someone else mentioned in comments, the result is a stutter). ------ martyvis Why is the diagram "exaggerated"? If the physiology is not that obvious maybe the significance isn't either. ~~~ Scaevolus It's pretty obvious on CT scans: [http://i.imgur.com/hKZqJUO.png](http://i.imgur.com/hKZqJUO.png) \-- and here I've been thinking I had a weirdly lopsided brain for 8 years! ~~~ marmaduke I've seen quite a few MRI scans, that's pretty heavily lopsided ------ ttizya20 If you look at a picture of Albert Einstein's brain it looks like something similar. ------ knolax Goes to show how stupid the convention of naming scientific terms after people is. The name "Yakolevian Torque" is not at all descriptive of what the phenomenon is, is hard to spell, and is hard to pronounce. You could say that it's to honor the discoverer but for a natural phenomenon does it really matter who discovered it first given that its a property of reality itself that holds true regardless of who discovered it. Besides that, many such phenomenon by their nature are discovered simultaneously by multiple people, making their naming by this convention a point of unnecessary political contention. Naming scientific terms after people also creates an unnecessary barrier to international collaboration. Although scientific terms are usually the most easy terms to translate given the universality of the topic on hand, proper names are usually the most difficult to translate terms from any given language to any other language due to their lack of semantic meaning and therefore the requirement for transliteration, which in most cases is a lossy process. For any given language and English, there are often many different transliteration schemes, making it difficult for even someone who speaks both languages to find the spelling that has been converged upon in English. The previous point basically nullifies any notion that naming a scientific term after a person honors that person, since it is very likely that it results in their name being butchered across multiple languages, often in egregious ways bordering on offensive. ~~~ blueprint Well, it's not strictly a bad idea to name it by some unique name if it turns out to be the case that another, better, more rigorous theory or set of observations is developed about the cause and range/extent of morphologies associated with the torque that makes the concept of Yakolevian Torque obsolete. ~~~ knolax If the concept of Yakolevian Torque becomes obselete we'll just stop referring to it regardless of how it's named. If it only needs to be updated in a way that obseletes the older descriptional name we can just give it a newer more apt descriptional name. ~~~ blueprint Kind of like Newtonian mechanics? ~~~ knolax You mean Classical Mechanics? Plus your example doesn't make sense because the term "Newtonian Mechanics" was likely coined only after Relativistic Mechanics were discovered[0][1], Newton himself referred to it as "Natural Philosophy". In addition "Newtonian Mechanics" isn't even the preferred name, Wikipedia refers to it as "Classical Mechanics"[2] while the Webster's definition of "Newtonian Mechanics"[3] is just the words "Classical Mechanics", which themselves have a much longer entry[4]. The fact that we do not in fact refer to "Classical Mechanics" as "Philosophiae Naturalis" actually supports my point: as our understanding of Physics improved we renamed the field, with older concepts/terms falling out of use and being renamed when they are reused. [0] [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mech...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mechanics&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0) [1] [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philos...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philosophy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNatural%20Philosophy%3B%2Cc0) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechanics&redirect=no) [3] [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mecha...](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mechanics) [4] [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mecha...](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mechanics) ~~~ blueprint Crazy how you knew exactly what I was talking about. ~~~ knolax Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never claimed that you can't use an arbitrary name to convey information. You can call it Classical Mechanics "gleeebnok" and people will understand you long as they can look up "gleeebnok" but that doesn't mean it's not a dumb name.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IPhone 4 in pure CSS3 - andrew_k http://tjrus.com/iphone ====== kulkarnic Perhaps I'm missing the point: besides a cool demonstration for what CSS can do (when aided by JS), why is this a useful idea? For anything practical, would one not be better off not being a purist, and using images etc? After all, image formats were meant to store graphics. I'm sure I'm missing something, since I've lately seen a lot of these "pure CSS" things. But what is it? [Edit: apparently, it is meant exclusively as a demo. And it's pretty slick at that] ~~~ rimantas Doing something in CSS instead of graphics often can let you save some HTTP requests and/or bandwidth — this comes handy if you are into client-side optimization. Also it is easier to update later: just change some values instead of recreating entire image (or set of them). However, depending on the case using sprites or data-uris may by preferable. ~~~ nirvdrum I'll take the network hit over the CPU hit (and thus battery life). This page is constantly using about 45% of a core on my MBP in Firefox 9. ~~~ dextorious Sure, but the (real or imaginary) savings of this is not about your hit, is about the hit from the server point of view. ~~~ atarian Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the combined size of an image and its complementary CSS file is less than the size of a 129kb CSS file with "CSS3 images", then don't you essentially lose the benefit of reducing server load? ~~~ dextorious Sure. That's why I added the "imaginary" qualifier to the savings. I just wanted to clarify that the savings the other commenters talk about were taken from the server point of you. ------ TjRus Hi! I'm developer of this iPhone. The reasons i've made it: 1\. Challenge. I saw the icons in pure CSS and deside to make full iPhone with icons. 2\. Demonstration of CSS3 posibilities (not all but many af them) 3\. Inspiration. Many young developers write me and thanks me for inspire themto learn more, use more... I titled it "..pure CSS3" because this iPhone is actually in pure CSS3, the JS part is for iPhone interaction. Without JS or with it - iPhone is anyway on pure CSS3. ------ willwashburn Perhaps I'm behind the times, but what tools do people use to make the icons like that in CSS3? Is it simply an art or can you start in photoshop and use some data there to help guide you along the way? ~~~ lazugod Not Photoshop specifically, but it would be easy to take vector art from something like Illustrator and convert it into CSS's simple shapes. ~~~ quizbiz Tutorials anywhere? ------ RKearney Why do people keep calling things "pure CSS" when they use JavaScript and HTML? ~~~ baddox I think HTML obviously is allowed to call something "pure CSS," since an HTML document is required to even load CSS, and CSS rules can only apply to DOM elements. JavaScript, however, shouldn't be allowed. ~~~ RKearney You could do it with XML and XSLT. ~~~ lojack XSLT is typically used to translate XML into HTML. Sure, you could use CSS to style XML, but I believe the point isn't to argue the semantics of the markup, only to say that some sort of markup is required in order to use CSS. ------ naithemilkman its cool but the title is misleading --> 335 lines of Javascript code used ~~~ okal A little like this - Donatello, a "pure" CSS drawing library, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3090290>. Not to belittle the effort, but 335 (or even 1) lines of JS is absolutely NOT pure CSS3. It really bothers me when people do that. It wouldn't have been any less impressive with a more honest title. That being said, this is a really cool demo. ~~~ ugh It is pure CSS as explicitly defined on the page, i.e. no images used. Just because you have a different definition doesn’t make it right. ~~~ icebraining It's not _his_ definition. Pure means "Not mixed or adulterated with _any other_ substance or material". Here there is JS mixed, hence it isn't pure. ~~~ ugh The point. You are missing it. He or she uses CSS for a job for which usually images are used. Hence his or her use of CSS is pure in that sense and it’s also written down that way. It’s not misleading in any way, shape or form. HN. A community of whiny know it alls. ~~~ icebraining I understand what you're saying. I don't agree with it. Not that I have any problem with it being pure or not, just with your reply to okal. ------ deepkut Despite the snide comments, this does demonstrate the power of CSS3, which I think was the designer's intention! On that note, NICE. ------ zalthor Anyone else notice the time displayed as local time? Not that its anywhere as cool as the rest of the demo, but I think its a really nice touch! ~~~ switz Try the calendar with the real day on it! ------ harryf Worth DOM inspecting, for example, the rays from the sun on the Weather app icon. Insane amounts of work have gone into this... ------ pothibo Very nice work. Love the details and the slider screen is a nice touch. Those iPhones in CSS are becoming more and more popular;) I made this 4 weeks ago, it's pretty much the same thing, but done differently. <http://pothibo.github.com/iPhonePerspective/> ------ jimmyhwang Wow, this is pretty sick. I wonder how much time it took to create this. ------ code_duck If anyone wants to see an alternative implementation, this one came to mind: <http://alexw.me/ipad2/> ------ joshuahedlund Would love to see a follow-up post detailing how some of the more challenging aspects were accomplished/derived/realized. ------ fatalerrorx3 Not to detract from the coolness of this demo, but it looks like garbage in IE 8 (what else is new) ------ quizbiz This is a beautiful resume. ------ bala79 this is cool!. Good to know the higher level of possibilities of css3. awesome work! ------ its_so_on stick a flash app in there that uses your microphone, camera, speakers, over tha internetz, and kill skype ------ zyb09 iPhone4 in CSS3? I predict this to be the highest upvoted submission on HN of all time. ~~~ ajarmoniuk It's funny because it's true. ------ alexhaefner (1) It's not pure CSS3, there's JS involved to handle events. Sure it's small, but it's not. (2) The only real gripe is that the animation is not accurate to an actual iPhone. After the unlock there is a delay between the lock/title moving away and the icons moving in. Both items clear the screen before the other items enter. Also there's a fade on the lock screen items. Demos like these are cool if they are well done, and correct. Otherwise they feel more like a gimmick. Having written webkit animations, all the added effect (the fades and timings) could be done with CSS3. So if you're gonna do it, do it well. Now after the criticism, good job. I like that all the icons and font and screens are all HTML/CSS objects. ~~~ marcusf Giving some benefit of the doubt, I really think the author was thinking "Done without images", not "Done without JS" when he was writing pure CSS. That change in perspective makes the title less misleading. I for one think it's a hell of a job. I'm impressed with the work involved, especially in small things like the positioning of the clouds on the Mail.app, and the loudspeaker design. ~~~ alexhaefner Ah I've done animation work in the past, so that's what I was drawn to. After that I looked at the other details more closely. Funny what we find ourselves focusing on.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mt. Gox Blames Bitcoin – Core Developer Greg Maxwell Responds - charlesism http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/10/mt-gox-blames-bitcoin-core-developer-greg-maxwell-responds/ ======	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft Pushes IE8 With Ads That Are Actually Funny - profquail http://www.pcworld.com/article/167617/microsoft_pushes_ie8_with_ads_that_are_actually_funny.html ====== paul9290 Interesting that they are doing these commercials for browsers when only 10% of the population or less could even tell you what is and or name one. Hopefully they are teaching this in grade, middle & high schools! Though that is doubtful! ~~~ redorb I have to ask for a data source on that 10%. thanks. ~~~ pushingbits Actually, it's 8%. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667909> ~~~ redorb that article (as far as I read) didn't share how many people they interviewed etc... I would be hard pressed to find 82% of these 'non knowing' people. I think the answer might have to do with the question - I would ask 'What do you think a browser on a computer is or used for?' Thanks for the information; ------ rbanffy I have to disagree with the original article. They are not that funny. More like a "meh" kind of thing. ~~~ snprbob86 I agree that they are "meh" except for the last one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-9Mjm-Hohc> I would never have expected Microsoft to be the first browser vendor to admit that private browsing modes are for porn.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to become a manager - technological Hi everyone. I am currently working as senior technical support engineer (L3) and have like 7 years of experience in various fields like Process development, Accessibility web developer, test engineer and support engineer. How do I take next step to become a manager ? is 7 years too short ? should I become team lead first ====== CyberFonic Start showing ever greater levels of incompetence ! Seriously, I'm not trying to be a troll magnet. When you are very good technically your management will keep you down in the mines to keep doing great work and preferably without too many pay rises. Working in support is especially bad in the sense that it is not an area that attracts many good engineers, thus you are probably indispensable. If you are seriously keen on moving up into management you could study one of the many DIY MBA courses around. If that still looks like where you want to be, then depending on the size of your organisation you could start applying for promotions into team leader roles and possibly low-level management roles. ------ itronitron the usual progression is team lead then manager, although every organization is different. Generally you would need to express an interest to your manager that you are interested in management (many people are not interested and for good reason :) ) and then wait for someone up the chain to leave the company. Before that happens you may be able to serve as delegate while your manager is out of the office. If you want things to happen more quickly then you would need to get hired in as a manager at another company which might rquire first getting an MBA or MS degree. ~~~ technological Thank you for the insight. Can you elaborate bit more why people are not interested for good reason ? I have an MS degree but all jobs outside need like 20years of experience for manager ~~~ greenyoda Managers spend a lot of time in meetings, and have to deal with personnel matters such as performance reviews, hiring, layoffs, pay issues and interpersonal conflicts. They bear the responsibility for the work of their entire team. They try to shield their teams from all the nonsense that's coming in from upper management so their teams can concentrate on their work. Some people thrive in this kind of job, but others don't. After being a manager for ten years, I got tired of the stress and went back to being a developer. One more thing: new managers rarely get the training they need to do their jobs well. They have to learn by making mistakes (some of which can be very costly and painful). I definitely think you should become a team lead before becoming a manager, since it gives you the opportunity to learn about leadership without having to deal with many of the other issues that a higher-up manager needs to deal with.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: HackerBuddy.com - illdave I built HackerBuddy.com with the idea of helping the Hacker News community get one-on-one help with fellow hackers that know their stuff. It matches up people that are good at a particular skill (Ruby on Rails, Python, beta-testing, general startup advice etc) with people that need that specialist help. All it does is swap your email address so that hackers can give fellow hackers one-on-one advice.<p>I built the site as a way to learn Ruby on Rails, I'm still a bit green when it comes to coding so there's a very good chance that the server will fall over. Any feedback you guys have would be really appreciated - and you can get in touch at dave [at] hackerbuddy.com. I hope you find it useful. ====== mcrittenden Great idea. A couple feedback items: \- The icons on user pages which stand for areas of expertise aren't really helpful since you have to hover over them to see what most of them mean (example: a coffee cup means General Advice and a person icon means Usability). At the least, these should have titles above/below them. \- I'd like the hardcoded areas of expertise removed in favor of an autocomplete freeform box, much like Stack Overflow's tags box. For example, I'd like to put that I'm a Drupal expert and I'd like to look for node.js help, but neither of those are options. ~~~ illdave Thanks very much - those are really good suggestions, I really appreciate it - I'll work on them both for v2. ------ topcat31 I love the concept for this, finding friendly hackers to help you on your hack project is massively useful ------ znt You should also add Flash/Actionscript to the skill list. ~~~ illdave Thanks, I'll add that in the next update. ------ cooler Love the idea ... very cool! I need to sharpen my skills before I sign up though ... ~~~ illdave You can sign up and ask for help to sharpen your skills :) - you wont be listed to help anyone until you click 'help a fellow hacker' ------ illdave Clickable: <http://hackerbuddy.com> ------ mufti Interesting and it will very helpful, now I am ready to contact person who will help me, I already get him email.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OS/2 2.0 LA - ASipos http://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-2-0-xmas-91-edition/ ====== ASipos Also see: [https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/ind...](https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/os2/history/os220/index.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Jason Fried: Never Read Another Resume - seanmccann http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume_Printer_Friendly.html ====== tptacek Broken down to bullets: * Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it. * Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent. * Stay as small as you can. * The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful. * Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write. * Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: <http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/> * Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions. * Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers. * Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can. ~~~ kenjackson I disagree with point 2. You only alienate the talent if you don't have a culture of exploration. On several occassions I've hired exceptionally bright people, with no clear idea what they might do. In every case they figure out what to do, usually by finding a gap that we didn't even know we had. ~~~ tptacek Some very smart people are just looking for a place where they can experiment and grow technically and do the basic things they love. If you can utilize these people _without_ having them end up building and testing CRUD apps to justify the headcount, that's fine. But other very smart people want not only to be doing interesting things, but also to be as close to the money as possible. What they work on needs to have an impact, and have some chance of setting the direction of the company. If you accidentally hire that latter person into a role designed for the former person, they'll get bored, or, worse, irritated when they try to get close to the money and then rebuffed (or, worse, pigeonholed into something boring). What I'm saying is, be careful with the notion that you can always find something for an A-player to do. Often, no. ------ anigbrowl Ah, the joys of grammatical ambiguity. ~~~ tome If we're going to be picky, isn't it orthographical ambiguity? [Edit: rephrased] ~~~ tome Having read RyanMcGreal's comment above I now realise there _is_ grammatical ambiguity as well as orthographic :) ~~~ yellowbkpk Is there a word for ambiguity ambiguity? (i.e. Which type of ambiguity?) ~~~ pigbucket Ambiguity ambiguity sounds like semantic ambiguity, but there are lots of different kinds of that. There's a book that disambiguates ambiguity ambiguity, by W. Empson (math geek turned lit prof), _Seven Types of Ambiguity._ ~~~ ramchip You just reminded me of why the Internet is an incredible invention. ------ patio11 This is just as compelling an argument that you never write another resume. Or, to make the conclusion a little less doctrinaire, spend more time on networking and creating things that you can present to prospective employers to convince them to employ you _beyond_ the confines of the 1-2 page resume that nobody reads anyhow. ~~~ btilly I disagree that nobody reads the resume. Last year I was looking for a job. During interviews I received enough detailed comments on things in my resume (see <http://elem.com/~btilly/BenTilly.pdf> for said resume) that I knew that people had read it. Furthermore they had followed through and actually read things I linked to in it! That said, it took a lot of work to get my resume to the point where that happened. And you have to be able to back up your resume. ~~~ ramchip That's an interesting resume. Gave me some ideas to improve mine. Thanks! ------ luckystrike Almost all the suggestions on hiring in this article are pretty good. The one where I would differ is: We're happy to skip over the perfect catch if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do. If you already know the person is 'perfect' for your organization, and have the financial capacity to hire him/her, you should go for it (IMO). I would think of it as an investment that would help my business in the longer run. Right now, a company might be content with their current suite of products, but constant innovation is required in our industry to stay ahead. It could be in the existing products or coming up with completely new solutions. If people working on existing products have their plates full most of the times, they 'might' not be able to devote as much time as they would like on coming up with newer things, that could further improve the bottom line. ~~~ danudey I'm going to second this. If you hire mediocre people without enough work, you'll waste money, it's true, but consider Google. They hire brilliant people, and through their 20% time they end up with amazing things (I think Gmail and Maps are two examples). Now imagine what an excellent employee could do with 100% time and support from the rest of your organization. ~~~ tptacek Here's one strong possibility: noodle, get bored, then quit. Consider the adverse selection problem here. People who can do valuable things with "100% time"? They're _inherently valuable_. Since they usually need to be pretty smart to be that valuable, they _know they're valuable_. Therefore: they are probably not looking for a W2 position as a base of operations. _Lots_ of people, many of them very smart, will salivate over the idea of a 100% self-directed R&D position. But smart or not, most of those people are not going to do well in that role, because: see last paragraph. ------ edw519 _Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer._ OK, I'll bite. Why? ~~~ axod 37signals is a PR company first and foremost. Programming seems a secondary concern. ~~~ puredemo They say 3 million people use their software. ------ blizkreeg What are the elements of a _truly good_ cover letter? Stuff beyond the cliched advice you get such as showing interest in the company/position and so on. Are good cover letters "from the heart" (so to speak)? Is semi-formal but well-written language better? ------ siculars "What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all. They immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job. And cover letters make something else very clear: They tell you who can and who can't write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the top quickly. Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer." Writing is critical in today's technologically, geographically dispersed world. Those who can write well can communicate their ideas and intentions well to their team and to their clients. There has been some ink covering the subject in various outlets over the last year or so. ------ tjmaxal it does seem a little short sighted to pay entire depts lots of over time because you can't find the perfect hire. This is what my current employer does and I'm always amazed at the practice. Isn't paying out twice as much in overtime more expensive than just hiring more people? ~~~ GFischer Maybe in the U.S... in parts of South America and Europe the administrative overhead of hiring new people (and the hefty penalties for firing) means that hiring has to be really, really well justified. That of course makes for a less mobile market, a stagnation culture (IMO), and less entrepreneurism I suspect (though getting a state-paid job that can realistically mean 20 hrs/week of actual work and doing jobs on the side is very common). ~~~ btilly I know a company that was outsourcing work to Argentina and was not entirely happy with said work. But they had a lot of knowledge sunk there. Argentina decided to respond to the downturn by bringing in legislation that would make the cost of firing people even higher. That fact pushed the US company to fire the Argentina employees right away rather than waiting for it to get more expensive. Unintended consequences and all that. ------ queensnake [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another- resu...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html) Link _with ads_ so they can get some small money for their content. ------ papachito > Finally, we never let geography get in the way. We hire the best we can no > matter where they are. We're based in Chicago, but we have programmers in > Idaho and California, system administrators in North Carolina and downstate > Illinois, designers in Oklahoma and Colorado, a writer in New York City, and > others in Europe. This obviously wouldn't work for customer-facing folks, > but for most everyone else, it does. The best are everywhere. It's up to you > to find them. This is so true, I don't understand tech companies from London or Miami or whatever that do not accept telecommuting and require someone from their own city. They're missing out on the best just so they can have face to face? Face to face is not required in programing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing - falava https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html ====== legulere I think this is a bit extreme trying to change words to adhere to your own worldview and makes real discussions impossible. There's nothing wrong e.g. with speaking about BSD-like licenses, if you don't see a lack of copyleft as a flaw. This list even kind of reminds me even of Newspeak ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak)). So let me try to find something similar from a different perspective: Copyleft Free Software: You may not be able to use copyleft licensed code together with code licensed under a different license. Better words are CDDL- proprietary or GPL-proprietary. An example in a sentence: ZFS can't be integrated into Linux because Linux is GPL-proprietary. ~~~ pcl Yes, RMS's obsession with clever wordplay is really a great example of Newspeak. It's always bothered me, but I hadn't made the connection to 1984 until you said it. This frustrates me, since he's otherwise fighting a good fight, but the rhetoric is marginalizing. A little bit of wordplay is charming, but RMS just takes it so far. ~~~ Decade Then what alternative would you propose? The terms of the debate have been defined by totalitarians who themselves use Newspeak to get people to accept their systems. By disrupting the language, RMS makes dissent thinkable. ~~~ Karunamon Is this using the RMS definition of "totalitarian", which makes moral judgements on the _great evil_ of not releasing the source code to _your_ software on _very specific terms_ , or the one used by most of the world in reference to government institutions? Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting. Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux". Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided _only_ because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet. The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago. "Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're _ensuring_ that the computer works in _your_ interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC. Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly- unnecesary noise to get it across. ~~~ Decade Trying to avoid the weeds that so many other people have argued, so: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google. ~~~ Karunamon And your point is...? ~~~ Decade You do not win the culture wars by using words defined by totalitarians. People who have no respect for others’ freedoms. ~~~ Karunamon You live in a parallel version of Earth I'd like to inhabit if you think the FSF is winning any culture battles, let alone wars. ~~~ Decade They are winning battles. Back when they started, nobody thought software deserved to be free. Bill Gates published a letter where he asserted that nobody should use Microsoft software without paying Microsoft, and only Microsoft had the privilege of improving it. 30 years later, Microsoft releases a lot of stuff under the Apache 2.0 license. If you were not connected to the past, you would not recognize how huge this is. ~~~ Karunamon And yet, Microsoft's releases are done under APL2, not GPL. I'd argue that that the FSF is culturally irrelevant - the hacker mindset (and so the sharing one) would exist with or without RMS. ------ verandaguy These are honestly kind of ridiculous, and they come off as unbelievably pretentious. They also lack self-awareness, since they're supposed to avoid being loaded. \- As mentioned, verbing "GIMP" can give it at least two loaded meanings which have _nothing_ to do with the image editor. \- "Cracker" also has a very, very different and loaded meaning outside of software. And holy heck, the whole GNU slash Linux debate has gotten to the point of mass parody with the "I'd like to interject for a moment" meme. The worst part of it is that it's easy to argue against this point because there are Linux systems out there which don't necessarily use the GNU toolchain. The statement tries extremely hard to generalize the idea that Linux is irreparably crippled without the good graces of the GNU toolchain. Ugh. I want to push for the adoption of free and open source software and hardware, and I really do care about the ability to see the internals of, and tinker with, and break, and then fix the stuff I run in my day-to-day, but this kind of article makes the FOSS community (the free community especially; but the OSS community by extension) look bad by imposing this image of snobbishness and obsession over honestly minute details. The movement to popularize free software and hardware won't be won by making people stop calling digital audio players "MP3 players," when it's an accurate term for an overwhelmingly large part of the digital audio player market. ~~~ dsp1234 While I have no opinion either way, the argument for GNU/Linux is not due to using the GNU toolchain. The argument is that it's the GNU userland and Linux kernel, thus GNU/Linux. There are very few (just android?) distributions that don't use the GNU userland[0]. [0] - [https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/software.en.html) ~~~ gregmac Not according to this article: > The operating system in which Linux is used is basically GNU with Linux > added. I'm not sure how you lump all distros into a single "operating system". And anyway, I'm not sure what the point of this argument is anyway. Why stop at the GNU userland? An OS with only GNU userland and the kernel would be nearly useless, so there's a lot more to it than that. "Please stop saying GNU/Linux. It's really KDE[1] with some GNU programs and Linux kernel tacked on". "Please stop saying KDE/GNU/Linux; your OS is really just Firefox[1] with some other apps, utilities and a kernel somewhere underneath." [1] Insert your favorite desktop/shell/browser if appropriate. ~~~ verandaguy Thanks for following up with the point that these things could stack almost indefinitely. It's hypocritical to put GNU at the forefront when, obviously, the kernel alone would be totally useless except as a portable-ish interface to talk to hardware and process syscalls with very little abstraction. \-- Sent from my <textarea>/HTML/Hacker News/Gecko/Firefox/GNOME/GNU/Linux ------ sverige The perpetual problem of this ideology is that so many people have "wrong" thoughts and speech. I'm surprised only that the list doesn't include a narrower redefinition of "freedom" to mean "free to agree with our definitions." ~~~ mhink I don't really see it as that much of a problem, to tell the truth. Every company with a marketing department worth their salt makes sure to figure out the "correct" terminology to market their product or service in order to present a unified message to the outside world. This is very similar, except the FSF, true to form, is making their terminology (and justification for that terminology) open to the public. The other major difference is that they're not marketing a product or a service, but rather an _idea_, which makes them come off a lot more pretentious than I think they actually are. Okay, scratch that- a _little_ more pretentious than they actually are. ;) But I mean, let's also consider that in the market of ideas, the idea of free software IS, and always has been, under siege by companies who _really don't_ want it to be a Thing. Or at least, companies who have ideas which are only profitable if free software isn't a thing. If you're going to establish an organization whose entire purpose is to keep an idea relevant and un-subverted for a long period of time, it's crucial to come up with practices for "memetic sanitation". I mean, look at U.S. political discourse over the last, say, 30 years. Politicians are experts at this sort of subtle semantic manipulation- repackaging old ideas under new names, giving disparaging/complimentary nicknames to existing ideas they want to reject/promote, or recombining names so that one idea gets mushed up with another in the minds of the public. It's memetic warfare. And so, for the most part, I sympathize with the FSF for doing a hard job. They're playing the game with their cards face-up, and trying to keep their side of the Overton window from getting dragged to a place which they, and I myself, believe will cause the world to become a worse place. tl;dr- if you're not worried about the Green Party's political ideology, you probably don't need to worry about the FSF's political ideology. ------ ams6110 "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." ------ kefka Nah. I'll keep using Photoshopped, even if it's a name of the ubiquitous image manipulation program. What's my comparison? Yeah, that's been GIMPed. Gimp has meanings other than "Gnu image manipulation program", like talking about handicapped peoples. In the wrong places, saying it's GIMPed can get you in real trouble. ~~~ episteme I think the implication is that we should say something akin to "the photo has been edited", not just replace the verb with a free alternative to Photoshop. ~~~ warkdarrior "Photoshopped" usually implies the photo was edited with the intent to deceive. Regular editing (e.g., removing red eye) is not malicious. ------ Frondo I don't imagine the FSF has really spent a lot of resources on this page, so it isn't really troubling in the sense of "so much effort, what a waste," so it's more of an amusing, "not much effort, but what a waste". Those sorts of language changes happen, and it's just never worth fighting for. Especially hacker vs cracker, that one was lost a long, long time ago. Several of these fit into the same mental territory as genericized trademarks, i.e. digital audio player instead of mp3 player, or Kleenex-brand facial issues instead of Kleenex, again, not worth fighting for. And several of these carry political loading of their own (e.g. don't say "theft"), as well as that perpetual lost cause, GLAMP. Oh well. Happily the FSF does a lot of other good work. ~~~ vizeroth It's not necessarily that the FSF spends a lot of resources on this page, but that Stallman appears to spend a lot of his time and resources on the issues that are repeated throughout this page (or the whole "Philosophy" section of their website). In some ways, it's good to have someone like Stallman around to remind us that there is another way to look at some of these things, and to push the political debate. One of the biggest issues in my mind is that the GNU camp likes to expropriate words with established meanings, then attempt to categorize everyone else's use of the words as inappropriate. However, that is only a part of the in- fighting which tends to occur between the "free" and "open source" software movements and helps to marginalize them in the eyes of the layman. ------ kristianc Can't help but feel that this would carry more weight if RMS did not do his thing or redefining perfectly good words to match his ideology - which I noticed is done here again with 'Service as a Software Substitute' ------ lmkg Let me voice a dissenting opinion: I don't mind this nearly as much as other people do. Entities invested in intellectual property have tried, and largely succeeded, to influence what terms people use to describe intellectual property. They do this because it's an effective way of affecting public opinion, by anchoring certain concepts against other concepts (it's more effective on people who don't have a strong opinion, which for copyright law is the majority of people). It's a common and useful marketing tactic. RMS is observant enough to see this happening, and recognize that it is one of the battlefields of public opinion. He is trying to counter it. And he is doing it in an open and transparent fashion, unlike his opposition, which unfairly opens him up to criticism. The main problem I have is that terminology seems to be the main front where RMS focuses most of his efforts. He spends more time on pedantry and very fine, subtle arguments about distinctions between different types of abstract freedoms. So much that actual messaging becomes a secondary priority, to his detriment. ------ br_smartass I'd like to point one thing: ever since I started getting more interested into etymology, I've sort of fallen in love with words, and came to see them as much more alive and powerful than before, and I've started to care much more about their weight, their truthiness, their application, etc, so that I'm precise, and of course I also started getting more annoyed when I see them malapplied. I sometimes think that nothing made me feel smarter and sharper mentally than etymology(like the same effect history, logic, philosophy has, but maybe a little bit more fundamental), the _confusing_ there is not just "this is bad!", if you're using confusing words your thinking gets less clear, lies pass through, making sense of things is harder, more error-prone, etc. When you start to notice things this way, a lot changes. And we sort of have to defend ourselves from the tonnes of bullshit we're shot with everyday. So, yeah, I think this shit is real. Of course changing your vocabulary entirely can feel a bit extreme, but still, KNOWING words are loaded or confusing, or just marketing, or plain lie, plain propaganda, plain politics, is useful. RMS of course cares much more about truthiness than he does what others think of him(and he was right before, remember it?). If one puts 'self-awareness' above 'truthiness' in their mind, it's no wonder they'll think this is weird, eccentric, etc. The cool thing about Truth, though, is that it's way above vanity and opinion. The former scratches the later two, the opposite, not so much or not for very long. ------ cguess "The term “creator” as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity (“the creator”)." I... don't... know... where... to... start.... ~~~ JdeBP That's because you are not a deity, obviously. (-: You could start with a capital "c" ("the Creator"). ------ KittiHawk "Please don't spread this mistake. People who break security are “crackers.”" No, no, no. "crackers" has its own sordid baggage. ~~~ kefka Hmm. I've always taken the recent hacker/cracker as the following: Hacker: One who breaks into computer systems or networks one does not control or have access to. Cracker: One who breaks into software and firmware on their devices as to gain control of root over their machines. This may be in contention with the arbitrary licenses they may have agreed to prior to installation or purchase. ~~~ flyingfsck I bet kittihawk is talking about the usage of cracker as a derogatory term as it regards to white people: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(pejorative)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_$pejorative$) ------ droopyEyelids This page is a succinct introduction to the important concepts of free- software thought and GNU ideology, regardless of what problems you might have with the actual definitions it supplies. Try and understand the different culture before condemning it all! ~~~ WhatIsDukkha I agree. It's definitely the worth the time to actually read it. Sadly the title of the page predicts what most people commenting seem to have done - Skimmed, got triggered by a word or a turn of phrase and came to type their first objection really quick. ------ dijit Agree with the Cloud one completely, but then again my laptop is adorned with the "There is no cloud; it's just someone elses computer" sticker so I'm very biased already. When I saw the topic and the URL I was taken back to the coreboot fiasco, and I was sure this was related.. but no, it's just a load of recommendations on changing language that nobody will follow. And mostly there is strong justification for not following, even if GNU/FSF had a huge following. Who on earth wants to replace "Photoshopped" with "GIMPed" or "digitally manipulated", it's not going to win friends with suggestions like this.. even if I see their point. ------ dolzenko > The term “WC” has been suggested for a computer running Windows. LOL ------ lovich A little offtopic, but could someone explain to me what the free software philosophy as espoused by Stallman/GNU is doing that is both good AND separate from the open source movement? Everytime I have seen the differences highlighted, it's been in some condescending article like this from GNU themselves where they are telling everyone how they are thinking wrong. I'd really like to know what the benefit of their philosophy is that isn't shared by the OSS movement ~~~ Decade Well, there was this last month: [https://opensource.com/business/16/11/open-source-not- free-s...](https://opensource.com/business/16/11/open-source-not-free- software) ------ Flimm The very confusing term "free software" isn't on this list, and that fact speaks volumes. ~~~ smu3l There's a whole page[1] dedicated to defining "free software" in the same Philosophy section. Of course that page also defines the "copyleft" pun which is loaded and confusing on its own. [1] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) ------ BurningFrog Thinking about what words to use is worthwhile for any language user. Obsessing about it at this level, and trying to cram so much meaning into them, is confusing surface with substance. In the end, a word is just a few syllables some people use as shorthand for deeper concepts. It can never _be_ the concept. ------ GFK_of_xmaspast Stallman wants "GLAMP" instead of "LAMP" for the stack, but if someone's already talking about the LAMP stack, how much of the gnu userspace tools are they bringing in anyway. ~~~ amyjess Yeah, once you're committed to the AMP, the first part doesn't matter. If you ran a LAMP shop, and you told the developers that the company is switching to BAMP (BSD) or IAMP (Illumos), it wouldn't change the code the developers write one iota. Honestly, the important parts are "free as in beer" and "Unix-like" (and you could probably replace "Unix-like" with "command-line driven" and it'd work just as well). ------ nougatine Larry Ellison is a software developer? That's news to me. Last time I checked he was the CEO of Oracle. ------ CalChris RMS	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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