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Create your first algo trading strategy with Arcade Trader and Alpaca - cryptoeu https://medium.com/@arcade_trader/algorithmic-trading-for-beginners-part-1-d6589d4beb05 ====== levered2019 I am big fan of Alpaca. More people should know about it!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Visual Search app for iOS8, Snap Search, feedback welcome - germcd https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/snapsearch-search-reviews/id946731654?ls=1&mt=8 ====== germcd Hi Folks, I'm Ger the developer of Snap Search, we are looking for your feedback on our app, both the idea and execution :-), there are certainly some rough edges but we have found it works well with products and RL visual information (Posters for concerts, museums, billboards etc.). Simply take a pic, wait for it to recognise and then tap one of the speed dial buttons or ask a question about the image.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: An app that transforms your phone into an iPod - sakofchit https://testflight.apple.com/join/1BHkrtFP ====== sakofchit Video Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbCfWC2GthI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbCfWC2GthI) Website: [https://retromusic.co](https://retromusic.co) Hey guys! Retro brings back the magic of having full control over your music––inspired by the design of the iPod. Why would we want that? I don’t know, but nostalgia hits us hard at the weirdest of times and sometimes there’s harmony in it. We’ve been spoiled with Spotify/Apple Music. Being able to have all your songs in one place is a godsend and is something we take for granted every day. I don’t want to take that away and currently you can control/sync Apple Music with Retro. You can theme the app to really make it yours. Right now I’ve made a few skins that you can select within the app (as seen in the video). You can also change the wheel color. Retro is 100% free to use and will always be. For updates, feel free to follow me on twitter! [https://twitter.com/sakofchit](https://twitter.com/sakofchit) ~~~ galuggus What was it like developing in flutter? ~~~ sakofchit It's awesome! Highly recommend working with it if you're aiming for efficiency. There's also plenty of packages that help speed up development	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
JQuery File Upload - DanielRibeiro http://aquantum-demo.appspot.com/file-upload ====== jcborro The number of jquery file upload plugins is astounding. This looks like a decent one, though makes the job of picking one that much harder...one of the drawbacks of jquery's open plugin ecosystem. Who wants to write the blog post reviewing and testing them all in various browsers? I will donate $5! ~~~ Xurinos Here is a community idea, not just for jQuery plugins but also CPAN, curse.com, and other code/add-on/plugin communities. (1) Plugins must be submitted with a list of tags/categories indicating their purpose. For example, a plugin for uploading multiple files might take the tag "uploader". If it has file preview features, it might have the tag "file- preview". (2) People rating the plugins may add tags. These will be marked specially as rater/community tags. (3) For a particular tag/category, a rater may arrange plugins in order of preference (preference voting -- see <http://selectricity.org/> for an example of a working system). (4) People looking for a plugin can see how the community rates it in each category compared to other plugins. And if you believe what the community has to say, this rating system can give you a decent idea of which plugin may best do the job for you. ------ tectonic I've been pretty happy with <http://valums.com/ajax-upload/> ------ davidmathers This was on the front page 2 weeks ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130501> Unfortunately that news item linked to a blog post and not to the project itself. ~~~ riledhel mmm... we could use some feature to mark posts as duplicated here on HN, right? ------ marquis We've been working with uploadify, but I like the fact that this comes readily built-in with image preview/delete options and requires no flash. Has anyone tested this on an iPhone? ~~~ revetkn AFAIK, Mobile Safari does not support file uploads, so this (or any similar plugin) will not work. ~~~ mhansen Hell, the iPhone doesn't even have the concept of 'files'. ------ rkalla Did some hunting for a good jQuery upload plugin a week ago for (self promotion warning) imgscalr.com. valums ajax-upload seemed like it would be the best fit, but I couldn't get a full-screen Drag and Drop target working and had a hard (impossible) time customizing it to behave differently. Wanted to use uploadify, but as mentioned it didn't work inside a browser with Flash-blocking enabled which turned me off immediately. I actually wrote an HTML5 DnD + File API tutorial a few months ago: [http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/html5-drag-and-drop-and-file- api...](http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/html5-drag-and-drop-and-file-api- tutorial/) and decided to get down and dirty with the whole process since everything else out there seemed relatively new to the scene anyway. Some things I found out: 1\. Opera and Mozilla (thank the gods) seem to behave almost identical to each other... at least with the HTML5 DnD behavior/events and File API functionality. 2\. Safari 5 (on Win 7) doesn't seem to understand Drag and Dropped _native_ elements at all. I also scrubbed through the Apple HTML5 site and found no mention of support for the File API anywhere... so even if DnD was made to work, it wouldn't know what to do with the resources. TIP: There is a great tutorial from 2009 online, and seems to be for Safari only, where you can hack the styling of an <input type="file"> dialog and MAKE it a drop target while hiding the default file box here: [http://www.borismus.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/02/drag_drop...](http://www.borismus.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/02/drag_drop_upload.html) 3\. Opera, as much credit as it gets for being so great, doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with some of these native HTML5 APIs -- I believe I read somewhere (this has all become a blur) that they are sitting out from these 2 APIs until the dust finishes settling... probably the smart move, but still annoying my app won't work in their browser. 4\. IE 8/9... what can I say. I don't think I expected any of this to work, and probably plan on a Flash-fallback for IE only as some longer term solution, but damn, I sort of hoped it would have. 5\. There is a massive post on all the things wrong with the HTML5 DnD API at quirksblog that made me want to give up HTML5 programming and go back to embedded Applets: [http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_dr...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_drag.html) My point being (12 paragraphs later) that from a week of working on this problem there doesn't seem to be a sure-fire solution out there yet for someone wanting to go the "pure HTML5" route... there are some awesome starts to it as linked below, and all the JavaScript from imgscalr.com is heavily commented if you want to take a look at it, but it seems we are still a far way away from some drop-in/jack-of-all-DnD-upload experience that we were hoping for. Made me realize HTML5, at least in the aspects I'm most interested in, is still a long way away from giving me exactly what I need. ------ pak One feature Uploadify still retains over this plugin: The Flash upload dialog allows you to restrict what file types (by extension) are selectable, which can prevent some people from uploading the .JPG when you only accept audio files, etc. I don't think anything in the HTML5 DnD API has accounted for this. ------ apinstein This is the first one I've ever seen that supports D&D from Mac/Safari. Very nice. ------ drivebyacct2 Similarly, <http://www.uploadify.com/> I really appreciate that this doesn't require Flash as Uploadify does. Very cool, I'm probably going to see if we can get this in our project - multifile upload is an important story coming up next week! ~~~ rkalla It may not require Flash but with NoFlash in Chrome I can't get any of the demos to load - not sure why. ~~~ drivebyacct2 Uploadify requires flash, the submission's script does not. Sorry if that was confusing. Uploadify uses Flash's multifile upload whereas the submission uses the new File API (I believe, I'm guessing, I haven't looked at the source)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Best way to deal with security software listing my new site as untested - Herodotus38 I have made my first real website (really just a simple calculator) which I am other users will use for prognostication in advanced cancer patients.<p>A lot of the users will be accessing through hospital computers which tend to use additional security software, so I've gotten some feedback that it is being blocked (Trend Micro Office Scan said it was "untested").<p>More recently another user using a hospital with Forcepoint says that it is also blocked (similarly due to being a new domain)<p>The domain is about a week old. I have submitted the domain to Office Scan's website https://global.sitesafety.trendmicro.com/<p>and they have said now it will be tested, and I talked to rep there that says it usually takes about 2-5 days.<p>So my question boils down to: 1) Does anybody know in general how long it takes for new domains to be vetted by these various security software programs? 2) Although I could in theory try to speed things up by contacting each company, I would rather not waste the time. Is there such a thing as a global whitelist that I could submit my new domain to?<p>Thanks It's been great reading articles here over the years and using this site for resources on python and then flask. ====== edoceo Give yourself a few months. Reduce usage of 3rd party tools while under review. IME using GA is OK but more "exotic" tools may cause problem. Also, you can submit yourself for review (various site), which may move you up the queue. I have no data, just habit. Patience to get some "legit" backlinks and clear some whitelist ~~~ Herodotus38 Thanks for the reply. I wasn't expecting months, so maybe I will just continue to contact them for review to help move things along.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stretching the limits of CSS 3: Amazing creations in pure CSS - henck http://www.independent-software.com/stretching-the-limits-of-css-3-amazing-creations-in-pure-css/ ====== noamyoungerm I once made a moderately interactive widget using pure CSS, and it was a relatively interesting experience. The widget itself had buttons that let you choose several parameters (about 400 combinations overall) and would render out a 'demo' of our product. Some stuff I learned: 1\. Most of css3 is supported in IE8, so we felt fine with using the widget in production. 2\. With any reasonable LESS / SASS syntax, it's easy to generate complex stuff so long as it's limited to a discrete number of states. Stuff like tic- tac-toe are easily doable if you treat them as a state-machine. 3\. It's way faster than JS, and there's a good reason for it. CSS can be totally figured out in one round of parsing, and so long as no JS is used to change it, the same parsed state can be used for all of your states. Even though it adds tens of kilobytes to the file size of both CSS and HTML, it's still faster than executing code. This definitely isn't the right solution for all problems, but I think it's important to think about whether you problem can be solved in pure CSS, and to strongly prefer it for static sites and nearly-static sites. ------ blowski Of course, kudos to the developers who are able to do this. It must be a lot of hard work, and there's no way I could do it. But for me personally, creating something like this, with no constraints on performance, filesize, compatibility, etc, is no more amazing than building a massive website (like say bbc.co.uk) that renders perfectly, almost instantly, across many different devices. ~~~ jordache Imagine a quadrant chart that plots the superlatives of web solutions. The bbc sites resides in a different quadrant than these Css emphasized solutions... ~~~ blowski Yeah, I understand that. These are like short but beautiful poems, where the BBC website is like the Britannica Encyclopaedia. But if there's someone who works on bbc.co.uk reading this, I salute you for the amazing work you do, because you often don't get enough credit. ------ j4_james This reminds me of my attempt to reproduce the Donkey Kong handheld video game using just HTML and CSS. [http://kong.詹姆斯.com/](http://kong.詹姆斯.com/) I also wrote a short blog post describing some of the mechanics of the build for those that find that sort of thing interesting. [http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2016/07/html- kong](http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2016/07/html-kong) ------ Scryptonite I once made a CSS-only Todo List[1] that demonstrated chaining sibling selectors, using the :checked psuedo selector, CSS counters and some other things to "enhance" a Todo without using JS (technically JS is used in a Jade template to compile the necessary HTML and CSS). CSS is pretty powerful. 1: [http://codepen.io/scryptonite/pen/oLGzdj?editors=1000](http://codepen.io/scryptonite/pen/oLGzdj?editors=1000) ------ johnhenry First off, the work is awesome, don't get me wrong, but I'm a bit disappointed. From the title, I expect the examples to be written "Pure CSS, yet many examples, including the very first, are laden with HTML and JavaScript. ------ azazqadir It's amazing what you can achieve just by using HTML and CSS, but still I wonder why we mostly see websites with generic design and layout that only use common HTML and CSS elements. ~~~ jordache Umm Compatibility reasons? It's probably also much easier to create certain things using a full range of tools rather than trying to implement it purely in css ~~~ throwanem Also because commonality of user experience has great value in satisfying the principle of least astonishment. It's true that a lot of web devs and designers don't get this right, but that's no reason to suggest they shouldn't be trying. ~~~ jordache I think this work is valuable, but this is more R&D type work than a lot of people who are actually producing work with immediate value results, and tied to a business need ------ onnimonni Seems to be down at The moment :(. Please use some caching solution to avoid your web host from shutting your site in cases like this. ~~~ blowski It's a short blog post linking off to CodePen demos: * [https://codepen.io/jaysalvat/pen/HaqBf](https://codepen.io/jaysalvat/pen/HaqBf) * [https://codepen.io/juliangarnier/pen/idhuG](https://codepen.io/juliangarnier/pen/idhuG) * [https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/QbRyOq](https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/QbRyOq) * [https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/vlrnd](https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/vlrnd) * [https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/eHGfj](https://codepen.io/rgg/pen/eHGfj) ------ brute the last link (Star Wars opening crawl) should be [https://codepen.io/TimPietrusky/pen/eHGfj](https://codepen.io/TimPietrusky/pen/eHGfj) ~~~ henck Fixed the link. Thanks man ------ ada1981 We broke the site it looks like. Sorry buddy, and you're welcome ;) ------ argio when I tried to look at the CSS tab for the MonaLisa that Browser tab froze (chrome). How many box-shadows is it using? ~~~ henck A whopping 7574 box-shadows.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere - bensummers http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2298-windows-phone-7-incompatibility-may-drive-developers-elsewhere.html ====== hga Hmmm, another example of the end of Microsoft's "cult" of backwards compatibility which we first saw with the capping of Visual Basic in the transition to .NET. (Joel S. has a lot to say about this.) I'm not sure it'll work well in this market, where from what I've heard the one thing Microsoft has going for it is IT department buy in, although Apple just helped with its legal assault on Android.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
"Lowest common denominator" for non-native English speakers - perfunctory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowest_common_denominator#Non-mathematical_usage As a non-native English speaker I've been always confused when I encountered the phrase 'Lowest common denominator' in a non-mathematical context. Don't people mean 'Greatest common divisor'? I have finally confirmed my confusion was correct. ====== ZeroGravitas I've been finding Wiktionary (which is linked from the top of this article) pretty good for this kind of thing. For me it's learning french from english, so I can read definitions in both languages i.e. I can find definitions of english words in both french and english, and french words in both french and english, amongst other languages): <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lowest_common_denominator> Though I note in this case the term is only translated into a few languages, and they seem to only give the mathematical sense. But it's only going to get better if people use it and contribute.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Terms and Conditions? - llambda I'm curious if any HNers have recommendations for writing or otherwise establishing terms and conditions for web services? I have to assume it's not a good idea to try to do it without some kind of legal consul but what about using canned terms? Thoughts, suggestions? ====== aspir Many companies I know of find a similar competitor and copy their terms, replacing names and other specific info. Legally, it's weak and won't replace having a general counsel draft up a document, but you likely don't have the money for a 100% fresh copy. Do this at your own risk, of course. On a related/unrelated note, the original Virgin Records contract for Mike Oldfield was another label's contract with this same find/replace action. ~~~ glimcat Checking out your competitors and drafting a version on your own is often a good starting point. You can sometimes save on legal hours and get something closer to what you want if you try this first and then run the result by your lawyer. Side note, avoid direct plagiarism. ------ SuperChihuahua Maybe this can be a beginning: <http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Take Affordable Online Music Lessons - Muebie https://www.muebie.com/ ====== Muebie Muebie is a platform where you can take online music lessons from passionate teachers around the world. It is affordable, convenient, and easy to use. Simply book a lesson and start learning from the comfort of your home!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Prolog's Death (2010) - vector_spaces https://synthese.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/prologs-death/ ====== mjn I wrote a somewhat related response at the time the "Who Killed Prolog" article this one is responding to came out: [http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/prolog_lost_steam.html) I agree that "easier to understand" could've helped. But things that are hard to understand can get uptake if they're big wins. The bigger problem in my opinion is that the number of cases where Prolog was a big win significantly decreased over time. When it appeared in the '70s, Prolog's declarative- programming approach based on logic had very few peers where you could do even simple textbook examples in as nice a way. But now even SQL (with features like recursive queries) can do a lot of the intro-level Prolog examples. It doesn't have the full logic semantics with unification, but a lot of problems don't need them. SMT solvers, LINQ, and rules engines like Jess/Drools are a few other declarative paradigms that ended up eating into some of what Prolog proponents once saw as its space. If Prolog were up exclusively against FORTRAN77 or K&R C, there would be many problems where it's a big win, but that's not the competition anymore. ------ roenxi > Arguably, the imperative programming paradigm is a more natural fit with the > von Neumann computer architecture Prolog's lack of popularity suggests that viewing a computer program as a pure (first order predicate) logic construct isn't a powerful way of thinking in general. That is a bit of a blow to all the programmers who seem to secretly want to be mathematicians because that in turn suggests that the logical aspects of programming are subordinate to hardware realities. I've gotten a lot of joy out of the Neural Networking fad similarly eclipsing the logic-based AI people. Logic is important and it isn't going away, but reality has too much uncertainty for simple logic to work in practice. The statistically grounded approach makes me happier, and again computer hardware's power is overwhelming the efforts of the logicians to tie everything down to certainties. Great language though, everyone should take a look at it to see what a different programming model might be. ~~~ TimTheTinker Prolog may suffer from a lack of popularity, but I'd argue that's not because it's lacking in power as a means of expressing an idea. Nor is it due to a hardware paradigm mismatch. Lisp and its variants (especially Clojure) enjoy increasing popularity for all sorts of general-purpose use. Lisp is merely a particular notation for expressing lambda calculus, and is rather far removed from the realities of Von Neumann hardware. I'd argue Prolog's demise is due to three facts: (a) the sorts of ideas _best_ expressed in Prolog have diminished due to new languages becoming available, (b) the remaining ideas best expressed in Prolog are only applicable to a narrow set of problems, and (c) Prolog itself isn't the most ergonomic language to use, so it isn't often people's first choice when alternatives are available. ~~~ SOLAR_FIELDS Can you elaborate with an example or two? I’ve always been fascinated by Prolog and thought of it as a language that is very well suited to a specific class of problems. It would be interesting to know what class of problem Prolog excels at and why newer languages or new features in existing languages can do what only Prolog did before. ~~~ TimTheTinker I'm afraid I can't -- sorry. I'm not a Prolog practitioner. My above observations are just culled from what I've read over the years. I suspect some kinds of expert systems remain best implemented using some Prolog. Perhaps someone who uses Prolog regularly can chime in. ------ YeGoblynQueenne >> That this process of computation is difficult to grok is especially noticable when you try to debug a Prolog program. Computations get undone when attempts at satisfying a goal fail; other computations get retried down different branches resulting in different unifications and worse of all, the order in which you wrote your clauses in the program makes a difference to how it gets executed and, indeed, whether any part of the program is reachable. Actually, Prolog's clause selection rule that relies on clause ordering in the database is a boon when it comes to understanding backtracking during debugging ("tracing", please). You know that if you have two clauses of the predicate p/2: p(a). p(b). And you make the query: ?- p(A). The interpreter will first find the result p(a) and then backtrack to p(b). You know the order in which choice points will be created, that is. This makes it infinitely easier to trace a Prolog program than in a hypothetical (and very impractical) "purely" declarative langauge where clause order wouldn't matter. Now, tracing a complex program with lots of recursive calls- that can be difficult. But that's not because of backtracking. It's because of the way Prolog "unfolds" recursion, which is something I'd have trouble explaining even after ten ish years of coding in Prolog. It's something you have to develop a feeling for, after tracing a sufficient number of recursive programs. Now _that_ I'd agree is a difficulty that may keep programmers from using the language. But- backtracking? I don't agree. ~~~ segmondy most people don't know how to debug prolog because they never got taught her. it has debugging facilities, even GUI debuggers. [http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=debugger](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=debugger) here's an example of a trace from a CLI section. [trace] ?- animal(X). Call: (7) animal(_G1588) ? creep Call: (8) is_true('has fur') ? creep ^ Call: (9) format("~w?\n", ['has fur']) ? creep has fur? ^ Exit: (9) format("~w?\n", ['has fur']) ? creep Call: (9) read(yes) ? creep \|: Most don't understand the standard 4-port prolog (call, exit, redo, and fail.) making it hard to grok what's going on. [http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(2,%27...](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section$2,%272.9%27,swi\(%27/doc/Manual/debugoverview.html%27$)) ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne That's not the fault of the language though. If you get taught, say, C# and you 're never taught how to debug it you'd have the same problem. The four-port debugger takes some explaining, but it's not the end of the world. It's actually a very conceptually simple way to understand Prolog's execution model. It's a shame that it's not taught more often. ------ normalhuman I've been reading so much about the death of symbolic AI and the complete victory of statistical approaches lately, that I suspect that a new symbolic hype-cycle is about to start. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but if you've been following such trends for a while, you might agree with me. ~~~ nerdponx I feel like we will end up with a hybrid approach. Powerful statistical models woven together with some kind of logic system.. ~~~ marcosdumay Well, it's hard to understand why, but for some reason everybody isn't expecting this. The hype goes on waves, "symbolic AI solves everything!", "no, numeric AI solves everything!". ------ PaulHoule I think more pure logical languages have had an impact since Prolog, particularly variants of Datalog. The thing with "Datalog" is that it is really a level of functionality that is implemented in various database query systems and not a well-defined language in and of itself. 15 years ago I remembered searching for papers about it and did not find so many, now it is hot. The painful thing about Prolog, I think, is the mashup of declarative and imperative, it just doesn't come across as natural. ~~~ mmarx > The thing with "Datalog" is that it is really a level of functionality that > is implemented in various database query systems and not a well-defined > language in and of itself. 15 years ago I remembered searching for papers > about it and did not find so many, now it is hot. Datalog as a language is really just one very specific form of rules (first- order horn implications containing just constants and variables, where each variable in the conclusion also occurs in the premise), and every Datalog program (i.e., every set of rules) is guaranteed to have a finite, universal model. [0] Ceri, Gottlob, Tanca. (1989) What you always wanted to know about Datalog (and never dared to ask). IEEE TRANSACTIONS KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING. [1] Abiteboul, Hull, Vianu. (1994) Foundations of Databases: The Logical Level. Pearson. ------ gavanwoolery Prolog is a terrible "programming language" \- and I would never try to use it as such. But it is (at least conceptually) an excellent query language. In that regard, it is much closer to SQL, as is its domain of reasonably applicable problems. _Clarification: I dont actually think prolog is terrible (I credit it as the most exciting language I have ever learned), I just mean its not intuitive to "program" with in the imperative sense of telling a computer what to do. What I mean by it is excellent as a query language is - given a set of data, it is great for drawing conclusions from that data (but not in the same way as a "traditional" query language like SQL)._ ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne Prolog is not a good language for querying databases (if that's what you mean by "query language"). Foe one thing, it lacks a SELECT statement or list comprehensions and the like. If you want all results of a goal, you have to use one of the bagof/setof/findall predicates, or roll your own. On the other hand, Prolog programs are logic theories (as are Prolog queries) and their executio is a proof. The range of programs that can be expressed in Prolog is the set of programs that are computable by a Turing machine. So yes, Prolog is a programming language. Whether it's "terrible" or not is up to personal taste. I mean, I don't konw of an objective measure of what makes a programming language "terrible". ~~~ marcosdumay Software has evolved on a direction where sending sets around is natural. That is no evidence that sending theorems around is problematic, it's just that current communication implementations happens to be very data-friendly and logic-unfriendly. There is probably a very human reason for that, but mathematically both representations are perfectly replaceable. ------ nemoniac Programming is about building abstraction upon abstraction. If you don't understand the abstractions upon which you're building, you'll have trouble building upon them. Unification and backtracking take some effort to grok. If you grok them you can put them to use in a clean and efficient way. If not then Prolog remains a mystery. ------ Glyptodon I think the complaint given about Prolog is about as applicable to SQL, which is widely used. Oddly, I could imagine it being easier to use as a query language than SQL in some circumstances. ------ derefr > ...by far the biggest cognitive problem that they have with this language is > understanding what the interpreter is doing at any point in time. Prolog’s > attempt at being declarative ... is the problem: how to get a computer to do > something without telling it what to do? I mean, people use SQL just fine without understanding how the DB is going to accomplish their queries. Maybe Prolog just doesn't have the same level of tooling as SQL for deducing "what's going to happen", e.g. an equivalent to SQL's `EXPLAIN ANALYZE`? > The traversal of a search space in which choice-points are introduced > whenever multiple clauses match the current computational goal and a process > of (possibly partial) variable instantiation ... and worse of all, the order > in which you wrote your clauses in the program makes a difference to how it > gets executed and, indeed, whether any part of the program is reachable. Some people (more than use Prolog) use Erlang—even the parts like chained binary pattern-matching†—just fine. And some people (still more than use Prolog) use the MLs just fine, too, including functional combinators and passing around monadic bindings, despite this playing utter hell on determining "whether any part of the program is reachable." † `foo(<<A/32,B/A,Rest/binary>>)` — an Erlang clause-head which takes a binary string, and attempts to unify the variable A with the first four bytes of it, and B with the next _variable-A_ bytes of it, and Rest with, well, the rest of it. I.e. A is taken as a uint32 and used to calculate the bounds of a slice on B, all during the attempt to pick a clause to execute. This is common, idiomatic code. > That this process of computation is difficult to grok is especially > noticable when you try to debug a Prolog program. Computations get undone > when attempts at satisfying a goal fail... People write Solidity code for the Ethereum VM just fine. (In fact, this one is kind of hilarious; Prolog is less popular than even an arcane programming environment like the EVM—where all function calls are implicitly nested MVCC transactions that roll back any side-effects upon their Turing-machine substrate upon any trap or fault, including even rolling back the emission of logging statements and the reservation or nullification of memory.) ~~~ jcranmer Declarative programming in general is notorious for being difficult to debug. SQL is the only language I can think of where this notoriety doesn't come up, and I'm honestly not sure if that's merely because I've never interacted with anyone who has had to deal with sufficiently complex queries. But the insanity that's involved with complex regular expressions, parser generators, even Python's decorator system in complex declarative projects (e.g., some build system tooling I've worked on) is commonly complained about. ~~~ hodgesrm The standard 'debugging' problem in SQL is query optimization, namely figuring out how to make a query return in seconds instead of a week. Many engineers simply can't solve it, so a typical solution is to hand it over to a DBA and go have coffee. ------ dang Discussed a bit at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624725) ------ NoInputSignal Personally I have only used Prolog in an academic context. I'd be curious to hear stories of people using it beyond that context. ------ rehemiau All that hype on property based testing is just moving prolog to different platforms ------ sgt101 >"worse of all, the order in which you wrote your clauses in the program makes a difference to how it gets executed and, indeed, whether any part of the program is reachable" That's because the algorithm that prolog uses to do unification uses committed choice - if the logic could be run using efficiently grounded answer sets then the behaviour could be made consistent and that would make the semantics a whole lot clearer. Especially if ! was done away with as well. ------ tingletech needs a (2010) ~~~ dang Added. Thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US - deepuj http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/28/-sp-jobs-brokers-entrap-indian-tech-workers?CMP=share_btn_tw ====== kabdib At a couple of companies I was at, an Indian jobs shop had somehow gotten their mitts into our HR types and we were indundated with candidates who showed up with books like "Learn Java in 12 hours" or "Windows Device Drivers for N00bs" under their arms. Very junior types, without exception. Our interview questions were fed back, and I had to change them a fair amount. Not a problem. "The guy at XYZZY will ask about hash tables, so..." and I'd ask them questions about something else, like concurrency, to very obvious consternation. Halfway through an interview, one candidate even asked when I was going to ask about hash tables. "Fine. We can talk about concurrency and hash tables." There was an undercurrent of expectation. Their handler / manager (the relationship was never really made clear) called me one day and said "We expect you to give a job to several of our people. You keep changing your questions. What is the problem?" And I would explain that I wasn't going to hire someone junior, who we would have to teach how to do engineering, for a senior wage. Eventually they stopped coming, presumably having found better pastures. ~~~ xxcode I am not sure if your response is relevant to the article, but I felt that there is some level of superiority complex that you and many fellow humans posses (in this case, about your superior knowledge and intellect). Perhaps the biggest difference between you and someone applying for the job through the h1b visa program was that they were born in a different set of circumstances than you were. They were likely born in India whereas you were born I the United States. As a result of being born in India, they went to a local school there which didn't teach them about hash tables and concurrency. Your school did, and you had a better education. This person from India is trying to make a better life for himself despite starting at a disadvantage in life(being born in a poor country with access to lesser educational opportunities than you). You are welcome to reject him for the job(you can do so at the resume screening state, especially if they don't have the relevant skills and experience) but I think it would be useful to remember that the other person is a human, likely disadvantaged, and express some human empathy. ~~~ kabdib I'm perfectly happy interviewing people for junior positions. We did this quite a bit at larger companies where junior engineers were desirable, and there was structure that let them succeed. But when I'm dealing with a professional organization that is basically trying to scam my company into doing mis-hires, that's when my empathy goes dry. I have a duty to my co-workers and my investors to not screw up hires. I see gaming the system as a legitimate opportunity to criticize someone else's behavior. I agree, these junior level people are in a tough position. They're being mis- represented and taken advantage of. It sucks. I _want_ people to succeed. But I don't do handouts, and the practices I've seen make me mad. Everyone in this industry sees many, many resumes from people who cannot do the job. Everyone interviews people who don't pass. Probably everyone has seen people fired because they couldn't perform or were doing damage. This happens. It's not going away. And it's not pleasant. So while it might not come across in what I wrote above, every time I affect someone's life like this -- every time I send a "Sorry, we're not going to proceed" email, or tell someone in an interview that we're cutting things short today -- I feel bad about it. Sometimes a little bad, sometimes a lot. Sometimes I agonize over a resume (and we spent quite a bit of time on a candidate the other day, trying to come up with reasons to proceed). But the alternatives (job charity? keeping someone on who does negative work?) are worse. _Much_ worse. And given all the people who _should_ be given a chance, I won't countenance fraud. That makes me write responses that are direct and forceful and unapologetic. These job shops are poisoning the well for the individuals who are truly deserving, and that should make everyone mad. ------ fadzlan Worked with one big Indian company here in Malaysia last time and I see intimidation as common means of dealing with employees. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work well here, since most of people have a lot of choices moving around. I've been pushed to accept work that has a minimum wage in a different country, despite my experience and the fact I can't possibly survive with my family there. I've had my resume jacked up multiple times when they sent my resume to the client, up to the point that I had to deny I had never put certain things on my resume. For fresh grad though, if they quit earlier than 18 months, they have to pay almost a year of their salary, which seems reasonable when there are trainings when they joined the company. Except for the fact that the first year salary of said fresh grad are being paid in full by the Malaysian government (in exchange of hiring certain number of locals per year). Some of the trainings are subsidized by the government too. Which explained how they can force employees to take a much less pay than what they are getting in other countries, where the cost of living is higher, because they can intimidate. Malaysia job market is much smaller than India, and such tactic didn't bode well, since there are not much replacement to come by when people are quitting, and smaller market means once you had bad reputation, new hires slowed to trickle. Now, I am not generalizing all Indian companies, there bad apples around the world, but I am just sharing my experience on how intimidation come about. I just find it disgusting that such practices are being practice somewhere in the world. ~~~ reduce "For fresh grad though, if they quit earlier than 18 months, they have to pay almost a year of their salary, which seems reasonable when there are trainings when they joined the company." No, that is not ever reasonable anywhere in any situation. May be typical, but not reasonable. ~~~ pmorici The US government does the same thing to the American students they give "CyberCorps" scholarships to. They have an obligation to remain in government jobs for the same number of years that they received the scholarship for and if they want to leave early they have to repay the scholarship. [https://www.sfs.opm.gov/](https://www.sfs.opm.gov/) ~~~ judk In that case, they repay the scholarship, not the salary. ~~~ pmorici For an entry level government job the scholarship probably is equivalent to a year of salary. Point being this sort of service requirement for scholarship is pretty common and isn't some practice relegated to shady companies on the other side of the world. ------ gxs When I graduated from colllege I started working at a top tech company on a contract to hire. The company was paid 50/hr fore and I was paid 20 an hour. When I asked for more, the indian-born Indian CEO of the company went apeshit on me. No real story only that almost everyone is scum. It's not just the companies. When I told the director of my org what I was getting paid she hired me full time right away at a competitive salary. And I was just lucky that she happened to like me. Other people who complained simply got let go. I sense there is something else at play here IT work isn't that hard, yet for some reason instead of increasing awareness that there is huge demand for these jobs, we fly people in from india. We pay 150 bucks an hour for them, when an eager college kid can do and would do the same job with a bit of training for a fraction of the cost. Something else is going on here. ~~~ usernamepc There are two reasons (both sort of hard to fix) for why contracting is screwed up. 1\. Co-employment- Large companies like Google or Apple would love to hire contractors directly but are very scared of being sued by contractors that can claim they were actually employees-not contractors because of the unclear rules around who is/is not an employee. So they introduce a staffing agency in between to become the 'employer of record' and offset the risk. Things like hiring and paying contractors directly, giving them laptops, keeping them for long terms, training them, etc. actually makes a stronger case for contractors that might want to sue them, which is why you see the weird ways these companies treat contractors (not allowing them into morale events, restricting how long they can work, etc.) How to Fix- Labor laws would need to change, making it clear to companies how they can hire contractors without becoming liable to be held as employers. New labor marketplaces like Taskrabbit, Homejoy, Workmarket, etc. will push lawmakers into doing something soon, but this is going to be tough given how strongly labor unions are against this. 2\. Non-transparency. Large companies don't like to advertise that they hire contractors. They instead give their open jobs to staffing agencies, who are not allowed to disclose the client name when they advertise the job on job boards. The staffing agencies are incentivized to provide the lowest cost engineer that meets the minimum bar and these are usually the engineers on visas that need to find a project soon or leave the country. How to Fix- If large companies publicly share all their current contract job openings (reqs) just like they do their full-time jobs. If that happens, anyone can apply to those jobs and even nominate the staffing agencies they'd be willing to work through. They already have Vendor Management Systems (VMS) that they use to share their reqs with staffing agencies, so its just a matter of will. In the meantime, we ([http://www.oncontracting.com](http://www.oncontracting.com)) are trying to solve this non-transparency by crowd-sourcing the list of preferred staffing agencies for the Fortune 1000 companies. Contractors can avoid bad labor brokers and instead discover who the preferred staffing agencies for any Fortune 1000 company are and approach them directly. ~~~ eli_gottlieb >How to Fix- Labor laws would need to change, making it clear to companies how they can hire contractors without becoming liable to be held as employers. Except that the entire reason these laws exist is because tech companies have been caught using people as contractors _permanently_ , "laying them off" on a consistent seasonable basis, and then "rehiring" them again as "contractors". A permanently-employed worker needs to legally be considered a full-time employee and be taxed/benefited as such. ~~~ WildUtah What's wrong with that? Lots of people love working seasonally. Teachers, fishermen, hospitality workers, and forest rangers can work seasonally. Why should programmers be denied the privilege by law? ~~~ usernamepc I'm not aware of how it works in those fields, but as I see it, trying to burden companies with unclear laws and force artificial behavior is what is causing the problem in this case. For example- A large company needs a contractor and is willing to pay $75/hr for 12 months. Option 1- Hires you as a contractor directly for $75/hr on 1099. You get paid well, but if they are not very savvy about independent contractor compliance, you can still go after them in the future stating you should have been an employee for various reasons. The IRS could also go after them for not classifying you correctly and claim taxes missed. Good for you- Risky for Client. Option 2- Give the req to their staffing agencies and offer to pay them the $75/hr. A Staffing agency finds and hires you as a permanent employee- pays you $40/hr with benefits. Terminates you after 12 months. Large Company ended up paying the same but has much lower risk of being considered employer because the staffing agency was paying you and taking care of your healthcare, etc. Same deal for Client but low risk- Bad deal for you - Good deal for Staffing Agency. In the quest to try and force the law upon a company, we successfully complicated and introduced a middle-man into this process. ~~~ judk Now the law can be improved to regulate these well understood staffing companies. ~~~ usernamepc There's already plenty of laws to regulate them and they work pretty well for the most part. The problem is if a large company wants to hire contractors directly- and not use a staffing agency. Thats where the laws are unclear and contractors are the ones paying for it. ------ selmnoo This bullying persists at the bottom of a complex system that supplies workers to some of America’s richest and most successful companies, such as Cisco Systems, Verizon and Apple. I find this extremely confusing, why companies like Facebook and Apple and others in SV, that're sitting on an unbelievable shitload of cash take filthy shortcuts like this, screw the very people that work for them so badly. I mean, seriously, I'm at a loss for words. Why? Why not just pay them a reasonable wage when you are _more_ than capable enough to? ~~~ here_you_go Why? Because a) it's profitable, and b) they can. That's all, really. Excessive money (== power == domination of your peers) corrupts _everybody_. We don't need any new studies to prove this. That's the sick part of our economic culture - the "natural" tendency of concentration of money/power (instead of spreading it as equally as possible). ~~~ flyinglizard Efficiency. Its not Tim Cook's or any middle manager's personal money, it's the money of the shareholders. Besides, overpaying drives all salaries up and can spark a wage war between companies that only benefits the employees. ~~~ eli_gottlieb >Besides, overpaying drives all salaries up and can spark a wage war between companies that only benefits the employees. Sounds like a great idea! ------ putlake As bad as some of these stories are, H1-B is way better than an L1 visa. Talk about indentured servitude. With an H1-B visa, an employee can at least change jobs and find another employer to work for. All the other employer has to do is transfer the H1 sponsorship, which is a few thousand dollars in fees but no legal hassles and not much delay. So with H1, you have decent job mobility. With the L-1 visa, which is almost never discussed in the media covering immigration, there is ZERO job mobility. You can only work for the company that got you to the United States from abroad where you were working for the same company. And for Indians who are here LEGALLY, the wait for a green card can be up to 9 years. A lot of companies make their employees wait before even applying for a green card. So they get a good 10 years of indentured servitude legally here in the United Sates. ~~~ jedmeyers Some people choose L1 simply because their wife cannot work on H4 but can on L2 spouse visa. ------ freshflowers This is neither unique for tech workers nor unique for the US. It has been happening in many professions for _decades_. Tech is just specifically vulnerable, because despite all evidence to the contrary (wage suppression, the huge discrepancy between reported talent shortage and actual salaries) we drank the industry kool-aid and believe we don't need no stinkin' unions and government regulation, and that we techies are part of the lucky middle class that will remain. Most of this complacency is caused by the fact that we still have pretty decent salaries compared to most other workers, but of course that is also what makes us a nice big juicy target for dubious practices. ------ houseofshards The worst part here is that H1B visas allocated to these scumbag companies end up starving genuine companies of these visas. ~~~ shams93 Worse than that, it also destroys the local talent pool. Employers use visas as a club against local talent, so you go without equity, work 3 times as many hours as you're paid for and when the company is sold you're out of a job. Not to mention taking "hair cuts" so you work without pay and do without basic necessities to make someone else rich, this shit has ruined my life being a coder in Los Angeles, yes I survive but I can't even afford a computer for myself, the employers game the system until you have to go without food to make someone else rich, forget about the dream of being able to own your own computer. ~~~ objclxt I see no evidence that H-1Bs are destroying the local talent pool in SF. I can't speak to LA myself, but from what I hear it's not doing that either. H-1Bs aren't the reason you've think you've "ruined [your] life being a coder in Los Angeles". Your profile has you down as an Android developer: I met a co-founder based in LA last week who was bemoaning the lack of good mobile app talent. I frequently get hit up from startups in LA, and I used to consult for a major firm in the OC that's vacuuming up Android devs. I can't tell you why you're having such a hard time, and I feel for you: but blaming H-1Bs isn't productive. ~~~ massmana It makes IT work low-class. This, I believe is the true reason women don't work in IT. ~~~ uberwach Do you have data for these claims? Here in Germany most women prefer career paths that are paid worse than IT modulo medicine. Also, IT is not considered low-class, maybe because there are many academics in IT. ~~~ reduce In the US it's considered low status because it's considered to have questionable long-term value, due to potential future outsourcing. He's absolutely right. In the US, software development has always, until perhaps very recently, been considered a very low status career and with low long-term potential. That is, versus one of the classic engineering or medical jobs. By the way, in the US, IT generally means support desk job, which is seen as the lowest of the low. Only very recently has the median software development job approached anywhere near a medical specialist or the classic engineering job, and it's still far below the wage of many US doctors. I'd say that the US general public is still expecting the imminent outsourcing of all software development, to foreigners making $2/hour somewhere far away, to occur soon. People in the field don't expect this, but that's how outsiders perceive it. This low-status is a huge contributor to what keeps most US women from pursuing software development as a career, according to women I've talked to. It really is that simple and obvious. This is also why there's a trend of US software developers prominently adding "scientist" or "engineer" to their job titles. Pure software development still has a low status stigma. ~~~ uberwach Interesting perspective, I would have expected the image of software professionals in the US to be way better due to companies such as Google or Apple. In terms of long-term potential medicine specialists are better off here, but it is not as extreme as in NA. If you are a top-tier IT freelancer, then you can easily compete with them. ------ manishsharan Most people coming on H1B are no less talented /skilled or hardworking that an average american techie. However, the H1B worker is not aware of his rights. The average H1b worker has no one to turn to for help as the people who are most vehemently against H1B have racist and xenophobic agendas. I speak from experience : while on a H1B VISA (and in middle of a unpleasant work situation), I sought help by seeking out the people behind anti-H1B VISA web pages. Not only did those people I asked for help had no assistance for me , they hounded me with hateful racist mails, phone calls and death threats. The focus of this article and sadly HNers is to punish and prosecute the companies. Not one opinion has been offered to make the lives of H1B better. So let me offer one. The US consulate can brief the H1B GRANTEE on his /her rights.Maybe include an DVD or training video on youtube along with a hotline or number of labour lawyers. Make the company sponsoring H1B agree to abide by labour laws of California or whichever state the the company is located in. ~~~ tristor > Most people coming on H1B are no less talented /skilled or hardworking that > an average american techie. I would like to disagree on this point, however I have never conducted any long-term research nor seen any conducted. My anecdotal experiences though definitely seem to indicate otherwise. I think it's first important to clarify that by me making the statement that an H1B is less qualified than the average American tech worker, I am not saying that due to their race. I think that the process is broken and exploitative, and it encourages and incentivizes companies to specifically bring in people who are under-qualified. Let's take two possible scenarios: A: Shyam excelled at the top of his class while attending school in India and managed to be accepted to receive a government scholarship to attend school overseas. With much glee he heads off to the US on his student visa to get his degree from a university there and get earlier exposure to new ideas and techniques. While there, he does an internship during the summers his sophomore and junior year with a local tech company. As graduation nears, he applies for and receives a green card, choosing to permanently reside in the US. Afterwards he begins his job search, starting with a position he is hired at with the company he interned with his junior year. B: Deepak did not do so well in school, but knows that he wants to work in the technology field because it's a good way to make money and gain social status so he can date and marry the girls he is interested in. Unfortunately, he didn't meet the requirements for an overseas scholarship, so he attends an Indian university instead. Afterwards, he goes to work for a large Indian technology firm (Infosys, Wipro, et al). During his entire professional experience to this point he and his colleagues have been slogging away doing things mostly incorrectly, but with many hours so that their clients appear to be getting a good deal. After doing this for a number of years, he realizes he's got to get out of India and this situation, so he reaches out internally and gets accepted for a staffed role through his firm. Happily heading overseas to the US he arrives in California with his shiny new H1B working at a big American tech company on behalf of the staffing firm, only to realize that he's been thrust into a position intended for somebody with 5 years of useful experience, not the 3 years of useless experience he's had. He's way under-qualified, and struggles to keep up. He tries but is just not experienced or educated enough to handle the situation well, so finds himself in the exact same slog of burning more hours to do things less efficiently to meet deadlines. I'm kind of hamming it up here, obviously, but my point is that for the most part there is absolutely no quality control from the perspective of the people who busted their ass, proved themselves, and have succeeded in their careers who are now working alongside people who are under qualified brought in under the guise of a staffing agency hiring H1Bs. Nobody has a problem working with Shyam from situation A, but they would have a problem working with Deepak from situation B. It's not an issue of xenophobia or race as you seem to make it out to be, and it's not that we don't care or empathize. But we're at work to get our jobs done and we all have goals. If you're an engineer at the top of your game working on some exciting new technology, the last thing you need is to have your project derailed by inefficiencies, bugs, or outright bad actions from someone who is not experienced or qualified enough to be involved, but through the foibles of management found themselves there anyway. ~~~ manishsharan I like your scenarios and I will add to it. If you are off-shoring or out-sourcing work, you will always get Deepak. But if you are hiring an H1B , you will most likely get Shyam and here is why: The hiring manager, the one whose project funded the salaries , can easily fire the H1B even more easily. If Deepak shows up when the hiring manager was expecting Shyam, Deepak would get canned in a less than a week. >If you're an engineer at the top of your game working on some exciting new technology, the last thing you need is to have your project derailed by inefficiencies, bugs, or outright bad actions from someone who is not experienced or qualified enough to be involved, ...then why are you not hiring a local engineer or throwing a hissy fit when Shyam shows up and mucks up your code ? Even the worst mangers I have worked with realize that their own job is at risk when they hire a Deepak. ------ danmaz74 > Contracting with labor brokers also benefits US employers. They can staff up > swiftly for temporary jobs and slim down just as fast, with workers paid > below-market rates. I really don't understand why H1B visas aren't tied to the worker's pay. Considering that they're intended for difficult to find specialists, it should be easy enough to weed out fake applications by tying the visa to an at least average salary for the sector. ~~~ deskamess That is one approach... but I would really like the H1 to not to be tied to an employer. Let it be open with instant portability. The only obligation is the current employer (even the original sponsor) has to report the employee assignment on the first date to the DHS. And if a company tries to put bond/restrictions on that movement (either in the US or back in the home country) penalize and remove their ability to get H1's for 5 years. ------ plicense I noted two things: 1\. "Shackling workers to their jobs is such an entrenched business practice that it has even spread to US nationals" \- such US arrogance. 2\. Almost all names of people affected seem to be from the state of Tamil Nadu in India. ------ starving_coder The Center for Investigative Reporting did approach me since i am victim of this scam too. I chose to settle out of court sheer out of fear and lack of ideas. As per settlement terms, i am not supposed to talk about this entire episode to anyone ever. But i am still talking here on HN. Back in 2008 I paid $330/hour (10 hours in advance as a retainer) to an attorney to file a response to the legal notice i received. I also paid other damages to my employer totaling $7500. I was literally forced to sign the "binding agreement" which was part of my joining formality after i landed in SF. Had i seen this doc earlier while still in India, chances are i wouldn't have taken that flight. I spent almost a month without pay, medical insurance (in spite of working for the client) but ultimately blinked and signed that document. Its evil. And this ritual is here to stay until the feds really are interested in solving this problem. ------ gleenn I think it is terrible that companies are taking advantage of foreigners, but I also keep seeing this $20,000 number thrown around a lot. That's how much it costs for a company to apply for an H1B. The companies should not be using that to prevent people from quitting, but it is a very real, large expense to getting workers from out of the US. The flip side of the argument isn't great either. If Softcorp or whatever pays a small fortune to get someone an H1B, that person shouldn't turn around and leave immediately either. It's just really sad that this means Softcorp, etc know they can use that as a leash and treat the worker like crap. Someone tell me a solution to this problem given the H1B's cost so much. How do you prevent abuse? It seems like making the worker pay for the visa would fix it, but I have a feeling that is quite difficult as well. Also, it would be kind of crazy to have to pay a huge sum to take a job. ~~~ enraged_camel >>but I also keep seeing this $20,000 number thrown around a lot. That's how much it costs for a company to apply for an H1B. To clarify, the actual application cost varies between $2500 and $5000[1]. The problem is that on most years, the visas are given only to a percentage of the applicants. For example, if someone is switching from OPT to H1B and they don't win the RNG game, the cost to the company can be enormous. [1][http://redbus2us.com/h1b-visa-2014-filing-fees-uscis-fee- att...](http://redbus2us.com/h1b-visa-2014-filing-fees-uscis-fee-attorney-fee- premium-processing-any-changes/) ~~~ klipt > For example, if someone is switching from OPT to H1B and they don't win the > RNG game, the cost to the company can be enormous. No, the fees are returned if the petition isn't selected. ~~~ pbiggar Only the petition fees, which are a small portion ($1500?). The lawyers fees aren't refundable. Some lawyers do charge up to $15,000 for H1Bs, and I've heard of people reasonably paying $8000. (Good lawyers are definitely in the $4000 range, though you can bring thing down considerably by using inhouse lawyers, which is probably what big companies do). So if we assume that lawyers cost $2000 per petition for large companies, and that there's a 33% success rate in the lottery (it was 50% last year), we're still talking only a cost of $6000 per hire. ------ saurabhnanda Is penalising early exit through contractual terms illegal? If not, then isn't this just a case of who has more leverage when negotiating the employment contract? That, and the fact that Indians are so desperate to go to the US that they're willing to sign any contract. PS: I'm an Indian working in India. ~~~ induscreep Penalizing early exit with loss of immigration status could be illegal...penalizing with money is probably not. ~~~ klipt Having an employee pay visa fees for an H1-B is illegal: [http://www.hackinglawpractice.com/video/h1b-employees- cannot...](http://www.hackinglawpractice.com/video/h1b-employees-cannot-pay- the-fees-associated-with-their-applications.cfm) Therefore if the penalty for "early exit" is there to cover the visa and legal fees, that penalty is illegal. [http://blog.laborlawcenter.com/news/virginia-company- pays-17...](http://blog.laborlawcenter.com/news/virginia-company- pays-17-million/) > A firm specializing in information technology has been ordered to pay nearly > $1.7 million in back wages to H-1B non-immigrant workers following an > investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor in a case that should sound a > warning for every employer. > Investigators also found that the Virginia company charged new H-1 B workers > fees for training ranging from $1.000 to $2,500. Such fees are in violation > of the law. ------ HaseebR7 WOW, this is scary. I'm from India and thinking of getting my MS in CS next year. I hope i don't end up like this. ~~~ abat The companies taking advantage rely on their marks/employees being naive, so you'll be fine once you know to be careful: 1) Get direct employment with a reputable US company instead of via a contracting company. 2) Don't sign any contracts that have any penalty for quitting. You may want to hire a lawyer to review any contracts. 3) If you are in a bad contract and your employer sues you, make sure you hire a decent lawyer. The biggest victims were those that ignored the suits or tried to represent themselves and lost their cases by default. ~~~ umbs I have been passively following this subject for past 10 years (since I graduated college). Your suggestions are all valid and with good intent. However, 'one' group of workers these labor shops exploit are in a vicious cycle and are looking for ways to escape. The following is typical scenario for this group: A student is enrolled in a university with average or poor CS program. There is no funding/scholarship or good on-campsu jobs. So, student works, often bending the laws, off-campus for more than 60 hours to pay for college. Obviously, education takes a backseat and somehow student graduates with huge debt. They struggle to find job and due to time restrictions on F1 visa, they are forced to find an employment and hence sign for these labor shops who give them employment letter (and apply for H1B visa) and securing students stay in US. So, initially, its a mutually beneficial arrangement. Once workers realize they are being exploited, the struggle to get out starts. I signed up for one of these contracting companies and they were paying me $48K when most of my fellow new graduates were making over $72K. I got out after 2.5 years, but fortunately, it was hassle free. This is a very complex web of fraud, exploitation, bending the rules, and what not. IMO, it starts with mutual agreement/need on both sides, but descends in to the scenarios the post has brought to light. ------ bbarn I think this is going to continue in some shape, even if it doesn't necessarily look like this, because these companies are going to India to pay less money, bottom line. Add in a large pool of people wanting to make the move, and someone will always be willing to do it for the types of contracts we're talking about here. As has been pointed out many times here on HN, there is no shortage of qualified dev/it talent in the US. There is a surplus of companies with bad jobs that don't want to pay market rate, and look at these brokers as risk mitigation strategies to fill the head count someone said they needed. When cutting costs is your motivation, people have a strong tendency to get hurt. ------ known More at [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/29/1244255/skilled- fore...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/29/1244255/skilled-foreign- workers-treated-as-indentured-servants) ------ designml This actually happened to one of the people I know. That person had to go through a lot just to get out of the stranglehold of those people. Literally screwed. They were paying half of market and also not even paying it on time. Unfortunately its difficult to pursue a legal route against these people because of the cost to pay lawyers and also the fact that they do it in such a way that its borderline legal/illegal. The only thing you can do is to save other people who may fall into the same trap. ------ ssiddharth This is disgusting on so many levels. Hopefully us Indians can now stop being so starry eyed over working abroad and see it for what it is. ~~~ lotsofmangos If someone is paying you an airfare you cannot currently afford, rather than already paying you enough before you leave a country that any paid flights are merely a courtesy, then be very suspicious. ------ coldcode If we have to have these visa programs, the law should be changed to only allow the actual hiring company to contract with the worker, and under no circumstances allow any intermediary to be a go-between. Then at least there can be some kind of tracking instead of everything being hidden behind closed doors. Of course with our stupid politicians nothing will change except for the worse. ------ thewarrior I'm working at a company in India and our bond period is upto 3 years long. Imagine that. ~~~ Sven7 What happens if you break it? ~~~ denzil_correa The company asks you to pay which you should NOT because it is illegal. The company however can hold you ransom to exit letter etc. which proves that you worked for the company. However, most people do not take that route. There are smart ways to avoid that coercion. ~~~ thewarrior The agreement never uses the word bond. They like to claim that it's just compensation for training expenses. ~~~ denzil_correa It is a one-sided contract which is commonly referred to as "bond" amongst the Indian IT workforce. The law clearly states that a one-sided contract (even if written as a compensation for training expenses) is illegal in India. ------ ugh123 Just an extension of the scummy tech recruiter industry we have currently. ------ tomohawk I have no problem encouraging people who want to be part of our country to immigrate, particularly if they have good skills. This H1B program, though - it's just got to go. ------ known H1B should be included in [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_collar_crimes](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_collar_crimes) ------ induscreep Does anyone know if this situation is specific to IT/tech/computer science related companies? Does it happen to, say, petroleum engineers? ------ torpmode "... spending his days at a company apartment in Norcross, Georgia. His first assignment:Wait for Softech to find him a job. After languishing for 10 weeks without work or full-time pay ..." This means free housing and paid unemployment benefit, plus the people paying you are finding you a job themselves. I'm sure there are some Americans who wouldn't mind subscribing to that service. Yes, there's a cost of not quitting before you contract's up, but for some it may be worth it, as long as they're sufficiently well informed. ~~~ selimthegrim How about, uh, 10 weeks of lost wages at market value because he could have found another job quicker? ------ yegor256a Do we really need to use so many words to describe so obvious situation?.. ------ danielweber The link has audio automatically playig. ------ waps Weird is how many of the bad employers are Indians themselves (or I think so, given they're names): Krishnan Kumar, from Softech Malini Sridhar, from Compsys Technologies (found through [http://appext20.dos.ny.gov/](http://appext20.dos.ny.gov/) ) Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, part of India’s Tata group Even the lawyers suing these employees : > Past president of the South Asian Bar Association of Georgia, attorney Roy > Banerjee has a penchant for wearing bow ties and representing body shops. He > has prevailed in many cases against Indian immigrant programmers, winning > judgments or settlements from some, while others fled back to India. ~~~ lmz Why would it surprise you, given that they are the ones having local knowledge on both sides of the trade? ~~~ hemantv These are people whose main aim is to exploit the system, and they are doing there best to game the system the best know. ------ hemantv This doesn't happen very frequently in California. Its much more prevalent in other states.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
OpenBSD Jumpstart: Learn to Tame OpenBSD Quickly - vezzy-fnord http://openbsdjumpstart.org/ ====== jlgaddis Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793831)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Here’s the story of a game I made in 1994, when I was 12 - danso https://twitter.com/rickbrewpdn/status/1210023029087985664 ====== yters I remember getting into QBasic as a kid. I played Gorillas, and noticed a variable called 'banana' in the source code, which seemed to correspond to the fact the gorillas threw exploding bananas at each other. So I thought replacing it with a variable named 'baby' would cause the gorillas to throw exploding babies at each other. Unfortunately, it turned out game programming is not so easy, and hence began my lifelong foray into coding. ~~~ SamPatt I learned with GW-BASIC and made a text based adventure game. I wish it was still floating around the internet today but alas I believe I wrote it before we got online and it didn't survive. ------ bjackman Beautiful! Strangely enough, when I was about 14 I used to make music using Reason 3. My friends and I would upload it to a shared MySpace. Two of them went on to become professional musicians, and a couple of years ago when browsing a forum for their fans I found someone had uploaded a .zip of songs ripped off the old MySpace, including songs I had made and lost! ------ davidy123 I grew up in the country around 1980, with a Vic 20, then C64. I read about dial-up services and eventually the BBS concept, but they were totally out of reach. Aside from the quite great manuals that came with the computer, I'd buy computer magazines when possible. I wrote a lot of simple video games, it was a great escape. I remember writing a Dig Dug style game in a jag while my family was away. By 1985 I'd moved to the big city and had access to dial-up. I wrote a sardonic platform video game called "Can You Get to the Very Top of the Thing" which I shared with friends. By then we had access to every video game as they were released, they were becoming incredible productions. Fortunately my attention switched to writing BBS software. ------ glandium It's quite amazing how the only physical copy of the game ended up copied on archive.org. ------ ralfd Ok, I beat the game into submission with the Fighter. Wizard and Thief are more difficult. You have to flee every strong enemy and farm weak Goblins/Orcs. When you have enough money buy the best armor. After that you should win every fight and buy enough health potions to get over 20 hitpoints. Search for the white robed man (looks like a snow man on the map) and fight him. You can save with alt-s and drink potions with h on the map. s is the statistics screen. Help screen is F1. ------ SimCity3000 When I was around 10 years old I made Use Map Settings (UMS) maps for Starcraft. Freeze tag, Aeon of Strife clones etc. I lost them all and don't think I'll find them again. I also made maps for Half-Life and Counter Strike. I had them uploaded to my Geocities page but have since lost them. Never found my webpage (cool_kirby77) in the various Geocities archives either. Those creations only exist in my memory now (and maybe others who played them at the time). Sometimes I wonder if what I created was really as spectacular as I thought it was. The only thing I have saved from my childhood is a single-player map I made for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The only reason I have it is because I searched years later, and apparently someone took many of the custom maps from the community over the years and uploaded them to some German website. So I could download the .bsp, but the original .map was lost so I couldn't make changes if I wanted to. I downloaded the map, installed MOHAA and recorded a playthrough so I'd never have to worry about losing it again: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhPK__EgsC4) I made that map because I hated how in MOHAA (and most other games like Quake, Soldier of Fortune etc) you were 1 man vs a million. I wanted an FPS where you actually had (useful) allies that helped you throughout the game. Not much longer after I released the map, a number of employees left "2015" (the company that made MOHAA) and started a new company, Infinity Ward. Their first game, Call of Duty, was very similar to MOHAA, but you were actually surrounded by friendly troops that fought with you! So I like to think that my map was a pioneer that launched a multi-million dollar franchise and cultural phenomenon ;) ------ ascorbic I love these. A couple of years earlier I was writing games in HyperCard, of a similar quality. I found the disks recently, but have no idea how to play them. I don't believe those old Mac floppies will even play in any standard disk drive. ~~~ betamaxthetape Maintainer of the HyperCard stacks collection on the Internet Archive ([https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks](https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks)), here. If you're able to make a disk image, you can use the uploader site at [http://hypercardonline.tk/](http://hypercardonline.tk/) to upload stacks to the archive. If you need help reading the disks in the first place, contact me ([email protected]) and I can see if I can help. ~~~ ascorbic That's awesome, thanks. I'll have a look when I'm next at my mum's house. They've probably got all kinds of rubbish on them, but should definitely have some of my HyperCard creations ------ th0ma5 I took a major hit to my ego when I tried to make a game and failed. Actually, I didn't fail, I implemented exactly what I was thinking of doing, I just was too young to realize I wasn't incapable I just hadn't thought up a plan... Which I guess was incapable in a sense, but not in technical skill, but just overall creativity and execution. It took me a long time to remember all of that and go easy on my 7 year old self. ------ zerr Kudos aside, it must have been cool owning a computer in that year and at that age! ~~~ cpach It was! :) But things are mostly better now. One striking difference is that in the PC world back then, getting a sane programming environment was quite hard if you didn’t have someone to show you how to do it. Many compilers/IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming. I had a PC but I had no idea that Perl, Python or Scheme/Common Lisp even existed. ~~~ einr _Many compilers /IDEs were commercial and too expensive for kids who just wanted to try out programming_ This is true, but on the other hand, every installation of MS-DOS came with some version of BASIC, so there was really no friction, just type QBASIC and you're immediately in really quite a good IDE with excellent on-line help. ------ tluyben2 At least there were BBS's and magazines back then for some lucky people, especially in the US I guess. In the beginning of the 80s I had 1 book (it came with the computer) and just the help of some friendly older hackers at a 'local' (fair bit away; my parents had to drive me) event. There were no magazines in any local shops yet, books were expensive and mostly not geared towards learning and they were in English (not my native language; although I am sure I aced English on my final highschool exam because of reading mostly English day in day out). The first years I had to learn like this and from experimentation. After a while I had 'viditel'[0], which allowed downloading short programs and games which I could study. I remember spending weekends just changing the source code until I understood what it did; this was especially painful with poke/peek; trying to figure our what addresses did what was painful without help as exploring would more often than not hang the computer. The advantage was; when you knew things, you were sure they would not be different next year (or 20 years later for that matter) on that computer. So once you got the hang of things, you basically could do them 'forever' (the IBM PC was there but it was garbage compared to some of the homecomputers and as a kid I couldn't see that ever taking off :). Very different from now. It was not really possible to 'update' the OS (although I still have my eprom writer from that time and it still works, so I could definitely install new hacked versions of basic, but that was a lot later). When the BBSs became normal here, things started to go a lot quicker. I ran my own one and worked with people to write our own BBS software in turbo pascal. Really quite a shame all the source code of the games, demos and bbs software got lost. I sold my second computer and foolishly sold all tapes + disks with it, also from my first system (which I still have, but without my own software). I didn't care as I was going to upgrade to an Amiga so I did not want that old stuff anymore. [0] [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viditel) ------ guytv Wow. Amazing work. Bring backs lots of memories of early "Personal computer" programming days. Kudos for actually finishing a game project at 12. Thanks for reminding me of happy childhood programming computer memories. ------ ikeboy When I was 13-14 I made games on a TI-83 plus in TI-basic. Made poker, blackjack, pong, some dice games. The biggest project was a version of space trader, I think I just had two commodities and two worlds but it worked. ~~~ DamnInteresting Some of my earliest coding experience was making games on my trusty TI-82 in high school. I had home-made blackjack, slot machine, fly-spaceship-through- randomized-asteroid-field, and a favorite among my fellow students, Russian Roulette, complete with gruesome graphics. It was silly, but it was a great way to get into coding. ------ Pigo I still Paint.NET a lot on my windows devices. That's funny to see the guy who authored it with a Rick & Morty avatar.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer - johnpolacek http://johnpolacek.com/2013/03/24/how-getting-married-and-having-kids-made-me-a-better-programmer/ ====== rayiner As someone with a four month old this really resonates with me. I got the best grades of my entire life the two semesters my wife was pregnant, despite having to spend time helping her cope with e.g. morning sickness and school at the same time. I take the night feedings now and find that I just don't need as much sleep as I used to. Some people have always functioned fine on 5 hours or so but I was never one of them. I'm forced to be efficient. My wife needs me to be there to give her a break from the baby on weekends and late in the evening, so I have to try and make every baby free hour count. ------ shn I have mixed feelings about this. Being married definitely forces you make different decisions than you would otherwise. You cling on where you are longer, no adventure. There are no quick decisions, but long and strategized, calculated ones. I think one makes more "mature" decisions when dealing with an adverse situation. However, on the other hand being married and having children (2 in my case) is a huge attention drain. You probably will buy the dwelling you're living and it bring its own distraction. Working long stretches of time, and even keep on thinking and solving problems while not working is long gone. Would I trade family to the other? No way, life is more than that. It's probably a cliche but true; smile of a cute 1 year old daughter worth more than millions of lines of code. ~~~ newbie12 Opposite for me. I was only able to launch my startup after getting married, and having a wife with steady income and health care. ~~~ shn How about children? ------ jroseattle I imagine most everyone with kids will agree with this at some level. The environment changes dramatically. For me, I discovered that work and programming and problem solving _slowed down_ , in a good way. While not suggesting comparability, it's something that top athletes have consistently remarked on -- how the game slowed down for them and it made them able to move about more effectively as they competed. I experienced the same thing as a developer after I had kids. Problems seemed more clearly defined, challenges seemed not so insurmountable, and alternatives with little/no chance of succeeding became more clearly defined. I absolutely attribute that to having kids, and the mindset it imposes on you as a responsible parent. It may have been that I needed something else to focus on in order to ensure I was not missing the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, having kids and being a better programmer? No one could ever convince me that's not the best outcome for my own circumstance. ~~~ as_if My experience with parents was, that they became more serios about their career. But I can't say they became really good at their job. Probably they became better than they were before, but not as good as I wished them to be... Anyway, I don't like to work with people when they get to serious about stuff. ------ seivan I remember when hearing about this asshole MBA standing on a stage in Singapore talking about how he wouldn't hire developers who were parents. I've not done my own startup yet, but I suspect developers that also were parents would understand responsibility and dependency the best. It's a bit of a generalisation, but so is the fact that most MBA's are useless cunts. Not going to name this person, but googling could help. I'm not a father, and I have no need to become one, but I've noticed parents are usually incredibly responsible. ~~~ rayiner Dude sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Not hiring parents is a great idea if you just need some warm bodies willing to kill themselves for beanies, but that doesn't say much about your company. If you're looking for people with real expertise, then you're limiting yourself greatly by focusing only on people who are still single into their 30's (not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just atypical). ~~~ rdouble In Silicon Valley, nobody has kids until their late 30s, if ever. Edit: the post I replied to originally said something to the effect that finding engineers without kids by age 30 would be statistically difficult. Which is false in Silicon Valley. That said, it's also not atypical in Silicon Valley to remain single well into your 30s. ~~~ bearmf This is just not true. If you look at immigrant software engineers, they are usually married by 30 and then start having kids. ~~~ rdouble I'd like to see your data. Silicon Valley aside, the trend for women with college degrees has been to postpone childbirth until around age 35. This isn't exactly news. ~~~ rayiner The average age of college educated women at first birth is 30: [http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/getting- mar...](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/getting-married- later-is-great-for-college-educated-women/274040/) ~~~ rdouble If Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are included in those statistics, the age is closer to 35. ------ codeonfire Tired of these self-fluff pieces getting upvoted. Is this 'popular hacking' or hacker news? On the face of the article: No, I wholeheartedly disagree. Less is not more and don't believe anyone telling you that. This guy is claiming that now that he has less time he is 6X better at his job due to 'unconscious cognition'. I feel for all the parents out there that have kids and still maintain a career, but we need some evidence to go along with the article. Right now, this article looks like appeal to emotion. Everybody likes family and feels good about it. Skill and ability, like everything else, still needs to be measured and tested. ~~~ noknockers >On the face of the article: No, I wholeheartedly disagree. Less is not more and don't believe anyone telling you that. This guy is claiming that now that he has less time he is 6X better at his job due to 'unconscious cognition'. I think becoming a parent, like everything in life, just taught him some lessons: How to manage his time and looking at the big picture often puts things into perspective. Both these things help with efficiency. It's almost identical to what I went (and still going) through with having kids. I got much better at 'mind hacking'. I could be playing with the kids or making dinner or whatever and my mind is hacking away at solution to problems. ------ nicholassmith I thought I was a great programmer when I was 19 and staying up for 30 hours grinding it out. I was totally wrong. I'm on the wrong side of 25 and I've realised even though I spend less time writing code, I'm a significantly better programmer because of it. Sometimes to write code, you must not write code; wax on, wax off grasshopper. ------ general_failure Agree. And this probably works if you want to be a programmer ie something quite independent and you don't 'run' things. I used to be a lot more entrepreneurial before my son. Having a child changes things, a lot more than marriage. There was a constant feeling of guilt of working on something when he was there to play with. I always felt I would miss out on something if I was working. Ultimately, entrepreneurial pursuits weren't as much fun as they used to. At some point (subconsciously), I decided my time with the kid was time I would never get again and gave up on my side projects. Only time will tell if my decision is what makes me have no regrets :) That said, I certainly believe that having no family commitments make you do 'big' things. If you see history, most 'great' people achieved things at the cost of family - Gandhi, Einstein, etc. There is simply no time to do 'great' things and be with your wife/children. ------ noir_lord I noticed something similar (though without having the wife and kids (though I'm getting the hints)). I recently switched to working from home while I sorted out a new office and thought "wow, 8-10 hours a day I'll be so productive"... nope. Much the same as mentioned in the article I find I work best in blocks of 2-3 hours with a decent period to cogitate before the next block. Now I've moved into my new offices I have someone to grab lunch with and/or can go for a wonder round the museum (which is opposite office and has a lovely garden/pond). It was a valuable learning experience though as I'd always aimed for working from home as a perfect programming environment and it turns out that I'm only productive at home on a night if I've been somewhere else during the day. ------ jaynate Great post, and good follow on commentary as well. I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Using this technique (forcing myself to walk away from directly solving a problem) got me through my college calculus course. Now that I have kids (3 of them), i know that a battle with a tricky bug or business problem is nothing compared to a battle of wits with a two year old. ------ tabulatouch Definitely agree with you. From the moment my now 2 years old daughter was born, a hidden register in my brain was activated to warn me every time i was losing time. I mean: losing time in my programming work. This is the main effect of having a constraint, less time, results in more efficiency. I also agree on the unconscious problem solving function, always related to taking a break, it really seems our lives could be better lived taking the right time to pause, relax, think. Still researching and experimenting on these things. ------ tacoman When you have kids and you realize how little time you have, it forces you to learn to identify and focus on the things that matter. This easily translates to your career. ------ drawkbox I think it really comes down to the programmer. I have heard from people without kids that they wouldn't hire people with kids sometimes based on them being busy. I have heard married with children people say that they like to hire married with kids for more dedication. What I have found is that single or married, some people just manage time better and have a knack for contributing in a way that makes a product better or not. Personally, I feel that parenting and being married with a kid has not only made me a better efficient programmer but it has made me a better product person somehow. I care more about a larger set of the target market. I want my things to work for kids, core and adult to old age if possible. In the end it is all bias, it comes down to good and bad and who can deliver in ample time with the best product. It isn't easy either way. I know I would tire of chasing girls and finding time to code/build/make products, with my wife and kid and home it is very much like a lab or study kind of setup. Lots of support and lots of motivation but also great time for focus. ------ hello_newman This article really hit a nerve with me. I am 21, single, surfer, and have had the opportunity to be able to spend time with many pretty and interesting ladies. But I got accepted into DBC and am now, more or less, out of the "college-mentality" and am now thinking more clearly. As a 21 year old, when you are not working or studying, almost everything you do revolves around trying to pick up some girl. I got tired of it because I would rather learn software than pretend like I care what some girl is talking about just to get in her pants. I have known this one girl for 8 years and we have essentially grown up together and spent our teenage years together. I used to be against marriage because of not wanting to get tied down. But she is my best friend, someone who I could spend every day with, which is what marriage really is about. She wouldn't tie me down, because she understands what i am doing and what I want to accomplish. Pursuing some girl just to bed her...would tie me down because you get "addicted" to trying to it. It's fun, but it makes you feel dirty and shameful. Many of the arguments the OP makes really resonates with some of the reasoning I have come up with. If you have someone who supports you, and she in return is expecting you do to the same, that is the most valuable asset that you could have. It provides better motivation than almost anything else I could think of. She is trusting YOU to provide for her. When your back is against the wall, you can do some pretty incredible things because what your doing HAS TO work. Not to go too far into it, but the point I was trying to make was I am seriously considering proposing to this girl. I am leaving, so this is kind of my Hail Mary. Maybe this is the worst decision I could ever make, maybe not. Thanks for a great read and I will be taking this article into consideration when making my next move. Keep the good writing coming! ------ senthilnayagam as a young man, girls and sex was always a distraction in my mind, I had more frustrations than successes. all my achievement have been post my marriage, most after having my kids. It brought me focus and calm to my mind, I was not looking around, I was happy and contend, I knew what I wanted and was making progress each day. ------ jzelinskie This is why I sleep on tough problems. I can honestly feel my brain thinking about it while I sleep and usually by the time I wake up, I have a solution or at least a new vector for attack. My father is the same way and keeps a notepad by his bed for this same reason. ------ bearmf There might be a correlation, but it is almost impossible to prove that kids cause one to get better at one's job. For example, I am sure that people with kids (up to a certain number) earn more. But it might just be that they started earning more and then had kids. What I believe is that kids are a normal part of life very different from anything you have experienced before them. Having them has nothing to do with your career (or should have nothing to do with it), and they don't really care where you work up to a certain age. ------ codegeek Even though I have not taken the entrepreneurial plunge yet (in the true sense), I just had my first child 2 weeks ago and for some reason, at age 31 with a kid, I feel like I am more than ready now to get into doing what I want. No more distractions. I know what I need to focus my day on and nights on (well nights is mostly for baby with breaks in b/w :)) ------ freework What he is describing is basically Hammock Driven Development: <http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586> Dealing with kids is a form of stepping away from the computer. ------ up_and_up +1 My kids are sleeping right now! 1.5 - 2 hours is the max 'free programming time' I have anymore. ~~~ jedberg And you're wasting it here. :) ------ reiz Thanks for posting this! I think there is a lot of true in it. ------ michaelochurch There's a lot of truth in this, but there's one thing I'll disagree with: _When you have a family to support, becoming great at what you do is excellent job security. Thus, doing web development has gone from being a fun thing that I do for a job, to a very important fun thing I do as my career. Now, my own personal hustle factor is at an all-time high._ This assumes that being good at your job and job security are positively correlated. Possibly above the 75th percentile and certainly above the 90th, it swings the other way, and hard. First, when you're really good, you tend to get into conflict with intermediate players to whom you're a threat rather than an asset. Your company might benefit abstractly from you being good, but "The Company" doesn't write your performance reviews. Maybe your boss gives you shitty work so you don't develop and become a threat. Possibly, mediocre colleagues tear you down. At the 80th percentile, you'll almost never be fired for low performance but there's little overperformance risk. At the 95th, you can be a fucking lighting rod for resentment in a nasty, dysfunctional environment and, let's be honest, most work environments are pretty broken. Second, there are all the risks you have to take to _get_ good. To get past 1.4 or so (scale here: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the- trajector...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory- of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/) ) you need to start taking creative risks and have room to fail. Beyond 1.8, you either need managerial buy-in or extreme autonomy-- and sometimes, you gotta take it through means that aren't the most accepted. We still live in a "hacker" reality: you get good by breaking rules. It's great that the OP seems to live in a world where things actually work and there's a positive correlation between security and technical excellence. For most people in our industry, however, the need for a regular income induces conformist mediocrity rather than moon-shot excellence. ~~~ lbrandy This is a dangerous line of thinking, useful as a counterpoint to consider, but a terrible basis for thinking about your life and career. The problem is that the worst kind of engineer is the one who thinks he is a top 5% engineer, who proclaims his, and all other, organizations dysfunctional, who is convinced his managers and peers are out to get him because of their jealousy, who sees enemies everywhere, and who ends up getting along with no one, self-fulfilling the prophecy, and being a net negative. Being really good at your job is a great way to succeed in life almost everywhere. If you frequently find yourself in political death struggles in organization after organization, it might be time for some self reflection. ~~~ jakejake I was just thinking that it's interesting how at least 80% of developers are in the top 5%. It's one of the truly amazing things about our industry, we defy the laws of mathematics. ~~~ hayksaakian I think its just another byproduct of America's confidence culture, where any sign of uncertainty next the a confident idiot paints you as inferior. ~~~ jakejake I have to plead ignorance about other countries. But in the US, I haven't really encountered too many developers who I sensed projecting superiority for the sake of job security. What I mean is that my impression is that they truly do believe they are a top developer. I have run into a few of those "job security" guys who are difficult to work with, but not that often. I think part of it is that it's easy to look at another developer's code which you inherit and judge it to be inferior to your own work. I have found this to be very common - the developer who is constantly griping about the terrible code they inherited. (I myself have been guilty of this). But, it can be more difficult to actually create the code - especially under time or budget constraints or requirements that change over the years. So, in that case it can be tempting to judge yourself as a better developer - when in reality you may have created the same crappy code or worse. ------ dsfasfasf I never ever want to get married nor have kids. I plan to be an eternal boy even way into my 90s if I'm lucky. All I want to do my entire life is experiment, play, build, learn. Nothing less, nothing more. Sure, I still have female friends to fulfill carnal needs but I do not care for long term relationships. The world has 7 billion people already. It matters not if I have no kids. I'm 35 already so I think that this is my destiny for if I were to get married I probably would have done it in my 20's. I have plenty of nephews and boy can they be a pain. Is nice to enjoy them for a couple of hours but more than that and it becomes like trying to herd cats. Don't get me wrong, I love them, but I just don't want to spend my entire time with them. Which makes me more sure that kids are not for me. So regarding this post, to each their own. p.s. For some strange coincidence, all of my friends from college, female and male alike, have not gotten married or had kids yet (except for one, and she just had a kid with her partner, she doesn't really want to get married). I wonder if this is a generation thing. edit: Why the downvotes? Everybody is free to live how they choose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to implement a programming language in JavaScript - jayflux http://lisperator.net/pltut/ ====== billconan in the link, the author says, don't use regexp for parser. is there any background on this? trying to understand the limitation of regexp. ~~~ galaxyLogic Simple example: RegExp allows you to find the next closing parenthesis. But it can not "see" how many opening parenthesis there were before that. Therefore it can not tell you if the closing parenthesis it found is the "matching" closing parenthesis	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Should I take this programming test to get the next interview round? - irishgeoffrey I was asked to take this take home programming test to get to the second round of my interviews. Im in two minds. Im actually against programming tests altogether.<p>I have 10 years experience and i think this will take more than 4 hours. What do you think ? What would you do ?<p>Please write a application to showcase your skills. Use your creativity to develop a compelling web application that will allow customers to view a list of products and add them to their shopping cart.<p>The MVP should include the ability for a user to log in, view products and add products to their cart. The cart information should be persisted to MSSQL.<p>We would like the app to be built using C# and .NET. Feel free to use web forms, MVC, or Web API as well as server side 3rd party libraries and JavaScript frameworks/libraries.<p>You can spend as little or as much time as you would like on this project however we think 3 - 4 hours is reasonable and you can factor that into your design.<p>Please submit the full source code along with instructions to build and run your application. ====== slackingoff2017 As a developer that has made these tests, I hope you do it but understand if you won't. We tried to start paying people to do these but it's too easy to make arguments that this makes people employees so legal wouldn't allow it. According to research by Google and others, the best correlated metric of a successful software developer is IQ. Unfortunately it's hard to make a test for this that doesn't discriminate against protected classes. So we settle for the two second-best predictors. These are a work sample and structured interview. Together these can predict maybe 50% of job success. If you've been in a position that involves reviewing others code its apparent that there's an extremely large spectrum of programming skill. We found work samples to be extremely effective for weeding out people that we would need to clean up after (damage quality metrics of our codebase). The upside for you is that if they take work samples seriously you're probably going to be working with more skilled developers. When we added work samples to our interview process the amount of people we had to retrain or let go for lack of development skills fell to nothing. Before that it was ~30%. Some people are really good at bullshitting you :) ------ twobyfour I bake this sort of project time into my job search in the expectation that I'll have to do a handful of them. Personally I much prefer these sorts of practical tests over "gotcha" whiteboard algorithm interviews. Then I just add them to my github portfolio. ------ techjuice From what I have learned from hiring others to join high profile and high performance teams these coding tests are very valuable and helps the team get a good look at what you do rather than what you say. A good benefit to this is, that it fairly helps include all personality types (quiet, outgoing, shy, etc.) and focuses on if they can perform an actual development project from theory, design, and finally to production. Once we started adding tests to our interview process the quality of people on our team and time to adjust dropped dramatically along with a decrease in the time between a hire and the individual leaving the company. Normally they only left if they were moving to another location or had a big family change. The task at hand is very simple, and helps weed out those that copy and paste everything along with those with an engineering title that have not actually been doing development for as along as their resume says they have. For those with actual experience developing projects, launching to production and maintaining them on a regular basis have a large capability to shine for these types of easy entry tests. I am guessing you are applying for a Senior or Principal level .NET Web Developer role? If so this test, tests your knowledge of taking customer requirements and turning them into a working prototype for review. It also tests your database and web development skills with C#, MSSQL and many of the various methods of developing web apps using standard web technology. The big test will be the way the final product is packaged up along with it's unit tests. If done correctly it proves you know how to conduct good deployments to production and actually tested your work instead of just copying the code to the server without packaging it up the .NET way. You are basically being asked to use the regular full cycle of developing and deploying a .NET web application. Many web developers do not know how to do this and just copy their code to a web server without packaging, changing the release types, unit tests, etc. I would recommend using this as a good way to actually set yourself above other candidates that want the job by going through the entire SDLC with a high quality MVP. When you get to the good jobs (higher quality engineering standards in place) normally the interview process is longer than your first job back when you first started as they just needed programmers not people that could conduct all parts of the SDLC and maintain large applications. Sounds like they want you to be able to do the latter and not just a small piece of applications. For my opinion on what to do, I always recommend doing these code challenges, as they are normally a pretty good mental engineering stimulant and honestly they have all been pretty easy and did not take 4 hours to complete unless I was trying to add extra shine awww to it. Normal outcome was a call back a few hours after they reviewed it with a really nice job offer wondering when the earliest I could start with a signing bonus to seal the deal.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ex-Googlers Launch Avocado, An App For Couples - MarlonPro http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/20/avocado-mobile-app-for-couples/ ====== bostonvaulter2 This looks pretty cool, I really like the idea of customized emoticon replacements.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Hire a Vet - famiynation I would like explore asking a Vet to help me hack out a minimally viable product demo for my online social media app. Where would I need to begin this exploration? ====== ScottWhigham I'd venture to say that, if you don't even know how to find a military veteran in the first place, your chances of success are limited. The fact that you've asked "How do hire a vet" is very telling and, I presume, predictive of both your (a) ability to communicate your ideas (after all, "vet" is an ambiguous word and most people would likely have thought of a veterinarian first), and (b) your inability to perform a basic task without asking a community for help. It might be worth re-thinking if now is the right time... ------ RougeFemme Actually, I think that most people _would_ assume you meant a military vet and not a veterinary physician, since most people hear a lot more about military vets. My question would be do you want someone with serious skills and just a good coder? If the latter, I'd suggest some community colleges. ------ mooism2 Do you mean a veterinary physician or a military veteran? ------ famiynation Military Vet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
It’s time to weaponize the “whisper network” - tomjakubowski https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/10/16/16482800/harvey-weinstein-sexual-harassment-workplace ====== navigator01 The potential for anonymous slander is too high for a real system like this to be justified. Whispers turn to rumors which turn to falsehoods. Someone interpreted as being "creepy" in texts by one woman shouldn't have his life ruined by an anonymous post on a spreadsheet. ~~~ f_allwein Agree, but this is also a serious and (apparently) widespread issue which moreover sounds like a combination of technical and social measures could help to address it. So it seems like a good idea to have a discussion about it. ~~~ navigator01 Traditional procedures that balance due process and expedient justice are the solution here. Anyone who faces abuse needs to speak up to either HR in a corporate setting or the police, if appropriate. ------ Toboe >We must show that the accused, not the accuser, will suffer when a case goes public, and do so by building institutions of support for victims who come forward. Shouldn't it be "that the one proven guilty will suffer"? With effective assumption of innocence for accused and accuser. (No "someone said x did y so x must be guilty" and no "nah, z is just claiming that for attention" without proof) ------ aaron695 They are justifying lynch mobs. On top of this they seem to live in a fantasy land where these tools they create will only be used for their own agendas. The abuse they are trying to justify is on par with the perpetrators abuse they are trying to stop. Wrong on many many levels. ------ bobzibub How about a system where accusations are entered and kept encrypted until enough actual people enter similar ones and the info is released (maybe to a Wikileaks type organization for verification) automatically? The subject could be notified if they get n complaints. The accusations would have to be enough that there would be an excellent chance of conviction. I think it is an issue for all people in power, not simply media types. Because of the power of the subjects there would have to be some way to avoid the courts shutting it down too though. Perhaps an Ether smart contract? It would never catch all the bad people in the world but could at least put some checks on or even stop the powerful serial offender. I know this is a bit "Pollyanna-Technical" "solution" to a human problem but it is the best I can think of given the adversarial court system, inequities of money, and all that. Also, I don't think one should limit it to particular crimes. On my phone: apologies for such a disorganized post. ~~~ jackvalentine Excellent starting point. You suggested some ways of dealing with the multitude of problems that intersect here: \- False accusations \- Accuser/accusee power imbalances \- Interfering courts \- Lengthy formal court processes One thing I'm not sure about in your idea is how you'd deal with brigading to force the magic number to be met. ~~~ bobzibub The Wikileaks style organization would have to vet the results and deem them as legit before any release. And then release to relevant authorities. ------ roywiggins Reporters were trying to weaponize the whisper network against Weinstein for years. They were part of the network, and managed to contact a number of his victims. But they couldn't get anyone to go on the record, for (I hope) obvious reasons. The woman who went to the police had her case dropped and her name splashed across gossip magazines, probably stories planted by Weinstein. Without someone on record there wasn't a story that would pass journalistic standards. Maybe we should relax those standards, I don't know. If a reporter has a dozen separate accusers with correlated stories who are not mutually in contact, maybe they should be able to publish without having to get any of the accusers to put their name to it. But would it have the same effect as having accusations with names attached? Or would the accused just say "I won't respond to anonymous allegations" and then the story goes away. ------ curtisblaine This advocates for the destruction of the presumption of innocence principle[1]. What could go possibly wrong? [1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence) ------ jsjsuu7676 As both a victim of rape (that was prosecuted in court) and someone who was falsely accused of sexual harassment (I never have done anything that could be construed as such), this is terrifying. The whisper network is already weaponized. It makes victims of the innocent and undermines the innocence of those who already victims. The only just way to proceed is to assume innocence until proven guilty. The discussion around this is becoming deeply disturbing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How much technical capability has Anonymous demonstrated so far? - boh http://www.quora.com/How-much-technical-capability-has-Anonymous-demonstrated-so-far?__snids__=13973951#ans388620 ====== arjunnarayan Anonymous not only is composed of the technically savvy people, but has immense potential. If say, tomorrow, Julian Assange is conclusively killed by the United States (with some evidence saying it was the US Govt.) they would probably gather many new recruits. If an election was stolen in the US with a load of evidence of massive voting fraud, I imagine anonymous would add half of hacker news to its membership. Anonymous is pretty much a nerd-mob amassed as a response to whatever they're massing against. And their technical capacity is determined by what they're fighting. If its something stupid, its probably just the script-kiddies involved. If it's something serious and massively threatening the societal sense of justice, I imagine some pretty tech-savvy otherwise-professionals would get involved. It's composed of a demographic that tends to lean anarcho-libertarian with a _very_ strong sense of justice and fairness, also coinciding with a demographic that tends to run most of the revolts/revolutions throughout history (men between 18-35). And is pretty much a subset of the 4chan demographic (which isn't too hard to get into/understand if you're a redditor; and who isn't a redditor these days?). They aren't dangerous unless you're doing something wrong in their eyes: and while their evaluation of what is right is rather hazy, and their responses ranging from ineffective outrage to very disproportionate rage, I find it hard to condemn what is essentially a very democratic volunteer amassed group of people. ------ Pooter Enough to be dangerous. How much more to they have to demonstrate?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Discover career opportunities in your network with CareerSonar - avirambm https://www.careersonar.com/invitation/hackernews ====== avirambm The most promising career opportunities are those in which the person has an inside connection that can help them get in the door. CareerSonar makes it easy to discover these opportunities in your social and professional networks, without having to manually cross check hundreds of job listings against your contact list (not to mention your 2nd connections, etc). The benefit for active job seekers is apparent, but we also help those who are employed keep on top of their best opportunities out there (because everyone is curious). Our ranking algorithm is currently patent pending, and we like to think that it gives results that are much more relevant than anything else out there. We just entered private beta and would love to get some feedback. Thanks! ------ kjhughes This appears to be Facebook based (Facebook login required). Is that true? Why wouldn't it be LinkedIn based? Some prefer to keep Facebook for personal and LinkedIn for professional relationships. ~~~ avirambm We actually allow you to add LinkedIn as well during the signup process. Your opportunities don't discriminate so we help you mine both your social and professional networks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TomTom ditches map updates for some sat-navs - edward http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/42859546 ====== thephilsproject Some product descriptions continue to state that maps on the devices will update multiple times a year "for the lifetime of your device". On its website, TomTom explains that "lifetime" means the "useful life" of a device: "ie: the period of time TomTom supports your device with updates, services, content or accessories. A device will have reached the end of its life when none of these are available any more." Updates will be available for the lifetime, which is defined as until we stop providing updates. (Unsure how to quote) ~~~ Spooky23 It’s amazing how companies are able to get away with bullshit like this with virtual goods. There was an article in our local newspaper about a dude who bought lifetime brakes for his Mustang in like 1970 from JC Penney (!). To this day, he’s still getting free brakes, I think Firestone took on the business. With tech stuff, they would declare the lifetime to the be average lifetime of a brake pad! ~~~ mikestew _There was an article in our local newspaper about a dude who bought lifetime brakes for his Mustang in like 1970 from JC Penney (!). To this day, he’s still getting free brakes, I think Firestone took on the business._ Can confirm as an ex-Firestone mechanic from shortly after Firestone picked up Penny's repair business (in fact, the shop I worked at used to be a Penny's auto repair). If a car rolled in needing brakes, and they had the lifetime warranty, we put brakes on it. I was never tasked with trying to find ways to wiggle out of it. Nope, it was "hey, mikestew, '72 'stang out there, check the brakes. It's lifetime warranty, so if it needs anything we don't need to call customer, just put it on and let me know what you did." And because a "lifetime" job required that the customer buy calipers and rotors in addition to pads, Firestone covered everything. Rotors are shot? New rotors for you, no charge! Caliper frozen? New caliper, on the house! Haven't worked for Firestone in about 25 years, but we still take our cars there for lifetime alignment (I can do brakes myself). No bullshit, no fine print, take it in once or twice a year, no questions asked. And I'll tell you why Firestone doesn't mind: they'll more than likely find something else that needs work (not trying to rip you off, folks, that's just the nature of mechanical things) and make some money off that. My personal observation was that folks also never took it back for an alignment until it needed tires, and therefore money in Firestone's pocket. IOW, Firestone's bean counters were counting on customers not actually using the warranty, and they were right. Tilley clothing is another one who honored the lifetime warranty on two of their hats we had for twenty years. Filled out the form, paid eight US dollars shipping, new hats in a few weeks. My only complaint is that the new hats are...different. I dunno, maybe after some break-in they'll be like our old ones. Tilley claims to be like the Craftsman tools of old: if you're in possession of a hat, you're covered under warranty even if you didn't buy it. "Put it in your will!", they say. I assume that's true, because they never asked us for any proof of purchase. ~~~ icantdrive55 There's a huge market out there for honest auto repair shops. I'm a former mechanic, and usually astonished at what most shops get away with. I've seen $1200 tune ups. (Six cylinder Ford Vallant, and the shop owner told my friend business was slow that week, and he needed money.) To a Franchise owner at Aamco (San Rafael, ca) who told he the tranny was going into limp mode when he test drove it, and then brought me into the office to look at the cutaway model. (It was never even driven because he didn't have the key. Plus--when he realized I knew the lingo; he started kissing my ass. He knew he was caught. He was a new franchise owner, but that's no excuse.) My point is there's some real business opportunities out there. An honest shop is gold. Its a very tough business though. I've even met some people who sware their "guy" is the best. They are usually the ones who are being taken the most. ~~~ mikestew _To a Franchise owner at Aamco_ You know, I've been seeing investigative reports about Aamco's crooked dealings since I was a kid watching Morely Schafer on _Sixty Minutes_ , and I am not a young man (in fact, I think Morely's dead now.) So I am continually amazed when I see Aamco in the news _again_. It's not like there isn't good money in running an honest shop. I wasn't a mechanic for all that many years, but of those years I've known one mechanic that I wouldn't send my sister to. The rest are just working class dogs like the rest of us, trying to make a nice middle-class living. The other Firestone I worked at while I was going to school, as a "tire changer" and not mechanic, the manager was a every-time-the-doors-are-open church goer, and lived it. There would be no ripping off of customers in that shop. That shop made plenty of money. So I dunno, maybe transmissions are a different business. And there will always be those for whom the good living of auto repair isn't good _enough_. Sure, I make a ton more writing software, but there are days I'd go back to turning wrenches. Much like software, someone has a problem, and I got a great deal of satisfaction out of solving that problem for a reasonable price. Personally, I never saw any compelling reason to be dishonest. ------ grecy How any company thinks it can continue to make money selling maps is beyond me. I have just driven the length of West Africa from Morocco to South Africa[1] using Open Street Maps loaded onto a $50 Garmin GPS[2]. The accuracy and completeness of the maps is nothing short of _staggering_. The tiniest town in Burkina Faso, Gabon or the DRC has _every single_ road, walking track and intersection, perfectly mapped. It's the same for all the countries. On the entire 40,000 miles I can count on one hand the number of times the OSM map did not perfectly reflect the real world. It happened so infrequently it was always cause for celebration when it did. [1][http://theroadchoseme.com](http://theroadchoseme.com) [2] [http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/](http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/) ~~~ jlgaddis It's ~$800 per year for map updates for one of my cars, a Nissan Altima SV (and that's just an SD card that, of course, must be installed by a dealership). As you might guess, I've never paid for them. In the worst case, the girlfriend (who actually drives the car), just uses the Maps app on her iPhone when she needs it. Contrast that with Harley-Davidson who is notorious for "nickel and diming" and charging outrageous amounts for otherwise regular products. I can just go to their website, download a file to a USB flash drive, plug the flash drive into my motorcycle, and it'll update everything -- including the GPS navigation system and maps. It just seems backwards to me. I probably wouldn't pay _anything_ for map updates for the car (and I don't for my truck, either), although I might if they were cheap enough. OTOH, I absolutely _would_ pay for updates for the motorcycle but even H-D doesn't charge for 'em. As long as navigation is available for free on everyone's mobile phones, I'm not sure how automobile companies expect to make much money from map updates. ~~~ nikanj It boggles my mind that Harley-Davidsons come equipped with USB ports, and require software updates. How do the grumpy old-timey bikers deal with the modern complexity in their bikes? ~~~ jlgaddis Heh, well, it's (mostly) optional. You can buy a new bike off the showroom floor and ride it for years without ever updating anything or, really, even _using_ any of that new-fangled techno-electro-logical crap. :-) Modern Harleys, however, have a _lot_ of electronics available, if you want to take advantage of them. I've got a touch-screen unit that includes GPS (including turn-by-turn navigation), SiriusXM satellite radio, Bluetooth (for phone calls or playing the music on my iPhone through the bike's very well- equipped "Infotainment" system), a USB port (for updates and playing MP3s), a security system, a garage door opener, and so on. Other models might have CD players, CB radios, etc. The lower end/cheaper models typically don't have much more than a speedometer. Some of these are, easily, $50,000 bikes, though. The software updates are dead simple, too. Download a file to a USB stick, plug it in, turn the ignition to accessory, and... wait. It shows the progress/status on the screen and takes maybe 10 minutes from start to finish. Someone like me (more "tech-y") usually gets the USB flash drive set up when an update comes out and then we all just pass it around when we get together for a ride or something. Others don't care and don't bother ever updating. Even the "grumpy old-timey bikers" like their tunes. :-) ------ dspillett _> On its website, TomTom explains that "lifetime" means the "useful life" of a device: "ie: the period of time TomTom supports your device with updates, services, content or accessories. A device will have reached the end of its life when none of these are available any more."_ This is very weasily legalise and quite contrary to what the customer is likely to interpret "lifetime" as meaning. They guaranteed the device would be kept updated for its useful life, but as soon as they stop updates the device's useful life is over so they can arbitrarily define what "lifetime" of the product is long after its sale. If the term has not been adequately and obviously defined to the customer in this way they might be liable for refunds on the bases of the product not matching reasonable expectations. Even if it has been defined that way in EULAs and similar for all time, there may still be valid claims against them for deceptive advertising and bait & switch. Of course they'll probably get away with it though, the same way for many years ISPs got away with using the word "unlimited" to mean "unlimited except for any limits we currently apply and might decide to apply at any time in the future", though not without losing some face. I own a TomTom sports watch which I've recommended to people in the past. I will no longer give unguarded recommendations[1] and when it comes time to replace it[2] I will seriously research competing options and most likely discount TomTom products unless there is an astronomical cost/value difference in their favour. [1] if any recommendation at all [2] which will be soon due to an event involving unintended high-velocity contact between myself and the pavement which has resulted in a damaged screen and probably a reduction in moisture resistance ~~~ oh_sigh I got bit by this same thing recently. I bought new windows for my house, and a selling point was they came with a lifetime warranty against manufacturer and installation defects. I only found out after reading the fine print that "lifetime" in this sense meant 10 years ~~~ stephen_g Wow, pretty sure that would be totally against our consumer law in my country (Australia)... ~~~ bruce_one It's not an uncommon practice in Australia (from a high level). (Never looked into the legalities though....) One example I know of is that Kathmandu offer a "lifetime warranty" on their goods, but that lifetime is their definition for how long that item is expected to last. As an example they might say "rain jacket x has a product lifetime of 5 years"; so a warranty claim at 4 would be covered but one at 6 years would not (if the staff act 100% in accordance with the policy). (These numbers are entirely arbitrary and not based on their policy.) It's actually surprisingly inline with consumer laws, but consumer law has a "reasonable expected lifetime based on what you paid for the item" type clause (such that a $15 jacket has a different lifetime to a $800 one). It's worth remembering for things like expensive TVs that only have a short warranty, because it often pans out that the expected lifetime (because of the price) is higher than the manufacturer offers, but they still have to cover the fault (because of consumer laws). (It's not accounting for a retrospective change though...) ~~~ dspillett The TomTom situation is worse than that for some (many?) users though. This isn't a device losing support because it is at the end of its physical life expectancy, or because of tech advances in th eX years since the customer bought it (as some of the devices are still available to buy), but because they can't be bothered to keep it up-to-date. They could at least maintain a slightly cut down version that does work on the older designs, for instance. If someone bought one of those devices in the last year or few I would hope there is a case for it being returned as "not fit for purpose". You could argue that it still works with older maps, but in some cases this could potentially be dangerous. In the case of a sports watch like mine not getting updates wouldn't be a big issue (I might not get new features, but the old ones would still work, I could still use it as a distance tracker and to tell the time) but for a mapping the device up-to-date maps are an essential part. For devices still on shop shelves, any sold near a statement that updates are a feature are actively being mis-sold. Who picks up the hit for having to sell these devices off cheap: TomTom or the retailer? Some retailers are going to be as irritated as the end users. ------ yitchelle I am currently shopping for a new car. Most of the salefolks I came across actually recommended us to stay away from dedicated GPS devices, (built into the car or stand alone). They actually recommend for us to use our smart phone and coupled it with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. ~~~ ams6110 The fewer electronics the car has the better IMO. I much prefer climate control and radio with knobs and levers, no screens thank you (hard to get away from now thanks to silly requirement for reverse camera). Fortunately the cars I buy are old enough that they pre-date the introduction of screen-based controls. Navigation much better on phone. Always up to date, no extra costs. ~~~ spike021 I wouldn't say the reverse camera is a silly requirement. At least in my car the lens has a pretty wide angle/fish-eye effect which allows me to see around cars on either side of me before I'm able to see them with the naked eye + my rear-view mirror. ~~~ sand500 Also add that it is way harder to see out of the rear windshield in newer cars. IMO a back up camera is essential and the top-down view some newer cars is pretty nice. ~~~ kevin_thibedeau The high beltline fad is ridiculous for what it does to visibility but a rear view mirror isn't absolutely necessary. Trucks manage fine with a fully obstructed view. ~~~ sand500 Other than backing up into the trailer or a loading dock, I wouldn't think trucks have to back up often and even in those two cases, there hopefully isn't a lot of pedestrian traffic around. Now a neighborhood driveway or Walmart parking lot, even the rear view mirror in a older car isn't good enough for me. ~~~ kevin_thibedeau Plenty of utility vans and pickups with service bodies have no rear visibility. They back up all the time. ~~~ s0rce Back up camera is super handy to hitch up a trailer on a pickup/truck. ------ mi100hael Me before reading article: "these are probably 15-year-old devices with 2 users still clinging on" _> Many of the affected sat-navs are still available online at a number of retailers._ Well OK then. No more buying TomTom. ------ ris This is where purchasers of Garmin sat navs are laughing because their map format was reverse-engineered years ago and OpenStreetMap on garmin satnavs is quite a well trodden path: [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin) ~~~ netsharc It makes me wish I had more time, to start a project to reverse engineer the TomTom format. And maybe even generalize it for all sorts of devices, for example car makers also have their proprietary formats (probably they just use their supplier's format, whichever 3rd party that is). ~~~ ars The best part of the TomTom map is what they call "IQ Routes" where they have timing info for each road, for each 15 minutes of the day. Without that there's little point in using it. ------ kawsper Bad experiences like these will most likely drive (no pun intended) more of their customers away from dedicated GPS-devices and onto using smartphones instead. ~~~ g09980 Why do people (outside of special applications perhaps... planes? military?) still use these devices? Had one in a rental car recently, after battling with it for a bit reverted to trusty iOS Google Maps. ~~~ khedoros1 \- Operation outside of reliable cell connection. \- A call or text at an inopportune time doesn't inhibit navigation. \- The dedicated UI is simpler and doesn't change; my GPS is about 8 years old and has stayed the same the whole time. Every Maps app I've had has changed a dozen damn times since then; I value the stable interface more than the bullshit bells and whistles. It needs to show me directions and be otherwise unobtrusive; a phone doesn't do that. \- Sometimes I turn my phone off to eliminate distractions \- Sometimes I'll hand my phone to my kid to play a game A phone does a thousand things, but none of them as well as a dedicated device can do 1 or 2 items from the list. ~~~ reaperducer > \- Operation outside of reliable cell connection. This. I just spent the entire weekend outside of cell range. And I can't always download maps in advance because I rarely know where I'm going from day to day. ~~~ Const-me > I can't always download maps in advance because I rarely know where I'm > going from day to day. Can’t you download offline maps for the whole country? On my phone I have two sets of offline maps for my + neighbor countries. Microsoft is free, Garmin was one time purchase. Both work OK without Internet. ~~~ lightbulbjim Yeah, I'm not sure why it's such a common complaint that phone service is required for navigation. There are plenty of apps available which let you download whole countries/regions for very cheap, and can do all of their routing offline. ~~~ exodust Because people will typically use Google maps, and Google only provides one month of offline map data before it demands to be put online again to "refresh" that data. Honestly, the way Google changes the goal posts and rearranges the furniture within its own apps, I stay well clear of that mess when I need consistency and reliability. My phone remains a phone when I'm driving and need an uninterrupted, non-internet, non-phone navigation device. ------ btilly It is easy to criticize, but I see their point. Over time we are adding more and more information and detail to mapping data. How does that work out if your older device does not have the resources to store/manipulate that much data? They have no good options. They can send the update, and break the device. Or leave the old data be and let the device slowly downgrade. Or pay a fortune to replace who knows how many devices. Or try to maintain two versions of their data indefinitely. ~~~ pebers They can ship a downscaled version of the data for older devices. Standard algorithms like Douglas-Peucker are simple to implement and the quality is bound to be good enough (certainly better than the alternative, which here is nothing at all). Yes, that's some work. But a build pipeline to produce varying qualities of assets is not something TomTom should be a stranger to. ~~~ btilly How do you choose which points of interest to throw away when downscaling? That data set is continuing to become richer and more complete over time. ------ oldcynic _> TomTom explains that "lifetime" means the "useful life" of a device_ Not the lifetime they think it is, but the same "lifetime" that every manufacturer of products uses. It's not like you're going to get a much longer life from a phone as they also turn off updates at some point. What is a little surprising is people still haven't learnt to a) distrust all MarketingSpeak and b) Google before purchase to find out how long the "new" product has been out. ~~~ nothrabannosir _> What is a little surprising is people still haven't learnt to a) distrust all MarketingSpeak…_ I hear you, it’s frustrating that companies keep getting away with this. On the other hand: people don’t live forever. There are many thousands of new people each day. Each of whom have to relearn all the unwritten rules of society, while tribal knowledge withers with every changing of the guard. This is an inherent inefficiency in a market free of regulations, where consumers learn whom and what to (dis)trust. I think, at some point, it’s more zen to accept certain behavioural quirks of the market as axioms and focus on how to work with them, instead of against them. Sorry for turning this into yet another anti libertarian rant :) ------ knodi123 I got a rental in new zealand, and the included tomtom sent me to the hospital. Seriously, I was following directions to an RV park, but wound up in front of a hospital. The RV park was a kilometer away. It was also woefully (and I mean extra-frustratingly) out of date in Dunedin. And yet it was online with a fast 3g connection 8 hours a day. Point being - looks like maybe they skipped map updates a while ago. :-P ~~~ knodi123 oh, another funny one - was heading to the botanical gardens in hamilton (a pretty big and highly populated city!) and it navigated me to the gated employees-only service entrance, not to the public entrance about 2km away on another side of the park. ------ jayflux I’ve had the Tom Tom app for many years now (iOS) and have always had free updates. I’m guessing it’s harder to support dedicated devices that will eventually be hard to maintain than it is to just update an app on Android iOS so this news is no surprise to me. Is there much point in buying. A dedicated sat nav anymore? It’s literaly cheaper in the long run to use an app ~~~ banana_giraffe The Tom Tom app no longer has updates. They've moved to a new free app that limits it's usage to a set number of miles a month, with a subscription fee if you want unlimited miles. ~~~ photojosh Didn't see this comment before posting much the same thing further up. I haven't used the TomTom app in years although I've had it since the Treo 650 and then iPhone. Fired it up again. Subscription fee is now $20/yr but they gave all owners of the old app 3 years free. That means I've got 11 years of updates for my original $80 purchase. Not too shabby. ------ rb808 I really like having a dedicated GPS box and keep my phone free. What would be great is dash mounted GPS that uses my main phone as a hot spot for traffic updates. Actually I can use an old phone for that now that I think of it. ------ DonHopkins Maps are big and expensive, and so is the bandwidth require to distribute them. So it's not a huge surprise that TomTom's weaseling out of updating maps on old devices. When I worked at TomTom around 2007-2009, they had just gone deep into debt buying Tele Atlas to acquire those maps for a hell of a lot more money than they originally expected to pay: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015) >The stunt that Garmin pulled of was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices. TomTom was paying Akamai a lot of money in bandwidth charges so customers could download subscriptions of bigger maps more often. So I developed and tested a prototype using BitTorrent DNA to distribute them, but Akamai ended up lowering their prices because they didn't want to lose all those fees to BitTorrent. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601083) >It turned out that BitTorrent would save TomTom about a million euros the first year, and more each year, since TomTom was distributing larger and larger maps, more frequently by subscription, and of course they hoped to get more customers over time. (See: [http://www.sadtrombone.com](http://www.sadtrombone.com) ...) >But then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Akamai unilaterally lowered the prices they were charging TomTom, saving us a lot of money immediately, presumably to prevent us from switching to BitTorrent (after I had made a bit of a scene at Akamai's GDC booth, in front Travis Kalanick and their sales people, about just having talked Bran Cohen and acquired a quote and beta testing agreement from BitTorrent, and insisted that Akamai tell me what their prices were and when we could start testing -- that may have motivated them to unilaterally lower their prices). >So in the end, TomTom middle management decided to can the BitTorrent project, in spite of the fact that it was the TomTom founder Pieter Geelen's idea in the first place, and he'd been micromanaging the entire project and user interface all along, to make sure it would not just save us money, but also not have a negative impact on usability or customer perception. ------ mwexler I love my TomTom. With a locked phone (Thanks, AT&T), I can't afford to abuse data when I travel. My TomTom works in both US and Europe with free map updates, and has gotten me through mountains, valleys, cities and towns. I also use CityMaps2Go and download various cities, but I will very much miss my TomTom when it stops selling to consumers and updating maps. (Or I will, at least until I get reasonable data costs internationally.) ------ LorenPechtel 100+ comments and nobody missed what's really going on: The old units don't have the resources for the new maps. I've got a Garmin and can see where they are coming from: A few updates ago my unit demanded that a SD card be installed before it would load an update because the internal memory wasn't enough. ------ m-p-3 Thank god for OSM volunteers. My Garmin GPS which is totally out of support can still use OSM data that has been converted to a compatible format from here. [https://www.openmapchest.org](https://www.openmapchest.org) ------ Feniks Lifetime subscription. Well I guess if you use a goldfish as your standard lol. I do feel a bit for TomTom. Bought a €120 nav set 3 years ago and the thing still works like a charm. Haven't spent a dime because of free updates and the road network here is already matured so nothing changes much. ------ jacquesm This sucks because TomToms voice navigation is hands down the winner of everything out there and their display is placed much better (on the windshield) than the in-car navigation systems. I like dedicated devices that do one thing and do it well. ~~~ philfrasty „...voice navigation is hands down the winner of everything...“ not sure if serious?! Bought my grandmother the most expensive TomTom model (GO 6200 for approx $400) last year, great big display, hands down the worst voice assistant I have ever used. „Landsberger Street, Munich“ was turned into „Luxembourg“ or similiar. Google Maps voice recognition seems far superior to me. ~~~ jacquesm I don't see what voice recognition has to do with it (maybe you meant voice synthesis), but my tomtom doesn't read out the street names at all, just works with distances and turns, so maybe that particular model (or maybe newer versions of the tomtom firmware) have that 'feature'? I'll consider this a warning to wait as long as I can with upgrading my oldie, it's still working well though. 7 years and counting... ------ jondiggsit TIL TomTom is still in business. ~~~ gramakri It's still useful in rental cars. Travellers may not have a working phone number to use mobile phone maps. ~~~ gruez offline maps? google and here both offer that ~~~ TeMPOraL Did Google start offering off-line maps _with navigation and pathfinding support_? ~~~ gervase This was first rolled out in 2015: [https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/navigate-and- search-...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/navigate-and-search-real- world- online.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/MKuf+$Official+Google+Blog$)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Enter 'petro': Venezuela to launch oil-backed cryptocurrency - iKenshu https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/enter-petro-venezuela-to-launch-oil-backed-cryptocurrency-idUSKBN1DX0SQ?il=0 ====== erikb The basic idea is so awesome. But to see that someone does this close before his regime ends, oh well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Efficient Hot-Water Piping (2013) [pdf] - rudedogg http://www.garykleinassociates.com/PDFs/15%20-%20Efficient%20Hot-Water%20Piping-JLC.pdf ====== DannyBee So, the article correctly says that efficient copper layouts will beat pex, but in residential, those layouts pretty much don't exist in practice. Plumbers are happy to just use whatever fittings, etc, to get pipe where it needs to go, and rarely, if ever, think about the losses caused as a result (i'm really not slagging on plumbers or the quality of work, i'm just saying the average plumber trying to get 4 homes done is trying to get 4 homes done, not sitting around calculating the most efficient layout for copper pipe when he discovers a stud in the way nobody planned for). In the past two brand new houses i've lived in, done to the latest plumbing code, the amount of hilariously horribly copper layout is amazing. (I'm sure anybody who does this for real has ridiculous horror stories). Meanwhile, most pex layouts i've seen perform significantly better in practice just because they use less fittings. So the attempt to be "as horrible as copper" fails. Also pex is a better insulator, so in the real world where pretty much no in- home copper is insulated, pex holds heat better. So, yeah, i agree with the sentiment that well thought out, well structured copper works really well, that doesn't happen to be residential reality, and hasn't been for a long time. (it's possibly a commercial reality though) ~~~ petre Pex doesn't insulate as well as PPr (thinner wall) and the fittings always introduce flow resistance and produce turbulent flow since they go into the pipe. Thread fittings for Pex area usually leaky. I would never use them except for serviceable manifolds with easy access, otherwise use press fit fittings. On the other hand PPr fittings go outside the pipe, just like those for copper and they're heat fused. PPr pipes are quite freeze-prone, the walls are thick (6 mm for a DN25 pipe) and glass fibre inserion PPr pipes don't have such a huge thermal expansion as pipes w/o insertion (only suitable for up to 60..68°C = hot water). Most plastic piping is prone to thermal expansion. PPr does not look pretty so it should be probably ran through walls and floors. Copper water pipes should always be insulated with at least 6 mm EPE sleeves or closed cell elastomeric foam sleeves (better). Even cold water pipes should be insulated at least in heated or high humidity spaces because of condensation that forms on the pipe. ~~~ aesh2Xa1 Well, the article explicitly states one should use "outie" style fittings for PEX. Check the fittings figure on the last page; letter (C). ~~~ japanuspus Exactly: Modern PEX fitting go on the outside. Where I live (Denmark), PEX is used almost exclusively for new residential installations, but I haven not seen an in-pipe PEX fitting since my parents build their house in the 80's. ------ tgb This is my favorite thing I've seen on Hacker News in weeks: immediately made me interested in something I had never thought much about before, gave me the information directly and usefully and got me started on a bunch of related questions. Speaking of which: I had always wondered why more plumbing isn't done with flexible hoses instead of this pipes. Hoses seemed like they'd be way easier to work with. Now my guess is that hoses generally have unnecessary curves no matter what and that this increases the pressure lost. Is that right? ~~~ kragen Most materials will not last long in water, especially hot water with the various chlorinated organic compounds that result from sterilizing impure water with chlorine. Copper and CPVC are really rather special! Gaviotas had to replace the pipes in all of their aluminum-piping rooftop hot-water heaters with expensive copper when it turned out aluminum could handle chlorine but not the municipal water at their customer sites. All over the US, polybutylene piping turned out to only last about ten or twenty years due to unforeseen issues with chloramine corrosion of the PB pipes and Delrin pipe fittings, but only where they're under stress. And that's why you can't buy polybutylene pipe anywhere in the US since 1995. And it turns out that an unexpected rupture of a water pipe can be very, very expensive indeed. Especially in a wood-framed structure with sheetrock. Especially if nobody's home. So builders are generally very conservative with water pipe materials. Nobody wants to install the next PB disaster. Building supply companies are even more so; the PB lawsuit cost Shell a billion dollars. Garden hoses are usually made from one of two materials: some kind of rubber (buna?) or PVC plasticized with phthalates. With hot water, neither of these will last even the 10 years that a lot of PB piping lasted, and the phthalates will leach out into the water and give it that garden-hose taste. I don't think the curviness of hoses is generally enough to cause a significant pressure loss. As noted in another comment, PEX is sort of flexible and hoselike, and is seeing a substantial amount of use for water piping nowadays. ~~~ rsync "As noted in another comment, PEX is sort of flexible and hoselike, and is seeing a substantial amount of use for water piping nowadays." Yes, PEX is the flexible tubing material you are thinking should exist. PEX and sharkbite fittings are like magic - you can plug together arbitrarily complex water circuits and layouts as simply as building with legos. I personally use copper piping for very long-lived installations and for simple, long runs. However, anything complex at the end of the line (irrigation, pump and well work, filter assemblies, etc.) transitions to PEX and shark bites. ~~~ JshWright I keep SharkBite ball valves on hand in every pipe diameter in my house. Twice now I've had some sort of minor plumbing "emergency" (leaking appliances) that would have required shutting the water off for a day or more until I could get it repaired. Having the SharkBites on hand meant I could just stick one in- line on that branch and leave the rest of the water on while I sorted out the issue. ~~~ kmeade I had never heard of SharkBite fittings. As a minimally-competent home handyman, I thank you for putting me on to them. Here's a link to an informative and sensible video on SharkBite... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E8X1VawLeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E8X1VawLeE) ------ ScottBurson Reminds me of this: [http://www.chilipepperapp.com/](http://www.chilipepperapp.com/) I was thinking of installing a couple of these a few years ago, but didn't and then forgot about them. It's a pump that gets installed near a faucet; you turn it on when you want hot water; it pulls water out of the hot pipe, sending it back into the cold pipe (where it circulates back to the water heater), until it senses that hot water has arrived, when it shuts off. As I say, I haven't tried it, but maybe I will — seems like an elegant solution, and works with existing plumbing. ~~~ Neil44 It sounds like a good idea although some water companies are not that happy with an end user putting water back into the supply. Technically the pipe under your sink is open all the way back to the reservoir or whatever so there’s potential for system contamination there. Systems are usually designed so that syphoning cannot happen if there’s a temporary supply problem also. This is why cisterns are fed noisily from the top rather than quietly from the bottom. ~~~ askvictor A cistern could be fed from the bottom as long as there is a length of pipe going up (to the highest level of water) then back down. Or using a valve/backflow preventer. ~~~ Doxin A length of pipe like that wouldn't prevent the supply sucking back water though. So that doesn't solve the whole contamination issue. ~~~ Neil44 Yes the pipe would need to rise from the cistern up to higher than the level of the resevoir, which would not always be practical. The resevoir would not then be able to fill the cistern over that loop :) ------ seiferteric These kind of things are fun to think about and tricky to solve. My thermostat in my hallway for example, if I set to 69, will turn off but it still feels cold. I used an IR thermometer to see that it is 69 right at the height of the thermostat, but is a gradient down to the floor where it is like 65. So there are thermal layers in the house. I started to put a small fan on the floor blowing up at the thermostat that will both mix the layers and blow the cold floor temp up at the thermostat. It will kick on and after a bit the whole house will be uniformly toasty :) I started to think why this kind of thing was not built in, but it would require air inlets and outlets at ground level and ceiling level and two thermometers, so it starts to sound too complicated and expensive. I see why people like in-floor heating now. ~~~ rblatz Ceiling fans have a switch that reverses the direction it spins. Specifically for that reason, one direction is for summer and the other is for winter. ~~~ triplesec This is interesting: I never knew that was the reason. Downwards for summer to fan you, I presume..? but upwards in winter why? Or am I backwards here? ------ sokoloff Tangentially related and complementary (though in a certain sense, opposite to this article), I am a big fan of the Evolve TSV shower valves. Turn the hot water on full while you're getting ready and the shower will run until the water turns warm and then will slow the water to a small trickle, minimizing the waste of hot water down the drain with no one in the shower. When you're ready, step in and pull the lever to restore (instantly hot) water flow. [http://thinkevolve.com/products/showerstart- tsv/](http://thinkevolve.com/products/showerstart-tsv/) ------ dv_dt I solved this problem for a small house w/ oversized hot water pipes by installing an endpoint electric tankless heater. It had a sensor for incoming temperature so it would apply electric heat until the hot water from the tank caught up. The initial phase wasn't as hot as the direct feed, but it made it comfortably warm (vs the very cold winter water.). Installing that was much cheaper than adding a return circulation loop - but I wish I had thought of the option dropping the pipe diameter now. Though it might have still been cheaper to install the point heater. ~~~ abraae We're on rain water so I always cringe when running perfectly good water down the drain while waiting for it to heat up. It would be great if there was some endpoint heater like you describe, that ran from e.g. ultracapacitors that could be trickle charged from solar. And yeah, having just built our house, I wish I had read this article earlier and learned about using minimally sized piping! Obvious in hindsight. ~~~ dv_dt For your situation, I would think a mini electric hot water tank at the endpoint could work as long as you have excess electric, you can dump it there as heat. It's much cheaper storing as heat instead of in battery or ultracap. You'd get losses from leakage, but if it's well insulated it could be worth at least checking out the math. Ive seen some claims that solar water heating/circulation systems are now more expensive over their lifetime than collecting the solar as electric and heating water, but I've never gone through and sanity checked that calc. ~~~ abraae Sounds good but then when that small tank ran out of hot water, I guess there would be a period of cold coming through until the main tank backed it up? Unless the small tank was big enough for most conceivable uses - in which case, e.g. in the bathroom, it would become a large tank. A continuous flow unit at least can do what you said in your earlier post, e.g. instantaneously heat up the cold until it starts coming through hot. That's why I was thinking the supercaps, they might provide just enough juice for those 45 seconds or whatever, and also hopefully be reliable enough for decades of use, like you would expect from a hot water appliance. ------ nkurz I don't understand his chart on Page 77 showing the amount of water wasted for the different layouts. He has the Zoned at 12 gallons, and the Manifold at 23 gallons. The note below says that the "estimate is based on 20 cold starts per day". I'm guessing this means total uses, with some fixtures used more than once (eg, kitchen sink 3 times and lavatories once)? And "cold start" means that it's assumed that the time between uses is such that one always needs to wait for hot water to come all the way from the tank? The Manifold system is a "home run" with 1/2" to all fixtures except the tub, and the Zoned system is a mix of 3/4" mains and and 1/2" branches. Since the direct run should never be longer than the branched run (right?) how can the system composed of all small pipe waste more water than the system with a mix of small and large pipe? In a cold start measurement, I'd think the Manifold would have to come out ahead for every fixture except the tub, which would be a tie. And thus I'd think that any combination of fixtures would have to come out better, rather than worse. (I'm not saying this makes the Manifold approach better overall, just that something seems off about this numbers) ~~~ nippoo You're assuming that the water cools instantly and you're always wasting the run from the boiler to the fixtures. This isn't the case: the big advantage of the zoned approach is that the trunk will remain warm if you're using multiple fixtures branched off the same trunk. So if you have a shower while your washer is in use, you only waste that little branch of water, rather than the whole trunk (or the home run in the manifold approach). Or if you wash your hands and have a shower in the same bathroom within half an hour (for example). With the manifold approach, you lose the efficiency savings when you use the sink / washer / shower within half an hour of each other. ~~~ nkurz _You 're assuming that the water cools instantly and you're always wasting the run from the boiler to the fixtures._ No, I'm just assuming that the definition of a "cold start" is that the water is allowed to cool before the next measurement is taken. The alternative (which I agree is common) is a "hot start". The author defines these terms on the box on the bottom left of Page 76 (which I don't seem to be able to copy and paste). Since the chart explicitly says "cold starts", my question/complaint is that as labelled, I can't see how the chart can be correct. I agree that measuring a blend of hot and cold starts is probably a better metric to judge the systems by. ------ edmundhuber Do "smart" tap systems exist? Here's what I'm imagining: * instead of a tap being a valve that opens or closes, relieving or building pressure, a tap is a switch that signals.. * to the "smart manifold" that it should start pumping water (hot or cold) to that output. * if the tap is shut off, the water is sucked back out of that piping and recycled. So then you would have instant hot or cold water, instead of any mixing at all. Here are some reasons why this is a dumb idea: * can't handle branching, * pipe networks have "welling points" where water will simply remain by gravity, and no pumping will get it out. Has anyone tried something similar? ~~~ jakewins Pumps are not good at stopping and starting. They like to start, run for at least a few minutes, and then stop. Each stop/start cycle adds wear to the pump, as the components inside it are at peak strain and friction when they speed up and slow down. Forcing a pump cycle each time someone opens a faucet would cause a lot of maintenance. This is why wells have pressure tanks, to allow the well pump to run longer cycles, building up pressure to be released over time in the tank. There's a second issue in that pipes don't like to be empty: exposing hot and humid surfaces to free air is a bad combination. ~~~ DannyBee The stop/start issue is true, but this is also an easily solvable problem. Variable speed dc pumps are a complete commodity at this point. You see them on geothermal systems, etc. It's just the recirculation folks are lazy AF.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What do you feel about Medium, where almost every story now is premium? - mrwnmonm ====== pwg If they don't want me to read them, then I simply won't read the stories. ------ thecrumb Who?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: My iOS5 app using CoreImage and Twitter integration - progolferyo http://www.getspookify.com ====== andreasklinger Add a function that shows ghosts are shaded figures/faces in dark spots of group pictures. And explain that there is the strongest XYZenergy the phone cpuld detect. Offer an option to facebook tag the people in the group picture - go viral ------ progolferyo Ughh, the link is broken at the moment, stupid EC2 Elastic IP screwed up my instance and therefore my DNS. Here's a link to the app, <http://bit.ly/spookify> in the meantime... ------ SurfScore Looks like a well done app, not very original, but that doesn't mean much. If you can position it right and gain some traction, you should be able to hit the top of the charts by halloween ------ chriseidhof Nice! When I played around with CI I noticed that a _lot_ of filters were still missing, almost all the filters I needed... how are your findings in this regard? ------ czhiddy What was your experience with CoreImage like? Is the accelerated rendering noticeably faster than compositing with CG? ~~~ progolferyo So the rendering is definitely faster but I think the biggest advantage to non-computer graphics engineers is in the available API's over the actual improvement in rendering time, at least with what I ended up doing with it. ------ djangle Nice. Another similar app is <http://www.demoncam.com/> ------ andrewtbham Besides putting it on hacker news, how do you plan to promote your app? ~~~ progolferyo Honestly, it was just a fun project that let me experiment with the new CoreImage API's, but also make something fun, polished and worth a buck. With the new camera in the iPhone4S and everyone upgrading to iOS5, the photo apps are going to explode. ------ mobirati Spookify is like a halloween version of Instagram :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
You won't need a driver's license by 2040 - ukdm http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/18/tech/innovation/ieee-2040-cars/index.html?npt=NP1 ====== enraged_camel I get the statistics, but I think CNN is drawing the wrong conclusion. Even if all cars are automated by 2040, they will almost certainly be required to have a manual override option, which will almost certainly require a driver's license to operate.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
CAP: Don't settle for eventual consistency - fanf2 https://yokota.blog/2017/02/17/dont-settle-for-eventual-consistency/ ====== rdtsc > CP systems can be made to be highly available in practice. Yes don't, if you happen to have Google's level infrastructure. Complete with private fiber connection down to GPS synchronized clocks in your data centers. Otherwise sometimes you don't have a choice. Now I am not being sarcastic as I understand Google offers Spanner as an API in GCP so you could technically do that by paying for it. [https://cloud.google.com/spanner/](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/) Also in general it is important to keep in mind that keeping consistency in a large distributed system is fighting against the laws of physics. There is nothing wrong with fighting them, and it sure is fun to do but it takes effort and money. Often is possible you can architect your solution to work with eventually consistency. There are CRDTs and other things that can help there. Eventually consistent system have also been around for a while so it is not a totally new and uncharted territory. The bottom line is consider the underlying assumptions. What is true for Google maybe not be and probably isn't true for your use case. ~~~ canes123456 It not clear at to me what you are actually advocating for. The article is pretty clear that most people should choose a CP database over an AP database. This is true regardless of your scale unless you don't care about consistency at all. A start up does not need to make a CP system highly available but they will likely need consistency. They can probably make eventually consistency work for them but it does take effort and money. I don't see many cases were AP is the right choice. Again CRDT are good but you need to design carefully to make sure you system can work with eventually consistency. Once you have done that you are only gaining availability during partitions which does not increase your up time much. I would recommend a standalone database, a stock CP database, or renting spanner over an AP if time and money is a concern. ------ kefka Nope. Eventual Consistency seems to be the best policy. The constant "C" isn't changing (or if it is, it's not much). that means there's a definite amount of time for a DB to be consistent to cover transit around the world. When the 3 DB machines are in the same rack, sure, we can approach 11.8"/nanosecond latencies, but the latencies are still there. The larger and more global (and soon, interstellar), the more these C related lags become. And it is glaringly obvious to me, that "eventual consistency" is the big solution here. The only case where it doesn't seem to be good, is transactional stuff like banking and investments. In those cases, seem to require CP and hardware like atomic clocks to verify every copy of the DB is on the same page.. Or perhaps an internal blockchain would be more appropriate, since it enforces consensus. But I digress on that one. ~~~ freneticfox To go a little further, I suspect with CP cases like banks the real underlying problem is more fundamental. You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location. At least, not efficiently or quickly. In other words, eventual consistency in the face of asynchronous remote actors never makes sense when your requirements dictate hard, consistent transactional ordering. You have to think of it as "the transactions happen in the order they arrive at the account's virtual location in New York". To think of them as globally-distributed in nature is always going to cause logical problems at some level. If your database was eventually-consistent, you'd have to build in some sort of after-the-fact safety checks that have the ability to abort the outer transaction, at which point you've wasted a lot of effort patching over the wrong model. So either you have a need for strong consistency guarantees (order really matters), in which case you have to pin the transactions' locality down (where do they meet up at for their efficient strict ordering?) and CP is your model, or you don't (simpler things like social network updates) and you're better off with AP and eventual consistency to scale things out easier and make it faster for everyone, and really who cares if once in a great long while a user-visible race happens and some people see a couple of posts in a different order than someone else does for a few minutes until things snap back into sync? ~~~ pjc50 > You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of > transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back > out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location You've just made me realise that the universe itself is only eventually consistent - that's what all those weird quantum observer / wavefunction collapse events are. ~~~ kefka Yep, that's what I was trying to get at, but failed in my explanation. Everything's eventually consistent on an ever-present sphere around the incident expanding at the speed of light. No faster. Even if the sun were to blink out of existence, we'd have 8 minutes that we wouldn't know. Gravity would still be there, holding Earth in place. The light would still warm us. Then 500 seconds later, darkness. We'd be flung out on a tangential course. ~~~ jacobparker This isn't quite right. Even with SR and the speed of light its possible to build consistent systems and achieve consensus. Not-eventually-consistent doesn't mean instantaneous. The SoL just sets a lower bound on the speed of consensus. It's important to not overstate the importance of that bound, though. ~~~ kefka Sure. CA fulfills that requirement. Of course, you throw away any semblance of partition tolerance. Of course, a single machine guarantees there can be no partitioning, and really easy to obtain consensus. It might not be terribly fault-tolerant, however. ~~~ jacobparker CA is a not really a valid/possible thing in the context of CAP. The original phrasing of the theorem was poor and the "choose 2" myth persists. You can choose to (or accidentally) give up C or A but you don't get to choose to not have partitions. Not being partition tolerant doesn't really make sense (you're just broken?) if partitions are going to happen. A better phrasing of CAP is "in a network with partitions a distributed system cannot be both consistent and available." (note: this doesn't guarantee that you are one of C or A, you just can't be C _and_ A.) You can see that definition used in formal treatments, e.g. Theorem 1 in [https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/GL- cap.p...](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/GL-cap.pdf) (Briefly, note that the original article is critiquing that definition of availability in practice which is legitimate but not relevant to this sub- thread.) What I'm saying is that EC is most definitely NOT a requirement of physics/the speed of light (what your original post claimed.) The speed of light only sets a (theoretical) limits on how fast you can implement a consistent system. The original Paxos paper ("The part-time parliament") uses an analogy of a quorum of parliamentarians occasionally getting together in the the same building and agreeing on something. Of course it being the same building is arbitrary and doesn't actually matter, but it's easier to intuit that the speed of light isn't an insurmountable road-block at that scale. ~~~ kefka My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Who actually runs a single DB server, with no replication, no slaves, no nothing other than the primary? CA is the correct way to understand a single un-replicated DB instance. And it's really really wrong :) ------ gregmac It seems like this has the same opinion as CockroachDB said a couple days ago in "The Limits of the CAP Theorem"[1]. Do both of these really boil down to misunderstanding the "A" in CAP? Until the first time I actually used an AP system, I thought "A" was talking in the sense of "five-9's highly available". I'm far from an expert on this, so please correct me if I get this wrong, but here's my take-away from these two articles: Since CP systems can be made "highly available" (in the five-9's sense of the term), I think what they are both saying is the only _real_ benefit of AP is low latency. CP still depends on some coordination, and despite tricks with locks and consensus algorithms, it's often still limited (even for reads) by the highest latency between nodes. AP, on the other hand, can respond to both read and writes much faster because it doesn't need to care about the consistency -- the trade-off is the application must handle eventual consistency. AP can also handle certain types of network partitions that "highly-available" CP systems can't (when DB nodes can't all talk to each other, but are still able to talk to client(s)) but in practice that type of failure almost never happens (at least not when your DBs all live in datacenters), so it's not a good reason to choose AP over CP. Also, not all CP systems _can_ be made "highly available" (in the sense of five-9's), so it's not always an apples-to-apples comparison, and that I think causes a lot of confusion. (Again: Not an expert. Please correct me if I got anything wrong here.) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14646063) ~~~ jeffffff Every part of the cap theorem is commonly misunderstood. Availability is probably the most commonly misunderstood aspect as is outlined in this article. People commonly conflate consistency with durability when really CAP says nothing about durability because CAP is based on a model where the only type of failure is a network partition. And of course there are the people who claim network partitions don't happen in their network so they can choose CA. CAP is also not stated with a sharded database in mind. Availability is stated as follows: "For a distributed system to be continuously available, every request received by a non-failing node in the system must result in a response" This means that if you have 100 machines and you store each row on 3 of those, if the 3 machines storing a row are partitioned from the client then the client can read and write the row on any machine. That machine must respond with something like "the row doesn't exist" or "the row is empty" if queried about the contents. This quickly devolves into an unusable system if you follow this train of thought to its conclusion. No practical sharded database is truly AP under this definition and it only makes sense to talk about CAP in the context of a single shard of a sharded database (which can be AP). It is actually quite easy to have consistency without sacrificing latency: Don't replicate. What you are sacrificing in this scenario isn't consistency, it's durability, which is totally ignored by CAP. Where the latency is really introduced is in trying to achieve durability. A durable AP system will end up with close to the same write latency as an equivalently durable CP system, but no one bothers to build AP systems with the same level of durability as a CP system. It is possible to build a durable CP system where reads are just as fast as in any AP system as long as there are no partitions at the time of the read. The trick is to use read leases so that reads only have to touch one machine. The CAP theorem is nowhere near as important as many people think it is with regards to performance and uptime of real world systems. It is a theoretical result based on a very simplified model. The only thing AP buys you is handling certain types of network partitions that almost never happen as you said. They have better uptime when you can talk to some machines but less than a quorum. This is not common. The real reason AP systems are common is because consistency+durability is really really really hard. ~~~ canes123456 If you are not replicating, than it not a distributed system and cap doesn't apply. Sharding just gives you two centralized databases. Talking about durability is just adding more confusion IMO. ------ justinsaccount Why does this read to me as an advertisement for cloud spanner? ~~~ idibidiart or Spanner-like guarantees which I heard might be possible with CockroachDB. I'm not really sure how the two compare, and whether or not there is anything out there with similar strong consistency guarantees. ~~~ tyingq There's a pretty good blog post from CockroachDB that explains the tradeoffs for not having the same level of time synchronization as spanner. [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic- clo...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/) CockroachDB is, though, only in it's first "real" 1.0 release. You see the sort of bugs you would expect to see in their repo. That is, basically, it's not really suitable for anything important yet. They do seem to be making a lot of progress though. ~~~ idibidiart Right. There is no GPS sync'd atomic clock in Cockroach so I imagine lock requests for a distributed object must use some consensus protocol, and that's overhead. Am I off by a lot? ~~~ irfansharif We use Raft underneath the hood to maintain consistency across the replicas. re: 'There is no GPS sync'd atomic clock in Cockroach', Cockroach actually has a command line flag (--linearizable) which makes it behave like Spanner: wait for the max clock offset before returning a successful commit[1]. This isn’t practical if you’re using NTP synchronization, but if you have atomic clocks at your disposal.. [1]: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic- clo...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clocks/) ------ mnarayan01 I think the point of this post is: You can use [https://cloud.google.com/spanner/](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/) to work with a CP model (typically much less of a headache than AP), while sacrificing so little availability that it's essentially CAP. The big concern I'd have (assuming using a Google-hosted database was practical) is the SLA. Unless I'm misreading [https://cloud.google.com/spanner/sla](https://cloud.google.com/spanner/sla), it seems like the SLA is...not very strong. Given how they discuss availability elsewhere, it seems like they're totally unwilling to put their money anywhere close to where their mouth is. That said, it does seem like going with Spanner to have the ease (and power) of consistency while also having reliability and scalability would be something to consider in a whole lot of situations. (Though I'd be reluctant to jump on it _this_ early.) ------ eternalban (Unmediated) Human personal perception has always been CP. But then we humans are akin to mobile agents that visit co-local (thus non-partitionable) data spaces and perceive a coherent 'classical' (as in Physics) world that is equally available. But AP is (by necessity) baked into the story of collective human perception. Collectively, we are more akin to static clusters that communicate information _about_ data spaces. ("Your full deposite will be available to you the following business day. Your book balance is x. Your available balance is y < x." Dealing with AP is a day to day common experience as old as organized hills.) I think the root of the surprising fact that programmers find it difficult to reason about AP data spaces (given the _fact_ that that is how we humans achieve 'civilization' and 'culture') is due to the personal perspective nature of iterative programming. We see this again when we consider the quite related issue of correct understanding of memory models. ------ urethrafranklin Transactions are an answer for atomicity, not consistency. It's possible to have transactions and not be consistent. Hopefully this is just the mistake of a non-technical product manager and not the engineering team that works on Cloud Spanner. ------ StreamBright Sounds nice in theory, I would like to see few years of history of production systems using Spanner before we have enough evidence that nothing goes wrong with this approach. ~~~ vgt While Spanner has only been available to be used outside of Google very recently (GA in May), it's been in production at Google across hundreds of products, including AdWords, since 2012.. with global consistency to boot... (work at G) ~~~ anarazel Isn't that global consistency in effect frequently weakened because applications have to batch writes to get throughput? It's great to be able to have consistency, but in many other cases the source of inconsistency will largely just moved to outside of the data management system. ------ marknadal Sigh, quoting from an earlier comment I made here: ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648745)) It is true that if you assume your client app is not important that a CP system is the right choice. And I would also say this /was/ true up till about 2004 when Gmail was released. But it definitely stopped being true in 2007 when the iPhone was released and you started having installed apps. Since then, users have slowly grown to expect both mobile apps and SPAs to work regardless of whether the servers work, regardless of load balances, regardless of connectivity. If you look at the market trends, things are increasingly going in this direction. From self-driving cars, to IoT devices, to drone delivery, to even traditionally server-dependent productivity tools like gDocs and others - people need to get work done even if the internet to your server doesn't exist. Will banking applications still need mostly server-dependent behavior? Yes. Is CP still important? Yes. But it is biased to say that CP systems are better. Choose the right tool for the right job. CP systems are definitely the right choice for a strongly consistent database, but they aren't the right choice for everything. My database is an AP system, but it should not be used for many apps out there. Neither of these are "better", they are just tradeoffs you have to decide upon. ~~~ aidenn0 If your client has to work when the database isn't available anyways, then isn't that an even stronger argument for a CP database? ~~~ naasking To be CP, your client and the server database have to both view the same consistent data, so your client can't be available if the database isn't available. If your client is available even in this case, then you have some kind of eventual consistency. ~~~ aidenn0 The article was specifically comparing database software, not entire systems; if your client is available when the DB is unavailable, then you can have an AP system regardless of the design of the database. ~~~ ProblemFactory I think the argument is that people expect mobile and client-side web apps to continue working offline, and eventually sync and merge changes across clients. So you need a good solution for resolving inconsistent updates made by two offline clients. The same solution could be used for resolving inconsistent updates made on two database servers. ~~~ naasking > So you need a good solution for resolving inconsistent updates made by two > offline clients. The same solution could be used for resolving inconsistent > updates made on two database servers. Exactly what I was trying to get at, thanks. The line between client state, server state and db state is a thin illusion. As REST makes explicit, every client operates on a _representation_ of some server resources, which means CAP can come into play in even the most trivial online apps.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Vancouver's 'freak show' property market - huhtenberg http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36369108 ====== danielrpa This time is different!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Calacanis vs DHH on This Week in Startups - pchristensen http://thisweekinstartups.com/2010/03/fridays-guest-david-heinemeier-hansson-creator-ruby-on-rails/ ====== pchristensen Most of the discussion is over now, but the video will be reposted to this url by Monday. It's the first time I've ever seen someone do a good job attacking dhh/37signals. It's not belligerent, but very probing. Makes me wish I could have seen Calacanis when he was a tech journalist. ~~~ jasonmcalacanis I think I would have become one of the top 10 tech journalists ever if I had not been cursed with being a CEO/founder. Sometimes I wish I was still a journalist. ~~~ jackowayed And you wonder why people hate you. "I could have been one of the best ever if I weren't cursed with having to make millions of dollars." It sounds so cocky. I actually don't hate you (When I first heard of you, I asked a friend of mine "Is this guy a dick, totally awesome, or both?" and I still think "both" is a pretty good way to describe you, so you could say I'm split.), but I hope you see why people do. ~~~ petercooper _but I hope you see why people do._ And like Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Branson, or whoever, I hope he doesn't _care_ if random people on the Internet think he's arrogant or is a "dick." You don't get to even Jason's level by dwelling on this (or, at least, showing it in public). That aside, if Jason had a ton of time to dump into being a "top tech journalist", would he be up against _really_ serious competition? Cringely? Mossberg? Scoble? Arrington? All awesome in their own ways but the gamut of skill in that game is pretty thin. ~~~ _delirium He seems to care enough to post in nearly every HN thread that mentions him, often pretty defensively, unlike those other people you mentioned... ~~~ petercooper Good point. I guess he's not far enough up the totem pole yet to stop hanging out with us serfs ;-) Actually, I wish he _would_ try and become a top 10 tech journalist. His writing is good and certainly more entertaining than the constant Mahalo SEO- runaround forced down our throats here at HN.. ~~~ jasonmcalacanis I like to talk with folks.... it's the journalist in me. I don't consider you guys/gals serfs--far from it. I consider you guys the real people who actually do sh#$%t. Most of the folks I get to hang out with are CEOs and VCs who talk about the sh2@#$t their people do. I'm all about the doing.... ... thus the reason I'm here with the doers. I'm from the bottom, so I still feel it for the bottom. ~~~ petercooper _I'm from the bottom, so I still feel it for the bottom._ Don't be fooled by the blogs that I rocked; I'm still, I'm still Jason from the block Used to have a little, AOL gave me a lot Mahalo isn't spam and I still know where I came from. ------ petercooper 404 error and I can't find the content on the site. Why was it pulled? ~~~ rnicholson [http://thisweekinstartups.com/2010/03/twist-46-with-david- he...](http://thisweekinstartups.com/2010/03/twist-46-with-david-heinemeier- hansson/) ~~~ petercooper Cool, but it doesn't play. The video gets a 403 error and the audio a 404 (on the underlying media files). ------ benologist Eh .... 30 seconds in I'm listening to some guy crap on about how awesome Apple are _because_ they only put one USB port in some laptop. Back to work for me. ~~~ pchristensen The interview section from about 45 min to 90 min in was really good, worth coming back to when the full version is posted. ~~~ jasonmcalacanis Thanks! DHH was an amazing guest with great perspective and obviously he has the talent to back up his positions. Really enjoyed having him as a guest.... the show will be up at www.thisweekin.com in two hours or so. best j ------ jrockway "Couldn't care less" versus "don't care very much" on "wow, i really don't care". The blogosphere is like an organism that can eat itself to survive and grow. ------ simon_kun The interesting bit is where David gets sucked into Calcanis' "more money is best" angle (and in some respects, JC's brain really lucked out on picking up on this weakness). From what I can tell, DHH is much more focussed on Quality of Life than simple monetary gain which was only briefly touched on (if at all). Good discussion. ------ robertgaal I hope somebody (Jason?) starts doing shorter 10m summary videos of this. ~~~ pchristensen <http://thisweekintwist.com/> ------ benofsky Does anyone have a link to the video? ~~~ ryanhuff Its usually posted on itunes a day or so after. ------ dnsworks I was just thinking, it's been about 4 or 5 days since the last rash of "Calacanis is an evil SEO monster bird mecha godzilla thing" blog postings. ~~~ pchristensen This didn't have anything to do with that. This was one of the most even yet intense debates I've seen in a while. Most of the time it's either one dominant person that no one is standing up to, or everybody is buddy buddy and I get suspicious about the lack of disagreement. The was healthy debate. ~~~ jasonmcalacanis I loved it. David is a smart, passionate guy... you don't see that too often in our business. he reminded me of a young Mark Cuban	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How does your (startup) office look like? - fara Luckilly we are 3 in our startup and the 4th partner is about to join us full-time. In our country rent contracts are for at least 2 years so we are looking for offices which are suitable for 8-12 people. So I was wondering how do your offices look like (size, space, layouts, desks). If you have some pictures to share they would be more than an inspiration to us. Of course ideas are more than welcome also. ====== iamclovin We (<http://gameplanapp.com>) work from a spare room in @andycroll's apartment. It's very functional, we do pair programming so it's great for focus, and we launched our MVP in 3 months so I guess it's been going great so far. P.S. Shameless plug - you can read more about us at NakedStartup <http://nakedstartup.com> ~~~ krisneuharth Very cool app. I just spent all last week writing something just like this in Django for a game my friends made up. (I'm not a competitor, it was just for fun). We have organized tournaments a few times a year and are looking to grow our sport in the next year. I like your site since it scratches an itch I had so here is some totally unsolicited feedback: 1) I would suggest you allow people to add custom sports, 2) change fixtures to "Events" or "Matches," being from the US I had no idea what a "fixture" is, 3) please create a way to delete my account, 4) please create a way to delete my organization since now my own sports site is going to be competing with this custom public site once it gets crawled, 5) create a way to make the "public" site hidden until it is ready, or even has teams, data to display, and 6) create a way to do automatic team picking from a pool of players like a "draft". Great start, if you have any additional questions, hit me up at the email in my profile. Just out of curiosity, do you plan on on having an ad supported freemium model or will this be solely subscription based? ------ mindcrime My startup office looks exactly like my living room for some strange reason. Part of it also looks exactly like the spare bedroom in my apartment. And the "break room" looks just like my kitchen. Weird, huh? All joking aside, my spare bedroom doubles as my office/lab/library, but I do most of my work in the living room. Right now there's a gaming chair sitting in the middle of the floor, in front of the TV, and there are stacks of books off the the left, another stack of books on my right, a big pile of magazines behind that stack of books, and behind me is the dinner table, which is doubling as a repository for more books, magazines. notebooks, scraps of paper, etc. On the walls around me are a total five big whiteboards, and in the corner is one of those cheap metal & fiberboard tables, with a pile of PC hardware (some in use, some waiting to be used, and some waiting to be thrown out) on it. In the other corner is a big pile of old Sun boxes, most of which I should probably just pitch in the bin, since I'm probably never going to use them at this point. Cloud Computing, ya know? Slicehost / Linode / EC2 have kinda removed my need to keep a lot of physical hardware around. Oh, and there are two mountain bikes and a BMX bike in another corner of the room, taking up space. That's my world these days.... computers, books, magazines and bicycles. And notebooks, lots of notebooks... I still like to brainstorm on paper a lot of times. One of those artist style notebooks (blank/unlined paper), a drafting pencil and a box of colored pencils and I'm set. ------ kineticac This is where Fanvibe first started, in my living room: <http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/Y2ceC3> Check out the photos! our first purchase was a foosball table ;) We also had one of our interns working with us in the "office" We since moved off to Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco, which became a bit too distracting to code in everyday, so I usually just work from a small home office that has three walls of windows =) ------ JoeAltmaier Former mortgage company office in down-on-luck building with 50% occupancy. Bargained landlord down to $700/mo. Already network-wired because of all those mortgage officer desks. Manager's office turned into conf room, nice perk. Previous occupants split in the middle of the night, leaving mortgage records stuffed in filing cabinets(possible scammers?) and furniture! All ours for free. Not the records; those we shredded. ------ quizbiz Summer: The dining room table in a condo provided by my summer job boss. Otherwise, dorm room.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Homan Square revealed: how Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people - prawn http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands ====== coreyp_1 If it can happen in Chicago, on such a large scale, as recently as 4 months ago, then are we really safe at all?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly - Leynos https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6p9t83/psa_you_can_try_out_stylo_in_firefox_nightly_now/ ====== NiLSPACE There is also a discussion on the Rust reddit about this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_tr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_try_out_stylo_in_firefox_nightly_now/) ------ H4CK3RM4N I really like this idea of switching over to servo bit by bit. It makes me happy that there might be a real WebKit alternative again. ~~~ chairmanwow I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers? ~~~ tolien > Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? It is, Firefox can do CSS and styles just now. Stylo is a replacement for that. > To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old > system, Servo. What am I missing here? Servo isn’t the old system. Servo is a research project to build a layout engine (analogous to Gecko which Firefox currently uses) in Rust, of which Stylo is a part. > Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already > supported by most major browsers? It sounds like you’re confused about what WebKit is. WebKit and its forks are _used_ by a number of browsers (Chrome, Safari etc.). EdgeHTML, Gecko and WebKit are, broadly speaking, competitors which attempt to implement certain standards and frequently disagree about how to do so. It’s important that there be alternatives to WebKit with significant market share because otherwise how WebKit implements a feature becomes the de facto reference implementation. ~~~ chairmanwow Thanks to you (and all the other commenters) for the detailed answers! I learned a lot! ------ wodenokoto Pretty cool that changing layout engine doesn't require a restart! ~~~ NiLSPACE It's not the entire layout engine that changes. They only switch to the CSS Style system of Servo: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_tr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_try_out_stylo_in_firefox_nightly_now/dknyjpe/) It's still pretty cool though :) ------ diegoperini The proposed flag in about:config exists in Firefox Developer Edition too. I tried to enable it, then loaded some pages. There seems to be no distinction in visuals. Did it work seamlessly or is it currently NOP? ~~~ NiLSPACE The flag exists in Firefox Developer Edition but it doesn't do anything yet. You have to be on Nightly for it to have an actual effect: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_tr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6p9s24/psa_you_can_try_out_stylo_in_firefox_nightly_now/dko3ko1/) ------ k__ Very cool. What parts of Servo are already in Firefox? What is missing? Is there a list of what will get into Firefox over time? ~~~ NiLSPACE There is a wiki page about Project Quantum: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) Currently Quantum CSS (Stylo) and Quantum Render (Webrender) are both in Firefox Nightly, but they are unstable and can cause really bad performance, especially Quantum Render. They won't be done until at least Firefox 57 and some most likely later. Quantum Compositor is in Release already I believe. It's the out of process compositor for Firefox. Changes from Quantum Flow are continuing to be implemented into Nightly and later on Beta. I haven't ready much about the progress around Quantum DOM, and I have no idea for which release it is targeted. ~~~ k__ Do I get this right. Servo is the experimental browser (engine?)? Quantum is the project that ports parts of Servo to Firefox over time? ~~~ sp332 Right. Servo is an engine that will be embeddable into apps that need to render HTML, not just browsers. ~~~ k__ Ah, so like the omni-present webkit view? ~~~ sp332 Yeah, exactly. It doesn't include a JS engine so for now it uses SpiderMonkey, but eventually you should be able to plug others in. ------ the8472 You can also try webrender, but it still has more issues than stylo in my experience. It gobbles up a lot of gfx memory for starters, which can actually slow things down if you don't have enough. But that's a known issue. gfx.webrender.enabled = true (restart required) ~~~ hansjorg According to the Reddit thread, enabling this will run both webrender and the regular renderer for now, so it will be both slower and more memory intensive. ------ blauditore I cannot find the flag in about:config - my version is "56.0a1 (2017-07-23) (64-bit)", so it should be in there, no? ~~~ ronjouch I have the flag in my about:config with build `56.0a1 (2017-07-25) (64-bit)` under Linux. You're SO two days ago! Update your Nightly :) ~~~ blauditore Hmm, I got it through `ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa` on Ubuntu, so this is generally a couple days behind? Did you download it manually? ~~~ eridius Looks like that disables Servo at build time. Someone on Reddit had the same problem - [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6p9t83/psa_you_can...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6p9t83/psa_you_can_try_out_stylo_in_firefox_nightly_now/dknv93q/?context=4) ~~~ blauditore Indeed, same issue. Thanks for the pointer. ------ Jayakumark When will this be incorporated in Firefox Mainstream release ? ~~~ steveklabnik The target, IIRC, is 57. ~~~ Jayakumark Cool, and when will servo go mainstream ? ------ rajnathani Does anyone have any links to benchmarks?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich - jseliger https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/the-poor-are-better-off-when-we-build-more-housing-for-the-rich/ ====== mc32 My hope would be the supervisors for The Mission district as well as Chinatown in SF would read this and take notice. But... given their politics, even if they came to understand it, I don't think they'd come around on this, to the detriment of those they purport to represent. The politics in SF are weird. Many politicians do superficially irrational things --they look good on the surface, but in effect they are detrimental. On the bright side, the mayors themselves have been rational about attracting business and bringing in development. If you listen to KQED and their local reporters, it's like they'd like to have SF frozen in time in 1992. As if they'd rather it go down the way of Detroit rather than it become an economic center on the Pacific with the effects they bring ("gentrification" population moves, etc.) They want to eat their cake and have it too. And I understand it. It's very attractive. Let's have a great economy BUT let's have it so all other things stay the same, no disruption, no changes to neighborhoods, etc. Not even China can pull that off. Especially when SF proper is all but 49sq mi. But if we will it that way hard enough... ~~~ rmason I do not think that San Francisco can in any way be compared to the decline of Detroit. Poor civic planning, racism and the loss of jobs to non-union Southern plants all paid a part in Detroit's population dropping by two thirds over a fifty year span. I read a great book over Christmas, Once in a great city by David Maraniss, which covered Detroit at its peak from 1962-1964. Wayne State actually pretty accurately predicted the city's future then but the report was ignored by those in a position to stem its decline. ~~~ mc32 You're right, it's not the same. Detroit is a remarkable exception. But, SF in the late 80's early 90's was not a place you might think would grow. People were leaving the city for other bay area cities. Labor intensive industries were leaving [bedding for one] SOMA, Tenderloin, Market were severely depressed areas. And companies can go --just like they left Detroit; just like they left SF in the late 80s early 90s. ------ timr Funny thing about this theory: the luxury housing market in San Francisco is in decline, and yet, it's still a seller's market for middle- and down-market properties. [1][2] This is not surprising to anyone who follows real estate. There's no such thing as "a market for housing" \-- there are several markets, each moving more-or-less independently, based on the net worth of the participants involved. A drop in the prices of units in the Millenium Tower doesn't have much of an impact on the rent of a pre-war hovel in the Mission. The reason that the author doesn't understand this is because there's a latent correlation at play: the communities with the most high-end construction _tend to have the most construction overall_. But in a city like SF, where _all_ of the new construction would be high-end (if so allowed), all bets are off. Observing that properties become cheaper as they age is also silly. There are _some_ properties that become cheaper as they age, but there aren't many of them, say, in Pac Heights. [1] [http://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/08/san-franciscos-luxury- condo...](http://wolfstreet.com/2015/11/08/san-franciscos-luxury-condo-bubble- turns-into-condo-glut/) [2] [http://sfist.com/2015/11/09/at_high_end_sfs_housing_market_f...](http://sfist.com/2015/11/09/at_high_end_sfs_housing_market_fina.php) ------ zach This is specifically related to the SF Bay Area and there is a link to the source which has a easy-to-use Excel sheet of the data, so feel free to make an awesome geo-mashup: [http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345#Technical_App...](http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345#Technical_Appendix) Also, the measure is not whether available housing is getting more expensive, but whether low-income households are being displaced. ~~~ jimrandomh They aren't being displaced. There's a good breakdown of the new construction that's happened in [http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times- make...](http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/05/25/new-york-times-makes-up- facts-about-sf-housing/) ; the short version is, new units are replacing vacant lots and abandoned buildings. ~~~ raldi I think you two are talking past each other because one of you is referring to "being displaced" in the sense of it happening because of new housing being built, and the other is referring to "being displaced" by the lack thereof. ------ gradstudent I think the headline is only true if the new housing for the rich actually increases the overall supply. Is that actually happening in SF? ~~~ jimrandomh No one is tearing down old units. People are trying to get new units built, mostly on vacant lots, and getting blocked by incumbent landlords who want to see prices go even higher. ~~~ gradstudent Tearing down old units is not enough. The construction works need to actually increase the overall housing stock. If old tenement buildings disappear and are replaced by oversize luxury apartments the overall stock goes down and the situation for the poor is made worse. ~~~ thrownaway2424 That trend has been going on in SF for a long time. Dwellings are getting larger steadily over many decades, and the number of people who live in a dwelling has been getting steadily smaller. ~~~ greggman Do you have any links that show this research? ~~~ thrownaway2424 The census tracks people per household. In 1940 this stood at 3.08. In 2010 it was 2.26. A "housing unit" built today simply doesn't hold as many people as it once did. ~~~ greggman Isn't that the opposite of what you posted above? I thought you were claiming dwellings are getting bigger in SF. My intuition is that they are getting smaller. The old houses are all subdivided. The new apartments are all small. The exception is some large lofts in SOMA but there are plenty of tiny lofts in China Beach, 5th and Mission, 8th and Mission, 10th and Market. I'm not saying the average is smaller since I don't have any data only personal observation. It sounds like your extrapolating that 2.26 people are getting more space than 3.08 people were before? ~~~ thrownaway2424 Dwellings are getting bigger. All the new construction is larger than average for the given number of bedrooms. Dwellings are larger, and fewer people are living in each of them. Both of these factors are headwinds for the housing market. ------ kincardine Extremely misleading headline. The poor are better off when there isn't a housing shortage, because (surprise, surprise) the rich aren't the ones who are going to be forced out. ~~~ raldi You say the headline is misleading, but you seem to be arguing the same point as it. Could you go into more detail about why you feel it's misleading? ~~~ ethbro Can't take a purportedly urban planning article seriously when it doesn't explicitly mention zoning and density. "More housing" is a pretty fluff summary of the intricacies of building sustainable neighborhoods. ~~~ raldi Do you take the original study seriously? [http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345](http://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/3345) ------ pennyless There is nothing in the article to justifying the headline. What the headline should have said is "more expensive housing keeps the prices of the expensive housing lower". While true, this has absolutely no reflection on the affordability, the latter being dependent on things like level of income and such. If the cheap housing is removed to be converted to expensive, there is less cheap housing, and it becomes less accessible, because more poor compete for it. ~~~ stale2002 And if the total housing stock increases then that means that rich people won't be buying up the poor housing stock. For every "Rich Person Condo" that is built in SOMA, there is one less "Up and Coming Apartment in The Mission" that gets taken up by a rich techie. The rich are going to move to the city whether we like it or not. They have the resources, they can buy out whatever place they choose. The only choice we have to make is whether to build housing for them or to just let them displace existing residents. ------ rokhayakebe Everyone (myself included) cries about house prices, yet I believe there are many many truly beautiful small cities and towns where you have great internet access, safety and amazingly affordable housing. People just needs to have the guts to move to these places and recruit friends and family and like minded folks to join them. ~~~ Grishnakh You seem to be forgetting that there are no _jobs_ in those places. Affordable housing isn't worth jack when the only job you can get there is working at Walmart, because there aren't any software development jobs there (for instance). The other problem is that if you're a young professional, you may very well be single. Moving to a small city or town means you will not get a date, unless you want to date some overweight, uneducated woman who has 4 kids and talks about Jesus and guns all the time. If you're on this site, that probably isn't the right demographic for you. You'd have better luck moving to a foreign country; rural and urban America are _that_ different these days. ~~~ mehwoot _unless you want to date some overweight, uneducated woman who has 4 kids and talks about Jesus and guns all the time_ I think if I wanted to pick a comment as the canonical example what is wrong with people on HN this would be the one. ~~~ jqm His choice of words was harsh but I think he does have a fair point. The demographics of rural areas don't make for good dating opportunities for educated, secular professional young people. ~~~ thaumasiotes Better or worse than San Francisco? (assuming a young male) I think the last statistic I found was something like 140 single men in the 20s-30s age bracket for every 100 single women. ~~~ x3n0ph3n3 Competition is high, but at least there's a supply. ~~~ thaumasiotes Assuming the women don't enter relationships with more than one guy at a time, this is very literally a case of no supply. ~~~ raddad The advantages of same sex marriages. ~~~ Grishnakh Or, the advantage of polyamorous relationships. ------ myohan what about the rich foreigners buying up the new development for the rich to park their money ~~~ scotty79 They don't rent what they bought? That seems dumb from investment perspective. ~~~ avuserow Some don't, and it can make sense. If you rent it out, then you have to be a landlord, which puts you on the hook for repairs, finding tenants, and collecting rent or evicting them. There's always the possibility of tenants trashing the unit to a large degree. Some of these problems become way worse when left untreated for a week, a month, or longer. I can imagine it making sense for foreign investors to leave units empty in these circumstances. In a similar vein, it's not just foreign investors. It might also make sense to leave the grandparent's house empty while they are in the nursing home if you live further away. If the grandparents don't need to sell the house to pay for retirement, you'd probably come off cheaply enough to leave it empty, pay the property tax and minimal utilities, rather than risk having tenants. ~~~ scotty79 > you have to be a landlord, which puts you on the hook for repairs, finding > tenants, and collecting rent or evicting them I imagine that there are companies that do exactly that for you taking percentage of rent you'd get if you done all that by yourself. I also imagine there are insurances for landlords and/or investors. There's so much money in this when you approach this as investments (as opposed to not renting your grandfather house because it's too much of a bother to clean it out and think about) that I imagine no sane investor lets their property, they just bought to stand empty. ~~~ undersuit Property Management companies can be extremely inept. At the end of my last lease the property managers for my place were fired for letting the owners family home degrade so far. The property managers then tried to pass all the damages off to my roommates and I, but we had extensive documentation of the existing damages. ------ gizi A housing crisis is pretty much always caused by government policies. It would be perfectly possible to build a satellite town up to 50 miles outside a major agglomeration connected by a high-speed transport link, such as a highway or train. People would live up to an hour from their work places. Housing units costing between 15 000 - 20 000 should be affordable even for the very poor. It is important, of course, to make sure that there is enough local retail and entertainment, but that is just a question of not regulating it out of existence. Without heavy-handed government intervention, it would emerge spontaneously. None of this would be economically a problem. The reason why it does not happen, is government interventionism. Seriously, there does not exist a problem in the world that is not made worse by governments. ~~~ jsprogrammer A two hour+ daily commute does not seem ideal. ~~~ xivzgrev It is if houses were much much cheaper. Shit I had a 2 hr daily round commute INSIDE San francisco, taking bus from the ocean and then walking to office. Id be beside my self if there was cheap housing an hour commute away. ------ known Sounds like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window) ------ reality_czech Not a problem. Just move the poors to Flint and keep SF as low-density housing for uber-douches. ------ swehner Predictable drivel. How about using international data? ------ staunch It's an absolute crisis. The government should response just as it would in the event of war time profiteering. ~~~ CyberDildonics Or people could move, but sure it's just like war time profiteering. ~~~ PhasmaFelis If you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, or even close to it, no, you can't move. Edit: I'm curious what people are disagreeing with here. Do you think that moving to a new city _doesn 't_ require expenditures? ~~~ raldi Many landlords would love to be able to evict their tenants and replace them with new market-rate renters, in exchange for paying the old tenants' moving costs. Or even the moving costs plus a year's rent in the new location. ~~~ staunch Not true in 99% of cases and no one said anything about paying below market rate rent except you... ------ transfire It's rough when the rich own numerous suites they rarely dwell in. They have to give some middle-class loner a basement apartment with discounted rent to meet occupant requirements. Yea, that'll help. ------ _cudgel You know, it makes sense to me that increasing supply should drive down demand and hence prices. But I frankly don't care. The entire piece reads like an excuse to not do things for the poor. How about we actually do things FOR THE POOR instead of tossing them scraps from the tables of the rich? ~~~ xtqctz Evaluating arguments on their merits seems nice, but mood affiliating feels so good. ------ obrero The language in this is Orwellian. She talks about how new construction is needed and how people are stopping it. Then she points to examples where people are not stopping it, just not letting developers do whatever they want (the dangerous junk developers build near me is insane), then she goes back to saying we need more housing. No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings. They're just asking for the same things groups like these have asked for almost a century. Article translation: "Hack employee of the Washington Post Co. says wealthy parasite developers and trustafarian transplants should ignore everything long time, mostly working class black people want, they don't matter". Well why not, that's the same message we've been hearing in this election campaign all year. ~~~ raldi _> No working class housing groups are trying to stop new buildings._ Ahem: [http://www.savethemission.org/save_the_mission_district_yes_...](http://www.savethemission.org/save_the_mission_district_yes_on_prop_i_endorsements) ------ DiversityinSV The data is nationwide. But California proves this NOT to be the case. Sunnyvale/Mountain View have experienced 4 years of building new housing without limits, yet every year is more expensive. The new units (rental or for sale) are way higher than the average rent or price. (e.g. ALL the new housing being built now in the peninsula is priced at $1MM or more) I fail to see the point of pushing for new unregulated housing here besides saying in 30+ years the middle class will move to housing built for the rich now. Sure... In 30 years the middle class won't exist. (and in SV I give it 12-15 years) ~~~ rst It also neglects a huge factor in several hot markets, particularly New York: rich out-of-towners buying apartments as investments, and leaving them unoccupied. The owners aren't living there, and the buildings are typically reworking or replacing former residential units where people actually resided, so the net effect of that new construction is that the stock of housing available to house people who actually live in the city is _reduced_. ~~~ danieltillett This problem is so easily fixed via the tax system I am surprised it has not been done already. Just tax high and rebate for residency. ~~~ Radim Too naive, I'm afraid (as well as, in my opinion, misguided). Just put yourself in the shoes of the investor. Government announces they're gonna make you pay through your nose if no one "lives" in your apartment. Leaving aside the dubious morality of such penalization (it's a slippery slope!), is your reaction going to be "Oh noes, I am ruined! Better sell my apartment now."? Or can you think of half a dozen simple, practical ways around it? I bet you have already. ~~~ danieltillett It is very hard to get around residency because someone living at that address needs to pay income tax. You can even rebate back the occupancy tax via the income tax or sales tax systems. If you don’t want to do this you can do random surveys of the suspect property (say any property without a taxpayer) and if it is unoccupied more than a few times and not registered as unoccupied then a big fine results. Finally, the owner does not need to sell, just have tenants. What you want to avoid is housing sitting empty or only being used as a holiday home a couple of weeks a year. ~~~ Radim Right. Let's send a secret police on "random surveys" to "suspect properties", checking to see who lives in people's homes :-) Did I mention "slippery slope"? You don't have to be a diehard libertarian to find this whole concept somewhat creepy. ~~~ danieltillett I hate to break it to you but there are dozen of authorities that can come around and inspect your property whenever they want - this slippery slope has long gone. I have no problem with someone with the appropriate authority politely knocking on my door to see if I am home if I am claiming a large tax refund for living there. The IRS and its fellow ilk are far more intrusive - the IRS makes my life a pain as it is and I am not even a US taxpayer. ~~~ Radim Where do you live that "dozen of authorities" can come around and inspect your property at will? I see where you're coming from, but as is probably obvious, I don't subscribe to your "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" world view on government surveillance. This seems to be the root of our disagreement here. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Argum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Arguments_for_and_against)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Everything I learned in the past 2 years - marco1 https://github.com/delight-im/Knowledge?hn=2016-10-18 ====== dozzie Sorry to break it to you, but there are things you got wrong. The first thing I opened, "IT operations", and the very top item is false. ~~~ marco1 > Sorry to break it to you, but there are things you got wrong. I would have been surprised if this was different! > The first thing I opened, "IT operations", and the very top item is false. You seem to be talking about the SMTP ports, right? What do you suggest instead? Port 465 with SSL/TLS and only as a secondary solution 587 with STARTTLS? The current statement was based on [1] which recommends _not_ to use port 465 but instead only 587 with STARTTLS. Granted, with STARTTLS, you have some additional attack vectors. [1] [http://blog.mailgun.com/25-465-587-what-port-should-i- use/](http://blog.mailgun.com/25-465-587-what-port-should-i-use/) ------ dorianm This is great! ~~~ marco1 Thank you! If only a single person finds something helpful there, it has been worth the effort already. So that's what I hope will happen. Apart from that, writing down things you've learned for yourself is pretty useful in general, as well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is your laptop cooking your testicles? - vezycash https://www.reuters.com/article/us-laptop-testicles/is-your-laptop-cooking-your-testicles-idUSTRE6A457320101108 ====== officialjunk >nearly one in six couples in the US have trouble conceiving a baby, and about half the time the man is at the root of the problem. While true that a laptop isn't good for male reproductive systems, it's still 50/50 chance (random) which sex is to blame for reproductive difficulties...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Good coding music? - sarreph I don't know why, but recently I've been unable to listen to music whilst doing work for extended periods (45 mins or more). It seems to distract me or <i>get in the way</i>.<p>Would anyone care to tip me off with some good (preferably non-mainstream, as I like discovering new artists) music to work/code productively to? I was thinking anything along the lines of Minimalism/House/Electro, although I like to dip into Classical from time to time.<p>... Or just share anything (music) that makes you work productively :) ====== darkmethod I'm a fan of anything by Zoe Keating. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TTX0ryyoac](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TTX0ryyoac) "Into the Trees" is my default coding music. ------ majc2 Big fan of movie and game soundtracks for coding. Regular rotation at the moment consists of Man of Steel, Batman Trilogy, Inception, Mass Effect 3, Skylander Giants and a lot of classical music esp the planets or anything else from civ 4! Final shout out would be music that Adam Curtis has used in his documentaries such as Power of Nightmares. He uses lots of good modern instrumental pieces. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/4202789.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/4202789.stm) is a starting point. ------ tjr I have for years found that if I really needed to concentrate deeply on a programming project, I tend to be immensely helped listening to Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky". Yes it is (was?) mainstream, and yes it has been cliche'd into the ground in countless movies that used it for overtly happy scenes. But regardless, it helps me. (If the ELO original is too mainstream for your tastes, you might like the version by The Delgados.) More generally, I find that light classical music, especially Bach, is pleasant to have playing while I work. Anything else may or may not help, and it's pretty random. A song that helps a lot one day may be a distraction on another day. For just "listening" to music, I mostly enjoy jazz, but that often doesn't really help me much to focus on programming. ------ jschrf Take a look at [http://musicforprogramming.net/](http://musicforprogramming.net/), you might find something you like there. I personally use di.fm or soma.fm and pick a channel that suits my mood, usually something a little more downtempo and free of vocals. ------ shoo Stars of the Lid - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaSi7Gut7xM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaSi7Gut7xM) , [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et_lDyRymrw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et_lDyRymrw) , [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OycCEDxQFoA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OycCEDxQFoA) Tim Hecker - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jXbnydhNjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jXbnydhNjU) ------ yulaow I usually listen the related broadcast in Grooveshark [http://grooveshark.com/#!/writhem/broadcast](http://grooveshark.com/#!/writhem/broadcast) ------ paul_willis Try this out, it's Keith Jarrett live at Köln [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a7xoYZZE4s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a7xoYZZE4s) ~~~ sarreph He's great! Hadn't heard of him before. Thanks for the share. ------ bnejad Trance, specifically the weekly "A State of Trance" hosted/mixed by Armin Van Buren. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_State_of_Trance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_State_of_Trance) There are like 600 episodes, each is a 2 hour mix. Great to just turn one on and not fidget around with the next track. Another one of my favorites is Digitally Imported, di.fm Basically a bunch of different electronic genre stations. ------ pushkargaikwad I personally find music to be distracting while coding but yesterday found this thread on reddit [http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1jke2r/whats_the_most...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1jke2r/whats_the_most_beautiful_music_that_you_have_ever/), this has some gems! I am sure you will find few good once ------ hemezh I personally prefer chillstep, it really helps me concentrate. Recently I created a mix @ [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EY0r-VJF6k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EY0r-VJF6k) I'd strongly suggest you to discover other artists of this genre e.g. Xan, Sizzlebird, Ramases B, etc ------ reisub I usually like instrumental music, words take my attention away from the code. Mozart, and other classical music is a great background for coding. Other than classical, God Is An Astronaut ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34C41eEpM48](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34C41eEpM48)). ~~~ ScottWhigham Love that God is an Astronaut! Awesome. ------ meerita My favorite coding music, for late nite is SomaFM: Mission Control, wich is ambient music mixed with NASA mission audio archives, it is sublime. You can find it iTunes radio or in SomaFM official website [http://somafm.com](http://somafm.com) ~~~ hmsimha My vote goes to SomaFM's Space Station, though the vibe of that station is a bit variable ------ Oculus DJ sets of artists like Kaskade or Porter Robinson always work for me. I find the key is to find something that doesn't distract you from the work, but is also nice to listen to when you focus on it. I find it really hard to just work when the room is completely silent. ------ vmarsy What about [https://www.focusatwill.com/](https://www.focusatwill.com/) ? or not really music but a coffee shop sound : [http://coffitivity.com/](http://coffitivity.com/) ~~~ Raphmedia Thanks a lot for those two links. They really make it for me! Edit: I found that Coffitivity goes really well with Muzak - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJWZxPW45c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJWZxPW45c) \- that someone else posted. Turns your office into a mall! ------ carlyle4545 The Diplomats are ideal for maintaining an optimal level of concentration. Their album, "Diplomatic Immunity Vol. 1" will put you in a zone. The song "Dipset Anthem" is the undisputed gem. Thank me later... ~~~ sonicallison I can't think of anything more distracting than this album, they stop to talk constantly... [http://www.amazon.com/Diplomatic-Immunity- Diplomats/dp/B0000...](http://www.amazon.com/Diplomatic-Immunity- Diplomats/dp/B00008GQ9Y) ------ jeremyirony I like the playlist made of: \- Kingdom of Heaven OST \- Assassin's Creed Revelations OST (the full 3 CD version) \- Full Mass Effect 3 OST (extracted by some guy from the game itself. Not the one you can buy ;)) ------ hyling [https://www.focusatwill.com](https://www.focusatwill.com) works well. I also create a Spotify station by searching for "background music" ------ jamesjguthrie I can't code with music on, my brain tunes into it and makes me want to sing along or pretend I'm drumming etc. I find TV on in the background to be much more helpful. ~~~ alexanderh This is why there is an entire genre of music called "Ambient" Seriously, I know where you're coming from but there is music out there for every situation. ------ pidge I like the this room on Turntable, electronic chill - [http://turntable.fm/chill_or_be_chilled2](http://turntable.fm/chill_or_be_chilled2) ------ wanderr When I really need to focus, I listen to a mix of mostly Au Revoir Simone, Ladytron, Metric, and The Faint ------ Skoofoo I like to listen to [http://scenemusic.net](http://scenemusic.net). ------ bdevine I swear by Boards of Canada, which, judging from the criteria you listed, might be right up your alley. ------ alexanderh I really enjoy all kinds of Ambient music for coding Sync24 and RQ come to mind. ------ mkname muzak, designed not to distract. example [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJWZxPW45c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdJWZxPW45c) (edited to remove distracting remark) ------ 2mur The Glitch Mob - _Drink the Sea_ and _We Can Make the World Stop EP_ ------ chewxy My playlist today is full of Tchaikovsky and a few Bear McCreary interleaved. ------ MonkoftheFunk [http://Di.fm](http://Di.fm) ~~~ MonkoftheFunk [http://www.di.fm](http://www.di.fm) ------ dethstar I usually listen some post-rock such as GYBE! ------ rdouble Try the free podcasts from bleep.com ------ keefe checkout state of trance on youtube I like those really long tracks for the sustained flow ------ jrokisky Brian Eno's Ambient albums ------ benjtinsley Steve Reich + coding = profit ------ biolime I always listen to grunge. ------ anigbrowl Extrawelt.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The arrival of 4D printing is making 3D printing look passe - leojkent http://www.humansinvent.com/#!/11261/4d-printing-making-things-that-make-themselves/ ====== NathanKP I think the title is quite overoptimistic. 3D printing is starting to take off because the cost of 3D printing is going down, and making it feasible. 4D printing is going to be far too expensive for practical application for a long time, and is therefore far from making 3D printing a thing of the past. ------ joezydeco Feh. I've got prior art on all of this. We used to scrunch down the wrappers on drinking straws, put the wrapper on the table, then add a few drops of water. =) ------ pfraze I can't wait to print more time for myself. ------ nawitus Just wait till we get to 5D.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Beginning Ember.js on Rails: Part 2 - dgeb http://www.cerebris.com/blog/2012/01/26/beginning-ember-js-on-rails-part-2/ ====== lackbeard I wonder why Rails was chosen for the backend. Naively, it seems like a bit of overkill. You don't need a full stack web app framework to create REST endpoints, right? ~~~ cobrabyte I can't speak for others but I'm building a Rails app that could benefit from an Ember front end for a small subset of the full app. This series shows how easy it would be to 'plug in' Ember into a much broader Rails app. If you're truly building a one-page style app, Rails is, as you say, probably not your first choice. Sinatra maybe? ~~~ Argorak At the danger of plugging it everywhere: if you skip the "view-helper" part of Padrino, its a pretty good backend for sproutcore/ember (I use it as such).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IBM Finland refusing to pay pensions - ryanlol https://www.kauppalehti.fi/uutiset/stig-64-voi-menettaa-jopa-180-000-euroa-elakkeita-suomen-ibm-lahetti-ruotsiin-toihin-ja-jatti-elakkeita-maksamatta/6e80b027-c260-320b-9b34-bed44ebe0f81 ====== ryanlol So apparently IBM screwed up big time in the 1990s and failed to pay many of their Nordic employees pensions, now those people are retiring and noticing the missing funds. The debts have expired, so IBM refuses to pay up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Startup Beer – Talk to fellow european startups. Online. Every Friday - grexi http://www.startupbeer.me/ ====== JazCE Under the requirements, they have "speak in English". That isn't very European. May as well be called "Talk to fellow silicon roundabout startups". Also, am i the only one who can't wait to get out of the office and into a pub on a friday? Maybe I work in too much a corporate culture than startup one. ~~~ bogomil We need to speak to one language to understand each other right? The meetup is at 4 :) ~~~ JazCE tell that to my Java server that talks to .Net. IMHO you should channel it off and allow for German, French, Spanish, Swedish etc rooms. Closed minded to only have English speaking.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why School Principals Need More Authority: they have responsibility but no power - girardy http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/why-principals-should-be-more-like-ceos/255183/ ====== girardy This comment: "Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school's obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else" is a lot like the part of The Other half of Artists Ship (<http://paulgraham.com/artistsship.html>) where pg says, "Whenever someone in an organization proposes to add a new check, they should have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least remind everyone there had to be a cost, and send them looking for it."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Verizon iPhone sales fail to meet expectations - apress http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/16/exclusive-verizon-iphone-sales-fail-to-meet-expectations/ ====== Cadsby Not all that surprising. Most existing smartphone users are still under contract. The interesting question is what many of those users will do in June when another iPhone is released. Or in June 2012 when all existing contracts will be up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Build a Remote Team: Resources and Advice from Remote Companies - raunometsa https://remotehub.io/blog/build-remote-team ====== jcadam How about be willing to hire experienced engineers who don't have remote experience? Every time I've applied for a remote job, this seems to have been the sticking point. I'd just like employers to start with the assumption that I'm a professional who wouldn't slack off all day if I didn't have someone to babysit me. ~~~ wyatt777 I think this just depends on the employer. I saw that statistic from an Upwork report. 40% of companies are not good with remote. If you have ever worked out of a coffee shop or home, you have remote experience! ------ thomas2718 I just wanted to buy a ticket for the Running Remote conference, and then I saw that there are only on-site tickets ... ------ Ididntdothis One thing I have been thinking about is that remote companies will have difficulty with leadership that doesn’t understand the tech they are working with. When I look at my current company even one or two levels up there are people who have no understanding of a lot of technology and aren’t able to make quick judgement calls. So they need a lot of meetings and salesmanship within the company to make decisions. When I look at successful remote companies like Automatic, 37 Signals or StackOverflow they all have very strong leaders who can’t be bullshitted in technology but have a pretty good idea what they want to do. They also can judge the output of their people. It’s hard to be the boss of a remote worker whose work you don’t understand. How can you tell if somebody is good or not? ------ jpincheira Building a successful remote company is no different than building a successful on-site company. It's about culture, and about setting the right processes with the right toolset. Establishing a great communication flow [1] is key for remote companies, and you have to help your teams to: · Create a community feeling · Get to see each other face-to-face daily · Be open about feelings I recently wrote a few tips on how to set the right environment for remote work [2]. [1] [https://standups.io/blog/communicating-better-in- distributed...](https://standups.io/blog/communicating-better-in-distributed- teams/) [2] [https://standups.io/blog/a-productive-environment-for- remote...](https://standups.io/blog/a-productive-environment-for-remote-work/) ~~~ xwowsersx Also, your posts you linked to are kind of fluff pieces (no offense intended). For example "By creating a strong community feeling and a sense of commitment to your company, your employees are excited about team calls and much more open with one another". Yeah ok, but how? I don't think creating community is a point of contention, but you're not explaining how to do so in a distributed environment. ------ em-bee we are just building a new remote team, and what we are missing is a good/affordable collaborative whiteboard or mindmap solution. something where we can visually structure our work. for the rest we have etherpad (as alfernative to google docs) and gitlab with all its tools to structure issues ------ wyatt777 Made a virtual office space for my team for just these reasons! [https://www.mydigitaloffice.io/](https://www.mydigitaloffice.io/) With over 40% of companies allowing some weekdays to be at home, this is the future! ~~~ GilbertErik COOL! How's this compare to Sococo? ~~~ aantix Sococo has been around forever and always gets a major eye-roll from the HN community whenever mentioned in a thread. But I don't think I know a single engineer that has actually used it. I like the idea of seeing who is chatting with who. If I'm working on something, and I have two colleagues that are also working on the same project and I can virtually see them chatting, I'd probably approach to see if there's anything I know or if they're discussing ideas. ------ SeanDav The article appears to end prematurely - last item I see is "Start Slowly" ~~~ em-bee same for me. it feels like there should be more	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Easily Convert Any Bookmarklet to Chrome Extension (+ source code) - legierski http://blog.self.li/post/16366939413/how-to-convert-bookmarklet-to-chrome-extension ====== acqq I don't know anything about Chrome extensions but I know that typical bookmarklets function in all browsers. So my question is: why? Why not just using bookmarklet as is? ~~~ brooklynite Some people hate having a bookmarks bar visible or just want to make more space for other things. ~~~ GBKS You can also get extra exposure through the chrome web store. It's not a lot, but every bit matters. ------ rmateu Brilliant! thanks. I've been planning on converting some of my markdown bookmarklets for blogging ([http://5typos.net/post/259552063/bookmarklets-for- text-manip...](http://5typos.net/post/259552063/bookmarklets-for-text- manipulation)) for some time, but was too lazy to checkout the specs. No excuse now. ------ ck2 I've always been annoyed in Firefox and now apparently Chrome that you cannot just have a simple, single-file extension if you don't need any external files. Why can't it just regex the manifest, etc. from the extension header in a comment field. ------ jenningsjason Does something like this exist for Safari or Firefox?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is anyone else having issues with stripe? - ceffio I am having issues when processing a payment using stripe. I am using Stripe::charge and 80% of transactions are getting declined. Previously (20 days ago) everything worked smoothly.<p>According to stripe logs, a successful transaction has 3 steps: create a token (/v1/tokens), then the customer (/v1/customers) and finally generate the payment (/v1/charges). At the moment, all the transactions are falling when they receive the customer (/v1/customer). Stripe has been telling me it is an issue with the bank. But the bank it is telling me that they don't are receiving request for payments (transaction is falling on step #2).<p>I've talked to several friends and they are having the same issue, so hopefully someone from the HN community can help :) ====== rogerkirkness We had a similar sounding issue involving where the token is passed in the Stripe client. Are you using the API directly or through a client library? We were using Go and there was a field that was pretty clearly not needed in the documentation but pretty clearly needed to make the customer step work. ~~~ ceffio We are using stripe's api in the frontend to generate a token and then it to our backend in order to generate the "customer" and the "charge". Our backend is on Rails so we are using stripe's ruby gem. Any advice?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
React from zero: a simple tutorial for React - galfarragem https://github.com/kay-is/react-from-zero ====== aidos For others who are probably going to skip this because it sounds like a getting started tutorial - it’s not. I’ve only skimmed it but it starts by building up the components React works with from scratch without any JSX / React helpers at all. Much better way to get an intuition of what’s going on under the hood. ------ woldemariam I started going through this but got stuck on Lesson 4. I copied this file [0] as is and tried running it locally using live-server but I get an error. Uncaught SyntaxError: /Inline Babel script: Adjacent JSX elements must be wrapped in an enclosing tag. Did you want a JSX fragment <>...</>? (36:4) [0] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kay-is/react-from- zero/mas...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kay-is/react-from- zero/master/04-components.html) ~~~ redleggedfrog Ah, and your _true_ React lesson has begun... ------ m3tr0s Somebody, please, publish a tutorial something like "Create simple web applications with Vanilla JS", or "How to build frontend-only apps using only native HTML5 APIs". I can't believe people are still interested about this horrible, overhyped framework. ~~~ aidos AKA: how to end up with your very own framework, that’s not as good as this other “horrible, overhyped” framework and you have to do absolutely everything yourself because nothing works with it. React fills a need and it’s features are bourne of real world necessity. Even if you don’t care for it, it’s interesting because the lion’s share of libraries are built to work with it these days and it’s backed by a company that will keep it going. It might not be the best way to fill a specific need, but it’s a good general tool. ------ k__ It's interesting how I posted this multiple times over, no one cared and just when Dan stared the repo, it gets on HN front-page. Anyway. I started this a few years ago to show people how simple React really is and that you can use it in directly in the browser :) Hope this helps many people. Btw. I am a remote software consultant for hire. [http://kay.is](http://kay.is) and I have a Patreon. [https://www.patreon.com/kayis](https://www.patreon.com/kayis) Didn't know what goals I should put there, but maybe more tutorials in that style, for Angular, Vue etc.? ~~~ IloveHN84 Who's Dan? I think dad that there's no commitment to create some beginners' guide using jQuery and only just React, as the "go-to" solution for projects. ~~~ k__ Dan Abramov is a React core developer from Facebook. ------ sametmax That should be the default approach for tutorials on react, including the official web site. Webpack, babel and create-react-app should be demonstrated as a conclusion, not as an introduction. ~~~ k__ Yes, this was the idea. Had the impression most people who didn't want to use React hated the tooling. I was impressed that even Babel itself wouls run via script-tag :D ~~~ syspec That is exactly correct, the tooling seemed like such a huge thing to sign onto just to find out if i liked a thing. ~~~ acemarke Which is why the React "getting started" docs pages were just revamped to emphasis that you can absolutely use it without any tooling: [https://reactjs.org/docs/getting- started.html](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html) ~~~ sametmax It just mentions you can. The doc should do only that: without tooling. It's a react tutorial, not a webpack/babel tutorial. I'd even say you should start with a toto list exercice with only react.createElement, and only move to JSX later. Using CodePen do show you full-gear examples is dishonest IMO. ~~~ acemarke Honestly, there's lots of different ways you can teach and approach learning React, in the same way there's lots of ways to teach and approach programming. Is it better to teach with something resembling a "real app" setup, so the user can start doing something "meaningful" right away? Or is it better to strip away all abstractions and start from the bare bottom, so that the user understands exactly what's going on under the hood? Both are valid approaches, and a lot of times it depends on both the individual's learning style and what their background is. ------ navs “Everything runs in the browser without a manual pre-compilation.“ This a million times over. I know webpack isn’t hard but it can be daunting to a newcomer. ~~~ k__ Often devs new to a project don't need to setup the tooling anyway. They just need to build components and not to configure Webpack and Babel. ------ wnsire I'm fascinated by how much React Tutorials exist over the internet, and how one can replace another five minutes after it get published. It feels like the community it still struggling with this framework , while it has existed for many many years... Very interesting. ~~~ k__ Has nothing to do with React. I'm blogging for over a year now, and the most views get the articles about basic JS stuff. There are simply more people starting coding world wide than senior devs. ~~~ wnsire > Has nothing to do with React. Then we might not speak of the same React. Angular and Vue have very rich documentation which makes tutorial unnecessary. React doesn't have that, so it's very likely "has to do" with React. ~~~ abiox vue and angular have plenty of tutorials. react is much more popular (at the moment), which is why one would notice material for it more often. ------ jscholes Appreciate the tutorials, thanks. I understand that the core concern of them is to demonstrate React, but it wouldn't hurt to use valid HTML. None of your pages have a html, head or body tag. Speaking as someone involved with accessibility I'd hate to think we were assuming that devs just know this stuff - how can we expect people to learn web accessibility guidelines or how to use ARIA when tutorials don't even come with the most basic valid HTML structures? ~~~ k__ As far as I know, html head and body are optional per spec. ~~~ spiralganglion Yep, this is valid HTML according to the spec, and _should_ have no affect on accessibility. It might not be “valid” according to the W3C validators, but neither are many perfectly normal practices like proper custom elements (hyphen in tag name) and wrapping links around container elements. The era where validators were worth following has passed — we're now in the era where you need to learn to look at the spec for the laws of the land. For a beginner React tutorial, I’m happy to see the React parts given emphasis, and the other parts don’t matter simplified. Omitting those tags reduces noise, and is a good subtle way for people to discover that they are in fact optional. ------ buraksarica Should we expect a written summary for the lessons? ~~~ k__ I don't know, do you expect a written summary of them? I thought about turning the whole thing into an ebook once. Maybe a few extra lessons with stuff like HoCs/RPs, more lifecycle methods and some principles? ------ sureaboutthis Jeez. Why does anyone do this to themselves? All the work by the javascript guy and then all the work by the server to produce simple HTML/CSS output. I am positive someone will come here and make a claim of large, dynamic sites and reddit's favorite nonsense phrase about DRY but I am also positive more people learn React because online articles tell them to than a real need for them. If one would spend all this time learning HTML/CSS/Javascript fundamentals, and how to properly use them, they would have the same questions I have after 14 years of doing this, for companies large and small, as to why anyone bothers with this, Angular, and all the others. It just makes no sense at all. ~~~ untog If you've been in the industry for 14 years, know JS and CSS inside out, and still don't understand why anyone wants to use React... I think you're the one missing some understanding, not the people who choose to actually learn the framework in question. ~~~ olavgg I disagree, everything is much simpler without React. I'm actually working on writing a tutorial for creating structured code for dynamic content with vanilla JS. With Ecmascript 6, a lot of advanced concepts has become much simpler and easier to read. ~~~ ng12 > everything is much simpler without React What's "everything"? Writing a mostly static webpage with a few moving bits? Yeah, sure. Building and maintaining a complex SPA on a team of 4+ developers? I'll take React any day. ------ rhapsodic For the life of me, I can't understand why React is as popular as it is. A web application is simply HTML, CSS and Javascript. Why do people want to make it so damn complicated? I was around when browser based apps started to take over the enterprise software world. One of the big selling points was its simplicity compared to native desktop development languages like (horrors!) Visual Basic. Anyone could open up Notepad and create a simple HTML page with some form elements and a submit button. Now, I realize that browsers' capabilities have advanced enormously in the intervening years, but it's still just HTML, CSS and Javascript, once the transpilers and the zillion other build tools get done with it. And I would argue that someone who really knows HTML, CSS and Javascript at a deep level can write it directly and maintain it a lot more efficiently than with a bunch of third-party frameworks and an overly-complex build process. ~~~ vbezhenar When people tried to write big enough applications with JavaScript, they found out, that it was a mess. JavaScript is a terrible language, so another languages were born (including modern JavaScript which isn't that bad). DOM is a very low level and very verbose API, so various approaches were taken to simplify development, e.g. jQuery, Angular, React. Hello world apps might be easy to do without frameworks, but once you're making complex pages with dozens of inputs, asynchronous loading, etc, lack of frameworks is likely to turn your code to a mess. Or, if you're brilliant developer, you might invent your own little incomplete buggy framework. It's similar to WinAPI. Sure, you can write C with WinAPI and it's enough for simple applications. But in practice people use better languages and frameworks. Simple JavaScript has its place, of course. If I'm making text-only website and I want to introduce just a little bit of interactivity, like image gallery, using anything but a few lines of JavaScript is overkill. ~~~ rhapsodic _> When people tried to write big enough applications with JavaScript, they found out, that it was a mess. _ I have written huge, complex, graphics-intensive applications with Javascript, and that was not my experience at all. So maybe it's not the language, but the person using it that is responsible for the mess. _> It's similar to WinAPI. Sure, you can write C with WinAPI and it's enough for simple applications._ That is a very far-fetched comparison, in my view. ~~~ abiox > So maybe it's not the language, but the person using it oh. it would seem this is more about you feeling impressed with yourself, rather than making substantive arguments. ~~~ rhapsodic _> oh. it would seem this is more about you feeling impressed with yourself, rather than making substantive arguments._ That is my argument. It's simple logic. If I can get good results without React, I've proven that React is not necessary to get good results. ~~~ abiox that seems like a trivially true statement, if not an outright tautology.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Zero Knowledge:The Absolutely Awesomest, Bad-assest Thing You'll Use - sabi https://blog.perfectcloud.io/zero-knowledge-protocol/#.VDiq4sZy9TA.hackernews ====== gjvc see also: [http://srp.stanford.edu/](http://srp.stanford.edu/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How do you raise money for start up? - youyap I am doing reserch on how people get funded. I read techcrunch everyday and see companies that raise millions of dollars. I also wonder how there do it. Anyone go thru this process before? Can anyone list step by step on how to raise 1 million dollar? ====== russw Nice question, impossible answer to provide. I have raised capital for a few companies but have found the process different each time. Lets just assume you have a product/service/technology that has a viable market potential. My first step is to define the size of the opportunity and my best path to an "exit". These two components will determine if you begin @ Angel funding, VC funding or personal credit card funding (or Y combinator:)) If you have a big enough opportunity and the connection to go straight to VC, congrats. So now lets assume you don't, and you are seeking Angel money. Here's ONE model...... Get your company as far along as possible without funding, take it to alpha, beta or public launch if you can. Build your advisory board and be very good at tracking your key data points that drive your valuation and prove your business plan. Identify potential funding resources through every means possible. Every major city has an Angel Group it seems now. Reach out and learn what the group has shown interest in and what company's they've invested in. If you think there is a good mix, use every resource the group offers but avoid the pay to share your company models (in my experience that is). Get your pitch down to under 10 minutes, and be unbelievably good at it. Angels tend to like ultra passionate, company consumed entrepreneurs, because thats a consistent trait in successful ones. Pitch, tweak, learn. Repeat process. If you want to see a good video of Tim Draper discussing how to get funded, try this link - [http://www.vator.tv/news/show/tim-draper-sings- fundraising-s...](http://www.vator.tv/news/show/tim-draper-sings-fundraising- secrets) ~~~ xenoterracide I like the link. ------ rms <http://www.venturehacks.com> <http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html> Read venturehacks in its entirety and pmarca's relevant posts. ~~~ russw I agree, v-hacks is a very good blog source. ------ babul If you want to raise $1M you need a product people will believe in and see value using. Focus on the product. Build as much of as you can without funding. Then once you have something tangible and working (even in alpha) you can seek out the investors and they may actually be interested. ~~~ xenoterracide what about less... me and my co-founder were talking and we were thinking that really for right now what we'd like is $50-100k between the 2 of us. So we can work on the project full time, relocate, and get any resources that we will need. ~~~ drusenko you can get 50-100k from a few places: either 1 angel (it won't be a very big deal for them), family, or friends of family. ~~~ xenoterracide definitely need to go angel hunting soon. I know in my case family and friends aren't an option. neither have that kind of money (even if I could spread it out I couldn't work 1000 out of them). ------ bigtoga I smell a rat. It's pretty common for spammers to create an account on public forums, let it sit for 30-60 days, and then come in and create a generic, link-bait style post which they later use to post links in (once the post has been around a while). The advantage is that Google indexes the page, gives it a high page rank due to the density and good content. I just have a tough time believing that anyone who reads this site and techcrunch would ask such a question. ~~~ youyap I actually need help. This is not a spam. click on my user, I have created my account over 2 months ago and never posted yet. I submit my start up to Ycombinator and Techstar this year but didnt get accepted. So I am looking for help. Techcrunch dont teach you how to get funded, there just tell you who get funded. This is why I asked. Sometime question may seem obvious. No matter how much you know, you can always learn more. ~~~ mixmax Don't worry - we believe you :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Steve Wozniak first in line for the iPhone 4S - acak http://twitter.com/#!/stevewoz/status/124581902777724928 ====== melvinram That's amazing that he's waiting in line. I would have expected Woz to get one by simply making a call... or even one without making a call. ------ beforebeta you gotta love the guy for this!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
September 11, 2011 - tokenadult http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/september-11-2011/ ====== egiva Questions of faith and religion aside, my heart goes out each year to these families that lost loved ones on Sept. 11th. I will always remember sitting there watching it all unfold on TV, or how one of our parents called early AM to wake us up in our dorm just after the first plane struck the North Tower. Truly a sad moment for everyone.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ThinkGeek's Clip-on 8-Bit Tie: An April Fool's Joke Becomes a Real Product - dpapathanasiou http://www.thinkgeek.com/apparel/hats-ties/9352/?cpg=59T ====== dpapathanasiou Here's the background story, in case you missed it in April: [http://kotaku.com/gaming/thinkgeek/thinkgeeks-8+bit-tie- not-...](http://kotaku.com/gaming/thinkgeek/thinkgeeks-8+bit-tie-not-just- vaporwear-249062.php)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
SimpleGeo Launches ‘Storage’: A Distributed Hosted Database For Location Data - atularora http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/simplegeo-launches-storage-a-distributed-hosted-database-for-location-data/ ====== alexgandy I might be a bit paranoid, but I'm a little hesitant to use a service like this when there's really no mention (yet) of the liberties I'd expect them to want to take with the data. ------ dominostars Wouldn't latency cancel out any advantage their faster algorithm might have? ------ gumbo Nice idea. Good luck. Added the documentation of Place to my bookmarks, will review this this week-end. Is it possible to just retrieve the POI you add using the API? Is it possible to restrict access to your own POI? ------ wan23 25 cents per 1000 calls? Is that a reasonable price? If you were to have an ad-supported page that requires a call to the DB then you would need to have 25 cents CPM just to break even.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming - Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics - gibsonf1 http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=E58DFF04-5A65-42A4-9F82-87381DE894CD ====== timr This is yet another long, distorted tirade by Senator James Inhofe -- and a year old, too! It would take hours to debunk every logical fallacy and twisted fact that Inhofe uses to justify his silly views; for brevity, let me recommend the book "The Republican War on Science" for a good overview of the level of intellectual dishonesty that Inhofe embraces. ------ Caligula The link you posted is a year old. Stop posting junk please. ~~~ gibsonf1 I guess I'm not clear on the correlation between age of information and junkiness? ~~~ brlewis You're correct that the junkiness does not stem from age. It stems from this piece being mostly name-calling, not information, and from the fact that the renowned scientist in question misrepresented the research he cited, according to the researchers. <http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/Claude_Allegre.html> ------ awt What about the huge chunks of ice breaking off the antarctic ice sheets? That seems like some sort of warming phenomenon going on in the southern hemisphere. ~~~ randallsquared Even the "global warming skeptics" aren't actually skeptical about the fact that warming has been happening. Rather, they're skeptical that there's a sudden uptick in the last few decades, and/or that global warming as it exists is human-caused. It's well understood that several hundred years ago, it was colder (at least in the northern hemisphere), simply because of historical records we have that don't make much sense otherwise. Also, it's well understood (though recently challenged) that it was warmer than twentieth century levels before that for some amount of time. So the controversy is all over whether humans are causing any significant part of the warming that is currently happening, and whether that can or should be fixed by reducing greenhouse gas levels.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What is the best way to get into DMOZ? - kreedskulls I have been submitting my site for almost a year now and still no luck. I am placing it in the right area and creating a great description. My website looks better than most and has great content. What am I missing?<p>Any Ideas? ====== jeffmould That is the problem with DMOZ. I don't know if it still works or not, but there used to be a way around the lengthy delays by creating an editor account with DMOZ in the category you are trying to get your site in. Once you as an individual are an editor you can approve your listing yourself for inclusion. I haven't played around with DMOZ in a long time so I don't know if this hack still works or not. It used to be that Google gave juice to sites listed in DMOZ, but I am not really sure how much play that has any more. I would really focus on other avenues if that is why you are trying. I don't think DMOZ use is that significant that it will impact your rankings or site visits overall. ------ brianwillis Why do you want to be listed there? To be honest, I had no idea DMOZ existed until now. The idea seems kind of quaint. It's looks like they're trying to recreate the early days of Yahoo search. ~~~ kreedskulls From the research I have done DMOZ helps you with ranking better for Generic Results when you get Listed in their Database.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Innovation in Education is Easy, Unless You Make it Difficult - ajjuliani http://ajjuliani.com/innovation-in-education-is-easy-unless-you-make-it-difficult/ ====== codva IMO, the only stuff that everybody needs to know is how to read, how to write (or more generally communicate) and math up through about Algebra I or Geometry. After that, everything else is an elective. Simply structuring the schools to make sure everybody got that core down by 8th grade, and then make high school nothing but electives, would go a long way towards making the education system much more effective. That could be done within the constraints of the existing public school system. I've read Holt and Gatto and generally agree with them. (Both my kids were homeschooled K-12). However, what they are talking about is less redoing school and more redoing society. It's too much to ever get done. However, cherry picking the ideas that can work with what we have now is a much more doable project. ------ coldcode And administrators and politicians make it their business to make it difficult. You can always find a few flowers growing in the cracks in a parking lot but that's hardly a trend. Most public school teachers I know have no time or budget to do anything other than do what the school board and state and fed guidelines demand of them. ------ zwieback It's hard because in every class you need to accound for the opinions of a teacher, students, parents and administrators to account for. One person's "innovation" is another persons waste of funds. I'm hardly a Luddite but when my kids' middle school rolled out a 1:1 iPad program I was uneasy and not a bit resentful about having additional parental responsibilities heaped on me. The last thing my kids need is another screen to stare at and now I'm in the position where I have to monitor what they are doing. I think the most innovative thing we could do in our classrooms is to give teachers only a blackboard and chalk instead of trying to compete with all the online distractions our kids are dealing with already. ------ thunderbong Sugata Mitra's new experiments in self-teaching - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU) ------ vezzy-fnord The problem with proposed solutions for improving education is that they all beg the question in a somewhat subtle way. They all assume the contemporary system of public schools, classrooms and standardized testing is correct and simply needs refinement. This is incorrect, in my mind. Compulsory schooling is an obsolete remnant from the days of Prussian militarism, and later revived by the large industrialists so as to breed a workforce that will fill the necessary quotas for such a society to work. _The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return._ \-- John D. Rockefeller \----- _We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks._ \-- Woodrow Wilson \---- _In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm._ \-- General Educational Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913 \---- So on and so forth. Compulsory schooling was never about intellectual satiation or real learning, but to instill a Pavlovian routine and to raise citizens within a framework that rulers at their respective times see fit. All attempts at educational reform that try to "fix" the problem within the confines of the current system are doomed to failure. It's insane just how well people have been raised to think that classrooms and strict routines are the only conceivable way to educate people. Not so, and the famous quote "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" rings even truer today. Nowadays with the rapid technological advancement of society, the necessity to abandon antiquated and ineffective compulsory schooling practices and replace them with more natural concepts: free schools, democratic schools, the deinstitutionalization of pedagogy, is more critical than ever. But most important is to breed a strong feeling and desire for autodidacticism in people. This is what is truly lacking. Achieve this, and the problems will be solved more smoothly. To figure out more about where I come from, read the works of John Holt, Ivan Illich ( _Deschooling Society_ ), John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt and others. I cannot recommend them enough, especially the middle two authors.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The unstoppable Google - PeterRosdahl http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/08/features/the-unstoppable-google.aspx ====== dfield In my opinion, this is an excellent article because of the attention given to both Schmidt's remarks and the reporter's individual insights. Wired could have easily misquoted / twisted Schmidt's words, as seems to be the practice these days, yet instead the reporter included Schmidt's corrections in the piece. Very objective reporting. Can all articles be like this? ~~~ marcusbooster It's not uncommon to get corrections/clarifications from the subject when writing an article about them. That it's so explicit in this article I don't necessarily take as objectivity, but as more stylistic choice to show Mr. Schmidt in a certain way, as perceived by the author. Which is fine, it's a good article. ------ azharcs The title of the article is "Inside Google: Eric Schmidt, the man with all the answers" and for the sake of the HN and its quality, lets stop giving fanboy spins to the articles. ~~~ gaius Historically, Wired have reported that a technology is the next big thing just before it has sunk without trace. They are excellent industry forecasters, just not the way they imagine... ~~~ miloshh Do you have any concrete examples? ~~~ gaius CueCat. ------ ehsanul So the article talks a lot about the culture of Google - striving to solve the world's problems (or a tiny subset of them at least), rather than worrying about monetization. A culture apparently instilled by the attitudes of the top three execs, judging from the kind of things they say. But does anyone buy this? I know many see Google as a threatening monopoly, not to be trusted, given the level of influence the company has on the internet. I could cite comments by many, say in reaction to the announcement of Google's upcoming OS - along the lines of "No way I'm moving from one overpowered monopoly to another". On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be many ways Google could impose a vendor lock-in in the way Microsoft could for example. Thoughts? ------ zandorg This quote: "we have the same goals. We’re trying to get information out there " I don't think book companies are all about getting out information at all. Some even press limited amounts of a book. ------ lucifer Two key points to take away from this article: 1) Effective ROI can translate (scarce) user time slices to a successful business not subject to ("industrial") models. Put in terms of an OS, Dr. Schmidt is effectively comparing Google's core competency (search) to a OS level service (such as networking) that will see sustained growth specifically because of the increased adoption of internet apps (FB, T, etc.). 2) VCs should consider recruiting senior business minded technologists to head young hacker ventures instead of MBAs. ------ Ardit20 I do not want google to tell me where my keys are. I have eyes and a brain to navigate and remember thank you very much. However, when I say what can I do if I am diagnosed with some illness, I want goggle to show me some sites saying that I need to exercise, or perhaps some diet site, or maybe some site saying I should not drink, and not sites about how someone else lost their mind and jumped out of the balcony. I think the quality of google search is falling. So many times I search and I get countless of irrelevant results and I would rather google showed me what I want them to show me rather than go on about my keys. I do not even understand why would google want to focus on telling me where my keys are. They seem to be loosing it and slowly moving to some cooko land. The world is not yours to save google! Go back to basics and try and improve search and make my results more relevant and try and find those cool hidden articles and stop going on about my ____keys. ~~~ peregrine You assume that search has gotten worse but provide no objective data to back it up. Could it be that you are using search today differently then you used search years ago? Could it be that you've read a large majority of the existing hidden articles that you deem cool? The only significant change has most likely been in how you use Google. Instead of just searching "Ubuntu" you may now search "site:ubuntuforums.org nvidia glx1800". ~~~ Ardit20 Yes perhaps I should have not assumed that. What I meant is that search is not so good as to worry about such abstract and pointless things as where are my keys. Search should focus on giving relevant results to queries we actually search.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Run you groovy/scala/js code on Twitter via @jvmbot - szimano http://szimano.org/say-hello-to-jvmbot/ ====== vorg The code runner first tries evaluation as a Groovy image, if groovy fails then tries it as a Scala image, if scala fails then tries it as a Nashorn image. Given that Javascript is more common than Scala and Scala more common than Groovy ([http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)), perhaps you should reorder the evaluation attempts to get the most probable language first. Heck, Groovy's only really used in Grails nowadays so you could even drop it completely or swap it for Clojure. ~~~ szimano as a matter of fact I code a lot in groovy, with no grails, but spring, but I hear you. There's a request to add support for hashtags with language choice [https://github.com/softwaremill/jvmbot/issues/1](https://github.com/softwaremill/jvmbot/issues/1) so it might solve your issue. Adding support for Clojure is more then welcome ;-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why is there no C11 hype? - z3phyr C++11 is gaining a traction, and a lot of hype. Why not C? Is there no one using C? ====== hamidr While projects like linux(kernel) or gcc compiler still use c98 as their default standard. why would it? Also M$ in its IDE doesn't care that much about c99.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Healthy home food different cuisines nearby, at affordable prices - hack_mmmm http://umeomni.com/ ====== hack_mmmm Started this service in California and Austin which lets you sell and sample Home Made Food nearby. Please check it out [http://umeomni.com](http://umeomni.com) and join / give feedback. · SELL Homemade food to nearby people. · BUY Homemade Healthy food from trusted members · Explore your cooking passion & Sign up ( It’s a free service) ------ aloksinha_iisc This looks awesome. Finally I can get a chance to sample homemade cuisine. Keep it up ...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deep Learning Optimizer Visualization - renus http://vis.ensmallen.org/ ====== antpls What about using a neural network as an optimizer, such that the input is the sampled neighborhood of a random starting point, and the output is the next point to evaluate. That neural network could be trained on billions of generated input functions. You could then use that optimizer to optimize the training of the optimizer itself ! ~~~ jamessb I'm not sure exactly what you are suggesting, but it seems conceptually similar to Bayesian Optimization, which fits a Bayesian Process to previous evaluations of the objective function, and uses this to estimate the best point at which to evaluate it next. This is expensive, so is typically used only when the objective function is itself very expensive to compute, such as for tuning hyperparameters. If you're suggesting training a single neural network to then use as a general optimizer for any problem, you should consider the No Free Lunch Theorem: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem) ~~~ human_scientist The NFL only applies to settings where your task distribution is uniform random over all possible tasks. It is my intuition that this kind of task distribution is almost surely not something we would encounter.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pricing models,the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough - bjonathan http://www.sethlevine.com/wp/2010/08/pricing-models-the-freemium-myth-and-why-you-may-not-be-charging-enough-for-your-product? ====== petervandijck Good points actually. Charge business users more than 19.99$/m. If they're gonna pull out the cc, 34.99 or even more is really the same as 19.99	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
User-Made Patch Lets Owners of Next-Gen CPUs Install Updates on Windows 7 and 8.1 - signa11 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/user-made-patch-lets-owners-of-next-gen-cpus-install-updates-on-windows-7-andamp-8-1/ ====== 0x0 What I don't get is that Windows 7 is in extended support until 2020, so if you bought Windows 7 retail and upgraded your CPU to one of these blocked next-gen versions, how is blocking windows update even excusable??? ~~~ type0 Because, EULA??? ~~~ jacobush Ah the thing where you agreed to sacrifice a goat at midnight ------ sandworm101 This is no patch. This is a hack. This is the bypassing of a DRM protocol, an undoing of an antifeature and part of the ongoing war. I await the MS counterattack. ~~~ ThrowawayR2 Why would MS bother? Like a Hackintosh, it's an unsupported configuration of the OS. If anything breaks, you're totally on your own. ------ mack73 Is Windows 7 abandonware to Microsoft? If so then this violation of terms might just fly under the radar of their massive team of lawyers. ------ lutusp Some points: 1\. I see this as a public-spirited project that favors consumers over a rapacious corporation. 2\. At a time when farmers can't even repair their own tractors any more ([http://modernfarmer.com/2016/07/right-to- repair/](http://modernfarmer.com/2016/07/right-to-repair/)), this hack will probably result in legal action. ------ yuhong I see a string saying "Only detected non-exempt updates on device with unsupported processor" when I was disassembling the code, so obviously MS has a way to mark patches as "exempt". ~~~ lightbyte If you had read the original announcement about this over a year ago you would already know that this was the case and what the exemptions are: >Through July 17, 2017, Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and 8.1. During the 18-month support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices. [https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windo...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/01/15/windows-10-embracing- silicon-innovation/#2LpTbACWqKlQSWFD.97) ~~~ yuhong Outdated, see: [https://blogs.windows.com/business/2016/08/11/updates-to- sil...](https://blogs.windows.com/business/2016/08/11/updates-to-silicon- support-policy-for-windows/) ------ MS_Buys_Upvotes What is the technical reason for Microsoft's actions? I've used Windows for decades and don't recall anything like this happening in the past. ~~~ rbanffy Chip manufacturers bent over backwards to make sure their chips ran Windows perfectly. This is obviously changing and they are not investing as much as they used to in compatibility with existing software. ~~~ awalton Err, no. This is 100% Microsoft trying to kill all Windows prior to Win10 by making it virtually impossible to continue to use the older Windows versions (i.e. by blocking updates and removing support for new hardware). There's nothing technically different enough about these new CPUs that anything significant needs to be done by Microsoft - in fact, it took more code to _deny_ the ability to install on these new CPUs than it would take to allow it. ~~~ downrightmike Win10 was 'Free' except now you have no recourse except to buy into the new system. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Deco – The React Native IDE is now free and available for download - drac89 https://www.decosoftware.com/download ====== brudgers Deco homepage does not start an automatic download: [https://www.decosoftware.com/](https://www.decosoftware.com/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What's the difference between a programmer in the top 10% vs top 1%? - ntkachov Lets start with some definitions: these percentages are in your own opinion. You can rate/rank how ever you like. All you have to do is explain the difference between guys that you would rank in the top 10% and guys that you would rank in the top 1%.<p>The discussion that happened in the comments in the 42floors offer letter post started an interesting point. What really is the difference between these two ranks? Is a 1% guy that does apps going into big data still in the 1%? Does the way you rank people have any affect on what field they are in, what language they work with, or what they do? How do you rank developers? ====== gexla The way to rank programmers is by how much they contribute to the bottom line. Shipping is important. Good developers are able to "move the chains" and help things get shipped. Bad developers hold up the process. Slippage can cost money. I think there is a lot more to this than programming ability. Perfection can get in the way of getting things done. A "cog in the machine" mentality keeps developers from taking ownership and making key decisions. Good developers accept that they don't know everything and tackle an area they aren't good at anyways because there is nobody better available for the issue. What you didn't define is, top 10% of what? All programmers? All available programmers for hire? All programmers who are working full time as programmers? I'm not sure there is even a big enough gap between the top 1% and the top 10% to make much of a difference. If the determining factor is being able to ship, then the top .1 % is probably either shipping their own products or have significant ownership in the companies they are coding for. Beyond that, it depends on how big your pool is. The best 1 out of 10 (10%) might be an average contributor just good enough to get in the door at a place not fighting for top talent. The top 1 out of 100 might be good enough to get an interview anywhere in Silicon Valley. ~~~ breathesalt I agree mostly except about your semantics. I would stick with the term "developer", not programmer. Being a good programmer is certainly correlated with being a good developer, but probably not by 1. ------ matt_s I think your question is too broad. Do you think you could have a top 1% programmer that does HTML, CSS, JavaScript? Think about this: you hire ten top 1% programmers but two of them have horrible interpersonal skills and they continually argue and don't work well together. Contrast that with hiring ten top 30% coders that work together great. Which team is going to accomplish more? When I hear stuff about top 10% or top 1% I have a mental image of a coder with an ego complex and for most of the stuff people do these days, that skill level isn't necessary and will likely lead to problems. ------ robatsu Top 10% - gets the coding job done, timely, high quality code. Knows his craft well, but is still essentially a craftsman. Top 1% - Designs systems that will get the job done for the business/larger org goals, or even designing systems that generate business props. Also, the systems designed are capable of being implemented/maintained by lesser skilled developers. Of course, knows his craft, but is something of the artist, can see the Buddha in the gearbox. The 1% guy should easily, as in no conceptual difficulties, be able to write a compiler/interpreter, that clearly demonstrates whether one is simpatico with the machine, capable of thinking like one. Actually should love doing this sort of thing, probably, and might have to resist the the tendency to incorporate custom command processing components/metadata/languages in every project. ~~~ eli_gottlieb _The 1% guy should easily, as in no conceptual difficulties, be able to write a compiler/interpreter, that clearly demonstrates whether one is simpatico with the machine, capable of thinking like one._ You do realize that compilers and programming languages are an actual realm of expertise, right? I can, and do, write a compiler, but I couldn't construct you a web framework from scratch. Acknowledge others' expertise rather than trying to construct a mountain to stand on. ~~~ robatsu Sorry, I think I poorly worded my comment. The point I was trying to make was that (imo) the better devs have an extremely deterministic viewpoint towards their code and are always paying attention to all the contextual layers in which they are coding and how their code may affect that context. The example of compilers/languages sort of follows from this, as this (constant) awareness leads to pattern recognition which then leads to surmising about leveraging languages, code generation, etc, to take advantage of these patterns & reduce effort/errors. There are other examples, just that I picked this one.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Switching a business to PHP - rcarrigan87 I'm currently negotiating with a potential co-founder. He's a senior PHP dev with incredible experience and a long list of solid experience.<p>My fear (unfounded or not) is that by rebuilding the current site in php it will pose hiring challenges down the road. It feels like most younger developers are avoiding php.<p>Is this a legitimate concern?<p>I'm not looking for a flame war here so please refrain leave those comments for somewhere else. ====== jeffmould I know this doesn't answer your question specifically, but if you have a site and a product already launched, and if it is working, why change to just to accommodate a single person. Not to knock him or his skills, but that seems like spinning wheels when you could be out selling and improving. Now if the site is not developed and you do not have a product, I would say do whatever you are most comfortable in to get it launched. There will always be the next great language out there and to second guess yourself now is just wasting valuable time. PHP, while it has its moments, is not a bad language to build a product with. There are plenty of big name sites that got their start as PHP or are still built on PHP. I highly doubt that in the next few years that PHP developers are going to be a thing of the past. ~~~ rcarrigan87 I've been developing for about 18mths and built the MVP in Django. The site has decent traction and user feedback has been incredible. But, in order to get the product to the next level I need to take a backseat when it comes to the development and focus on marketing (my primary skill set). Migrating the site to php would be trivial, the codebase is pretty basic. The technical requirements of V2 of the product will far exceed my abilities as a developer. He also has extensive CTO experience and just all around is the kind of developer that can take the company to the next level... ------ velmu PHP is going through a technical renaissance and does not deserve (some of) the bad rep it has: [http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/03/the-new- php.html](http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/03/the-new-php.html) The community is huge and there are plenty of mature software and components to use. I would not be shy of using PHP and wouldn't worry about hiring challenges in the next few years. That said, I would not hang my business on a single technology. Building with a combination of PHP and Node.js should be a good bet as these compliment each other and will provide developers chances to learn new things. ~~~ rcarrigan87 Interesting, I know next to nothing about the php community. Appreciate your advice! ------ timetraveller I can't talk for others but according to my experience I found that getting high quality Python/Django developers is much easier than PHP. Someone would expect the situation to be the other way around due to the larger PHP pool, but it's not. ~~~ rcarrigan87 Funny you say that because I built the current site in Django. This is definitely my fear!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Getting users for my niche product - hanskuder I recently launched the beta for http://gainstudio.com, a subscription-model scheduling, project management, and facility management tool for recording, film, and production studios.<p>I have a dozen or so beta testers who I've been working with throughout development, but it's time to put some real energy into driving lots more people to my site.<p>This is a pretty niche product. How would you market it? I have an adwords campaign set up, but haven't quite seen the volume I need to get signups. I've hit up the major bloggers in this arena with offers of discount codes and extended trials for their readers, but nobody has written anything yet. My next step is to go out to forums and other discussion sites and just start posting and conversing, but I think that could take some time to build up a critical mass.<p>Has anybody had luck with print advertising? What about industry trade shows? Any other suggestions?<p>Thanks! ====== ismarc I've got a friend that works as an audio producer at a recording studio here, and I've sent the link off to him. I'm not sure, but I think they have an on- site system they use, but it may be something like MS Exchange, I really hadn't thought of it as much of an issue because they have staff who are responsible for the billing aspects of studio time, including studio use and then any engineers/producers associated with the use. Since it's a billed product, I imagine actual use tracking rather than just scheduling would play a key part. I think your biggest hurdle will be that you need the head/ownder of the studio/facility to decide to use and roll out the product. I'd either find out where all the engineers hang out online and market directly there (ie, drive the bottom up recommendations for change) or go the bold route. You want to make studio's lives' easier. So do a search for the studios in your area, pick up the phone and keep working away until you get to someone with purchase authority. Then arrange a demo/sales pitch. I think your price ranges fit well for the small-medium sized studios, and if they're tracking the scheduling of 8 rooms, it's probably done in Excel and they aren't even thinking of looking. ------ paulsingh It's definitely going to come down to your own budget. When I launched SnailPad (www.snailpad.com) I decided that I wouldn't spend anything out of my own pocket -- if SnailPad could afford something on it's own, that's how I'd buy it. In reality, that meant that I pretty much had to cold call people all day for the first few weeks. In my case, I specifically targeted real estate agents, insurance salesmen and lawyers that had large print ads in my local newspapers. I figured that if they were already buying print stuff, I wouldn't have to convince them of the value. One other thing: you should include these words (in some variation) in any initial phone call or email you send someone: "I'm not trying to sell anything, just get advice..." :) Good luck! ------ danskil A question to ask yourself. If you were a "scheduling, project management, and facility management person or working for a recording, film, or production studio" where would your eyeballs be? Are there magazines that would be interested in featuring your product, rather than just putting an ad in it? Who are the movers and shakers that all of your potential clients look towards for advice? Can you get an interview with one of them, post the interview on your websites' blog. Looks like your product targets music studios...so go out and talk to them, ask what they're currently using, and see how you would be capable of solving their problems...use this opportunity to gain users and possibly evangelists. ------ hanskuder Thanks for the feedback. I've started cold-calling and cold-emailing and have been getting some good responses so far. ------ hanskuder Clickable link: <http://gainstudio.com>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is that true startups on small business space are too crowded? - fenghao120 Why ask: saw lots of big name in this space, groupon, living social, google, square, even apple ... and some "smart" products.<p>However: the fact is most of the SMBs are still struggling a lot on their business.<p>Why this happens, does it mean it need more innovation to jump in?<p>Or they just can't leverage the power of technology? ====== pedalpete I don't think the space is too crowded. For many opportunities, the sales force necessary and the dollar opportunities make it a significant challenge. Groupon and LivingSocial have to maintain a huge sales force to keep new daily deals in the pipeline. SMB's aren't serving themselves. Square is a one-time purchase with recurring revenue for the business, and a massive benefit to the business. Square also has a significant amount of money to spend on marketing. Google is the go to solution for e-mail, so again, a no brainer. Innovation (technical) isn't the solution to everything. I believe to break into this space you need sales innovation as well. Remember, many people in this space are non-technical, so selling them a technical solution that they don't NEED can be a challenge. ~~~ fenghao120 I am a big fan of one point u just mention "SMB aren't serving themselves" for the groupon livingsocial like products. I think "serving themselves" is the first step to really help them to boost their business, which must be very non-tech friendly, so that they can understand what happen there and trust the product. The sales innovation I think might be the most challenging part, since there is almost no virality between SMB. Maybe an accurate sales targeting on the tech early adopters among them could be a potential solution, just like the accurate ad for consumers. ------ dylanhassinger there are infinite opportunities in this space, always will be easiest way to make money is help other people make money	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Japanese man sets room ablaze, catches it all on internet livestream - lloydde http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/japanese-man-sets-room-ablaze-catches-youtube-vid-article-1.2386206 ====== lloydde "The robotic sounding voice (according to the Reddit comments) is commentators (via text to speech) on the live stream telling him useful things like to call the fire brigade, use a fire extinguisher, or even just to look behind where the fire is [spreading]." [http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/live-streamer- sets-room-on...](http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/live-streamer-sets-room-on- fire/) "Kotaku reports the man was injured along with his father, mother and another relative who was in the house at the time." [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/minecraft-fire- livestrea...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/minecraft-fire- livestream_56131e25e4b022a4ce5f444f)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Best of Kickstarter 2012 - sethbannon http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012 ====== evoxed TEXT-ONLY VERSION FOR MOBILE BROWSERS &C; \----- From groundbreaking projects to inspiring stories, 2012 was a year of many memorable moments on Kickstarter. To celebrate the year that was, our team put together this look back at some of our favorite projects and moments. We hope you enjoy! \----- Let's begin with some numbers In 2012 2,241,475 people pledged a total of $319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects Backers pledged $606.76 per minute to projects in 2012 \----- Of the 2.2 million people who backed a project in 2012 570,672 people backed two or more projects 50,047 people backed ten or more projects 452 people backed 100 or more projects \----- People in 177 countries backed a project in 2012 That's 90% of the countries in the world \----- Of Kickstarter's 13 creative categories Music had the most funded projects with 5,067 Games had the most money pledged at $83 million Art, Film, Music, Publishing, and Theater each had more than 1,000 funded projects \----- 17 projects raised $1 million+ in 2012 ~~~ evoxed _January_ 10% of the films at Sundance are Kickstarter-funded 19 films selected; four win top prizes (<http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/Sundance2012?ref=yir2012>) FUBAR hits the New York Times Best Sellers List ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1607639297/fubar-2-empir...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1607639297/fubar-2-empire- of-the-rising-dead?ref=yir2012)) The Kickstarter Popsicle Little Bee Pops celebrates backers with a new flavor ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/730155451/little-bee- pop...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/730155451/little-bee- pops/posts/160739?ref=yir2012)) Incident in New Baghdad nominated for an Oscar Second Kickstarter-funded film to be nominated ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1941167757/incident- in-n...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1941167757/incident-in-new- baghdad-oscar-qualifying-la-releas?ref=yir2012)) \----- _February_ Double Fine Adventure ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double- fine-a...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fine- adventure?ref=yir2012) ) kicks off a huge year for games Games in 2012: 561,574 backers $83,144,565 pledged 2,796 projects \----- _March_ Backers make Chattanooga the first US city with its own font Font integrated into bike lanes, billboards, and even the public library, then released online for free ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chatype/chatype-a- typefa...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chatype/chatype-a-typeface-for- chattanooga-tennessee?ref=yir2012)) Stanford teaches Kickstarter for class credit (Our Kickstarter School is still free) (<http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/storyviz?ref=yir2012>) A Kickstarter-funded bus stop in Georgia Athens artist spices up the morning commute ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1016187241/the-love- shac...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1016187241/the-love-shack-bus- stop?ref=yir2012)) \----- _April_ Google Maps integrates images from DIY mapping project ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1775485688/balloon- mappi...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1775485688/balloon-mapping- kits?ref=yir2012)) Dark Sky app predicts the weather ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky- hyperl...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jackadam/dark-sky-hyperlocal- weather-prediction-and-visuali?ref=yir2012)) Air Quality Egg makes fighting pollution awesome ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality- egg...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edborden/air-quality- egg?ref=yir2012)) Kickstarter turns three ([http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/happy-3rd-birthday- kickstart...](http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/happy-3rd-birthday- kickstarter?ref=yir2012)) \----- _May_ Classical music goes open source Musopen and Open Goldberg Variations release recordings to the public domain ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and- relea...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-release-free- music-without-copyrights?ref=yir2012)) ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open- goldberg-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open-goldberg- variations-setting-bach-free?ref=yir2012)) Cards Against Humanity tops the Amazon charts Friends make irreverent card game, sell 100,000+ copies, ruin family gatherings forever ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxtemkin/cards- against-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxtemkin/cards-against- humanity?ref=yir2012)) \----- _June_ A Kickstarter-funded opera premieres at the Kennedy Center 188 backers help produce Paola Prestini’s Oceanic Verses ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/MexicoSings/oceanic- vers...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/MexicoSings/oceanic-verses-an- opera?ref=yir2012)) MaKey MaKey inspires the world’s first banana piano One project, infinite possibilities ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joylabs/makey-makey- an-i...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joylabs/makey-makey-an-invention- kit-for-everyone?ref=yir2012)) Open source geiger counters measure radiation levels in Japan ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seanbonner/safecast-x- ki...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seanbonner/safecast-x-kickstarter- geiger-counter?ref=yir2012)) Musician writes songs for backers, including his grandma The cutest thing we saw all year ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2031742392/he-said- she-s...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2031742392/he-said-she-said- thats-what-she-said/posts/239704?ref=yir2012)) \----- _July_ Kentucky sixth-graders send a camera to space ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scifres/the-edge-and- bac...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scifres/the-edge-and- back?ref=yir2012)) Design firm Final Frontier develops a civilian space suit ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872281861/final- frontier...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872281861/final-frontier- designs-3g-space-suit?ref=yir2012)) Publisher's Weekly calls Kickstarter the #2 publisher of graphic novels ([http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/co...](http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry- news/comics/article/52925-is-kickstarter-the-2-graphic-novel-publisher.html)) Kickstarter gets parodied The New Yorker, The Daily Show, Portlandia, McSweeney's, The Onion, Funny or Die, and others make us laugh ([http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2012/07/30/cart...](http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2012/07/30/cartoons_20120723#slide=17)) (<http://www.kick-stopper.com/>) (<http://www.ifc.com/portlandia/videos/portlandia-kickstarter>) ([http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-the- official-k...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-the-official- kickstarter-page-for-greece)) ([http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/70f7ef3d34/bar-refaeli-s- se...](http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/70f7ef3d34/bar-refaeli-s-sex-tape- kickstarter)) \----- _August_ T-Rex wins Olympic gold Boxer Claressa Shields, subject of the doc T-Rex, triumphs in London (<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zcdc/t-rex/posts/286163>) 87 projects go to Burning Man Art cars, bathroom beacons, laser lights, oh my! (<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/search?term=burning+man>) Kickstarter-funded journalists cover the world (<http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/journalism?ref=yir2012>) \----- _September_ Amanda Palmer debuts in the Billboard Top Ten Thanks 24,883 backers with a block party ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda- palm...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer/amanda-palmer-the- new-record-art-book-and-tour?ref=yir2012)) The world's first pizza museum Philadelphians pay tribute to the glory that is pizza ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2023690459/pizza- brain-t...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2023690459/pizza-brain-the- worlds-first-pizza-museum-and-rest?ref=yir2012)) Kindergarten class launches experiments into space ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/1000-student-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569698176/1000-student- projects-to-the-edge-of-space?ref=yir2012)) XOXO Fest explores the creative universe Kickstarter-funded festival unites artists, creators, and technologists ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/xoxo- festival...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waxpancake/xoxo- festival?ref=yir2012)) Projects transform public spaces The Lowline, Kulturpark, and Logan Parklet create new urban environments ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/855802805/lowline-an- und...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/855802805/lowline-an-underground- park-on-nycs-lower-east-sid?ref=yir2012)) ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1353197694/kulturpark?re...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1353197694/kulturpark?ref=yir2012)) ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/122241678/lets-build- the...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/122241678/lets-build-the-logan- parklet?ref=yir2012)) \----- _October_ The first hackerspace opens in Baghdad ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bilal/baghdad- community-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bilal/baghdad-community- hackerspace-workshops?ref=yir2012)) Kickstarter opens to UK creators Picade first to launch, Chime Pavilion first to succeed ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/picade-the- arca...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/picade-the-arcade- cabinet-kit-for-your-raspberry-p?ref=yir2012)) ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/georginanaishmsa/the- chi...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/georginanaishmsa/the-chime- pavillion?ref=yir2012)) Photography exhibition travels across Afghanistan ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/52943134/streets-of- afgh...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/52943134/streets-of-afghanistan- exhibition-hits-the-streets?ref=yir2012)) \----- _November_ OpenROV sends underwater robots around the world ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openrov/openrov-the- open...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openrov/openrov-the-open-source- underwater-robot?ref=yir2012)) Atlanta's first squirrel census Turns out, there are even more squirrels than we thought ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jamiewashere/inman- park-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jamiewashere/inman-park- squirrel-census?ref=yir2012)) Windowfarms grow in the American Museum of Natural History ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to- gro...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to-grow-and- share-with-new-windowfarms?ref=yir2012)) \----- _December_ 63 Kickstarter-funded films (<http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/filmsintheaters?ref=yir2012>) open in theaters The first marriage proposal via Kickstarter project ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1042570429/the-last- door...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1042570429/the-last-door- episodic-horror-adventure/posts/366903?ref=yir2012)) The Griz Coat ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hansr/griz- coat?ref=yir2...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hansr/griz- coat?ref=yir2012)) makes bear hugs even better (Aaron's dancing skills not included) ~~~ evoxed _2012: The Stats_ Total pledged $319,786,629 +221% from 2011 Total collected $274,391,721 +238% from 2011 Total backers 2,241,475 +134% from 2011 Pageviews 709 million +279% from 2011 Unique visitors 86 million +252% from 2011 \----- Category Launched Successful Pledged Pledges Art 3,783 1,837 $10,477,939 155,782 Comics 1,170 542 $9,242,233 177,070 Dance 512 381 $1,773,304 23,807 Design 1,882 759 $50,124,041 536,469 Fashion 1,659 434 $6,317,799 83,067 Film & Video 9,600 3,891 $57,951,876 647,361 Food 1,828 688 $11,117,486 138,204 Games 2,796 911 $83,144,565 1,378,143 Music 9,086 5,067 $34,953,600 522,441 Photography 1,197 427 $3,283,635 46,550 Publishing 5,634 1,666 $15,311,251 262,738 Technology 831 312 $29,003,932 270,912 Theater 1,787 1,194 $7,084,968 95,225 \----- Thank you! Thanks to everyone for making 2012 an unforgettable year. Here's to an amazing 2013! Love, Team Kickstarter Perry, Yancey, Charles, Lance, Cassie, Fred, Andrew, Brett, Cindy, Daniella, Cedric, Samuel, Kendel, Mike, Justin, Meaghan, Tieg, Elisabeth, Jed, Jared, Cooper, Nicole, Aaron, Zack, Stephanie, Aurora, Callan, Jessica, Alex, Chris, Andrew, Dan, Brandon, Tomasz, Katherine, Bridget, Erik, Emily, Shannon, Niina, Bethany, Ian, Luke, Michal, Aaron, Eli, Chris, Leland, Michael, Ellen, Shayne & Jake (<http://www.kickstarter.com/team?ref=yir2012>) P.S.: We're hiring! (<http://www.kickstarter.com/jobs?ref=yir2012>) ------ edw519 Slightly off-topic, but not really... That design is gorgeous. Maybe not the most practical, but I couldn't stop clicking the arrow to see more. I don't remember being this excited about eye candy since the first time I saw Flash. Is this a trend or an outlier? ~~~ guelo Awful design. It would be much more digestible as a single page of data that didn't screw up your back button. ~~~ moistgorilla I liked it, but I agree, not being to back into the hacker news comments in one click is frustrating. ~~~ marknutter I'm surprised there are people who don't open their links in new tabs on HN. ~~~ redstripe I find managing tabs annoying. What I would really like is for ctrl/alt clicking the back button to take me back to the previous domain. ~~~ hnriot How is it annoying "managing" tabs? They really aren't that difficult. If you open the link in a new tab, then when you're done you close the tab, it will go back to the previous domain (because they undo in the order they were created) - in other words, exactly what you wanted. ------ andrewljohnson All I can say is... holy cow. I had no idea Kickstarter had so much influence, from Oscar nominations, to amazing technical products. ~~~ Posibyte I've heard, and thought, about all the bad rap they got for the worthless ideas that were presented. From what I've seen in the past couple years, it looks like Kickstarter is allowing the kind of change, the avenue to enable and realize, that was difficult or impossible to achieve in the past. I should be more clear, I think it's good for positive change that couldn't have otherwise happened. ~~~ InclinedPlane I honestly think that Kickstarter and crowd funding will be one of the most significant developments of the 21st century. It empowers individuals and strengthens the bond between artists/fans or makers/consumers in a quite dramatic way, and I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of its potential and its disruptive and transformative impact on the economy, society, and culture. ------ ebertx I know Kickstarter has been around for awhile, but 2012 seems like the year it really took off. I'll be very curious to see what percentage of funded projects see completion. I genuinely hope it's high, because I would like to see Kickstarter be a permanent fixture in the world of project funding. ~~~ liquids Near the end of the presentation they show the numbers on launched/successful <http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category> Art 49% Comics 46% Dance 74% Design 40% Fashion 26% Film & Video 41% Food 38% Games 33% Music 56% Photography 36% Publishing 30% Technology 38% Theater 67% ~~~ chas Same data, but sorted and formatted. Dance 74% Theater 67% Music 56% Art 49% Comics 46% Film & Video 41% Design 40% Food 38% Technology 38% Photography 36% Games 33% Publishing 30% Fashion 26% ------ sami36 I've backed over 20 projects on Kickstarter & I check it daily for promising upcoming projects. I know of no other use of my money that delivers a better bang for the buck in terms of making a difference. I'm grateful it exists. I just wish it would grow faster. Launch in more countries, accept other forms of payment, enlarge the scope of projects it accepts. It's such an amazing mechanism for raising money. ------ melling I've backed almost 30 projects on Kickstarter. I managed enough diversity to finished my pie. :-) However, I'd still like to see more projects that do big things. Like build a rocket engine: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hermesspace/hermes- space...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hermesspace/hermes- spacecraft?ref=live) There's another site that claims to do real science. <http://petridish.org> Wouldn't it be great if we could crowd source, and solve, "real" problems too? ~~~ VikingCoder Do you mind if I ask? Are you rich? Did you just contribute $1? Did you really "buy the thing?" How many big, crazy perks have you bought? I really want to know more about those 452 people that funded 100 or more. ~~~ melling I'm not rich, but I'm old enough not to have to worry about $25 here and there. For this project, I did give $250, which was the amount needed to get it across the line on the last day. Most projects are only $10-$50. Here's my list: <http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/982897515> Personally, I find it very satisfying to give to a worthwhile project. I live near NYC where it costs $30-$40 for two people to go to a movie with refreshments. In many ways, Kickstarter is money better spent. ~~~ corporalagumbo You're amazing! ------ replicatorblog Interesting note: There wasn't a single mention of the Pebble watch or Ouya game console, by far their two biggest financial successes. Kickstarter is not a store. <http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store> ------ adambenayoun This is amazing. By the way - it seems they did around $14M in revenues. From their help page[1] - they state they're charging a 5% of collected money from successfully funded projects. Knowing that $274,391,721 has been pledged on successful projects. [1][http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#Wha...](http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter%20basics#WhatAreTheFees) ------ peterhajas How many of the projects delivered products to their backers within 3 months of the Estimated Delivery Date? ~~~ arrrg You are completely wrong about what is precious about Kickstarter. If you expect projects to be on time you couldn’t have picked a worse thing than Kickstarter. That’s not what it’s good at. And it’s nevertheless completely awesome. Take the Double Fine Adventure: It will completely overshoot the estimated delivery date by a long, long time. However, following its progress has been one of the most awesome media consumption things I have done this year. I don‘t even care if the game is ever released (well, I do, but only because I want Double Fine to do well, not for my own enjoyment). At Kickstarter you give money to something that might or might not work out in the end, but that will most definitely overshoot its estimated delivery date – if it doesn’t it’s a fluke. That’s how you have to see it. Maybe that’s not something for you, but for me it’s great fun. And that’s all that matters. ~~~ peterhajas I certainly understand the point of "crowd funding". > If you expect projects to be on time you couldn’t have picked a worse thing > than Kickstarter... Take the Double Fine Adventure: It will completely > overshoot the estimated delivery date by a long, long time This is a problem with estimation. It's way worse to overshoot a delivery time than deliver before it. This is poor project planning. If I would have known this, I perhaps would not have backed Double Fine Adventures. > At Kickstarter you give money to something that might or might not work out > in the end, but that will most definitely overshoot its estimated delivery > date I disagree fundamentally. If a project is funded, then _it is funded_. The backer rewards aren't qualified with "if we're successful". They're "you will get ___". > if it doesn’t it’s a fluke. If I didn't get my backer reward, then they stole from me. If I do, and I get it late, then they poorly managed their delivery date. ~~~ manuelflara >> if it doesn’t it’s a fluke. >If I didn't get my backer reward, then they stole from me. <http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store> ------ jakozaur Kickstartes is absolutely amazing. Any 3rd party statistics of project deliveries after they were funded? Delays are common, but they are acceptable (at least for me), but I wonder how much actually never delivered anything close to the promises. Anyway, I would guess it is still far better than most VCs. ------ eggbrain Word to the wise -- open this link up in a new tab unless you like clicking back more than a dozen times ~~~ bunkat In Chrome, you can just hold down the back button to get a list of recent urls - the referrer is at the bottom. Makes getting back to where you were after long slide shows easy. ~~~ bobbles Right clicking on the back button will also perform this function. ------ arjn I've backed several projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo over the last 1 year and am happy with them. Most of the projects were successfully funded and I have received the products. Sometimes I wish there was more. ------ niftylettuce If you plan to launch a Kickstarter in 2013, then get in touch with the Teelaunch team; we'd love to work with you. <https://teelaunch.com> We print and ship your t-shirt rewards. ------ egypturnash "In 2012 2,241,475 people pledged a total of $319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects" Kickstarter and Amazon Payments both took 5% of that, for a total of $15,989,331 apiece. Not that I'm complaining; $5,928 (before KS/Amazon's cuts) of that $320k was for one of my own projects. ------ danieldrehmer 18k projects?? Think of all the ukulele players needed to create the bg music on all those pitch videos! ------ hawkharris Kickstarter is a great organization and I think that this page, for the most part, nicely showcases its impact in 2012. That said, they might some lose viewers' attention by opening with several pages of stats. As a public relations student specializing in social cause-related campaigns, I learned that it's usually most effective to choose a "killer fact" (or 1-3 facts) and to tether those facts to a memorable short story with visuals. To be fair, the stats interest me and I'm sure that they appeal to other HN readers, who probably have an above-average ability to appreciate data. Just saying that all this info, when presented to a broader (non-technical) audience, is probably too much of a good thing. ------ Mz I wish I knew how to do the kickstarter thing. And thank you to those folks who reposted some of the info here. My Android isn't coping so well with it. It makes me grateful to be alive in the Internet era and reminds me of all the ways in which my life has been made infinitely better by the Internet and technology and the infofmation age. ~~~ egypturnash 1. make a cool thing[1] 2. make a pitch video 3. launch kickstarter campaign 4. promote kickstarter 5. make and ship the final products and various higher-tier perks 6. profit![2] [1] alternatively: 0. spend a decade or two building up a reputation 1. promise to make a cool thing [2] assuming you don't end up eating all your profits and then some on manufacturing and shipping those perks. ~~~ Mz I have spent a decade or more building up a reputation. Part of that is a good thing. Part of that, I am still trying to live down. If "make a cool thing" were easy, I wouldn't need to ask. I have done some very cool things. I don't know how to turn that into some kind of "product" (for lack of a better word, because it galls me to use that one since it was a favorite of someone incredibly disrespectful who liked spitting in my face about how my work is "worthless" and "not monetizable", though they found it personally life changing). I am still trying to wrap my brain around a few things and I am very clear that there are logistical challenges inherent in some of my goals. In other words, some of this is not me, it is the nature of the beast of what I wish to do. I sometimes wish to god I could stop being me and just become some money grubbing type, and to hell with my personal values, etc. But after 47 years of being me, it seems I am very unlikely to stop being me. Besides, it seems sort of boring to take that approach. I think it would be fun to pull off my goals. :-) But thank you for replying. ------ lazerwalker Of everyone who backed a project in 2012, only around 25% backed more than one. That seems kinda low to me. ~~~ robryan Many people are being drawn to a particular project on kickstarter rather than the brand as a whole. Given that it doesn't seem unusual. ------ acremades Check out the kickstarter for startups here <http://www.rockthepost.com> ------ ceautery That popsicle sounds pretty damned good. ------ DocG Not readable on nexus 7:/ ~~~ evoxed I'll post a text only version in a sec. ~~~ npsimons Thanks; even some of us on full computers don't like to have to disable flashblock and noscript just to view what is essentially a list. ~~~ evoxed Warning, it's a long one! Refresh and you'll see it, but I'll try and fix up the formatting too. Seems I mussed my double returns and a few other things. Whole thing: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5028958> The list (month-by-month): <http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=5028959> Stats overview: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5028961> ------ nhangen They are certainly great at self-promotion, I'll give them that. ------ wissler Congress needs to allow "poor" people to become investors, that'd make Kickstarter 1000X more effective because you'd be able to purchase shares in these companies rather than merely being promised a one-time thing. ~~~ nakedrobot2 from this article: [http://allthingsd.com/20121105/kickstarter-ceo-no-ipo-for- us...](http://allthingsd.com/20121105/kickstarter-ceo-no-ipo-for-us-and-no- equity-crowdfunding-either/) " Kickstarter has no plans to get into equity crowdfunding — where small backers would get a piece of the companies they fund — despite legislative efforts like the JOBS Act to make such investments more accessible and legal. “We think the most disruptive aspect [of Kickstarter] is the removal of the investment component,” Chen said. “People are supporting projects because they want to see them happen. It’s so different than giving money because you want to make a profit.” " ~~~ zanny I think they are right, that is where all information based media needs to head. It is a bygone concept to keep charging per unit for something infinite and have it funded by people trying to make money off the sales. Makes much more sense for people to put money into what they want and directly fund it. ------ FredBrach Sincerely amazing. It's just unbeleivable. For me, Kickstarter is the startup of the year 2012. They did amazingly well as a company _and_ by the way make possible so much good things for people and creators. Thanks so much Kickstarter.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Culture fit hiring - ashbrahma http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/friends_without_benefits ====== jesusmichael Wow... I can't imagine a stupider way to hire someone... what does social networking mastery have to do with driving a forklift?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask: Will coding ever be made redundant? - gitgud Some friends of mine (mechanical engineers) once asked me (software engineer) if I was worried about my career in the software industry, as they were certain that apps are just made in drag and drop editors and people didn't need to code any more... Thus programming was becoming redundant.<p>This seemed ridiculous at the time (still does) but I sometimes wonder if code will ever be made obsolete? what could replace it?<p>After looking at countless graphical implementations of programs and dealing with the frustration of GUI builders, I just can't see <i>CODE</i> ever going away. To me code is the essence of automation, the logic and brains of a system. It would appear you could replace everything else but that... ====== 666lumberjack The idea of drag-and-drop editors replacing code is laughable as far as I'm concerned. We might eventually see compilers evolve to the point where a specification written in natural language can be translated into a program automatically, but as the old joke goes at that point writing a sufficiently detailed specification _is_ the programming. ------ swatcoder This reduces to the question of: will technical innovation slow down? Hand-crafted code, composed by thoughtful experts, is a really useful tool when _exploring_ new technologies or when _adapting_ technologies to new industries. But as when a technology-industry fit matures, and innovation slows down, you can start working in larger grains that require less crafting and less expertise. The problem domains are understood, the tools are stable, and there’s an affordance for inefficiencies. People with industry expertise and vaguely literate in programming concepts can build the tools they need without the intervention of a professional engineer. This maturation process has already happened a thousand times in various industries, and sometimes we see it disrupted by new innovation. If there continues to be widespread innovation and disruption, we’ll still need lots and lots of professional programmers writing code. If, instead, industry problems can genuinely be optimized or technical innovation can encounter practical limits, professional coding will narrow to smaller and smaller niches. We’re probably still a long way from the latter scenario. I’d say your career as a software engineer is safe. Your daughter’s? Harder to say. ------ CM30 Yes and no. No, we'll never see a complete replacement for coding. Unless we get literally god like AI that can code by magic, it's simply not possible to replace all programmers/developers/coders with a tool that lets people do the same thing with a drag and drop or WYSIWYG interface. It's simply too complicated for that, and the more ambitious edge cases simply can't be built like that. At the same time however, a lot of people's needs are also quite modest, and a fairly simple system that could do a few things well could replace many of those needs. Look at the CMS market for example. For many sites and web apps, something like WordPress or Drupal can indeed be used to build them with minimal coding experience, just by adding in a few plugins and a custom theme. Same goes with online services like Shopify or Squarespace or what not. For many simple use cases, that's enough. Another good example would probably be the Super Mario World tool 'Blockreator'. It's basically a GUI for building simple interactive elements for the game, which lets you drag and drop commands like 'if condition X do Y' as well as 'set whatever variable to this value' (like the timer, power up, coin count, etc). It's not gonna do everything a power user wants, but for many people who just want a few extras in game, it's a time saver. So the answer is yes and no. Yes at the low end you'll likely see more and more services/tools/whatever crop up that make hand coding less necessary than it was in the past, and many individuals and small businesses won't need anything more complex than that. But coding will always exist in some form, since the high end requires bespoke stuff that can't easily be done through some fancy tool or service. ------ avoidwork Code is just instructions, so ... yeah humans can totally be replaced with something more efficient & better... but what does 'better' really mean? is the output lower latency? higher concurrency? did it do something amazing with little resources? I've only been in the industry 20yr, but I've met a wide range of people with different goals that drive many factors of many outcomes; as long as people are in the picture stuff is going to be inefficient from 1 pov, while at the same time human diversity can be a huge pool of talent/skill/creativity that a code generator can't have by design (it's solving for efficiency). It would be a mistake to think things are never going to change. I think it's more reasonable to plan for change and try to keep a head of it by being relevant in a field that interests you, and has demand. ------ BjoernKW Some aspects of coding as we think of it today probably will be made redundant and in fact have continuously been for quite some time now. Higher-level programming languages, abstractions, libraries, IDEs: These are all tools that automated one or several aspects of coding However, short of an AGI some tasks will still require a human being, particularly the translation of business requirements into code. Humans get this wrong frequently enough due to communication failures. I don't see how a machine without at least human-level intelligence could perform better at this. ------ m11a Consider website builders. Have they made web developers redundant? Generally, website builders suck. They do not allow for the customisation and flexibility required. Static site generators, such as Jekyll, are pretty good for their limited scope, but tools such as Webs generally remain bad for any purpose. I don't believe some kind of drag + drop editor will replace programming. Even if some kind of editor could, additionally, design underlying functionality and design well, programming also involves a certain style of thinking. Mathematical thinking, for example, is not only applicable in research mathematics. I don't think "business people" could design apps better than us, even if such a tool exists. Indeed, the converse has been true, however (software engineers have indeed managed to replace, to some extent, business people). Startups have thrived on the idea of not monetising early, I think that's something missing in traditional business. I don't see software engineers being replaced by drag+drop editors, or the typical users of such editors, ever. Conversely, I believe software engineering is one of the most secure job fields there is (some others being mathematicians, scientists, journalists, etc.) - though I may have a bias in this respect. What may be true, however, is software engineers being replaced, to some extent for some tasks, by their own creations. Although it may be an interesting discussion, it usually follows a lot of hypothesis and any evidence-based discussion on that matter tends to be moot. ------ codegeek Coding is a means of getting something done. They are just set of instructions that computers can process. So technically, there is an argument to be made that tomorrow we could have a new way of creating instructions for computers and not through human coding? Who knows. Just like when cars replaced horses, it did not change the fact that people still need to travel. Just the "how they travel" part changed. ~~~ m11a Indeed, we could see industries change. Technology itself has changed many others intensively, who's to say it itself cannot be changed. Though, unless we can create some self-refining process to create software automatically, some group of people must be creating it. Unless another group, other than software engineers, would be better and more able to apply their current skills to whatever coding becomes in the future, it is more likely that it will simply just be software engineers refining the way they work, rather than being replaced by a different group of professionals. ------ sloaken A friend told me a story from the early 80s. He had double majored in CS and Accounting. He was interviewing and the guy told him programming was doomed. EVERY thing he needed he could do with this new fancy spreadsheet. LOL When I went to school I had to learn assembly language. Even then C was a good replacement for it, but I still see jobs for people who can program assembly. WTF... ------ artemisyna Act of software engineering overall probably no, aspects of it yes. Just like how industrial jobs are increasingly becoming "human manages machines doing labor" rather than "human does labor", I imagine the same will happen to coding. A computer won't be able to write all your code for you, but it will become more efficient to work in conjunction with one. That's already happening with lots of existing tasks related to software engineering. (Searching through code, linting, etc.) ML will mean there will be more of them. ------ segmondy Yes, some parts of coding will be made redundant. It's already happening partially with APIs, everything doesn't have to be built in house anymore. ------ DrNuke Dystopian, self-programming molochs making everything but themselves redundant? Enter deep reinforcement learning 2030.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to Master Linux? - leeshire I've changed my pc into a Ubuntu machine. what are some resources to get into the world of linux and master it from begining?<p>I like it more than windows but want to learn more about it including the terminal.<p>which distro should I go with between Debian and Ubuntu? I'm also in the process of learning web development and computer science so I figured linux is a good machine for it. ====== svennek First of all, the distro you use doesn't really matter that much in the end. Two distros you definitely should not use from the beginning are Arch and Gentoo. Both are great distros, but way to complex for a beginner. As a beginner be sure to take one of the popular ones, so that you have a large array of packages and help (forums, wikis and such). Also, consider installing some of the others as virtual machines on your computer. So that you can try the different things on different distros without reinstalling all the time. Consider having one of the following your daily driver and the others in vms: \- Ubuntu or debian (both debian family) \- Centos or fedora (both redhat family) \- Manjaro (arch family) You could also add SuSE and Slackware (both their own families) Use the machine as your daily driver and accept that mastery is a journey and it takes (a long) time. Getting good at the terminal merely requires two things, first you must decide to use it often, and secondly time where you are using it must pass.. ------ mixmastamyk Distro doesn’t matter much to be honest. The problem is that this question covers a wide number of fields. The art of unix programming is a good book to get your bearings: [http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/](http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/) Then learn a shell like bash, zsh, or fish thoroughly. A scripting language like Python can’t hurt. Building a custom kernel and toolchain is a fun process as well. That’s plenty to get started. Good luck. ;-) ~~~ CyberFonic The "Unix Philosophy" section is solid gold. With those principles in mind many other aspects suddenly make sense. Might be a good idea to keep that page bookmarked and return back to it, often. ------ CyberFonic I'm sure you'll get lots of conflicting advice. There really is no high road that's better than the others. Although I've been using variations of Unix since Version 5 running on a PDP-11/45, I use an Ubuntu desktop system for everyday use. Simple because it is easy to keep up to date and works well both as a graphical environment and with the terminal. My setup includes 2 LCDs in landscape mode for graphical apps and a third LCD in portrait mode exclusively as a terminal with lots of open tabs. As for getting started, have a look at [https://www.lifewire.com/beginners- guide-to-linux-4090233](https://www.lifewire.com/beginners-guide-to- linux-4090233). Then you just need to frequently refer to the man pages and the many other guides you will find with Google. [https://unix.stackexchange.com/](https://unix.stackexchange.com/) provides reasonably high quality answers to many common and not so common questions. I recommend that you learn to use terminal commands well. As a pro tip, if you are using 'vi', CTRL-] is the same as ESC. When you get used to using that your speed will increase significantly. Oh, and remap the CAPS-LOCK key to be a CTRL key. You don't want to get RSI in your left pinkie. ------ NotZachari Distro wise, I'd probably go Ubuntu simply because it's the most "mainstream ready" option. There's not much you run into that is not going to play nice with it compared to a lot of distros. It also takes a lot of pain out of the swap out of the switch at times due to that. Honestly, the best advice I can give is to just use it as you would any other OS. It seems like common sense advice, but you really pick up a lot just by treating as if that's all you have to work with. The most important thing is to master the terminal. Once you know the basics, you're set. At this point, swapping to Linux has never been easier so you won't run into as many compatibility issues and whatnot like you would have a decade or so ago. Explore. You're trying something new. There's no correct answer here. It's like picking a main in SSB. Tier levels don't mean shit if you hate who you're playing with. Figure out how to survive if you were left with only the terminal, and you'll be fine. ------ Yaa101 Most important is to know where your "stuff" is. Learn how the filesystem on your disks are built up. Try to use the terminal as there is the hidden world of linux capabilities, often commandline programs are very efficient, they save you a lot of mouse movements and clicks. Install mc to help you within the terminal. ~~~ leeshire interesting you mention filesystems earlier my pc was saying /dev/sda2 contains a file system with errors. I googled and did fsck I think and some other code fixed the problem but don't actually know what happened just google helped me fix it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Can anyone site an example of a Knowledge Base? - stabiilize "A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems which were the first knowledge-based systems." - Wikipedia<p>Projects, code, research, anything<p>Thanks in advance ====== Cozumel Have you checked out Semantic Wiki?[0] Here's a list of sites using it[1] It's basically wikipedia software (mediawiki) with structured data markup that lets you extract (sometimes dynamic) data and use it meaningfully. [0][https://www.semantic- mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki](https://www.semantic- mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki) [1][https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Semantic_statistics](https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Semantic_statistics) ~~~ stabiilize cool, though what is the difference between this and wikidata? ~~~ Cozumel It's a lot more established and used on a ton more sites, covering stuff that wikipedia/wikidata doesn't, wikidata also looks to be just a subset of semantic wiki code and not as full featured or capable. Wikipedia explains it better [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki#Semantic_Me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki#Semantic_MediaWiki_and_Wikidata)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
4chan Founder Unleashes Canvas On The World - jedwhite http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/31/4chan-founder-unleases-canvas-networks/ ====== tseabrooks It sounded interesting so I clicked through to the actual 'Canvas' website. I am a little disappointed to see that the site is set up to require facebook for requesting invites. It seems like we are getting closer and closer to facebook being our single online "ID Card" and I'm more than a little afraid of that. I don't think facebook is evil, though I know some people do, I just think they have a more caviler attitude towards privacy than I'd like. I hope we end up with a more open / distributed way to authenticate and identify ourselves... Maybe open ID could catch on if facebook became an open ID provider? ~~~ thomasz In this case it might be possible that he just doesn't want /b/ to turn it into a giant ocean of puke right from the beginning. ~~~ redthrowaway Most of the people on /b/ who would be a problem have facebook trolling accounts, anyway. ------ athesyn That looks awful, it looks like 4chan but trying to appeal to the facebook crowd. Where did the 625k go? ~~~ brandnewlow "The Facebook crowd" is...everybody. ~~~ sfphotoarts \-- except me ~~~ Dylanlacey Congratulations, you are a very special snowflake, in a bucket of fairly non- moneytizable snowflakes. ------ ashbrahma Anyone have a beta invite? ------ kmfrk I think it's really impressive - the design is fantastic, especially for a startup whose site just launch. I, too, think Facebook is a bottleneck to keep the tossers out, but I hope Poole/moot finds another way to throttle abuse and trolls eventually. ------ desigooner so .. am i right in saying that it's a SFW + a more PC version of 4chan with a few elements similar to say, buzzfeed.com ? ------ leif Am I a total moron, or is the signup site broken? I've tried my facebook email address, the email address I used to sign up for an invite, my facebook username, and a username of my own choosing, and in all cases, it tells me "Connecting with Facebook is required." ------ jefe78 I feel like this will also degenerate into another cesspool. What value is this to society? ~~~ forwardslash It's probably less of being valuable to society and more of finally monetizing the culture he helped create. ~~~ jefe78 I can certainly appreciate that. Just seems like he's a pretty talented guy who could be developing something of value. Just my humble opinion! :P ~~~ joshu Telling someone that what they choose to work on is not of value is very condescending.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Json-Base – Database built as JSON files - davidbarker https://github.com/Devs-Garden/jsonbase ====== bvinc Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production. The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time. Next, his problem was that the database would get corrupt sometimes when something bad happened in the middle of writing the file. His solution was to put the entire JSON format inside of a JSON string. If it could be parsed successfully, then he knew the whole file was written. Then all he needed were "backup" files for each table, in case the current one was corrupt. Next, his problem was that querying and iterating through a large table performed badly, since it required parsing the entire thing first. Querying several times required the whole file to be parsed every time. The solution was to move SOME of the tables over to JSON-inside-SQLite. EDIT: Oh yeah, the next problem was how to structure the data inside of sqlite. He decided to make a single table called "kitchen_sink" that held every JSON value. There was a column that said which "collection" it belonged to. There was another column that represented the row's primary key. So you could quickly query for a collection name, and a primary key, and get the full JSON row. So the next problem was that you couldn't query quickly for things that weren't the primary key. So new columns had to be added called "opt_key1" and "opt_key2" where certain rows could put key values, and indexes could be added on those columns, so you could quickly query by it's first optional key, or it's second optional key. ~~~ boynamedsue It's easy to get a little laugh from this, but congrats to the guy for exploring. Now he knows first-hand the inordinate challenge and can describe it in detail, but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later. ~~~ xienze > but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later. Depends, I’ve known people who have gone through similar experiences and still poo-poo all those “unnecessarily bloated” solutions like a proper database. ~~~ colecut I make crappy thrown together frontends and will probably forever poo-poo the 'unnecessarily bloated' js frameworks ------ chmod775 You definitely shouldn't use this in production. Looking at the code there's: \- race conditions everywhere. \- bad and inconsistent formatting, which doesn't help with the \- huge if-else monstrosities. \- Also uses synchronous IO and asynchronous IO randomly. \- Uses try-catch liberally, doesn't check the caught errors, and just re- tries blindly forever in some cases. If you do any parallel updates/inserts/removals with this "database" you're pretty much guaranteed to lose data. Updates are essentially: 1. read table, 2. make changes, 3. save table. Which at least would work if it was all synchronous. I know this is going to sound harsh, but building databases is hard for even the most experienced coders, and whoever wrote this is clearly at the other end of that spectrum. [https://github.com/Devs- Garden/jsonbase/blob/master/tables.j...](https://github.com/Devs- Garden/jsonbase/blob/master/tables.js#L1664) ~~~ adamredwoods They're using readFileSync? Doesn't this lock up the thread? ~~~ mbreese It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at JavaScript like this, but I would guess that the thread lock would only exist so long as the read() call is running. That returns and then the write is initiated. It doesn’t look like there is a lock that exists throughout the update callback. If that’s missing, then if you had two threads/processes operating on the same table, you’d all but guarantee one of those update calls would be lost (in the best case scenario). Or maybe there a different locking mechanism in place that my cursory look missed? ------ russnewcomer I did something vaguely similar to this recently, and I still maintain it was a good choice. I volunteered to write a medical visit recording app for an NGO in a developing country (a friend works with the NGO and asked me if I would help), and they have almost no budget, no guarantees of internet connectivity when their folks are in the field, and the likelihood that they may be using this software for years. So I wrote a C# app that uses Winforms, and stores all data as JSON files, the 'table' structure is basically directories in the file system. It lets them share visit file by import/exporting a zip file of the JSON via sneakernet USB drives [super naive last record written wins], does not rely on an internet connection anywhere at all ever, and all files are stored in plain JSON so that they can conceivably in the future do some data analysis on it. Their alternate plan was to continue using paper, or some terrible regular reconciliation of excel spreadsheets. Having said all that and defending my decision on this single use-basically-I- wanted-to-have-independent-JSON-instead-of-SQLite-so-in-the-future-maybe-have- a-web-function-to-sync solution, This feels like a different use case. ~~~ jaspax I strongly approve of this sort of thing. Using dead-simple and human-readable formats is a big win for things like this, even if it isn't architecturally "correct". It sounds like your decision was a good one for the use case you were looking at. ~~~ sangfroid_bio It is great until your charity gets acquihired by a big think tank/bigger charity/international aid group and most doctors/charity operators are not known for their talent at scaling software. ~~~ russnewcomer In this case, this NGO is not going to get acquihired. It's more likely that I'll get an email in 5 years from someone who I don't recognize asking me if I know anything about this program because my email has been attached to this thing they got gifted from a dead project, and have been using after all of the original people have moved on. :) ------ sanqui Sounds like how MongoDB was born. I believe that has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. ~~~ kevsim Was my first thought as well. Mongo stores things as BSON rather than JSON but that feels more or less like an implementation detail. ------ rubyn00bie I'm not trying to be a huge asshole here, but this has zero tests and just saves json files to disk. There's literally a full readme and contributors guide but zero tests for something that's supposed to store data for you? For a community that loves it some Jepsen analysis, I can't for the life of me figure out why this has been up-voted so many times. This is just saving JSON file to disk. I'd argue this is harder than using Redis (flushing to disk) or (vomits in mouth) Mongo. Or shit, just use your filesystem and `jq`, you'll have something likely faster, safer, and more maintainable. ~~~ identity0 What are you talking about? They have tests right here: [https://github.com/Devs- Garden/jsonbase/blob/master/test.js](https://github.com/Devs- Garden/jsonbase/blob/master/test.js) Just uncomment the tests you want to run! Easier than using a testing library IMO. ~~~ choward I can't tell if you're being serious but one of the main features of tests is they are automated. They should be able to run as part of the build. And just because you're not using a library doesn't mean you shouldn't have assertions. All these "tests" do is log. What do I check the output for? All you need to do to have a somewhat respectable build is uncomment those tests, make them clean up after themselves, change the console logging to be assertions instead, and make them run on GitHub. ------ jaywalk It's all fun and games until this ends up in somebody's production environment. ~~~ alecco And there's never a serious consequence to the ones who did it. By then they switched to a new position somewhere else. Like most prima donnas. And this shows that deep, deep down they know they are fake. ~~~ mongojunction That sounds like it comes from some specific experience you had... but it's pretty uncalled for to apply it so confidently to someone you don't know. Don't be mean, right? Actually, another view is that there's nothing wrong with tinkering and DIY. Perl, JS, Redis all came from people hacking their own solutions (as far as I know). Also, many big software orgs build extensive internal tools themselves. Plus, making your own stuff is a lot of fun. You should try it sometime (if you haven't already) :) ~~~ jfkebwjsbx There is nothing bad about writing your own solutions. What is bad is putting them in production when you don't have a clue about the domain. ~~~ mongojunction Being ignorant didn't make you a prima donna tho, as above says. Also, they have to have some clue about the domain, because the domain is their own problem and they're writing a solution for it. So I don't think we can really just someone as not having any clue about their own engineering challenges.... especially if they're working solutions to them.... Antirez said literally he didn't know about existing solutions when he went to write redis, and he and redis are awesome. nothing bad about that but I get your point about bad solutions are bad but that's sort of a tautology, doesn't add much value, and who are we to judge someone else's solutions are bad we don't know everything about their use case. Again... even if we can say that you choosing someone else's technology for your problem is not a good solution we just can't criticize the author because it's your responsibility what you choose. so I just don't think it's valid to criticize the author ~~~ jfkebwjsbx > they have to have some clue about the domain, because the domain is their > own problem They can be lifelong experts on their problem, yet have no clue about writing a database engine and low-level programming in general. > Antirez said literally he didn't know about existing solutions when he went > to write redis Nobody is born with knowledge. The difference is that Antirez studied previous solutions, studied how to do it, and then applied that knowledge right. Instead, that person did the equivalent of building a bridge disregarding everything humans learnt about it since the Roman empire. It will not be a surprise if the bridge ends up collapsing. ------ tobr So much pessimism! Not sure if the author is here, but it would be interesting to hear what makes this different from, say, Lowdb. Also, the writing in the README feels sloppy, which doesn’t inspire confidence. For example, you might want to decide if it’s called jsonbase, JSON-base, JSONBASe, Json-Base, JSON-Base, json-base or jsonDB. ~~~ teej If the author doesn’t provide any explanation of why this exists or what motivated them to create it, what am I supposed to assume? They’ve called it a database. They have said explicitly “ You can use this as a backend for your ReST APIs.” But it doesn’t meet the table stakes for a database and encouraging folks to use it in a production environment is actively harmful. I wish more folks were up front with the trade offs they make. I respect an OSS author a lot more when they are honest and upfront with what a thing is good at and where trade offs have been made. When I don’t see that, I assume that either the author doesn’t know/care (red flag) or they can’t be bothered (annoying). ~~~ zachrip I don't believe the OP of this post are the same person as the author of the library. Someone publishing a project isn't harmful, you don't have to use it. If someone uses it and gets burned that is their fault, not the author's. If you're making this project a dep, it's your job to vet it, especially if it's a database. Just because something is OSS doesn't mean it needs to be some polished stone that meets your standards. ~~~ teej I agree with you. For those same reasons it’s reasonable for HN commenters to be “pessimistic” about a library with no track record and no discernible take on why it deserves to be production ready. ~~~ zachrip The project is 2 months old and they say nothing about its readiness for production, simply that it _could_ be used for a REST backend or similar. They also say that it could be used for a quick PoC. I'm not quite understanding how either of those claims are wrong. Why are people torching a young project that someone is releasing publicly for free? Again, if you don't want to use the project, nobody is forcing you to. ------ MH15 I wrote some code to do this in high school when I couldn't figure out SQL. Then I learned why databases exist. ------ jarym What ever you try to do with JSON has probably been tried before with XML. Including XML databases. Now I’ll accept that XML databases has their use (especially if it involved storing and transforming third-party XML) but I can’t think of any good use for this when there’s SO many better options. ~~~ mbreese Having lived through XML databases and build systems, it’s sad/funny/interesting(?) to see this all play out again. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again. ~~~ toyg Same here! I tried pretty hard at the time to work with XML databases. In the end, SQL is just more practical in most circumstances, and easier to reason about. The same will likely happen with this sort of effort. ------ time0ut I could see some niche uses for this. Anywhere you want a quick and dirty local db for demos and hacking. That said, I think you'll get more mileage out of SQLite. It is generally my go to for these use cases and far richer and more powerful. ------ syastrov Back in the day, we used to use CSV for this :) ------ techntoke This is what happens when someone with basically little technical experience joins a JavaScript coding school and has to build something in order to graduate. ------ tushonka Aaah the beginners project to store info without having an actual database. ~~~ pstuart SQLite with the JSON extension works well. ~~~ tushonka Who has time to learn SQL when you can just read/write JS objects from/to files. ;) ------ winrid I work on a system with a JSONB column with 11k unique paths with no schema. I created some tools to generate jsdoc which is a start, but please no. ~~~ beamatronic Are there tools which will scan a body of JSON and and generate all the unique paths? Is it common to do this? ~~~ winrid It's pretty easy to do. Also, a common interview question. :) ------ smt88 This is both more effort and a worse outcome than just using Postgres with JSONB data types. ~~~ boring_twenties I had the same thought, especially nowadays when you can just type `docker run --name mydb postgres` and wait like 3 minutes. ------ waltpad That's a very strange idea: JSON is basically structured data, like XML, it's nice for documents with deeply nested structures. The main issue is that contrarily to a DB, any modification will shift everything after it, so any indexing will have to be corrected. I suppose that if the document is not stored as is, but instead broken up in pages (filesystems are likely doing that already, so piggy backing on that could help), then indexing could be improved, but then storage starts to look like a regular DB, rather than JSON. Interesting nonetheless, time will tell. ------ slifin Nesting in your primary data store is an anti-pattern for information workloads where you need to ask questions against your data Consider: { "name": "Sam", "age": 12, "friends" [ { "name": "Tom", "age": 15 } ] } Attributes like name and age are properties of a person entity, when placed in a JSON hierarchy something else is happening, the one dimensional relationship the things have between each other is also being saved into the structure That's dangerous because relationships should be formed on read, not on write, otherwise you concrete all future reads towards whatever it was on write, and if you're particularly sloppy the data gets duplicated which is even worse The solution is to normalise your data store and use relational algebra to reify relationships at runtime The problem with mainstream databases is they don't force normalisation, automatic indexing and pulling off attribute level normalisation is unworkable performance wise, so in most teams this doesn't work but this idea does work if you want to try this out learn Datomic ------ issa I don't mean this negatively, but I'm having trouble thinking of a real-world use case for this. Can anyone add some? ~~~ bradstewart Looks a bit like [https://github.com/typicode/lowdb](https://github.com/typicode/lowdb), which I've used for a few production-ish usecases in the past. Specifically for storing the results/state of a set of manually-executed management scripts. The scripts needed to query the data from previous executions, do some stuff, and store the output. Think poor mans version of terraform. Everything was dumped in a git repo that was shared across a few people. It was a quick and dirty solution to manage some alpha customers before the "real" system came online. ~~~ randtrain34 Yeah lowdb or even [https://github.com/LokiJS- Forge/LokiDB](https://github.com/LokiJS-Forge/LokiDB) will probably be much more performant/more featureful. ------ neilobremski Didn't everyone do this at some point? Sort of like everyone that started C++ in the 90's rolled their own string class. I remember doing this before "JSON" hadn't yet found its acronym (shaking rake ... get off my lawn!) ------ slantyyz This reminds me a lot of LokiJS[1], which, if I recall correctly, could optionally save the data as JSON file(s). [1] [https://github.com/techfort/LokiJS](https://github.com/techfort/LokiJS) ~~~ waltpad I think that, oddly enough, the point of that project is to use the JSON format as the DB storage format, not as an export option. Just from the look of it (I don't know either projects), LokiJS will very likely be always faster. ~~~ slantyyz Sorry for the confusion, by "save as", I didn't mean export. LokiJS has multiple persistence options, with JSON files in the filesystem being just one of them. Alternatively, you could also just use it in-memory or with IndexedDB. ~~~ waltpad Oh, I understand. I suppose it makes sense, if for instance one needs to store a bunch of parameters somewhere, it might as well be a JSON file. ------ maxpert I once built a toy document store using SQLite and Python using almost similar idea, [https://maxpert.tumblr.com/post/47494540287/a-document- store...](https://maxpert.tumblr.com/post/47494540287/a-document-store-with- sqlite3-and-python) if done correctly the advantage of that approach IMHO is: \- ACID (Powered by SQLite) \- Complex and efficient Index (Powered by SQLite) \- CouchDB like API I've been playing around with Rust recently maybe I will do a simple implementation in Rust-Lang which will keep it memory safe and efficient. ------ randtrain34 Why would someone use this over [https://github.com/typicode/lowdb](https://github.com/typicode/lowdb) ? ------ coding123 There are many use-cases for this for super simple ma-pa shops. It may be relegated 100% to shopping carts and checkout processes, but this would allow one to hand-edit her database, and even potentially let the server git push live changes... kinda interesting concept. ------ aabbcc1241 I went further, to log the logical changes of state as json files. (aka command sourcing) To reduce the IO overhead, I batch multiple json values into a larger file. I don't need random access because I'll replay all the changes when the server start. Going to open source the library soon. ~~~ jarofgreen I'm also working on a similar system - a JSON datastore with a event stream so there is a full history of changes. However we are using Postgres as a backend. Our code is already technically Open Source, but it's not relatively stable and not doc'd yet, so I won't link. ~~~ aabbcc1241 I can see why people prefer sql database over plain files, for better edge cases handing. But that requires more configurations and resources. ------ bullen I also made a distributed JSON database over HTTP, it's been running live with 250.000 customers since 2016 without reboot: [http://root.rupy.se](http://root.rupy.se) ------ deft This is useful for a lot of projects. I've used a similar db library in a rust project I was working on for an example application. This way there are no heavy dependencies or even the need to say "you need sqlite". ------ xrd I would prefer to use pouchdb as an in memory database. Then, if I outgrow that, use the pouchdb server. Then scale up to couchdb if I need that. It's much better architected and your front end code never has to change. ------ jordic Minio also does this... Haha [https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-select-api- quickstart-guide.h...](https://docs.min.io/docs/minio-select-api-quickstart- guide.html) ------ mkl95 This brings me back sweet memories of saving my Pygame minigames state to clunky JSON files when I was basically clueless about databases. It worked surprisingly well until it became a huge spaghetti mess :-) ------ jmull Seems like it should use standard callbacks and/or standard Promises for responses. That's probably beside the point, though. Hopefully no one ever uses this so the non-standard async pattern doesn't matter. ------ laanfor JSON file as backend, So can I directly edit the JSON file? ~~~ hedora Bind does something like this (but not with JSON). You have to run a “freeze” command before editing the database directly (so it can flush the current version of the database, and redirect writes to memory + log), and then “thaw” so it can read your changes and apply the log of updates to it. ------ drbojingle Could be good for things that are often read and rarely written. As soon as multiple people try to update the same file though just use an established db ------ StreamBright But why? ------ CogentHedgehog This reminds me of XML Database from back in the day... except JSON instead of XML. ------ tobyhinloopen Makes me think of how many Minecraft server plugins use YAML files as a database ------ globular-toast What a stupid idea. SQLite exists and you should use it. I took over a codebase at work that contained an ad hoc implementation of something like this and it was surely the most unprofessional thing I'd ever seen. What are they teaching kids in university these days? ------ trollied Just learn SQL. Please!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ Would Be Advertised in 2012 - RuggeroAltair http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/trailer-recut-2001-a-space-odyssey-modern-summer-blockbuster-loupy.php ====== RuggeroAltair Of course, 2001 has so much good visual material that such a recut was possible. But this confirms why I stopped watching previews. 1\. They are rarely a reflection of a movie style, although they are at least forced to use the same images (but weird fact, not the soundtrack, why?) 2\. They give away too many twists, what's the point of showing some major twist that in the movie happens 30 minutes after the beginning? 3\. They are not helping you understand whether you'd like a movie or not, they are there to maximize the number of people going to the theaters. I know it's more complicated than that. But roughly that's what comes down to it, for me. Some of the trailers are so much similar to each other that it's hard to think it's not pure software what's making them. Imaging going to watch the above advertised 2001, what would you think after watching the real movie? ------ RuggeroAltair For completeness, the original trailer: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8TABIFAN4o>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
European millennials are not like their American counterparts - brandonlc https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/europes-young-not-so-woke/598783/ ====== morningseagulls Thanks for posting this. It's interesting to see how different experiences can lead to different political views in populations. ~~~ brandonlc It was an interesting read, for sure!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tech-Hub Housing Costs - jseliger http://www.trulia.com/blog/trends/price-and-rent-monitors-jan-2014/ ====== marme please tell me where i can find a 2 bedroom in san francisco for $3350. I will sign a lease right now. I doubt you could even find a place in the tenderloin for that price. This article is almost 2 years old, why is it being posted now? ~~~ dikdik I looked around just for fun and found 3 places in ~2 minutes. I don't live there, so I'm not sure if these are terrible locations. Also, two are on the outskirts and it's possible they don't qualify as being in the city. Bayview $3050 [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5364791015.html](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5364791015.html) Glen Park $3200 [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5356024005.html](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5356024005.html) Twin Peaks $3200 [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5341244930.html](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/5341244930.html) ~~~ marme The bayview and glen park places you posted are literally blocks from the SF city limits and only technically count as being in the city most people would not realistically call that in the city. The twin peaks place is in the city and i do concede that every once in a while a cheap place like that comes on the market but there will be at least 50 people competing for that apartment, i have a better chance winning a scratch off lottery ticket than getting that apartment, i know i tried getting similar apartment in twin peaks last time i was looking. There is also possibility that it is scam and they just collect 100 dollar application fees from everyone and dont rent it to anyone. It is not realistic to say this is average 2 bedroom you can get in SF because not even 10% of people could get an apartment like this, i doubt if even 1% of people could find a place like this not count all the people in rent controlled apartments here for 10-20 years ~~~ sundaeofshock The Glen Park location is not in The City? Really? I lived in the area when I was in high school, and it is very much a part of The City. It's about a 1.5 miles (in a city 7 miles across) from the border with Daly City. There are over 70,000 San Francisco residents in the zip code south of this location, with at least 120,000 living in the southern part of The City. There is significant shopping, parks, schools and a freaking college in the area. Why don't you ask one of those people if they think they realistically call where they live The City? ------ lwhalen Jumpin' Jehosephat, people. 'Working Remotely' is a thing in 2015, you know. Just as much (if not better) moolah, plus you can hang your hat anywhere you have a decent internet connection. ~~~ beatpanda Is it? Because the last time I was looking for a job, everyone I asked about remote work had some hand-wavey bullshit excuse about the "value of collaboration". As does my current employer. I would dearly love for remote work to be a thing, but it seems like very few employers actually allow it. ~~~ lwhalen [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724031) [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/) and many, many others ------ grillvogel >February 6, 2014	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facial recognition systems stumble when confronted with million-face database - jonbaer https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/23/facial-recognition-systems-stumble-when-confronted-with-million-face-database/ ====== gwern Very relevant to the recent hoopla about that Russian face-recognition/social- media tool.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Zuldi - Looking for a Developer - hartej Zuldi is a startup developing a next generation self-ordering and payment processing platform for Mobile and Mobile Tablets in Restaurants and Nightclubs. Swipe your credit card on the device (PayAnywhere) and get SMS or Email'ed the receipt.<p>Why we're a good team for you: My co-founder Patrick and I have got the business side of things down. We have gotten excellent feedback pitching the company at DC Entrepreneurship Week. We have been accepted to Startup Chile (startupchile.org) granting us $40k. We have been in talks with restaurants and nightclubs who are on board and prepared to run a Zuldi beta.<p>We aren't just 2 business bums looking to bring on a developer. Patrick and I (Hartej) have gone through Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, Python Osmosis, and are teaching ourselves how to code although we aren't anywhere close to being pros.<p>Looking for a developer with knowledge of iOS, HTML5, Java Script, SQL, how to utilize jquery, knowledge of server side language such as php, c#, java, and good object oriented java script. Currently the prototype is being built solely in iOS.<p>Also, to be clear: We are NOT looking for someone who has a full-time job / freelance gigs, and wants to spend 10 hours a week on this with me as a cofounder. We are fully committed to this and want someone who is able to fully commit to it as well.<p>Why is this a great opportunity?: - We are offering equity in the company (terms to be discussed) - A chance to take a project and help mold it into a success - Proven to obtain funding and if necessary will secure more funding. Who know's, 6 months from now we'll be sippin on drinks with Jay-Z at the 40/40 club as he utilizes Zuldi for bottle service (An actual possibility)<p>Interested in talking more?? Contact me at [email protected] and let's get the dialogue started.<p>http://angel.co/s/7qTUEM ====== davyjones Actually, at this stage, you are better off hiring someone as a contractor. All those skills you talk off is typically spread over a couple of people at the least. Pro-tip: If you are not a tech guy, do not dictate the language/stack. ~~~ heretohelp >If you are not a tech guy, do not dictate the language/stack. This 100,000,000 times over and over until it sinks in universally. Nothing turns me off more viscerally than someone who isn't a programmer dictating to me how to do my job. ------ hartej You guys are right. I didn't mean to dictate terms or tell anyone to do there job by any means. We are certainly looking for a tech co founder and are open to giving away equity. ~~~ heretohelp First impressions. Give it another try in a different community, incorporating what we've said to approach it differently. ~~~ hartej Sounds good thanks! ------ heretohelp You're looking for a do-it-all know-it-all walk-and-chew-gum developer for basically free. Also you're not looking for a developer, you're looking for a technical cofounder. I'd keep cracking on those Python courses if I were you two. Pretty hard in the presence of all this seed/angel money to convince someone that capable to not work on their own idea. ~~~ hartej I am looking for a technical co founder. The startup is poised to succeed. And we're not just 2 business chumps looking to find a tech guy to just do it all. After hours guys just aren't cutting it at the moment but the prototype is being coded in iOS by them.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
$5000 Preorders in 24 Hours - codinginterview https://www.sketchcase.com/blog/5000-preorders-in-24-hours ====== stevewillow How do you price something, when you have no idea how much each unit costs to produce? ~~~ codinginterview I had a rough idea. I even shared how you can make one on the DIY page. The economy of scale shows that the more you produce, the cheaper it becomes to produce each unit. DIY was the maximum cost to produce one and you just work from there. Work out a rough estimate of the cost of the material, packaging, shipping, labor, and the fixed cost (vinyl cutter, etc).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My favourite Git commit (2019) - neo2006 https://dhwthompson.com/2019/my-favourite-git-commit ====== bassdigit The author spent all the time documenting his journey but totally fails to explain the actual reason of the problem: If the file contains a UTF-8 byte sequence, why is there an attempt to parse it as US-ASCII? I get that it's just a wrong space, but if some day somebody actually want to put a UTF-8 char there for some reason, this commit essay wouldn't help at all whereas googling stackoverflow seems to deliver (unverified): [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks- fail...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15947425/rake-tasks-fail-with- invalid-byte-sequence-in-us-ascii) ~~~ bassdigit Following this thought, it could be argued that the author did not even fix the problem, only eliminated a symptom of the underlying, serious configuration mistake that restricts file contents to an outdated character encoding. ~~~ mar77i I like your approach. And the blogpost's author does not even hint that the story told could mask an underlying issue at all. Which I find mind boggling somehow, but can we call this symptom whack-a-mole and what can be interpreted as anxiety-driven reasoning a cultural issue? Or is there a different, broader context that can wrap this up better that I'm not seeing? ~~~ bassdigit The commit message succeeds in justifying the effort but lacks an in-depth understanding of the related mechanics. I can imagine the developer felt bad about 'only' committing a one character change at the end of the day and wrote the message to make up for it. Because of this un-economic outcome, he hesitated to dig deeper. There is no reason to feel bad. The cultural issue is bad management that still evaluates developers by lines of code / commit activity. ------ jspash I'm just curious but... did this actually fix anything other than the spec? The reason I ask is that I find myself (with Rails particularly) spending an awful lot of time on maintaining tests that were written by a much younger and much less experienced developer (me, a few years ago). And I've come to the slow realisation that a lot of what I was testing wasn't really important. I'm not saying the author shouldn't have written the spec, or that the spec wasn't valuable. But maybe the true bug here was that rspec matchers don't honour utf-8 spaces and perhaps they should? I dunno. Just thinking out loud here. ~~~ hinkley Getting people to write tests is hard. Getting them to write matchers... it’s like you’re asking them to fly. Which is a shame because you can avoid so, so much test boilerplate by writing a high quality custom matcher. ~~~ jfkebwjsbx What do you mean by matcher? ~~~ allover > "matchers" [...] let you test values in different ways Example docs for Jest's matchers: [https://jestjs.io/docs/en/using- matchers](https://jestjs.io/docs/en/using-matchers) Generally speaking, if you use a specific matcher, you get a better (more informative) error message when the test fails. ~~~ jfkebwjsbx Ah, the common testing functions like `assert_equal`. Thanks! ~~~ hinkley Right, and some APIs let you write your own. Getting a custom one to hand out actionable error messages is a bit tricky but quite worth it. ------ pvorb I, too, use git commit messages to document the reasoning behind my changes. But I'm unsure if my colleagues even notice, since they regularly write bad commit messages like "Fix bug" and things like that. Also I regularly find my commit messages got lost, since the reviewer squashed several commits into one. Do you have any tips for establishing a culture of good commit messages? ~~~ optimuspaul I usually start with being aggressive about people not squashing commits. I think it's bad form. I also find shame works, as well as blocking merges when reviewing when commit messages provide no value. Could also start a swear jar of sorts, the offender puts a dollar in whenever they push a commit with a useless message... and use the proceeds for charity rather than something that benefits the team. ~~~ l0b0 This requires an existing buy-in from the team. How do you establish that buy- in in the first place? I know trying to be a good citizen isn't enough, because the worst offenders simply aren't interested in the revision history. ~~~ optimuspaul Great question I don't have a solid answer to. Due to my seniority I tend to either be the lead or act as the lead for teams. It is easier for me to reason with the team to buy into these kind of things. The worst offenders will tend to be weeded out over time either by changing their ways or leaving. I don't have much sympathy for them if they can't see how their actions affect others. A team has no place for a rogue agent. ------ judge2020 Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827) (domain has changed since the last post) ~~~ saagarjha I knew I had seen it earlier and was wondering why I couldn't find it… ------ ahh I do love the social history of good commit messages, and what they teach us about the process of what we do. I will offer one nit here, which is that I _always_ start my commit messages with one-line summaries; this makes it really easy to scan commits (and git is tooled to do this!) ~~~ sixstringtheory I don't understand your nit: is it that you don't see a one-line summary (which exists: "Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error") or that you don't feel it correctly summarizes the change? ~~~ BoorishBears It doesn’t summarize the intention of the changes, but it does summarize a bunch of stuff already in front of you when you’re looking at a diff... - Remove non-ascii character to fix error from `bundle exec rake` - That commit message would add external context (what was broken/where the error was coming from) and intent ------ rachelbythebay I wonder: what is the bad character? It's apparently not 0x20, but what is it? How did it get there? What keeps this from happening again to someone else? ~~~ robert-boehnke If I had to guess, the no break space that macOS has on [alt]-[space]: " ". EDIT: Hmm, that doesn't seem to be it, here's the commit in question [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75a848e2125008aa1e880c5861cf46#diff-18df4bf9d3ebe0f2e326ef9a94f3146c) ~~~ bassdigit It IS the no-break space. The hex UTF-8 representation of it is C2A0; you can find that sequence in original version of the file. ------ c3534l What's the latest on how long a commit message should be? Used to be everyone said a message should never be longer than two sentences and that they should be as short as possible so that people actually read them. This thing posted is an essay. Not the haikus I thought was considered best practice. ~~~ chucksmash I've always just gone with 52 ~line~ [edit: character] summary Then write a book, just being sure to wrap at 72 chars. Never really considered what an optimal commit message length was. Maybe it's something along the lines of "if you are playing poker and you can't figure out who the easy money is, the easy money is you." I've never seen a commit message, PR description, etc and thought "well that was excessive," so maybe I'm the one... This one stood out to me: 157 lines of rationale, discussion of alternatives, etc for 22 lines of uncontroversial changes[1]. It's much more likely to be useful in and of itself as a piece of documentation than a one-liner, "Changes to prevent strcpy" though. [1]: [https://github.com/git/git/commit/c8af66ab8ad7cd78557f0f9f5e...](https://github.com/git/git/commit/c8af66ab8ad7cd78557f0f9f5ef6a52fd46ee6dd) ~~~ temac While I'm perfectly fine with this commit-essay, and would probably be with any other, in _this_ particular case I would also be perfectly fine with a terse "ban strcpy" \+ actually a few more comments in the source code. Commit messages are not going to serve as a knowledge base for state of the art and best practices, and strcpy is universally recognized as problematic. Plus, about the how, while it is fine to see the dev thought a lot about it, did some testing, etc., the way he did the ban is ultra classic in the end. Also, it might have been even better to put some short explanations in comments instead of in just the commit message, in particular the usefulness of the BANNED macro to preserve some line numbers with gcc. So in this particular case I'm not really convinced that the commit message serves any strong purpose. But it does not hurt. And it participates to a culture where useful commit messages are important. So I still (weakly) prefer it to my hypothetical "ban strcpy". ------ mroche Linking to the mpv commit[0] message brought up in the last discussion[1]. It’s absolutely hilarious, and a great example of someone rage typing after dealing with an issue. [0] [https://github.com/mpv- player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...](https://github.com/mpv- player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f027338b0fab0f5078971fbe) [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21290517) ------ s3graham My personal favourite commit (as opposed to commit message) [https://chromium.googlesource.com/crashpad/crashpad/+/badfac...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/crashpad/crashpad/+/badfacccee) (Sadly, the commit message isn't great, but clearly it's worth that hash.) ------ sytelus Please do not do this. Long essay style commit messages are not really searchable, have no real way of discussions, do not support formatting, images etc and are hard to even read in many tools. A better way is to create an issue first and attach it to your commit. ------ kimusan This is my favorite git commit: [https://android- review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/bt...](https://android- review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/bt/+/1241366) result: [https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/bt/+/refs/h...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/bt/+/refs/heads/master/gd/README.md) ------ dirtydroog That's just way too verbose though. There should have been a ticket with a description of the problem. Name the branch after the ticket and jira will automatically link the ticket to the commits that fixed it. I've encountered bad utf-8 when data is copied from excel or outlook. ~~~ gwright I prefer the engineering details to be in the commit message and not an external issue tracking system. That system might not be accessible 3 or 5 or 10 years later. ~~~ dirtydroog That is true, and it might not work for Open Source development, but I don't see managers trawling through git commits to see what was done / is in progress. ~~~ couchand Then find better managers. ------ jariel Can someone comment on a best practice whereby the commit might merely refer to the problem ticket (in whatever system), which should have all of the relevant problem histories, and the articulation of the solution? As opposed to all of this documentation in git? ~~~ saagarjha If you company has a bug tracker like this internally and you maintain the project "in the open", please don't do this. I'm looking at you, Google and Apple… ------ Jefro118 Does anyone here try to enforce good commit message practices within their engineering teams? ------ juped All that text and it doesn't mention that the offending character is a U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE with UTF-8 bytes C2 A0. ------ codegeek Tl;Dr: Sometimes, Why is more important than What. ~~~ cborenstein +1 that Why matters most. My teammate recently wrote a blog post on how we document Why in git commits and PR descriptions. [https://medium.com/better-programming/daily-habits-to- turn-y...](https://medium.com/better-programming/daily-habits-to-turn-your- git-history-into-valuable-documentation-15113e1bf312) Would also recommend checking out a related talk by a tech lead at StitchFix: [https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2018-documentation- trade...](https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2018-documentation-tradeoffs- and-why-good-commits-matter) ------ neo2006 It's not only about the fact that the commit message for a one char change is about a page long. It's about that all the information in that page long commit message is a useful information ~~~ BoorishBears Strongly disagree. There is so much superfluous cruft in the message. Listing the error, and the fix, would give exactly as much context for the next person to run into this issue. If your goal to explain the process to find similar cases, just a couple more lines would have done just as well: - Fixes case where `bundle exec rake` would fail with error message: ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII This is caused by the presence of non-ASCII characters in files. The following command was used to find files with non-ASCII characters: `find modules -type f -exec file --mime {} \\+ \| grep utf` Running `iconv -f UTF8 -t US-ASCII` on listed files will show the exact location of offending characters. - No long winded exposition, no extremely case specific program output (including current machine's name...) I’m not saying this is the worst commit message ever, and I’d appreciate the intention if I came across it, but if you’re caring enough to give this much context, you can save both yourself, and the next person to look for your message, some cognitive load by sticking to what’s needed. - And if you’re wondering how to decide “what is needed”, it varies, but I think a good rule of thumb is: ask yourself how one would find this commit message What would someone grep for in git's history if they came across this? And if they found it, what information answers their query? They’re likely to search the command that is failing, and the error. The answer to that query is, what causes the command to error out, and how to find cases of that cause. They’re not going to search for the program output of find, or iconv, not going to search for the exact file you were modifying when this happened, or the fixes you tried that didn’t work. ~~~ skrebbel I disagree. I mean, you're right, but I don't think that's time well spent. This is a commit message, not a blog post. Writing concisely is hard and time consuming. This was probably written in stream-of-consciousness fashion which strikes a nice balance between time invested and possible future usefulness (if any). I mean, the commit might be useful in the future, but there's also a reasonable chance that nobody except the reviewer of the PR is ever going to read that commit message. (If the OP hadn't blogged about it) ~~~ BoorishBears How is writing concisely more time consuming than this long winded stream of consciousness with multiple quoted command outputs and explanations of non- fixes? If I come across an error and it takes two commands to fix it, my immediate intuition is a commit message with... the error and the two commands. And that’s extremely quick to write... It’s definitely not “let me write a detailed account of the last hour of my life”... that immediately feels like it will take much longer Also to be clear, the rule of thumb I mention is not about “what should you think about, then write down” It’s a filter on what you were already about to invest effort in writing down. If you feel like an even shorter message is good enough, that’s great. Just realize sometimes less is more... ~~~ JoshTriplett It's the exact opposite of "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand". This is "This was hard to debug, so let me make it easy to understand and give you (or future me) the hard-won information I just discovered so that you don't have to go through what I did". If the information took you a great deal of effort to get, that suggests it may be valuable to share. That may not be the right time to attempt to cut out some of that information for brevity, especially if you don't know what the future reader of the message might need to know. ~~~ BoorishBears What information in the concise version I gave is missing, that causes you to go through additional effort? I think you edited this in after my reply: > If the information took you a great deal of effort to get, that suggests it > may be valuable to share. I think this is the core of where we disagree. I often spend insane amounts of time debugging something, only to find the solution was quite simple and unrelated to what I tried. Often the amount of time you spent debugging is because the search space for your solution was unbounded, not because each step you took was particularly relevant to the actual solution. To me a commit message should be able hopefully narrowing that search space, not documenting the original unbounded one. ~~~ JoshTriplett I'm not suggesting that the version you gave would be a problem in practice; I'm also not suggesting that the commit message in the article is the best possible commit message for that change. I'm suggesting that after a long debugging adventure, I'd prefer to err on the side of including any information that feels hard-won, rather than trying to make the message as concise as possible at the _possible_ expense of missing an important detail. I've read many commit messages with too _little_ detail, and zero with too _much_ detail. (I have read code with too many comments, but it's rare; I've never once read a commit message that made me think "too much detail".) I'm sure it's possible, but on balance I prefer to cultivate instincts of "document anything that was hard to learn" and "in the moment, prefer to over- document rather than under-document". ~~~ BoorishBears Isn’t this exactly what I said in my original comment... I appreciate the intention and wouldn’t complain, it’s just if you care enough to write so much, save yourself sometime and the next person to read it some effort by being a little more concise. Commit messages are like naming things, there’s no right way, but the more you try to do it “right” the more “right” you get. If you just throw your hands up and say “I’m goin to vomit our every thought I had working on this”, sure it won’t kill anyone and it’s preferable to always writing _nothing_ (that’s kind of obvious...), but you’ll never get to the point where writing even somewhat balanced messages is comfortable ------ bassdigit Paraphrasing the first comment of the commit[1]: A commit message with such a long explanation helps nobody, because it is not searchable by Google, not even by GitHub[2]. [...] If the commit message requires a blog post to be good (searchable) – it is a poor commit message. [1]: [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk- puppet/commit/63b36f93bf75a848e2125008aa1e880c5861cf46#commitcomment-35571322) [2]: [https://github.com/search?q=invalid+byte+sequence+in+US- ASCI...](https://github.com/search?q=invalid+byte+sequence+in+US- ASCII&type=Commits) ~~~ emj I must say our private git repos are a treasure trove of information, not using git for help is immensely stupid. In the same say it's sad that Jira and all do not help you find commit messages in a better way.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Tao of Pixar - Secrets of a Successful Animation Juggernaut - veritasinc http://inceva.com/22-secrets-of-pixar-success-the-recipe-of-a-successful-company/ ====== iso-8859-1 List style article... _sigh_	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Universa tail fund returned 3,600% in March - ZeljkoS https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-advised-universa-tail-risk-fund-returned-3-600-in-march ====== justinmares The 3600% return in March is sort of misleading. The returns are on the premium paid for options (or margin), not the notional (which is where fees are paid). That $4bn fund is counting its performance on only $40 million of invested capital (of the $4bn). So they are up 3600% on $40 million. Universa’s model is they take 3.5% of a portfolio value per year and use it to buy puts over the course of a year. So at any time, maybe they have 30-60 basis points of the portfolio in puts. So they are up 3600% on 30 basis points or like 12%. "Spitznagel included a chart in his letter showing that a portfolio invested 96.7% in the S&P 500 and 3.3% in Universa’s fund would have been unscathed in March, a month in which the U.S. equity benchmark fell 12.4%." "The same portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year since March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index." 2.6% per annum is a lot of outperformance, albeit not quite as eye popping as 3600%. ~~~ paulpauper very misleading and after taxes it is probably less i would not be surprised if it much worse. if they truly had a good strategy why tell everyone? ~~~ kevstev For more investor funds. Also, his style of investing is supposed to make a killing during times like this- but when you are flat to down a few percent for all the boring years in between black swan events, things don't look great. There is also ego and prestige, and Taleb seems to desire both to a great degree. ~~~ mrscottson The problem is not Taleb's trading method, it would provide a great return if the US had free markets...what the fed is currently doing is more akin to communism, bailing out and buying up all the essential industries. ~~~ kevstev While I agree that the Fed may be overplaying their hand, I disagree that Taleb has an otherwise outperforming strategy. The cost of hedging against black swan events is not zero, and has increased substantially since the financial crisis- at least in part by his own work to increase awareness of them! Volatility used to be greatly underpriced by the market, and while that may still be true, its not nearly true to the extent it was pre-crisis. ~~~ beagle3 We are not out of the crisis yet. Taleb has been banging this drum for decades, and profited handsomely in 2008, and IIRC also in 2001 and 1998. His lesson was not appreciated by the industry at large during those decades - and it is likely that a couple of years after the end of _this_ crisis (whenever _that_ may be, anywhere from a few month to over a decade), hedging black swans will be cheap again. ------ oskarth A lot of this boils down to having a better understanding of uncertainty and probability, especially in terms of being non-naive when it comes to extreme volatility and risk. If you find ways to bet on this in a rigorous manner, the payoff is disproportionally larger. For the lay investor, the hard part is that this essentially means losing money 95% of the time [in those positions], something most people aren't comfortable with. That and some technical difficulties, like liquidity, etc. Of course, the bets needs to be sized correctly. This is not something you'd put all your money into, and this is part of the design from the beginning. See Kelly Criterion [https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-INVESTMENT- CRITE...](https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-INVESTMENT- CRITERION/dp/9814383139) for how these people think about it in a rigorous way. For those who are interested to read more on how this is done, have a look at the papers here: [https://www.universa.net/riskmitigation.html](https://www.universa.net/riskmitigation.html) Spitznagel has also written a book called Dao of Capital which talks about the logic and underlying philosopy of these ideas: [https://www.amazon.com/Dao- Capital-Austrian-Investing-Distor...](https://www.amazon.com/Dao-Capital- Austrian-Investing-Distorted/dp/111834703X) There's also Dynamic Hedging by Taleb [https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Hedging- Managing-Vanilla-Opti...](https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Hedging-Managing- Vanilla-Options-ebook/dp/B000UG9JQA) which talks about these options and their structure in more technical manner, though I haven't read it. ~~~ hardwaresofton You don't even have to be a genius -- everyone expected the market to collapse, ~10 years of a low not-QE-but-definitely-actually-QE federal funds rate means a lot of companies and banks with access to that credit were over extending themselves. The financial system is cyclical -- funds like Berkshire Hathaway were starting to sit on more and more cash since last year. Even if you did nothing but follow their movements you would have been tipped off to the upcoming downturn. The consensus was that a crash was overdue, the question was just _what_ was going to cause/trigger it. Also, disregard when pundits, government figures and central bankers say that this crash happened to an economy that was "doing great just a few months ago" \-- it's just like 2008, the problems were there, they were just _uncovered_ by COVID-19. Years of cheap loans, lax regulation, and lack of financial prudence means over-leveraged companies were taking risks they shouldn't have been, and all it took was one or two months of projected lost revenues for liquidity to implode. We're not even talking about restaurants who might run super tight margins here, we're talking about huge banks, institutions and large companies. Take the airlines for example, years of record profit and a clear view of what 9-11/H1N1/Ebola did to travel, yet no rainy day fund. And the risk COVID-19 caused was absolutely _not_ unknown. We've had SARS, MERS, H1N1, Ebola all come through, businesses have had plenty of chances to consider insuring themselves or making themselves resilient -- there's just less and less incentive to be fiscally responsible with free-flowing credit. ~~~ caseysoftware As Taleb has said many times: _Don 't tell me your predictions, show me your portfolio._ What did you do with this "obvious" information? Did you go all in beforehand to make a killing and set yourself up for life? Did you make smaller bets and build an awesome rainy day fund? Did you sit on the sidelines and call the plays afterwards? ~~~ chillacy The beautiful thing about trading is that you're either right or you're wrong. It's unforgiving in a way that punditry isn't. When you trade you have skin in the game, since past failures leave a permanent record on your portfolio, and people quickly learn that overconfidence is a liability. ------ paulpauper This method is highly path dependent and needs low volatility to work. It requires that the market not just fall, but rather fall suddenly. And it req. a vix be around 15 or so. The tail method would have failed from 2000-2008, which was a period of weak stock market returns but no sudden drops like in 2008 or 2020. The tail fund needs a very sudden drop to make those huge returns but also very low volatility proceeding the drop. The market falling 20% over a 1-year period like in 2000,2001, and 2002 would incur both losses for the tail part and losses for the equity part, versus a 20% decline in a month. From 1997-2003 volatility was quite high so the method would have done badly too. It would have done badly from 2003-2008 due to losses from the hedge. [http://greyenlightenment.com/does-tail-hedging-work-it- depen...](http://greyenlightenment.com/does-tail-hedging-work-it-depends/) The tail hedge method loses 10% a year from option decay assuming that 1% of the portfolio is invested in such options and the rest in stocks. That is very substantial over the long term if there are no sudden crashes. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. ~~~ huffmsa But there are always sudden drops eventually. Market crashes aren't "if" they're "when" People made huge money in '08 because they were betting the fail side of the CDOs. Small bleed for years, big win in '08 ~~~ beervirus If your burn rate is 10% per year, the “when” is what matters. ~~~ huffmsa True, but figuring out how much of your bankroll you need to invest in a fund like this to properly hedge (that's why it's called a hedge fund) against catastrophic loss in your other investment is the balance you need to strike. ------ bretthopper For the people commenting that this wouldn't work over the long run (or the past ~10 years of the bull market), the article says this: > Spitznagel included a chart in his letter showing that a portfolio invested > 96.7% in the S&P 500 and 3.3% in Universa’s fund would have been unscathed > in March, a month in which the U.S. equity benchmark fell 12.4%. The same > portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year since > March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index. So, yes this shouldn't be 100% of your portfolio (same with any fund), but a similar strategy _might_ be successful in a small % of your portfolio as a hedge. ~~~ hooloovoo_zoo That's interesting but those endpoints seem cherry-picked given the strategy. ~~~ gwern Also cherrypicking the fund, it seems. I noted a few days ago a broader view: [https://www.ft.com/content/602c45e1-219c-49b2-ab17-9b47791fd...](https://www.ft.com/content/602c45e1-219c-49b2-ab17-9b47791fd038) > Such funds on average lost money every year from 2012 to 2019 inclusive, > according to CBOE Eurekahedge’s index of tail risk hedge funds. Despite > having three crises to profit from since the start of 2008 — the global > financial crisis, the eurozone debt crisis and the coronavirus crisis — they > are still down by an average of 24 per cent over that period. ~~~ moistly Yes. One-quarter of 3.3% of your portfolio would lose value during that period. That is the cost of the insurance that paid off when 96.7% of your portfolio would have lost over 12% of its value. The hedge is not your primary investment. It is an insurance policy. Crashes happen several times over an investor’s lifetime. ~~~ gwern > The hedge is not your primary investment. It is an insurance policy. Crashes > happen several times over an investor’s lifetime. The more frequently they happen, the _less_ valuable such insurance is, especially one that has such ruinously negative returns. (I'm not clear if that's -25% compared to a S&P benchmark or an absolute -25% in a period where the S&P is up like 200%+, but neither way is flattering). Note, of course, that Taleb makes all of his money from books, and that the funds he actually ran all seem to have closed ignominiously and gone down the memory-hole - despite 'black swans' like 9/11... ------ gumby The article buried the news in exchange for a clickbait headline. The real news is this: > The same portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year > since March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index. So IMHO the insurance premium would have been worth it. If you'd been paying this premium for 11 years and looking at it in late 2019 you might think otherwise. OTOH if you were the kind of person who'd buy this product in the first place, 2019 would _definitely_ be the time you'd be sure to hang on to it! ~~~ valuearb That claim is based on Cherry picked endpoints and probably doesn’t include impact if his fees. ~~~ gumby Quite possible, as that is a common practice. ------ jawns Yes, it is possible to set up a fund that is structured to produce strong returns during black-swan events. But outside of black-swan events, you are going to lose money investing in such a fund. It is more like an insurance policy than a traditional investment. Traditional investors might hold lots of equities during a bull market and fewer equities during a bear market. A fund like this allows you to maintain a more constant percentage of equities, with the understanding that you're spreading your losses over time, instead of incurring more significant losses during a sharp market downturn. Similarly, you can make some excellent money in a 3x bear fund if your trades are fortuitously timed, since they aim to give you three times the amount their associated index loses in a day. But it is not a buy-and-hold investment. If you buy and hold, your money will eventually disappear. ~~~ throwphoton I think the thesis of this type of trading is that black swan events are underestimated in the market, making far out-of-the-money options (i.e. insurance against unlikely events) sufficiently cheap that you can make money in the long run even if you lose money on 99.9% of days. ~~~ celticninja This is an extension of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid'. You could make money in the long run if you have the funds to get there. If we consider that this and the 2008 crisis were black swan events, then we could expect them to occur perhaps once a decade, which from now could be up to 20 years for the next one. By the end of that 20 year period the amount you have remaining to bet on the black swan event would be severely limited by the preceding 2 decades. ~~~ valuearb If you aren’t leveraged, it’s trivial to ride out crashes. Why drag your returns down with expensive insurance? ------ rayuela I'm getting really tired of these funds advertising these single event returns. Looking at their long term performance makes them look mediocre at best. There are seriously countless funds that have been betting on the next big disaster for the past 10 years and have been bleeding money out the nose and then they've made up a tiny fraction of their losses in the past month and are now like "Oh look we were right all along!" ~~~ paulpauper agree. these hedge fund managers are just glorified salespeople. even ray dalio. ~~~ brenden2 Dalio is a really good salesman though, have to give him credit. ------ rkapsoro As an NNT fan I knew about Universa long ago, and would have loved to have used it. Sadly however as a lowly "consumer" investor of normal means the minimum investment to gain access to funds of this kind is just astronomical. A serious tail risk hedge of NNT caliber that members of the unwashed like me could use would be a great thing. And I lack the technical knowledge or patience to manually do all the necessary option trading to build this kind of tail risk hedge. The Cambria Tail Risk ETF was my next option, and it did give some positive returns over the Coronavirus crash, but sadly nothing like 3600%, so it didn't do all that much good as a hedge. I assume this is because being an ETF it is liquid, and therefore the entire point of buying options _ahead_ of time is defeated. edit: grammar. ~~~ shivasword Problem with Cambria's ETF is a majority of the fund is in treasuries, so convex exposure to volatility is dampened; the fund doesn't act as insurance. ------ juskrey Note that they are true hedge fund, that is their job is insurance, not investment per se. That means their clients are likely heavily invested to other means, dedicating small percentage to Universa, which sums up to 0-1% of gain in total while all other assets are losing a lot. ------ erentz I'd really like a better understanding about what these active long volatility funds do. It seems a lot more involved than just buying rolling out of the money puts, which sounds like it would be an expensive/inefficient insurance. Another fund example is Artemis Capital which have a number of papers I've read over the past month. [1] [1] [https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome#research](https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome#research) ~~~ SkyMarshal Some of the things required to manage a tail risk fund are: 1\. Finding mispriced way-out-of-the-money puts, probably a full-time job in and of itself and requiring savvy, if not also sophisticated, price models 2\. The other half of the strategy is to mitigate the losses on the way OotM puts by simultaneously selling close-to-the-money and in-the-money options. I don’t recall the details but Taleb has mentioned this in the past. There’s a lot of work in designing, managing and executing those too. ------ javert Anybody know what the minimum is to invest in this? I emailed them a few months ago trying to invest, but they ignored me. I realize it's going to be a large amount, but is it like $1M+, $10M+, $100M+, or something larger? Also, is there a way to get in, indirectly? For instance, banks will pool smaller investors' money to get them into private equity. Is there a channel like that, to get into Universa? I imagine I would have made a life-changing amount of money if if I had gotten into this fund when I attempted to. (Although my goal was to hedge, not to make money.) Stupidly, I also followed the fund managers's advice (in their literature) of "don't try to do this yourself." In fact I could have done well buying put options. ~~~ valuearb Why not just take your money and buy lottery tickets? None of their clients made this return on more than a tiny fraction of their portfolio, and odds are it won’t happen again for decades. ~~~ javert Please don't talk beyond your expertise. Making this return on a tiny fraction of your portfolio is exactly what hedging is designed to do. The strategy worked as designed. Please don't denigrate legitimate investors by equating them to lottery players. I hesitate to say that much because you don't seem to care about actually understanding what you are talking about, anyway. I feel like I'm just feeding a troll. ~~~ valuearb You know nothing of whether the hedge worked, because you don’t know what it’s long term cost is outside some cherry picked return claims. Meanwhile unhedged long term investors will book zero losses simply by not selling, and ultimately regain all and more without paying a hedging tax. ~~~ javert > You know nothing of whether the hedge worked, because you don’t know what > it’s long term cost is outside some cherry picked return claims. If you've studied the issue, as I have, you'd see that the claims being made, make sense. There isn't reason to question them unless you have some specific evidence to present (which would probably require you to be a client of the fund). You seem to have an unusual perspective. You are super bullish about the market, to the point that you think this kind of event only happens every few decades and you think long-term investors are guaranteed to make money. Yet you are so anti-hedging that you compare it to a lottery and totally denigrate/downplay it. I don't know where that perspective comes from. ~~~ valuearb The greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, has never used hedging. That’s proof how unnecessary it is. In the long run retained earnings drive market valuations higher. I don’t know how long this bear market will last, or how long it will be till the next one, but I know remaining fully invested beats market timing by the end every time. ~~~ javert You shouldn't try to market time or hedge unless you know when to do it. I find that I usually don't know when to, so I usually don't want to. But there are exceptions to that. There are times when market timing and/or hedging make sense if you know enough. > The greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffett, has never used hedging. > That’s proof how unnecessary it is. I'm not claiming hedging is necessary. I'm claiming hedging can be a rational thing to do. That Buffett doesn't use it, doesn't mean it can't be a rational thing to do. Not everyone has the same knowledge and circumstances as Buffett. Buffett's strategy is undoubtedly not the best strategy for everyone, though it's almost certainly the best strategy for him. ------ anonu And what about the other months? From what I understand the strategy bleeds money until an event like this. In such a scenario you cannot really deploy that much capital. ~~~ hogFeast This is why people don't understand hedging. Some people will get it but for the majority it will never, ever compute. ~~~ anonu Not sure what you're referring to. I'm saying a large percentage number in the headline is misleading. It looks cool but the reality of tail hedging is your paying up for insurance premiums. So this 3600 percent return is based on the premium you paid? The denominator is probably small... On the order of a few million is my guess.. ~~~ hogFeast Yes. You have to pay for insurance. And in terms of performance, you could have totally hedged out a portfolio for under 50bps (often well under) pretty much all the way through this market. Universa did this but in a more sophisticated way...afaik, they created a portfolio where you got paid to hedge. If this isn't clear: this is the kind of thing that people look back on and can't believe that it occurred. This is CLO manager in 2005 stuff. Literally incomprehensible. All because people cannot resist strategies that show small gains consistently. Retail investors cannot and won't ever understand that you will underperform, that is what a hedge is for, and that is how you reduce risk and end up with returns that crush the market. If you try to chase returns, you will get owned. ~~~ pnako The idea that you can insure a stock portfolio against market events is bogus on its face, without any fancy math or logical argument. Do I need to even discuss it? ------ carlsborg And how much did they lose shorting the market every month over the past 10 years? ------ jliptzin I would be interested to see a study of how buying puts on a small percent of your portfolio over time fares over just a 100% index strategy. I have to imagine that the no-insurance strategy fares better over long periods of time since you’re taking on greater risk. With puts you’re just offloading your tail risk onto someone else willing to take it on. If that were not true it would mean puts are chronically underpriced. For the average investor with a long investing horizon it does not make sense to reduce your gain just to smooth out your equity curve. But if you are a few years away from retirement, for example, then maybe it makes sense as an alternative to just scaling back on risky assets. ~~~ looping__lui Unless you are an institutional investor, Puts are just expensive to have... Imagine you invest 3% of your portfolio in Puts, that money will be lost (probably cutting your 6% S&P500 return in half) only to give you a 500% / 1000% return on those 3%. There generally is a huge Spread (e.g., 10/30/50%) so you are already down the moment you buy the Puts. The spread increases for “black swans” far out of the money events - so people are pricing the possibility of a crash into the Puts... I doubt that a lot of people actually make money w/ Puts... You would have lost your money most of the time for the past 15 yrs or so... May come out “even” if you get “lucky” and the market folds twice in between. The only exception might be individual titles you believe are overpriced (e.g., 950 USD TSLA...). Instead of buying Puts prior to retirement, just reduce the exposure. Btw, that is always true: Puts on stock index essentially have the same effect as lowering your equity invest (but you safe money). Personally I doubt the Joe Doe investor will make any money w/ Puts on indices. ~~~ chillacy I assume that there was a tax advantage at least: hedging (with puts or otherwise) lets you hold your stocks for longer. ~~~ looping__lui How is that a tax advantage? If I am not mistaken unless you hold your stocks/ETFs shorter than a year the taxation stays the same. What is the math behind that? I’m really curious because a 10-50% spread on Put options just makes them pretty unattractive imho and more a “gamble” than a real option (pun intended) ~~~ chillacy Yea as you pointed out the long term capital gains is one area where you might have a tax advantage hedging. Imagine you bought a bunch of stock 11 months ago and you want to capture profits right now, it may be cheaper to buy puts out for 1 month and then sell for as long term capital gains. Puts are of course only one way to hedge, some people hold cash, buy gold/bonds/natural resources, buy VXX, etc. Also the spread varies a lot, options on SPY tend to have tighter spreads than on a random stock, but I've found that submitting a "reasonable" offer (in the middle of the buy/ask prices, in-line with the black-scholes estimate) usually gets filled within the day. Just buying a put without owning the underlying is definitely a risky gamble. But if you own 100 shares of the underlying it becomes a hedge since it limits your downside (at the cost of upside). And if you buy the put and sell a call you can limit any gains and losses to within a narrow band: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collar.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collar.asp) ------ mcnamaratw Nice! I wonder if they ever had a winning year before. NOTE! I understand that a Black Swan Fund (a) may have very different goals from an ordinary fund, and (b) might be very successful and only ever have the one winning year. ------ alphagrep12345 Wow. This is insane. What's the idea behind this? How can this be replicated by individuals on stock brokerages like robinhood,fidelity, etc? ~~~ keithly From what I have read, Universa's clients are institutional investors and super rich people. Not sure how easy this is to reproduce as a less sophisticated investor. ~~~ burlesona One of my good friends follows a strategy like this by simply buying puts against SPX. He is very bearish on the market in general, and has missed out on a lot of growth in the last decade, but in his case it did “finally pay off” recently. As with any other strategy, though, it’s not really valid to compare just the recent months, you’d have to evaluate his total return over say the last ten years, and I don’t know how that stacks up. ------ tremguy Is there a way for a small, non-institutional investor to participate in Universa? ------ brenden2 They're conveniently not reporting their overall returns which would include all the underperformance from the cost of hedging through a 10 year bull market. There's also no mention of the fees and how much they eat into the returns. ~~~ markvdb Actually they somewhat did: "Spitznagel included a chart in his letter showing that a portfolio invested 96.7% in the S&P 500 and 3.3% in Universa’s fund would have been unscathed in March, a month in which the U.S. equity benchmark fell 12.4%. The same portfolio would have produced a compounded return of 11.5% a year since March of 2008 versus 7.9% for the index." This seems to suggest they needed to include the bad 2008-2009 time to come out looking better than just plain dca etf investing... ~~~ paulpauper yeah but you would have a capital gains tax on that option trade ~~~ markvdb Not over here. Belgium is the world taxation champion, but it has no capital gains tax on equities. As you can imagine, accumulating etfs are quite popular here... ------ JoshTko this like saying they bought insurance and the insurance paid out. This is not an investment strategy in of itself. ------ themark Dude has been talking his book hard for months. ~~~ imperialdrive As he should - It's invaluable knowledge he's trying to share. * If we're talking about Antifragile. I haven't read the others yet. ~~~ themark I agree but I meant [http://www.investorwords.com/8436/talking_my_book.html](http://www.investorwords.com/8436/talking_my_book.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Massive octopus nursery found in deep sea - okket https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/10/deep-sea-octopus-nursery-discovered-animals-news/ ====== ioseph Original source: [https://nautiluslive.org/video/2018/10/24/massive- aggregatio...](https://nautiluslive.org/video/2018/10/24/massive-aggregations- octopus-brooding-near-shimmering-seeps) Seriously great project, the live feed can make for interesting viewing ------ Rifu Every time I see deep sea creatures being filmed with bright white light I always wonder if that leaves them permanently blind. ~~~ kulahan Many times, they will use a wavelength that doesn't bother the animals. ------ pandeiro Paging Ringo Starr... ~~~ zellyn Paging Raffi :-) ------ wiredfool Worlds largest, aka the second one found ~~~ dang Ok, we've replaced the title with the HTML doc title. ------ wHTL This may sound cynical. But, I sigh each time I hear of such natural discoveries. This basically means humans will begin interfering in the name of research. ~~~ fatjokes That's optimistic. We'll probably try to eat them. ~~~ twic These are not an edible species of octopus, they live at a depth of over 3000 metres, five times deeper than any trawler can reach, and they're small - species in that genus are typically ~10 cm across, so all 1000 of them would make about a tonne, worth <$10k if they somehow became edible. I don't think they're in much danger of being eaten by humans. ~~~ mikhailfranco So a massive nursery of octopus, not a nursery of massive octopus. P.S. I feel the plural of _octopus_ should be neither _octopi_ nor _octopuses_ , but either: _octopus_ \- same as singular, you know, like 'sheep'; _octopussies_ \- for fun, because they're not as cute as cats. ~~~ grkvlt Isn't the plural _octopodes_? ------ Psrajan I'd like to be under the sea In an octopus' garden in the shade He'd let us in, knows where we've been In his octopus' garden in the shade ~~~ jxramos That's exactly what I just thought, ha. ~~~ jxramos Geez, guess there's no Beatles fans here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus%27s_Garden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus%27s_Garden) ------ newnewpdro It shames me to admit this made me hungry, octopus is delicious.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
30 Apparent Reasons You Launched Your Startup - divia http://valleywag.com/tech/why/30-apparent-reasons-you-launched-your-startup-251240.php ====== far33d Strange. I submitted this 9 hours ago and no one upvoted it (though I found it funny). It seems the morning gets more response than the evening (maybe because of east coast / west coast, evening here is already late in the night on the east?) ------ Goladus What about "31. Read too many blogs and essays by smart, inspiring people"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Setting up an SMS server/gateway? - msencenb Increasingly I have found text messaging to be very interesting and would like to build a few apps / play around with sms in my spare time.<p>Do you guys have any advice on where to start? ====== gaiusparx <http://www.twilio.com/> ? ~~~ msencenb Agreed Twilio is probably the place to start/ the most established. I guess my question pertains more to rolling my own sms server/gateway. Or is that just not worth the hassle at this point? ~~~ misterbwong When I looked into this a long while ago the cost to set up a gateway was too prohibitive for personal projects. My memory is _extremely_ fuzzy on this but I vaguely remember a figure in the thousands.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook is sponsoring the Daily Telegraph to downplay 'technofears' - jonathanhd https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-daily-telegraph-positive-sponsored-news-stories-2019-4 ====== Barrin92 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/information- age/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/information-age/) that page looks like something out of a cyberpunk fiction, amazing. ------ ineedasername At least they show it as "advertisement feature for facebook" It's still laughably transparent though. The UK is seriously and rightfully angry with Facebook, and if Parliament wasn't so caught up in figuring out which way they want to be facing when they walk off the Brexit cliff they'd probably focus more on this issue.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Single Payer Is Not a Principle- the Principle Is Universal Coverage - iamjeff http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/single-payer-is-not-a-principle/ ====== trendia The three issues of healthcare: 1\. Who has access to it? 2\. How much does it cost? 3\. Who pays for it? This article mostly addresses (1) and somewhat (3), but doesn't really give enough attention to (2). If pharmaceutical companies are granted a patent for a drug, then they have the sole capability to set the price, which the purchaser of the drug will be required to pay. The most obvious example is that of Martin Shkreli, who bought a patent for an _existing_ drug and hiked the price. How do you fight someone like Martin Shkreli who raises the price? One option: don't buy the drug until the price is lowered. Collateral: anyone who doesn't have access to the drug. Problem: it is "unethical" to not pay for a drug that could save someone's life. (That is, our emotional brains set the value of a life at infinity). Another option: set price controls for drugs. Problem: pharmaceutical companies will inevitably lobby the government so that the "right" price control will be a very high one. Yet another option: Remove patents altogether. Problem: This removes the incentive to produce pharmaceutical drugs with a low barrier to entry (which is practically all pharmaceutical drugs). So, any discussion of healthcare that says we need "universal coverage" needs to balance all of these issues. So far, everyone seems to ignore (2). ~~~ mullingitover > Yet another option: Remove patents altogether Another option: free market, but create a streamlined process for removing patents in a punitive fashion so bad actors like Shkreli can lose their patent within a very short time for price gouging. ~~~ trendia How do you determine whether a price is "price gouging"? ------ gremlinsinc Why couldn't hospitals.. create a union... where they negotiate together for better drug prices, AND they ALSO become the insurer-- your primary hospital is your insurer--you pay them monthly to keep you healthy. They get recurring income from sick/healthy people alike, they get to control the costs...and they could set prices to be related to income...say 4% of income goes to healthcare... When someone travels to another hospital, their primary hospital picks up the bill...etc... I think costs could be a LOT lower because w/out insurance agencies there's more money for the hospital directly and being MRR the hospital can have a better idea of how much revenue they bring in on average per month. ~~~ Veratyr I believe this is basically Kaiser Permanente and it exists. The main thing missing is the income-based payments. ------ Overtonwindow Paying for it will always be the problem, but not just who pays for it, but whom will be paid for those services. IMO the problem with today's healthcare and insurance dilemma is that everyone wants to get in on the gravy train. Doctors, specialists, and everyone in between, are eager to take a fee. Pharmaceutical companies charge just about whatever they want because they know, eventually, they'll get paid. Insurance is best left to the private market, because if it goes universal through the government, then there will never truly be any limitations on what is covered, how much is paid, and the system will collapse upon itself. For those that want to draw parallels to other nations, please remember those nations tend to be considerably smaller than the U.S., and they've had a LOT longer to work on these problems. For my two cents, healthcare in America could be greatly improved with the following: 1) No one gets turned down for insurance, no matter what. Even if it's just basic prescription drug coverage, some basic level. 2) The cost of insurance is tied to your income, with the price gradually increasing as your wage increases so people are not forced to keep a low paying job for low paying insurance, unless of course that's what they want. 2a) The longer you have continuous insurance the more coverage you get, and the lower your costs. Incentive people to get, maintain, and keep insurance. 3) A cap on the price of drugs that have been on the market for more than 2 years. 4) Exclusive patents on drugs no more than 4 years. 5) Insurance is available nationwide, portable, and covers you no matter where you live, work, or go. 6) Finally, if you cancel your insurance you may not reapply for insurance for six months. Stop people from dropping insurance and waiting to pick it up only when they need it. There are a dozen holes you can poke in that, I understand, but it's a start, and it's a short law that I think many would agree with. ------ EwanG Article points out that the important thing is that everyone has healthcare that they can access as they need to. Many ways to get there, and Single Payer isn't the only option. Rather partial to the German system myself... ------ payne92 The real underlining principle is a question: Should healthcare be the responsibility of an individual, or a collective responsibility of a group? Without some agreement on this principle, we will continue to spin our wheels.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
3 Weeks already, $0 income – what are we doing wrong? - gumbo http://www.buildnrun.com/it-is-hard-promote-mobile-games/ ====== teej I'm co-founder of MinoMonsters. We launched our game on iOS but spent a lot of time prototyping on the Android market. Our android prototype has 250k+ downloads and 2k+ reviews. Here's some steps you can take _today_ to try to move the needle. * Test your screenshots! Assume that 50% of the people in the market will never read your description. Right now, your screenshots communicate "Samurai game". Try a different direction, maybe one more Sudoku focused.[1] Test lots. * Test your app icon. Test lots. * You should have a purchase already. Review your monetization strategy. Most developers err on the side of under-monetizing their game, in the hopes that they won't "make players mad" or some other nonsense. Spoiler alert: you're wrong. Start your re-education here: [http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-w...](http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-will-go-wrong/) * Doing games is hard and a lot of what works in games is non-obvious. Be very skeptical of advice you get from anyone that hasn't done games. * There is only one "tried and true" marketing channel - getting featured on the platform. Outside of that, you need to hustle _hard_ to get your app featured in other places. You've reached out to "a few" sites and forums. Expand your reach to 10x as many sites and forums. Point to your past reviews as social proof for potential future reviews. No one site is going to bring in all the downloads - it's about building buzz and the snowball effect. That's all I can think off the top of my head. ======================================================= [1] - No one can tell you what's going to work best. The only way to know is to test. ~~~ mirsadm I shall repeat: It is very very very hard. We were featured on CNET, AllThingsD, Kotoku, 148Apps and even reviewed on TV. Result: You get a nice bump in downloads for a couple of days then it drops back down. The best thing I have learnt is your budget should be at LEAST 50/50 between marketing and development. If you spent 3 months making the game with 2 developers then your marketing budget should be in the tens of thousands if you really plan on getting anywhere. Simply having and spending the money won't get you good results though. It needs to be spent really wisely with a lot of thought placed into metrics and analytics. You need to have them in the game. You need to test screenshots/icons/descriptions. Simple change of screenshots helped us get 25%+ more downloads a day. There is a lot of info out there but it is a huge uphill battle right now. If you take a look at some app review web sites you'll notice every single day there are well over 20 very well polished games being released on iOS and Android. That is every single day. Most don't get anywhere. ~~~ cageface I've had some modest success with my own iOS apps but I think that's mainly because they're targeted at a more specific niche (music making) and I've been able to do my own grassroots marketing on forums etc where I know the audience really well and there's far less competition overall. Games are such a big, saturated market that I wouldn't even consider trying to tackle them as an indie unless I could find a similarly specialized sub-niche. ~~~ kokey I believe the apps market, especially games, is and will become even more like the chart music industry. It will settle into major 'labels' who will pick games on criteria they think will make it a success, and then apply their big guns on promoting it using ever evolving methods. Sometimes an indie production will slip through but as the methods mature so will the independent successes be increasingly niche bound. ------ alanbyrne You're going after the wrong target market. Sudoku apps are for middle aged women (Yes, I generalize, but it's pretty much the only game my mother plays on her Android phone). Stop targeting your ads at Android related users (Android forums, games review sites). Go find a place where the people who will actually play your game hang out and then advertise there. Mothers group forums, parenting forums, business traveler hangouts, school teachers - whatever. ~~~ Lewisham Yes, it is worth reading this about how Tiger Style got their target market wrong: [http://www.edge-online.com/features/success-on-greenlight- is...](http://www.edge-online.com/features/success-on-greenlight-isnt-just- about-your-pitch-its-a-matter-of-appealing-to-the-right-gaming-culture/) ~~~ r0s That's interesting, they ultimately passed. I'd like to read their reaction. ------ angersock We may have reached Peak Sudoku on mobile devices. Also, your price is "Free". That may be why income is 0. ~~~ gumbo The OP here Yes, the Game is indeed free, but only with basic feature to get excited about the app. Then the user should upgrade to get access to the other cities and unlock level. The real issue is not only the big 0 income, but the fact that after 3 week we barely pass the 100 downloads. Google advertise everywhere that there are more than 1M new android activations everyday.... Those are potential users of any game right. What is not quite right I believe is the discovery of new app on the market. It took us 13 days to start appearing on the 20th page of the search "sudoku". ~~~ xshoppyx So your app that just got released and has 100 downloads should appear before an app that has been out for a longer period of time and has more downloads? I don't really think this makes sense from a user perspective, maybe fiddling with the search results once or twice to show recent apps, but it doesn't make sense to permanently move an app like yours up the list. Sorry if this comes off as harsh. ~~~ gumbo Fair enough @xshoppyx I don't mean that a recent app should appear before others. But at least give opportunity to "users" (not apps) to discover alternatives to the apps they have been using or games they've been playing. For example, on IOS, when you launch your app, you have a section where only the newest apps appear, at that give them enough exposure to sufficient traction if they worth it. ------ dubcanada Maybe try making a game there isn't already 50 million ways to play it. Sorry, but Really!? You expect a game that is also in every single newspaper in the world and has a puzzle book on every single book selling stand to do really really well because why? You launched it and sent it to a few app review sites? That's not all it takes to advertise something, there has to be a reason for someone to choose your game over the 50,000 other Sudoku games. And looking at it, there really isn't. ~~~ Macsenour And while we're at it, please don't make game #2 an Angry Birds game. ~~~ lurkinggrue Hey! Angry Sudoku! ~~~ bobbles Hey now a modification where you need to slingshot the appropriate numbers into the correct position might have a market. Think angry birds meets bubble bobble meets Sudoku. I'll take 50% of the profits thanks guys ------ n9com This is the perfect example of a why many devs here on HN need to stop undervaluing the benefits of a non-technical co-founder that can seriously rock the marketing side of stuff. What I see here is a pretty good looking app. Sure, it lacks things like scratch marks, but a solid version 1.0. However, you have really not done very much to promote the app. Emailing press and posting on forums won't get you far. The press get hundreds of review pitches a day - you can't expect to email them out of the blue on launch day and get them to cover your app - especially when it is not exactly noteworthy (it's not the first app of its kind). Learn to hustle. The newspaper ad under the sudoku puzzle was a good idea. ~~~ nostrademons I think there's a more fundamental problem here: entering a market where there are already literally 1000s of other competitors. It doesn't really matter how much he promotes his app - the people who like to play Sudoku probably already have a Sudoku app installed. And there're limited ways to be "better" than existing entrants. Perhaps a non-technical cofounder could've helped here, but really what he needed is courage and the ability to take risks. People who strike it big - in any market - do so by providing what other people are _not_ providing; you have to be willing to say "I'm going to do what other people are not doing, because they're doing it wrong" and then be right about that. ~~~ gumbo First, I have a non technical co-funder and he's doing a lot of stuffs to get us traction. I am not playing it defensive here. I've explained in a previous blog post where the game come from. I admit it should have been out a few months ago already. Nevertheless, what I tried to express in the blog post is my surprise/disappointment the results we are getting from our strategy. For example of getting featured on two facebook page of more that 200k fans each and not get at least 1k download is still interrogating me. And to come to the point of "providing what others are not providing", this is the whole point of the app. Our premises were: \- Sudoku can be fun. \- Sudoku can have nice design too with nice ambient sounds. \- You can build a fully featured sudoku game with all the above extras. Now I know, one can say that it is not enough... ~~~ regomodo > getting featured on two facebook page of more that 200k fans each and not > get at least 1k download is still interrogating me. That stat is pretty worthless. You can buy "fans". ~~~ gumbo I don't think so. I don't want to disclose here the concerned pages. But It is pages of android device manufacturing company. I don't think those kind of company need to buy fans. ~~~ katbyte I wouldn't expect the majority of those likes to be people who like your type of game, out of 200,000 how many like sudoku? Of of that smaller number how many would want to play it on their phone? Who don't already have an app they like with historical data/saves already? From 200k your potential target audience drops rapidly I would imagine. Instead of being featured on device pages you should try and get featured on actual sukoku or puzzle pages where a greater percentage of likes are from people who are more likey to be interested in your product. ------ lubujackson Well here's some advice: since you've written an article about your game, link the name of your game to the app store or a review or something. Also, mention that it is free since it is free. And explain what the game is and why anyone should care. In other words, you are always advertising and the biggest mistake people make is to not remove the roadblocks from all the roads. Marketing is easier when you realize, by default, no one cares. Not in a rude way, but no one will put in effort to care about something for no reason. Give them a reason. ------ andrewdubinsky If your game is a cool evolution of Sudoku, then focus your initial marketing efforts on places where people discuss that game. Find where your customers are, then spend your time and effort there. Go to those specific forum boards/google groups and be helpful and cool. Don't just barge in and spam everyone with new topics. Help people out first. Ask senior members to review your game and give you direct feedback. Take their concerns/comments seriously. Trying to market to everyone simply dilutes your effort. Make sure you have a good keyword rich domain name like sudoku-pro.com or sudoku-evolved.com or something (I have no idea if those names are taken). Highlight how your product stands out from "generic" soduku games. Setup a simple landing page (e.g. from a wordpress app template) with more information that details how great your game is specifically for Sudoku fans. Add google analytics or kissmetrics to the landing page. List your landing page in google for indexing (be patient it takes a while). Then buy a little traffic on adwords when people search for the keyword Sudoku (like 50-100 clicks). Limit your budget at first. I'm not suggesting you spend a lot. Just a little. Check google analytics to see the keywords that showed up on your page. When people click on an adwords ad, it shows the keywords they searched google for. So, if someone clicks your ad for "Bacon-flavored Sudoku", you will see in your logs their search term of "delicious tasting sudoku" You can learn a lot about what people are looking for this way and then fine tune your messaging and even your product to fit what people are looking for. Hope that helps. ------ zalambar You released a free app in a crowded market. You are going to need something exceptional to stand out. Searching for "sudoku" in the Play store returns "at least 1000 results" for Android apps. Potential buyers are unlikely to discover yours on its merit alone even if it is the best in the field. Review sites are unlikely to want to review "yet another sudoku app". Your 1000+ competitors are all asking for reviews as well. Unless you can offer a compelling narrative or give them an interesting reason to write about this app in particular you should not be surprised that there seems to be little interest. Your app also requires significantly more permissions than some of the other most popular sudoku apps. I don't know if most users care but given a choice between several free sudoku apps that might make a difference. ------ Dove 18MB seems pretty heavy for a Sudoku app. And it comes with a lot of permissions, and it's free with no obvious monetization strategy? I don't have data to tell you those things scare away users, but they'd sure as heck scare away _me_. ~~~ gumbo Thanks. I'll definitely work on that, I'll be able to remove few of them even if it mean removing features. ~~~ Dove Do take it with a grain of salt. I develop for Android, but mostly as a contractor for other people. I can tell you what would worry me as a user, but it's the guys up the thread who have had success selling their own apps that you really want to listen to. ------ duiker101 I totally feel your pain. It seems a very well done game. Unfortunately there are already hundreds of sudoku games, so a user will hardly find i. I can give you a couple suggestions anyway: send it to the guys over androidpolice.com every 3 weeks they make a list of the best games that just came out like this one [http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/15/40-best-new- android-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/01/15/40-best-new-android- games-from-the-last-3-weeks-122512-11513/) so I think you might have good chances of getting in there more than a fully featured article. Post it here. I think HN is more than willing to review your game. Post it on reddit.com/r/android it's a very open community and they often try apps for people that ask nicely. ------ boonez123 Go buy an ad in the Newspaper right under the Sudoku puzzle. So many freemium models invest hundreds of man hours into development then expect to pay $0 for advertising. It doesn't work like that. If you invested 100's of hours into dev, then get ready to spend 1000's of hours marketing, or alternatively buy your way into the market which is expensive. Good luck! ------ bstar77 Curious what your 'freemium' strategy is for this app. Crafting a strong freemium strategy seems to be a very difficult task which is probably why many companies struggle to find that perfect balance. Rocketcat games had a huge problem selling their game "Punch Quest", which was stunning due to that game's high quality. They ultimately realized that the money drops were too generous, that links to buy stuff were lost in the UI, that not enough compelling upgrades existed, etc. What you have built seems to be very polished and I think it's a very interesting take on the genre, but I think you might be in similar territory here. I'd also guess that the lion's share of people that pay for sudoku games are not the type that would want RPG elements mixed in. They are probably an older demographic that values simplicity over everything else. When the game "10,000,000" integrated rpg elements with "match 3" style gameplay, the masses loved it because it was a convergence of two types of gameplays that had similar demographics. ~~~ gumbo Not all the feature are free, there is in app purchases to unlock levels and cities. It also allows the user to take notes while playing and use hints (only for paying users). ------ justjimmy "Is It hard to promote mobile apps?" Hard when you are a few years late, in a genre (Sudoku) where there's not much room for innovation in game play. ------ endymi0n On top of ALL the comments here, which all have very valid points - even if you had a brand-new, innovative game concept, it's still damn hard to get traction and visibility in the app store(s). Nobody knows why this game is so good or that he needs to have it, and for some of those games, it's really a shame. The situation is comparable to web sites a few years ago. There's basically the SEO way - sideline promotion, forums, reviews, people skills etc. and there's the SEM way. If you invest enough to push your way up in the store through advertising (Trademob, the company that I'm working for, estimates around 10-100k, depending on category and target market), you'll eventually be paid back through the resulting organic installations coming from the visibility once you get into the top charts. TL;DR: In 2013, even for killer apps, there's no way to the top except through the hardship of promotion on all possible channels. Viral campaigns, PR, spreading the word, posting, blogging, and often pure money investment as well. Sorry, pal! ------ chipsy Like others, I would have to point to the choice of making another sudoku as a critical flaw. When a game is the same game as every other, it gets very little buzz or word of mouth...unless it has some overwhelmingly strong new feature to add value. Content items like art, storytelling, quantity of levels and pre-scripted events are mostly reflective of how video game development budgets tend to be proportioned against marketing budgets, where as the marketing budget gets bigger, more money is spent on making a lavish production that slightly outclasses the competition. These things help when a game has an existing audience that needs to mature into a more elaborate experience, but they have strongly diminishing returns on investment. Software features like multi-player, solvers, hints and tutorials, puzzle generators, are all good incremental extensions that can get people's attention, and many of these features are relatively cheap compared to additional content. Unfortunately, all of the big, obvious features for incrementally extending sudoku have been covered - there's no chance of gaining a lot of new users in this market when it's so thoroughly saturated. Monetization has also been saturated. Game monetization follows a pattern typical to innovative technology: Innovators can go pay-to-play if they're selling the privilege of a new experience. A good number of niche games can slip under the radar, making good profits for the innovator, but not enough to get attention. If the game is so profitable that it attracts a lot of attention, clones will appear and add incremental improvements, which pressures both price and quality. Eventually price collapses as free-to-play versions appear. However, free-to-play is _not_ the last step - open-source is. When people are hacking together polished, open-source versions of the game design, it's usually well past profitability, and sudoku is definitely in this category. (Exceptions to open-source as the last step exist, but are mostly related to the relative costs of content vs. technology) Which leaves you with "create a new, sudoku-inspired game design." Game design is the underlying source of both profitability and popularity in the videogaming sector, but it means having design skills in addition to production skills - formulaic processes for making original, marketable designs don't exist. The vast majority of people in the sector understand either original(but unmarketable) or marketable(but unoriginal), but have trouble recognizing when a design decision and a marketing decision are related, and what the implications are. And since maximizing marketability is more likely to keep you in business, industry consensus always biases around it. ------ jasimq This is what's wrong with your game: \- It's on Android. In my experience Android apps don't monetize as well as iOS. \- It's Sudoko. There are a lot of Sudoku apps out there. \- It's free. You probably need to change the pricing model. Try soem of the suggestions given in the comments above and let us know what happens. ------ michaelhoffman You made a sudoku game and most people who want a sudoku game already have one. ------ georgelawrence Try a little AppStore SEO Using my AppStore SEO tool (still in beta) I see you only appear in the results page of one popular search phrase "amazing sudoku"... [http://www.straply.com/app/android/guru-mobile/empire-of- sud...](http://www.straply.com/app/android/guru-mobile/empire-of-sudoku- single) But some other Sudoku apps appear in the results of hundreds of popular search phrases... [http://www.straply.com/app/android/genina-com/sudoku- free/so...](http://www.straply.com/app/android/genina-com/sudoku-free/sort- strongest) Perhaps you could try expanding your description to include more of the popular phrases related to Sudoku? But the real problem is what everyone else has been saying. Sudoku is just too crowded. ------ webreac Hi. I play a lot sudoku and I will not try your app. All the fancy you added to the sudoku game may be interesting, but the first thing I noticed is that your sudoku game is not ergonomic: on a touch screen, you MUST make the grid as big as possible. Personally, I use a sudoku game where I can put remaining possible digits in cases. If the purpose of your game was to improve my sudoku level, there would me more than 4 levels. I do not know who are your clients. I think that if I had a good free sudoku game (better than the one I am using), I would accept to pay (not too much) to have one more feature: the possibility to play a photographed grid. ------ SeoxyS One of the things you're doing wrong is that social sharing bar which, besides bring completely tactless, overlaps the content on mobile devices such that reading the article is impossible—even when scrolling due to it being fixed. ~~~ gumbo Thanks, just fixed. Launched the blog yesterday, haven't get time to test everything yet. Thanks again. ------ tjtrapp Tony Wright has a good write up about free vs paid iOS apps here [http://www.tonywright.com/2012/how-to-evaluate-a-paid- iphone...](http://www.tonywright.com/2012/how-to-evaluate-a-paid-iphone-app- idea/) ------ gumbo To respond to those asking why I made YET another sudoku game... Well, ... As I explained here : [http://www.buildnrun.com/sudoku-as-an-arcade-whould-you- play...](http://www.buildnrun.com/sudoku-as-an-arcade-whould-you-play-a-multi- player-sudoku/) This game is in the pipeline since a few month now (I made few mistakes by not being lean) but I wanted before the end of the year get it out and see how it's really look like to be out there in the wild. And YES it is out, and I'm not feeling like throwing it, so I need to see what I can make out of it. There are very good piece of advice bellow though. ~~~ georgelawrence Mamadou, Just curious, are you going to continue to refine Empire of Sudoku, or are you going to move on to other apps, like LiberTweet or perhaps other ideas? ~~~ gumbo :-) We'll keep refining the app based on the feedback we get from users. Currently working on a few stuffs like LiberTweet, but those don't affect my commitment to Sudoku Empire. The multiplayer edition is already ready, but we don't want to push it out yet because it could be confusing for user to grasp the game. We want to release it, when we will have enough user, and when those users will get confort using the single player edition. ------ moore1474 I agree with the commenters that there is just too much competition for Sudoku apps. I don't think the game I have on the android market [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moore1474....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moore1474.android.games.pyoo&feature=nav_other#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDYsImNvbS5tb29yZTE0NzQuYW5kcm9pZC5nYW1lcy5weW9vIl0) is nearly as polished as yours, but it gets a couple hundereds installations a day with little marketing from me, because there aren't very many games like it on the market. ------ davidcollantes The game looks fantastic. I think you developed for the wrong platform. On iOS you would have seen tangible results. ~~~ seestheday I agree on your premise, but think you got the os completely wrong. Why would iOS be any different for them? If they developed it for blackberry or Windows he would have had much less competition and may have found success. ------ clarky07 I've been trying to get off the ground with a few Android apps myself [1]. A few suggestions: 1\. As others have noted, test screenshots and icon. People looking for a sudoku app probably want to see a board playing sudoku. 2\. SEO. There aren't keywords on Android like there are on iPhone so everything goes on the description. I think you might be better off with a bit longer description with more keywords. 3\. Keep working on outside promotion. You picked a really crowded niche. When I search for Sudoku on the play store it tells me there are over 1k results. That is not going to be an easy thing to crack so you really need to get an outside feature and get word of mouth working for you. The multiplayer aspect should help with that. 4\. Look at more aggressive monetization strategies. I haven't tested it yet (my device is currently dead and charging), but it sounds (and from the screenshots looks) like you might be being too passive. You have to ask people for their money before they will give it to you. Don't give away too much of the game and make it obvious how to upgrade. You have to provide lots of value or they won't want to obviously, but you can't give away so much that people think the free version is "good enough" [1] - [http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/case-study-of-android-vs- ip...](http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/case-study-of-android-vs-iphone- app.html) ------ vellum When I go to your app’s page, these are the things I see (in order): 1.) smiling samurai on top, 2.) a bunch of menu pages in the screen shots + 1 sudoku puzzle, 3.) a description that’s more tell than show - “the most outstanding sudoku app”. The problem is, I have no idea what makes your game so special. You have about 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they hit the back button. I don’t see anything here that differentiates this from other sudoku apps in a meaningful way. ------ swastik As an answer to the actual title of the article, yes, it is hard. It can't be any other way. The answer to the question here: there could be many reasons for this. The one that stands out is the fact that the market is very crowded and thus, to get traction in the early days, you need a lot of marketing. The method you have adopted (blogs, forums, videos, etc.) sound like a good start. To make money — and since the app is free, I presume you are looking at ads — you will need traffic. That traffic isn't going to come in a month; it may not come at all. It seems you've had high expectations and are disappointed at not meeting them. So, yes, here are some of the things you did or are doing wrong: * the market and the offer (as a combination, not separate) — A crowded market and a me-too offering. There has to be something distinct, something that makes you stand out in a market as crowded as this. * the marketing itself — You need to be a lot more aggressive in marketing, get your app out on a lot more places. Even if a few blogs aren't publishing as quick as you'd like — and there's a reason for that — be persistent. With this kind of an app, it will be difficult. But not impossible. Get traffic in as many ways as you can. In some ways, as far as the traffic is concerned, you are also limiting yourself. Why advertise on just game related forums? You can go anywhere you think there is a good percentage of Android users and post. Build some reputation and you will drive some traffic. Again, the key is to be persistent. You may not meet your expectations but the traffic will go up. Great job on getting something out there! You have made some mistakes, and set some really high expectations, but you have something that you can learn from, if nothing else. ------ dice As others have mentioned, Sudoku is a rather crowded market. Still, your take on it looked interesting so I clicked over to the Play store intending to install it. I then saw that your app wants the "phone status and identity" privilege, which is an automatic no-go for me. Perhaps your potential customers do not want you to know what their phone number is, or the phone numbers of the people they're calling? ------ robomartin These are some thoughts and ideas from the launch for "Tommy Teaches the Alphabet" (www.tommyteaches.com) 1- I knew that this was a crowded segment and had no illusions as to the high probability for failure. In fact, my assumption was that I would have to almost personally make every single sale until other aspects of the "plan" could start to generate them. 2- I also assumed that the app would not do well by itself and would require a family of related apps that could cross-market themselves. 3- The app was built with an SMS-based recommendation mechanism from the very start. In fact, the code is there to extend this to email and social, but I wanted to see if SMS would work well first. Testing is important. 4- Enhanced cross-marketing would be turned on as new apps are released in order to make parents aware of the expanded line-up. 5- The current thinking is that half the apps are going to be absolutely free. The working hypothesis being that they will drive traffic to paid apps. 6- Being that the target users are small kids you really can't have advertising and in-app purchases. Including these things can have viscerally negative reactions from parents. Probably not a good idea. Apps geared towards adults have huge advantages in this department. 7- Given the expectation of having to exist in an already crowded segment I also put forth another working hypothesis for the problem of getting eyeballs to the app. The idea is that, in some ways, it is far easier to market and test (A/B testing) on the Web than on the App Store. Therefore, a companion website was, so the idea goes, of crucial importance. The primary goal of the website being that of a conduit to the various app stores. 8- These days you have to consider strategies beyond iOS. That's why I said "various app stores". The website could also vector traffic to other platform's stores. 9- Website traffic would mostly consist of adults looking for learning tools for their kids. Here's an opportunity to also potentially generate revenue with other branded items and/or affiliate revenue. 10- A website for an app like this can also become a destination in and of itself. Porting these games so that kids can also play them online could be a great way to sell them on mobile devices. Parents might see their kids enjoy them online and want to have time natively on their devices for when they are out of the house. The jury is still out on this idea. 11- Once a few more apps are out I plan on issuing press releases and generally making the product far more visible to relevant sites and reviewers. My thinking here is that doing so with one app might not be the best investment of time and money right now. Multiple apps means more hooks in the water. Therefore, the probability for conversion might be greater. 12- Having one slow-growing app in the market is good in that it will help you identify issues and usage patterns with the app that you are never going to see in your own testing. I've already integrated user feedback and bug fixes into this one app that would have been a disaster to deal with in the case of having tens of thousands of downloads. 13- Analytics are important. Without this data you are blind. I understand my app's usage patterns far better today than I did in the few weeks that it has been out. This tells you where you might want to focus. 14- As I said above, being the my assumption is that I'll have to sell every single copy myself, I have acted accordingly. For example, I took one of my kids to get a haircut the other day. A woman was there with her little girl. They had an iPad. I handed her my phone with the app running and ONLY asked for her opinion. I left them alone and said absolutely nothing. When I got back from my kid getting his haircut she told me that she bought the app and had some interesting feedback. The moral to that story is: Get out there and show your app to everyone that might be in your target market. And, yes, while you are trying to sell, the most important thing you want out of the interaction is to understand why someone might NOT want to buy it so you can improve things. 15- Don't expect overnight success. It could take a year to get to the point where you consider the effort worthwhile. If you are not OK with that then don't jump into the mobile app market. Very few apps become overnight money makers without a significant (read: expensive) marketing push from every angle). 16- Don't give up. I have hopes for the web+app model. The website has thousands of visitors per day due to my efforts. And the site isn't even finished or optimized in any way yet. I don't have solid conversion numbers yet, but I think that, with time, it could be a good driver. It'll be interesting to learn if the apps and brand can become more powerful as a web property than a mobile app. In other words, an inversion of sorts: start with a mobile app and discover that there's more money to be made on the web. Good question. Sudoku is probably just as tough, if not tougher, than the children's segment. Get creative. ~~~ gumbo Thanks for sharing all those insight. I'll definitely look into some of them with my partner. ------ intenscia We run www.slidedb.com which is a developer driven website for mobile games. Whilst our site is only new so the installs we drive will be small, it is one more outlet for you to promote your game (add it here www.slidedb.com/games/add). And because all content shown (including the homepage) is posted by the community / developers - you are not hoping an editor decides to cover your game, any coverage you get is entirely dictated by the effort you put in and what you post. We have been running simarly themed sites ModDB and IndieDB for years now reaching over 200k+ visitors daily. We hope to bring the same independent developer driven coverage to the mobile space in time. ------ dominic_cocch It's a great looking app - you definitely have a sense for design. However, like many others have already mentioned, Sudoku is overdone. While you may still gain some traction here (14 5-star reviews is a good start!), you definitely have some talent to use on your next project. If you go for another game, try to come up with an entirely new gameplay-type. Or at least pretend it's a new gameplay type by not using the gameplay type as part of the game's title. Halo isn't called Halo: First Person Shooter for a good reason. ------ visualR You made a game. Youre competing with every other game and other forms of entertainment. Id say regroup and refocus on writing software that solves pain points. Read patio11. ------ h4rrison Unrelated to discussion, but I proof read your article for you: <http://pastebin.com/Hd3YyqA6> ------ randartie This is why: <http://i.imgur.com/QspUu.png> You're getting overwhelmed by 1000 free versions of the same game. ------ pkamb Price: Free Platform: Android ~~~ rtkwe Game Type: Sudoku. I think this is the larger factor. Getting people to pay for Sudoku seems like a big ask considering the plethora of existing apps which scratch the same itch (and better) for free. Graphics aren't a big thing for Sudoku to me. ------ JabavuAdams 1) Congratulations on shipping. That's more than a lot of people do. 2) There are too many Sudoku games out there. The product is fundamentally flawed. 3) Cross-promote. You need to somehow get a friendly slightly bigger player to put a link in their game to your game, and visa versa. The difficulty is that you can't really supply clicks. So, play on their sympathies? Indie dev, hometown dudes, etc? ------ MacsHeadroom This game looks great. Unfortunately, it plays horribly. * There is no easy way to see when all of one number have been found. * It is very easy to accidentally click the wrong number (thus losing points). * Only one level is available without purchasing What does this game even provide over the dozens of free Sudoku games? As far as I can see- nothing, aside from some pretty graphics. I wouldn't be paid $2 to play this Sudoku game. ------ clinth Just downloaded and gave it a minute. Mute doesn't work. Reproduce: start app, hit mute, start game, and this _tremendous_ gong noise rings out when the round starts. Would uninstall right there. Also, on the Play Store, it's "Empire Of Sudoku - Single", while in my app list, it's "Sudoku Empire". I had to look for it after installing it. ------ deliv Spend some budget on marketing. Or find free distribution channels. What worked best for me was to create a channel on Playboard (<http://playboard.me>) and add my app. Or just ask one of the more popular editors to add it to their channels. ------ LukaD I don't install apps that have a banner that says 'FREE' in their logo. I always suspect these games to be of very low quality (I have no clue if that's true of your app as well) and that they are packed with micro transactions. This is how I see it from my user's point of view. ------ gumbo The op here: Many have said that maybe the market is crowded with "sudoku" games. I do agree, that may be in part a reason. However, I'm talked to many indie developers that have built very nice game and by nice I mean addicting that are unable to cross the 1k downloads. ------ jyap "Now this is not our first mobile apps, we’ve made some in the past that got after a few months (without any advertisement) 30k downloads" Quick tip. Cross promote your new app to your established audience. ------ lurkinggrue ...Wait. It's free? Were you expecting to make it up in volume? ------ d0gsbody I see that you are getting it posted on Facebook pages and G+. Why not give it its own facebook promotional page? Ask all of your friends to like it, use bufferapp, etc. ------ j45 How do you know what you were building was something people wanted before you started building? What steps did you take to find this out before starting? ------ watmough Why does your app require permission to look at my phone calls? ~~~ gumbo Will be fixed in the next release. ------ jamesaguilar It's Sudoku. ------ vrajesh5 did you try appgratis? ------ rprasad I have 3 sudoku apps on my phone; I can tell you what you are missing: scratch marks. At higher difficulties, it is absolutely necessary to be able to note eliminations or possibilities within a square. Without that, the best you can hope for is casual sudoku player, but soduku is by nature not a game for casual players. ~~~ dizzystar This is exactly true. Soduku players are attracted to words like "difficult," "hard," "impossible," or any other challenge. The level-up format sends a very strong signal that there are tons of "easy" puzzles and like many of these level-up games, it is going to take a while to get to "hard," and that is a tough investment to make when you are 99% sure the payoff doesn't exist. It is a nice-looking game, but I don't get the impression the creator is someone involved in the soduku world or understands the market too well. Think of soduku like you'd think of crosswords. Crosswords have a very quick ramp-up. Those that do well early and like it will quickly move on to the hard stuff, only bothering to do Monday and Tuesday as a speed-trial if they bother at all. They use ink instead of pencil and they get very upset at poorly designed puzzles and bad clues. In other words, you are dealing with a highly finicky crowd. ------ TheAmazingIdiot It's yet another sudoku game. No matter how good it is, or looks, you compete with the multitude of free sudoku games out there. Try something more vertical niche, and hunker down. A fill-in-the-blank game is not super-profit worthy. Even Rovio took a decade before they hit it with Angry Birds. I think this is a problem too: Price: Free Well, unless you make up for it in quantity...? ------ rorrr Your main problem is that your app is a sudoku game. There are literally thousands of sudoku apps on Android (I just verified with a search). Your app probably doesn't even show up in the search results, which are limited to 20 pages on Google Play. If you want to make money with anything, you start with checking your competition. So my advice to you is - make an original game.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dynamic variables hack in Erlang - coglethorpe http://hyperstruct.net/2008/1/31/dynamic-variables-hack-in-erlang ====== aaronblohowiak I agree with Jay's suggestion of adding a property list to the end instead of a hash -- this leads you with much the same effect for the passthrough args. For dynamic language on erlang vm, check out [http://on- ruby.blogspot.com/2009/03/reia-new-dynamic-languag...](http://on- ruby.blogspot.com/2009/03/reia-new-dynamic-language-on-erlang-vm.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AI Startups in Montreal - myth_drannon https://www.wired.co.uk/article/best-startups-montreal ====== myinnerbanjo As someone going through the Canadian immigration process right now, it sure seems easier and faster to immigrate to Quebec, either on a work visa or investment. That no doubt will be a huge factor in any explosive growth, truly being the fuel for the fire.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Roll your own Authorization in Rails - shakycode http://shakycode.com/post/119853043794/roll-your-own-authorization-in-rails ====== shakycode Would love to get some hints/tips on a refactoring for this. This is something I came up with a while back and I'm sure it could use some improvement.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to use Python (code provided) to get historical data from Binance - finance_student https://fxgears.com/index.php?threads/how-to-acquire-free-tick-and-bar-price-data-for-backtesting-in-2020-and-beyond-stocks-forex-and-crypto-currency.1229/#post-19305 ====== finance_student There's also some info on getting tick level Forex data on that page.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Help me get my life back. - efiusiqei Hello HNers,<p>I'm posting with a new username, don't want to disclose my identity.<p>ADDICTION ========= I'm seriously addicted to an Internet and entrepreneurship activities. It's not worth than a drugs... Most of you will get what I mean, that feeling when you can't think about outside world.<p>PERSONAL LIFE ============= I have a girlfriend (soon to become wife). My personal life is being damaged because my above mentioned illness. I can't compromise enough time to her, even if I do I still think about my projects.<p>I tried an "Information Diet", to eliminate all the worthless activities like FB, surfing without a purpose, etc... Even went outdoors but day after day I feel that I'm changing to the bad. This hurts both my personal life and my productivity.<p>PROBLEM ======= I also know how to achieve what I want, but as I go deeper I encourage another problem: If I focus on my projects, I hurt my personal life and this demotivates me. If I focus on personal life, I still think on my project.<p>PURPOSE ======= In general I know what I want from the life, among the most important things are my personal life (wife, family, friends...) and the work (startups, projects, coding...).<p>ROUTINE ======= Here's what my daily routine looks like, in general I'm very self disciplined: - Get up early (6:30) and do some project related stuff; - Take a bath, eat a breakfast and go to work (which includes loads of coding); - Finish work at 6:00 and go meet a GF, - Hang out several hours together, then go to sleep at 10:30; - Trying to do as much project related staff as I can on weekends, besides I simply rest or go outdoors;<p>Being like a robot makes me depressed, I'm kind of getting tired with the casual routine.<p>CONCLUSION ========== I know most of you will say that I have to find the balance (I know it myself), but I would appreciate if one of you advises some realistic things.<p>Thanks in advance HNers. ====== attheodo If you want my humble opinion my friend, you're pretty much fine. Your addiction is quite bearable and you seem to have a pretty structured routine which is a luxury for most of people. Maybe get some more exercice and relax... everyone goes through some bad times every once in a while. Keep calm and keep hustling... everything is fine.. ------ epoxyhockey Can you clarify what the problem is? The fact that you can unplug from work at 6pm until 10:30pm shows that you are enjoying your personal life. If you are in the United States, I would say that your allotment of free time is on par with most individuals employed at a typical corporate job. ------ michaelpinto A really wise project manager once told me "no matter how hard you try you can't fit ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag". If you apply this to time management you really can't have your cake and eat it too. So either you need to be more productive with less time on the entrepreneurial front, or you need a personal partner who accepts that's who you are (or some compromise combination of the two). I think the key thing to realize is that there aren't any silver bullets when looking for these sorts of answers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
To end mass incarceration, cap all prison sentences at 20 years – Vox - iron0013 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/12/18184070/maximum-prison-sentence-cap-mass-incarceration ====== justtopost I say, cap them at 10, make prison compulsury college, and bring back capitol punishment for eggregious crimes of an unforgivable, or irredeemabe nature. If a decade is not enough to learn, I doubt and extra one will help. Much less an extra decade being treated like meat inside a cell. Prisons are just places to hang out and learn from other criminals, while sowing distrust for authority right now. Precious little rehab is happening behing bars, and more trama than can be counted. It is well documented that trauma leads to more violence, and the cycle repeats. Either we start treating prisoners like people, or justify the current system of incarceration some other way. I realize capitol punishment is unpopular, but there is some validity to deterrance, and life behind bars, unless things change, seems even less humane to me. I welcome a better solution, but what we have now seems ancient and barbaric compared to the rest of the world we have created. ------ squozzer The funny thing about a 20-year cap is that at least for murderers and rapists, some vengeful loved ones of the victim(s) may still be alive to take retribution. For which they might get 20 years. ------ nilskidoo Or we could just limit prison stays to rapists, murderers and bankers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
EFF to Santa Clara County: Improve Police Body Camera Rules - DiabloD3 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/eff-santa-clara-county-improve-police-body-camera-rules ====== DrScump Our letter addresses, among other issues, limits on when deputies may record at protests... EFF seems unfamiliar with the County Sheriff's jurisdiction: they only cover _unincorporated_ land plus a couple of cities that contract with them to be their police force (e.g. Cupertino). I doubt there has ever been a protest in their jurisdiction since they got BWCs.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Advantages of monolithic version control - Tomte http://danluu.com/monorepo/ ====== pipu I find discussions on this topic highly interesting. Thank you for this piece. I myself summarized Google engineers' reasoning behind the monorepo decision. It may be found here [https://www.extreg.com/blog/2017/02/googles-ultra-large- scal...](https://www.extreg.com/blog/2017/02/googles-ultra-large-scale- monolithic-source-code-repository/) and it's based on this original article [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google- store...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores- billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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