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Apple, FBI, and the Burden of Forensic Methodology - jazzdev
http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645
======
alexqgb
In essence, it's legally impossible for the FBI to keep any software created
under this order from becoming public. And they know it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Introducing $Cashtags by Square Cash - chirau
https://cash.me/
======
ominous
hmmmm what about: "twitter is now rolling out the ability for you to click on
stock symbols with a $ sign in front of them. Once you click them, you’ll be
able to see all of the conversation about a particular company, much like you
would a hashtag."
[http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/07/31/twitter-rolls-
out-c...](http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/07/31/twitter-rolls-out-
clickable-stock-symbols-so-you-can-keep-up-with-your-investments/)
------
AustinDizzy
I love the new features and usability they throw into Square every few months,
but when will they start to branch out internationally or at least to support
more countries? A client of mine live in Canada, and I in the US. There is no
other fee-free and easy way to send money back and forth between us besides
Square Cash, but it's not available in Canada. I'd imagine branching out to
Canada would bring in a lot of other business besides myself.
~~~
tubbzor
Bitcoin?
~~~
AustinDizzy
Sadly, he would be losing money to pay me money because 1 CAD is only 0.80 USD
so purchasing BTC with a Canadian bank account/card gives him worse exchange
rates. How we've gotten around this is him buying me Amazon gift cards. He can
spend $50 CAD on a gift card that is worth $50 USD and I just use that on
Amazon anytime I want.
------
dvcc
For anyone wondering, registering your $Cashtag does not force you to enable
the cash.me page. The page can be disabled from within the app, so you can
grab the name without having to make it available.
------
zcdziura
Someone, somewhere, is patting themselves on the back for the seemingly clever
name.
------
j_s
A new namespace land-grab!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tim Berners-Lee on the exact location where the web was invented - adamhowell
http://davidgalbraith.org/uncategorized/the-exact-location-where-the-web-was-invented/2343/
======
jamesshamenski
according to <http://CERN.ch-> CERN is neither swiss or french but neutral. So
does that mean no country can claim to have invented the web?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Heatwave unveils ancient settlements in Wales - seanalltogether
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-44746447
======
freehunter
It is mindboggling to me that ancient humans could have had such an impact
that it's still seen today without concrete, stones, or any lasting structure.
Just digging a ditch, then forgetting about it for two thousand years, until
one day you can see dark lines in the grass.
Absolutely staggering. I wish they knew that they'd have made such a long-
lasting impression on the Earth.
~~~
madaxe_again
From my house, in North Wales, I can see a vast landscape shaped hugely by
ancient hands - Snowdonia. The hills were once heavily forested, and held
springs and glades in which Mesolithic, Celtic and Roman peoples lived and
farmed - but they are now all moorland, as the trees were felled thousands of
years ago, for construction and grazing.
Much of what we think of as natural landscape was made by man.
Even that which is patently unnatural passes without much consideration- the
neighbouring farm sits smack atop a Roman fort (situated on an inconvenient
hilltop between a known fort on the conwy river and a known fort atop a
mountain, which has a view to the sea on one side and our hill, but not the
river, on the other) - and my garden atop a Roman road - and nobody knows. The
dead giveaway was when we took the mouldering plaster (gypsum atop lime) off
the internal walls of the house, to find dressed masonry, and one slab with
part of a funerary inscription upon it - the cottage was built from spoilage
from the road and tombs that lined it - 400 years ago they would have just
been some handily squared off chunks of stone, ideal to build with.
~~~
corin_
I’m not a local or an expert in this area, but do spend a week or two at least
once a year in the mountains, either the Lake District or Wales, so have had a
few conversations about this in the past.
> _”as the trees were felled thousands of years ago”_
Might you have a source on this you could share? I was under the impression
that at least the majority of the deforestation happened in recent centuries
or even decades, rather than thousands of years.
I did a quick google and didn’t immediately find much detail, although this
[0] article from the Independant claims “ _half of its ancient woodland lost
since the 1930s_ ” talking about Britain as a whole.
Maybe it happened much earlier in North Wales?
Anyway, wherever the line is between natural and man-made, I still really love
Snowdonia - was there most recently two months ago (staying quite near you as
it happens, a few miles inland from Conwy), it’s such a nice place to get away
from city life for a little.
There’s a guy who has been campaigning / writing a lot about this subject (I
think specifically about the Lake District but might be wrong) pushing for
more tree planting, but I can’t think of the name right now... Edit: George
Monbiot. I don’t have time right now to revisit his writing but just remember
he’s interesting on the topic.
[0] [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/worrying-
sl...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/worrying-slump-in-
tree-planting-prompts-fears-of-deforestation-1997344.html)
~~~
vincebowdren
It's true about the trees being felled thousands of yours ago; it's believed
to be the same in my local countryside, the Peak.
That claim about half of ancient woodland lost since the 1930s : that's true,
but it's referring to what ancient woodland still remained in the 1930s
compared to what remains now. Both are very small areas, compared to the
amount of land which became forested after the last ice age.
A quick reference I've found; wikipedia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanket_bog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanket_bog))
has "In some areas of Europe, the spread of blanket bogs is traced to
deforestation by prehistoric cultures.", cited to an article in Nature: Moore,
P. D. (1973). The influence of prehistoric cultures upon the initiation and
spread of blanket bog in upland Wales. Nature, 241, 350–353.
------
paganel
For those interested in aerial archeology I recommend the work of French
archeologist Roger Agache, who pioneered the domain in France in the '60s and
'70s and based on whose work tens if not hundreds of Roman-era villas have
been mapped in the plains located between the Loire valley and the Northern
area of Paris. Just a couple of links: [http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/discip5-p...](http://www.archeologie-
aerienne.culture.gouv.fr/en/discip5-pg1.htm) (presenting his work in English)
and especially this
[http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/memoire_fr?ACTION...](http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/public/mistral/memoire_fr?ACTION=RETROUVER_TITLE&FIELD_6=REF&VALUE_6=ARR22%2b&GRP=5&SPEC=9&SYN=1&IMLY=&MAX1=1&MAX2=1&MAX3=50&REQ=%28%28ARR22%2b%29%20%3aREF%20%29&DOM=Tous&USRNAME=nobody&USRPWD=4%24%2534P)
(with actual aerial photos taken by Agache and his team).
------
furyg3
Something similar is happening in Holland, where it's possible to see where
the historical fields were within current field divisions.
[https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/nederland-zo-droog-dat-zelfs-
hi...](https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/nederland-zo-droog-dat-zelfs-historische-
akkers-weer-zijn-te-zien~af7ac467/)
~~~
Freestyler_3
Though thats only from 50 years ago.
What is nice is that the article mentions the rain shortage, which is a nice
way to compare.
------
throwaway5752
Not to be pedantic but does it really qualify as a heat wave? Essentially the
whole planet (with a few exceptions) is 2-3 F hotter than the last 100 year
avg and the 3-4 highest month ever measured. This is really just new normal
temperatures in a continuing upward trend.
~~~
andyjohnson0
I live in the UK, and the weather over the last six weeks has been
exceptionally dry and warm compared to our usual summer weather [1]. It might
not be a heatwave in some technical sense, but here on the ground that's how
people are describing it.
[1] _" Three fine days and a thunderstorm"_
~~~
jadavies
We haven't had a hosepipe ban around here yet so it's not a proper heatwave :)
------
hayksaakian
I wonder if this explains crop circles in the USA
~~~
simonswords82
Interesting thought but crop circles are made by crops being pressed down in
to complex patterns, so probably not?
[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=crop+circles&num=100&sourc...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=crop+circles&num=100&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjl9dzZ_ZPcAhUFTcAKHRZsCIYQ_AUICigB&biw=1440&bih=675)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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A member of our community is missing, help find him - mcgwiz
http://blog.izs.me/post/72990767417/a-member-of-our-community-is-missing-help-find-him
======
8ig8
Please read this. It seems to be the source of the original post and provides
additional details (news articles). It is also easier to read.
[http://findluk.com](http://findluk.com)
Edited to better describe the link.
~~~
thisishugo
Isaac isn't just some guy who read a website and made a blog post, he has been
at the forefront of the search for Luke, and is (rightly!) using his profile
as the maintainer of Node to call attention to the dedicated website that has
been set up.
------
bazzargh
Hope Luke turns up ok, here's a story of someone local to me who disappeared
but came back: [http://thepopcop.co.uk/2013/12/the-boy-who-went-missing-
from...](http://thepopcop.co.uk/2013/12/the-boy-who-went-missing-from-
belladrum/)
The point being (as Tom says in his story), if you feel alone - talk to
someone. It's ok not to feel ok.
~~~
Snail_Commando
Asking for a friend, what do you do if you don't have anyone to talk to? I
feel like the answer should be obvious, but I have no idea what it is.
~~~
wavesounds
I find it hard to believe your friend doesn't know a single person who will
listen to him talk. I think more likely he is afraid to show vulnerability to
people he knows.
In my experience I've always become better friends with someone who has shared
with me or who I have shared something personal with. Through showing
vulnerability, which takes courage, we build strength.
I've also been surprised at how accepting people are when you confide in them.
People are much more sympathetic then we think.
I'm not usually a fan of Ted talks but theres a good one on this subject, you
might want to show him
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o)
That being said here is the national suicide prevention hotline 1-800-273-8255
just incase its an emergency. I know people who have called before it's not a
big deal they don't send out police to your house or anything like that, if
anything you may have to wait on hold for a while, but the people who work
there are saints
~~~
strathmeyer
College didn't work out for everyone. There weren't enough jobs for all of us,
now I am in my mid thirties, have no friends, and am unemployable. But you can
rest assured that, yes, most people think that I shouldn't exist.
~~~
httpagent
Hello! I believe you are more valuable as a person than the contributions you
make through a job. Many people find their self worth through employment, but
when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, employment generally means
making money for someone else. This concept of economic slavery causes people
who don't fit into the job market to feel like they're not worth their weight.
Your value as a person doesn't have to be defined by your employment. If you
open your mind you can find your value as a listener, a thinker, a gardener...
whatever.
I could use a friend as well - hit me up @gmail.
------
MojoJolo
There are some inconsistency with regards to his tattoo in the blog and the
website.
In the blog, it mentioned that the _rm -rf /_ was in his left chest. And in
the website, it was said to be in his right chest. This is also the case for
his sacred heart tattoo. Based on the picture, sacred heart tattoo is placed
in his right chest.
I hope Luke is fine and okay.
~~~
gmrple
I imagine that is probably a webcam photo, so left/right are backwards.
~~~
CanSpice
If left/right were backwards, then the text would be backwards as well.
------
mcantelon
according to another person who worked with him when he lived in New York, he
disappeared for 5 days once there. So hopefully he'll turn up.
------
dhimes
Beyond giving my heartfelt wishes that he turns up ok, I have to give kudos to
Yahoo for hiring a private investigator to try to find him.
------
elwell
His last tweet just says "Ok." [0]
[0] - [https://twitter.com/luk](https://twitter.com/luk)
~~~
ricardobeat
That's not really suspicious, someone answered "thanks for coming", this was
right after he was last seen in public.
His friends have stated that later on he communicated in private, with
something that got them worried (not publicized). The search begun just a
couple hours after that.
~~~
lexandstuff
I think the "Thanks for coming. Ok." thing is an in joke. See @isz's Twitter
profile.
[https://twitter.com/izs](https://twitter.com/izs)
------
jaseemabid
Hey Luke,
I hope you are ok and is reading HN right now. Come back, the world is missing
you.
------
failho
I'll share this - not that I'll be any help (no where near you). Hope he turns
up ok!
My friend disappeared before and it's amazing to see how many people we
reached with just facebook and twitter. In my case it sadly didn't have a
happy ending - but the support you receive from complete strangers is just
mind blowing!
------
industriousthou
Hope the guy's okay and he turns up. It's sort of touching to see his
coworkers come up with this. I wonder though, if he had issues with anxiety or
depression, if the attention could push him away.
------
VMG
Reminds me of this guy:
[https://twitter.com/mauricemach](https://twitter.com/mauricemach)
Could never figure out what happened to him
~~~
dudurocha
could you expand on the history? As a fellow brazilian I'm curious.
~~~
VMG
He is the initial creator of
[https://github.com/mauricemach/zappa](https://github.com/mauricemach/zappa),
but his online activity stopped late 2011
------
duffdevice
I don't mean to be callous, but what exactly are you asking for help with?
He's not a 4 year old child, he's not an elderly person with dementia. He's a
grown man. If he can't be found, apparently he doesn't want to be found. Are
we concerned that he is somehow wandering around town without access to any
means of communication? I don't get this.
~~~
moocowduckquack
Grown men, despite what you may have heard, sometimes need a little help too.
~~~
duffdevice
Obviously this is true, but rarely do they need help being physically located.
If he needs psychological help or emotional support, clearly that is a
different matter, and not something that can be provided by rallying as many
random, well-meaning strangers as possible...I still fail to see what is being
requested here.
~~~
rurounijones
hard to render psychological help or emotional support if you cannot find the
guy who needs the help.
------
jacquesm
Ominous title on that last twitter picture.
ITS THE FINALE
[https://twitter.com/luk/status/418306940662321152/photo/1](https://twitter.com/luk/status/418306940662321152/photo/1)
~~~
gojomo
That's not really suspicious in describing a new-year's-eve fireworks photo.
That tweet was followed by a few more innocuous tweets, and one of the other
links posted suggest Arduini was last seen the next afternoon (~12 hours
later).
So those words are only 'ominous' with some straining, in retrospect... and
are unlikely to be relevant to the disappearance.
I point this out just so that people won't see your comment and, lacking
context, jump to premature conclusions.
------
pjbrunet
"rm -rf /" is pretty cool.
Hope he's not in trouble.
~~~
__matt
i think he is suicidal, do the math. if that is his most recent tattoo...,
otherwise just a cool guy.
------
gotrecruit
sorry i can't be of more help, but i'm curious as to why the fact that he "has
travelled to Thailand" is relevant...
~~~
steveklabnik
It's possible that he knows someone there, or is at least familiar with the
place, and so might turn up there again.
~~~
watson
I'm in Thailand - don't know if I can be of any help?
------
bhartzer
Seems as though he was in the SF area. For those of us who are not in
California is there anything we can do? I'm in Texas...
~~~
dutchbrit
Share the message. And keep your eyes open :)
------
SG-
what if he doesn't want to be found?
------
tensafefrogs
What's the deal with the creepy hookah/booze bottle picture at the bottom of
that page?
~~~
cleverjake
its a tumblog of isaacs. it changes every page load.
------
jheriko
it would be nice if this could somehow be a banner across the top of HN...
hope he is found soon.
~~~
ballard
echo 'Amber Alert' | sed 's/Amber/Luke/'
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What kind of computer chair do you use at home? - siavosh
======
michaelpinto
Three suggestions:
1\. Go to the store, sit in the chair, and buy the one that feels comfy but
won' break your budget. Other than that don't worry about it.
2\. From my past experience in the web 1.0 era I've found that startups that
focus on furniture over their own product don't do well in the long run.
3\. The real thing you want is a HUGE whiteboard.
~~~
dutchrapley
Great suggestion on #1, and I recommend looking for a store that specializes
in office furniture - not Staples or Office Depot.
When I started working from home, I did exactly this and sat in two dozen
different chairs. I settled on this one
[http://www.bestofficefurnituredeal.com/Eurotech-Mid-Back-
Erg...](http://www.bestofficefurnituredeal.com/Eurotech-Mid-Back-Ergonomic-
Task-Chair-Aviator-FM5505-Green-Mesh-Fabric_10049.htm) and never had a sore
back from it in the 2 1/2 years I sat in it.
Now that I'm back in an office, I sit in a Steelcase Leap and have enjoyed
this chair, too.
Just don't randomly pick one based on reviews, try them out. Even check to see
if your local office furniture will let you take one home for a test drive.
------
Khao
I am either sitting on the couch with my laptop on my knees or at a standing
desk.
------
steventruong
Some leather desk chair (don't even know the brand).
~~~
benologist
Same ... not sure mine even _has_ a brand, it's just a desk chair heh.
------
bluekeybox
Herman Miller Embody.
------
olsonea
I stand!
juststand.org
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
StartupBus 24 hour challenge - elias
http://blog.startupbus.com/the-24-hour-challenge
======
mskpeck
Elias has another brilliant idea for startups to work together on a short time
frame. The competitive environment is fun and tests your abilities - I'm ready
to sign-up, are you?!
------
alexkehayias
They should stick them in a tiny room next to a smelly bathroom. That'll
separate the men and women from the boys and girls!
------
cemregr
StartupBus is soon going to be considered a martial art.
------
nerdshepherd
This looks like a really unique Hackathon! Super excited
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Investment Thesis for a University Incubator - paulorlando
http://startupsunplugged.com/startup-programs/investment-thesis-university-incubator/
======
j4pe
What's the level of demand for spots in the incubator? It seems that a
university-specific community would be small enough that optimizing for just
one of the factors mentioned (teams, for instance) is enough to winnow the
applicant pool to a reasonable size, if applied stringently enough. It's only
when you get up to a YC level of demand where you need additional judgement
criteria.
Or maybe the USC community is just huge?
~~~
paulorlando
The USC community is big, but of course smaller than what other non-university
programs can take (the world). It's not really a problem of winnowing the
applicant pool, it's more of a problem of creating something that makes sense
for the participants. One piece of that is not only looking at tech
businesses. While YC and other accelerators have to think of financial
returns, a university program that is not taking equity can think of other
benefits.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Ask HN: When's the best stage to join a company? - alphagrep12345
We hear a lot about early employees at Google, Facebook who went on to become leaders at the firm, found their own startups, become VCs etc. What about 500th employee? 5000th employee? To optimize for growth, is there some heuristic to determine the best stage to join a company?
======
todipa
There are too many variables to say when exactly. It depends on how much
equity you get as an employee.
[https://www.realfinanceguy.com/home/2018/7/21/joining-a-
star...](https://www.realfinanceguy.com/home/2018/7/21/joining-a-startup-
after-series-a)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Oracle launches their own social network - cleverjake
https://mix.oracle.com/home
======
naner
This isn't unusual, a number of larger companies have created internal social
network clones. Big companies seem to have a bunch of little pet projects that
get started because somebody important is trying to look good and be noticed.
A _lot_ of projects. Large companies spend a massive amount of wasted effort
on very poor internal software projects. It is sad.
~~~
cleverjake
any good examples?
~~~
naner
Several, unfortunately. I'd rather not talk about my personal experiences
here, though.
Here's some social networking examples:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/322857/The_new_employ...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/322857/The_new_employee_connection_Social_networking_behind_the_firewall)
A lot of these projects are hardly used and hated by employees. Typical
tactics involve making it mandatory for all employees to upload a picture and
start a profile so they can boast huge adoption numbers.
------
c3
"Launches"? Heh. I'm actually the lead dev on this (entp). It's been around
since at least 2007, when my git history starts. Nothing new about it, but it
seems to be a good way for Oracle employees and customers to communicate about
products.
------
pt
This is not new, been around for 3-4 years now, and is targeted for oracle
employees.
What Oracle launched on Wednesday is this:
<http://cloud.oracle.com//my-cloud/service_social.html>
This is a Social Network layer on top of their latest Fusion Applications. In
my opinion, this is more about enterprise collaboration and less about
"social". Oracle is just being buzzword compliant here.
------
bane
Why am I secretly wishing that users have to specify their profiles using
BPEL?
------
ethank
Lord.
This is classic management by objectives incentivizing with checklist
implementation. "Social is big, we'll be social!"
People say that big companies are aircraft carriers: to big to be nimble, too
big to stop. It doesn't have to be that way, but things like this do little to
assuage from the notion that it's endemic.
------
namidark
Isn't this incredibly old? I swear this has been on ENTP's portfolio page for
at least 2 years now... <http://entp.com/work/>
~~~
etherael
I was working on an australian focused social network for oracle a while back
(almost three years now) and this was an example site given for what they had
done overseas, at that point it was also a rails app, and I note in the
portfolio it's a rails app too. Higher up in the comments here I can see
someone referring to this as an overused enterprise framework, so maybe it's
been relaunched using one of oracle's tools? Couldn't be bothered to fiddle
with it and figure it out.
It looks pretty much the same to me from memory.
------
prodigal_erik
This is what happens when enterprisey frameworks are overused. Every link on
the front page wants to log me in using js to submit a hidden form containing
thousands of bytes of base64 crap to express what they know about me, namely
nothing. The unenhanced <noscript> version is generic and completely useless,
of course.
~~~
c3
That's actually the Oracle single sign-on server you're seeing there, not the
Mix app itself.
------
alfiejohn_
Clicking on a couple of posts, or going to the verification link in my sign up
email, I get:
"System error. Please re-try your action. If you continue to get this error, please contact the Administrator."
Edit: it looks like it doesn't like Opera.
------
cleverjake
wonderfully buzzword filled description video -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dK60hDNuTDo)
------
bozho
"Oracle" and "easy to use" just don't match. Sorry, but unless Oracle acquire
such a tool (and doesn't have time to make it crappy), I don't think they can
have something user-friendly, useful and working.
~~~
fondue
They aren't allowed to try?
~~~
bozho
By all means, they are allowed to try. I just don't think they can do it. If
they do - good for the customers.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you get things done in hourlong intervals? - zackattack
I'm talking about code.<p>When I was alone, I would go to the coffee shop and do work for 6 hours, and tune out the rest of the world. But now I'm visiting a friend, and keep getting interrupted by them in order to do various things, and it seems like my intervals to get things done are altogether too small to really dive into my code. I've made minimal progress, even though there are so many things to do, and I have so much time(on aggregate) to do them.<p>Possible solution: every time I wrap up a coding session, write a paragraph summarizing what needs to be done next, why, and where?
======
JimmyL
When I know I am wrapping up a coding session, I'll often leave a few trivial
things unfinished - so that when I sit back down again for the next session,
I'll have an easy place to jump right back in, and it will force me to
(consciously or otherwise) get back to somewhere near the mental state I was
in when I half-finished the thing.
In this particular situation, pick what you want to do: get your coding done
or visit your friend. If the priority is the former, tell them "I've got some
work to do for a few hours, so I'm going to go find a Starbucks and set up
station. Want to meet for a drink around <five hours from now>?" If the
priority is the latter, then embrace the distraction, spend some quality
time/activities with the person you've traveled to visit, and if you must
code, keep it to small discrete chunks like bugfixes or writing unit tests.
------
edw519
Work in 48 minute increments...
[http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-
of...](http://successbeginstoday.org/wordpress/2006/09/the-power-
of-48-minutes/)
I've been doing this for years (depending, of course, on what I'm working on).
It can be very effective.
Get a digital timer. Set it for 48:00. Start it. You may not stop working
until it beeps. 12 minutes for stretch, email, bathroom, snack, etc., is
plenty. Then back to work. And no alt-tab to hacker news during the 48
minutes. You're only cheating yourself.
~~~
zackattack
That doesn't answer my question, though. My point is, how do you know WHAT to
work on for 48 minutes? How do you facilitate things so that you can load the
problem into your working memory quickly?
~~~
tungstenfurnace
I've been reading about the American inventor Elmer Gates.
<http://www.elmergates.com/egamu/egamu_link_page.htm>
I think his three tips would be:
(1) quiescence (2) periodicity (3) dirigation
Which in modern language means (1) remove or zone out all distractions, (2)
work at the same time each day, (3) pay deliberate attention to each aspect of
the problem in turn in your imagination. (4) Repeat.
Step (3) helps to build the relevant mental structures. Visiting them
habitually will strengthen them.
'Each aspect' will include mental images (visual, aural, kinaesthetic),
concepts, ideas (including all the relevant constraints and conditions that
must be met). Generating mental images is important as the mind works best
with things that are translated into sensory terms.
Eventually a conjectured solution will pop into your conscious mind, possibly
at a time outside the working hour. You may know it is coming before it
arrives.
He might also add that thinking draws from one's personal store of vitality.
So it may be necessary to adjust sleep, diet, exercise and any addictions you
have in order to conserve this.
Being unstressed is vital. Partly this means only working on important
problems and working with the intention to do good. It also means switching to
a different problem if you get bored of the first one. (You can go back to it
another day).
------
keeptrying
<http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/>
And for the best tool to use to apply the technique:
[http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/pomo...](http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/development_tools/pomodoro.html)
This has really changed my work habits. The tool is just perfect. One easy
click and you can see what you've worked on the whole day for how much time.
Brilliant.
------
dryicerx
End of day, I usually list out the things I want to get done the next day
(just point format a small list) on my notepad (a physical paper and pencil).
Then I stick to it.
I don't think writing paragraphs helps, keep it real simple. "Fix bug #12345,
Test blahblah, Tune XXX, etc"
~~~
pmorici
Totally agree with this. I also find if I separate the "research" aspect of
something from the implementation things go more smoothly as well.
For example at the end of each day I'll gather documentation, code samples,
etc... for the things I want to get done the next day.
------
tetha
I have and am experiencing what you experience atm.
The first thing which is helping me very, very much is focus training. After
like a month of training to focus fast and hard, I am able to dive into a
problem and ignore everything around me within minutes, allowing me to work
more efficiently faster, resulting in more getting done in less time.
The second thing, closely related to the first (and an item on my list of
mental improvements) is improving focus stability, but I know several people
with a very, very stable focus. Interrupting them is pretty much like being an
IO-Interrupt in a modern processor. It takes a few seconds, but then
everything they need right now is swapped out and they can answer simple
things or do something easy for a few minutes until the interruption is over
and they go back to their focus and continue doing what they were doing.
Going a bit further, this is a certain experiment me and several people are
performing on a fun base: Is it more efficient to sleep less and thus get more
done due to having more time, or is it more efficient to improve ones focus
and get done more in the same time, by being better? :)
The third thing which works very well for me is dynamic, hierarichal task
structuring. Whenever I have a task and I consider if I am very confident if I
can finish this particular task in the time I usually have (I don't start
working seriously if I have less then half an hour to an hour). If I can, I
finish it, if I cannot, I split it into more subtasks (or sometimes decide
that this is not possible and somehow mark this task). Doing this, I always
have a set of tasks which fit nicely into a short time and tasks which need to
be refined further.
~~~
andymism
A reference/link to focus training would be much appreciated.
As for your experiments with getting less sleep vs better focus, I think that
stuffing more hours in the day is only more effective for tedious work, where
you don't have to think much to get it done. In my experience, when the
quality of your ideas and code matters more than just getting it done, you
definitely should be well rested.
In most cases, the self-inflicted pain from getting less sleep is just a
psychological substitute for real productivity
------
breck
<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>
------
mannicken
Extremely detailed microtasking. Like this:
<http://taskulus.com/taskulus17.png> or <http://taskulus.com/taskulus16.png>
Each of these is a very small tasks that 1-20 minutes but it's important that
I can devote my complete concentration and focus to it, without the need to
load everything else in my brain.
That of course requires a lot of what SICP calls "deferred decisions" and so
units of my code are forced to be much more independent.
------
wglb
Much of what I am doing these days takes a couple of hours to spin up, so I
don't have any ideas for you here. Maybe find a way talking with your friend
about your need for long stretches of uninterrupted time. Already mentioned
here is Paul's very relevant essay
<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>.
~~~
pasbesoin
Yes, this sounds like an occasion for social optimization rather than
technical. See whether you and your friends can agree to a schedule that
leaves you with a good block of uninterrupted time. Perhaps they would prefer
to do things in the afternoon, leaving you the mornings free. Or they may be
earlybirds, leaving you the evenings. This latter might be hard, though, as
your work time would come at the end of the day and you might be tapped out.
Another recommendation might be meditation, rather than additional overt
effort. It would take practice, but 5 to 10 minutes of quieting the mind might
allow the context you want regain to emerge more quickly. I'm not too
experienced in this personally, however, although I do find lost context
returning to me once my physical environment quietens.
------
kirubakaran
<http://smacklet.com/>
------
jey
Don't let them interrupt you..?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral - icey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmTg3bHwuw
======
boredguy8
Personally, I love the "Music Animation Machine" visualizations, especially of
Bach.
Toccata and Fugue <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o>
"Little" Fugue <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVadl4ocX0M>
Also enjoyable: Debussy's Clair de lune
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o>
~~~
frankus
What's neat about the OP's video is that it shows the "periodicity" of the
various octaves.
Back in college (1996 or so -- it was on one of the first PowerPC macs) I put
together an animation for a class project that was sort of a combination of
the two using Bach's Invention #13.
The view was of traveling down a tunnel of a sort of swirly green fog. Each
note was represented by a little yellow or magenta stripe painted on the
inside of the tunnel, based on which "part" (i.e. hand) was playing it. The
angular position was determined by the pitch (which wrapped around at each
octave), and the length of the stripe was determined by the duration of the
note. All in all it was a really effective way of visualizing the song.
I wish I would've videotaped it, because the source code is long gone and
wouldn't run on modern hardware anyway.
~~~
eru
> I wish I would've videotaped it, because the source code is long gone and
> wouldn't run on modern hardware anyway.
Emulation could have worked.
------
TheTarquin
Cool! This is a great way to visualize the relationship of notes in a chord.
One of the harder things to teach in beginning music theory are chord forms,
since it requires thinking relatively, rather than absolutely. Major and minor
chords are related together not because of the notes themselves, but because
of the intervals between them.
In this visualization, though, all the related chords are roughly the same
shape. Seems like it'd be a great way to harness visual thinking to teach a
more abstract concept.
Very cool!
~~~
chipsy
Two-dimensional keyboard layouts mostly use regular chord shapes. It makes
both theory and playability come a lot more easily - two fingerings per scale
and chord, no adjustments for different keys. I own an Axis 49 and while I'll
admit it isn't perfect for existing repertoire, it excels in every other
respect. If you want to "learn music" this is the fastest way to do it.
------
RiderOfGiraffes
The music itself is perhaps best known from the Academy Award winning (best
cartoon, 1946) Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Cat Concerto"
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWGQaczNL5I>
------
caryme
If you find this interesting, you might want to check out the Topic 7 lecture
notes from Bryan Pardo's Machine Perception of Music and Audio course at
Northwestern University:
[http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/courses/eecs352/lectures.ph...](http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/courses/eecs352/lectures.php)
Those notes show an example of a spiral pitch representation and discuss
chromagrams (mapping complex wave forms to pitch classes) as well as other
concepts.
For a deeper look, check out the book Signals Sound and Sensation by William
M. Hartmann.
------
Dejen45
Very hip visualization, reminiscent of integer notation (c=0, c#=1, d=2, etc)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation>
Music educators are slowly finding ways to catch up traditional pedagogy with
the ever-expanding technologies.
some color coating would even help younger players.
fantastic work
------
zokier
Isn't that a normal, not logarithmic, spiral?
~~~
icey
My title is probably a little inaccurate. The frequencies decrease
logarithmically as you move outward on the spiral.
------
gwern
I wonder how playable a spiral pyramid version of that would be; I've long
thought that a long line must be a suboptimal piano layout (like a single long
alphabetic row would be bad for typing).
------
speek
I wonder if visualizing this kind of data can help people find what makes
"popular" or "good" music.
------
briancooley
This one is my favorite, for obvious reasons:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=oDUyz8lGw58&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=oDUyz8lGw58&feature=related)
------
nopinsight
If someone can create an instrument arranged in this form, it might help a
great deal with music education.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What are your experiences with customizing Twitter Bootstrap? - jacobwilliamroy
Whenever I run into a problem with Bootstrap (usually a layout issue), I try to customize it. Every time I look over the docs, I become extremely anxious, jettison bootstrap from the project, and write the whole site from a clean slate.<p>Am I missing out on incredible time-savings by not taking the time to learn Twitter Bootstrap customization?
======
sharmi
I am not sure about your skillset.
In my case, I am a backend developer. While javascript and general scaffolding
is so easy to myself, creating a button and other ui elements with perfect
shadow and border options resemble the dark arts. And there are so many edge
cases.
For example basic dropdown is rendered differently in different browsers and
are often ugly (atleast in the older versions of the browsers). One would
expect something as basic as a dropdown to be fairly standardised :(
Bootstrap is rather handy in such situations as the ui is standardized across
browsers.
What I tend to do is, use the bootstrap Sass version. So I can write my own
layouts and pull in only the components that I need using the bootstrap Sass.
My apps are usually light on the front end and don't use too many javascript
features from Bootstrap. So I hate having to load jquery, which is a basic
requirement for Bootstrap. One thing that I do is, I use Native Javascript for
Bootstrap[0].
[0]
[https://thednp.github.io/bootstrap.native/](https://thednp.github.io/bootstrap.native/)
------
sheraz
Perhaps rather than using bootstrap on a high stakes project (like client work
or apps with paying customers) you could try bootstrap customization on a low
risk side project? That way when (not if) your screw it up there is no anxiety
of an angry client or customers demanding a fix? There is no anxiety of having
to support IE or some client’s esoteric dom-modifying browser plugins.
This way you can learn at your own pace and really get s feel for the codebase
and workflows for bootstrap customization.
------
mkempe
It's been singular.
You did not explain the exact cause of your anxiety. External pressure or
personal standards?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Five ways to lie with charts - rgun
http://nautil.us/issue/19/illusions/five-ways-to-lie-with-charts
======
wsc981
There's a well-regarded book on this matter that I still hope to read someday
"How To Lie With Statistics":
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics)
Ah, just discovered the book can be read for free online:
[https://archive.org/details/HowToLieWithStatistics](https://archive.org/details/HowToLieWithStatistics)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Restoring an unusual vintage clock display - mmastrac
https://tinkerings.org/2016/05/21/restoring-an-unusual-vintage-clock-display/
======
userbinator
These are known as "projection displays":
[http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/tubepage.php?item=10](http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/tubepage.php?item=10)
[http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/articleview.php?item=989](http://www.decadecounter.com/vta/articleview.php?item=989)
One company that makes them is still around:
[http://www.ieeinc.com/about-us](http://www.ieeinc.com/about-us)
A lot of other interesting old display technologies here:
[http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/count.html](http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/count.html)
~~~
slig
Thanks for the links. I was curious to know how each digit is projected on the
same place. Looks like the masks are on a curved plate.
------
Animats
Oh, those things. I used to use UNIVAC 1108 computers, which had the system
clock on the console with those displays.[1] It took about a hundred small
printed circuit cards to drive the thing. It actually was the system's time of
day clock, read by the computer, not a remote display of a counter elsewhere.
If the muffin fans under the console were not regularly cleaned, the clock
would make intermittent errors, which caused the operating system to have
problems. I once had to write software to detect this.
[1]
[http://www.silogic.com/Athena/Univac%201108.html](http://www.silogic.com/Athena/Univac%201108.html)
------
jonah
Here's a guy who used a two digit "one-plane display" like this as a "period
correct" digital speedometer in his 1973 beetle.
[http://thegarage.jalopnik.com/project-make-the-weirdest-
peri...](http://thegarage.jalopnik.com/project-make-the-weirdest-period-
correct-digital-dash-1728464825)
------
Someone
_" Which, for a clock showing HH:MM:SS, means 72 light bulbs to replace."_
??? There are only ten digits, and you don't even need all of them everywhere.
By my reckoning, you would need 3+10+6+10+6+10=45.
If you add the ability to display dd-mm-yy, you till would only need
3+10+6+10+10+10=49. I wonder what they did with the remainder. Spelling out
the word "ALARM!"?
Or did they simply ship spare bulbs inside the product?
~~~
jsnell
I would imagine they wanted 6 identical modules just for the manufacturing
efficiency.
That still leaves the question of why 12 lights instead of 10. I would bet
that the separator colons are actually produced by a separate mask+lamp,
rather than having different masks for each digit on those two modules. I.e.
to show "8:" you light up both the "8" lamp and the ":" lamp at the same time.
That gets us up to 11. No theory on the 12th one though.
~~~
S_A_P
One for each . In the colon?
~~~
HCIdivision17
Almost certainly this. In one of the links by another commenter here, you can
see a voltmeter where the guy changes the decimal. The dots are bizarrely high
to be a decimal point, but right where you'd expect it if it's the bottom dot
on the colon.
~~~
Symbiote
I didn't find that video, but several of these seem to be British made. The
decimal point in British use was traditionally centred: 3·141.
(I still write it like that, in handwriting.)
------
xvf33
I had figured that it would be about NIXIE tubes but was happy to learn about
something I hadn't come across before. Pretty neat.
Here's an interesting channel on youtube I came across and the newest video
happens to be about the NIXIE tube.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytF5bvPGcU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytF5bvPGcU)
------
ams6110
When I was a kid, my dad would sometimes bring home scrap electronic equipment
from his lab and I'd have fun taking it apart. I remember one of those
displays, with the arrays of tiny bulbs.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Patent Troll Forced To Settle Frivolous Lawsuit Against One-Man Business - ghshephard
http://www.marco.org/2013/08/08/lodsys-honest-headline
======
chasing
Thank you. This is a good clarification.
I believe attaching the names of people like Nathan Myhrvold to this is key.
Being associated with him and Intellectual Ventures needs to be seen as an
embarrassment. (Think of how people react to Zynga.) Myhrvold's clearly
interested in being some sort of public icon of brilliance, given his cooking
books, appearance on the Colbert Report, and Intellectual Ventures inclusion
in the (not so good) SuperFreakonomics book. Take that away from him.
Or, at least, make the patent trolling stuff such a giant part of his public
persona that the other stuff won't override it. So every article prints his
name as "Nathan Myhrvold, noted patent troll..."
This isn't a total solution, but we've got to run people's names through the
mud who do this. Especially to make the bar higher for scumbags who are
considering getting into this line of work. Really make them think about what
they're giving up.
~~~
NelsonMinar
There's a whole lot of names to attach to Intellectual Ventures; Myhrvold is
only the most visible. Their list of Senior Inventors may be particularly
interesting to Hacker News members. I don't think there's any "run through the
mud" here, I imagine these folks are all proud of their work at Intellectual
Ventures.
Here's what's on IV's site today at
[http://www.intellectualventures.com/index.php/inventor-
netwo...](http://www.intellectualventures.com/index.php/inventor-
network/senior-inventors)
Bran Ferren: Co-Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc. • Daniel Hillis: Co-Chairman and
Chief Technology Officer, Applied Minds, Inc. • Leroy Hood: Co-Founder and
Director, Institute for Systems Biology • Muriel Ishikawa: Senior Scientist
and Inventor • Robert Langer: Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology • John Latham: Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester, U.K. •
Eric Leuthardt: Neurosurgeon & Biomedical Engineer • Roy Levien: Co-Founder
and Consulting Inventor, Rax • Mark Malamud: Co-Founder & Consulting Inventor,
Rax • John Pendry: Professor, Imperial College London • John Rinaldo: User
Interface Architect • David Smith: Augustine Scholar & Professor, Duke
University • Thomas Weaver: Senior Interviewer, Fannie and John Hertz
Foundation • Chuck Whitmer: Software Architect • Richard Zare: Blake Wilbur
Professor, Stanford University
~~~
zimpenfish
What are the odds of there being two distinct John Lathams at Manchester Uni?
Sadly the IV/JoLat is a Climate wonk, not the loveable CS wonk I was lectured
by (many years ago.)
~~~
willthames
I was immensely disappointed to see his name there, and then heartened to see
your reply. He was pretty much the person who most made me want to choose
Manchester for CS.
~~~
peterstjohn
It's been over 13 years since I graduated and I still remember his varied and
wonderful choice of trousers ;).
------
VengefulCynic
In a world where journalists had unlimited research budgets and the time to
run facts to ground, this sort of campaign to link Myhrvold's "good" name to
his patent-trolling deeds would be unnecessary. But since we don't live in
that world, I suppose the next best thing is to make sure to SEO Myhrvold's
name so that it always turns up "scum", "patent troll", and "extortionist".
Who knew you could do so much for journalism by priming the Google pump for
future journalists?
------
jonahx
Can someone explain to me why the former CTO of Microsoft, a person I assume
was quite wealthy already, would become an infamous patent troll? Is he just
trading his reputation and karma for.... an even bigger pile of money? Maybe
I'm naive, but that seems bizarre.
~~~
wmf
Here's a totally speculative hypothesis: He started IV as a sort of Xerox PARC
that would also make money; the idea was to hire really smart researchers,
advance the state of the art, and license the results to other companies to
productize. This didn't work (perhaps the research was low-value because it
was disconnected from the needs of the market, or perhaps technology transfer
is really hard) and rather than admit defeat they pivoted into patent
trolling.
~~~
jonahx
Thanks, this seems plausible. Is it possible that they've actually convinced
themselves they are doing something justifiable with their own IP? I'd find
that hard to believe, but who knows?
~~~
wmf
I've noticed that there are definitely people who think ideas — even
unimplemented ones — are valuable IP and patents are a reasonable way to
monetize ideas. It's sometimes expressed as a business model for those who
can't afford to execute their ideas. I guess the line between that philosophy
and patent trolling is when the inventor starts going after companies that
independently reinvented their idea.
------
adolph
Lodsys is part of Intellectual Ventures, really? It makes sense, but I guess
I'll have to listen to the podcast to find the citation.
~~~
NelsonMinar
It's widely believed that Lodsys is somehow affiliated with Intellectual
Ventures, but US corporate law makes it hard to really know who owns or
benefits from Lodsys' lawsuits. Intellectual Ventures is known to participate
in a lot of shell corporations and intellectual property trades. EFF notes
that Intellectual Ventures used to own some of the patents Lodsys is
prosecuting: [https://www.eff.org/issues/faqs-lodsys-
targets](https://www.eff.org/issues/faqs-lodsys-targets)
Edit: here is a story about the Guardian trying to get Intellectual Ventures
go on the record about its relationship to Lodsys. (Spoiler: they couldn't.)
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/27/intellectu...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/27/intellectual-
ventures-myrhvold-patent-lodsys) . And here is Myhrvold saying that
Intellectual Ventures sold the patent to Lodsys, although he carefully avoids
saying anything about ongoing business terms between his company and Lodsys.
[http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/04/02/1926255/nathan-m...](http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/04/02/1926255/nathan-
myhrvold-answers-your-questions-live-qa-today-at-12-pm-pacific)
~~~
dia80
> US corporate law makes it hard to really know who owns or benefits from
> Lodsys' lawsuits
As the director of a UK company every time I here this I am simply
flabbergasted. In the UK all limited companies/partnerships accounts are a
matter of public record.
~~~
oijaf888
Even if they are through various UK dependencies like Jersey and the Cayman
Islands?
------
it_learnses
Here's the wikipedia article on Intellectual Ventures. Make sure it continues
to say they're patent trolls:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures)
------
tenpoundhammer
This is also a great indictment against our elected representatives who
represent the wealthy and powerful, not the people. If our reps truly were out
to serve the American people this would have been solved years and years ago.
------
thinkcomp
What is the exact nature of Lodsys's relationship to IV? I have done a lot of
research on trolls and IV and I am not aware of any connection at all. Basic
assignments aren't enough to claim IV's involvement.
~~~
throwawaykf02
Agreed. I suspect there's no significant relationship at all. As another
comment mentions, Lodsys used to have this page on their website, now only
found on archive.org:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110618140937/http://www.lodsys....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110618140937/http://www.lodsys.com/1/post/2011/05/q-what-
is-dan-abelows-involvement-is-intellectual-ventures-behind-lodsys-or-
controlling-lodsys-in-some-way.html)
As an aside, the FTC is considering a special investigation "piercing the
corporate veil" to ferret out the real entities behind trolling operations. If
they do, I look forward to seeing their findings. My hunch is that they won't
find the usual suspects behind them, if they find any at all.
~~~
gruseom
A couple questions (I have no knowledge on this):
1\. Wouldn't your hunch have been equally applicable to Oasis? Yet we now know
that IV was behind them.
2\. If your hunch were correct, wouldn't it be in both Lodsys' and IV's
interests to unequivocally establish the facts?
~~~
throwawaykf02
Sorry for the late response, very infrequent logger-in:
1\. No, we really don't know IV was behind Oasis. I am guessing you assume
this because NPR reported IV gets 90% of profits. But note how they did not
prove or even outright state there was any controlling interest; they just
throw the 90% number out there and imply it, Glen Beck-style. The original
inventor also made millions off Oasis, but can you say he was "behind" Oasis
too? Unless there's a clear indication of control (which shell companies make
very hard to prove) it is just as likely a "share-cropping" operation as a
shell company. Something like the FTC probe is needed to prove anything either
way.
2\. IV has publicly stated at an FTC panel that (paraphrasing) they do not sue
under any name than their own. Now, that's not under oath, mind you, but
making such statements in front of a government panel holds some weight.
However, I do find it a bit odd that Lodsys put that denial on their website
and then removed it.
------
gojomo
I find it amazing that at this moment, there are zero Google hits for the
exact phrase ["Intellectually Dishonest Ventures"] or the variant
["Intellectual[ly Dishonest] Ventures"].
So at least there will be now.
------
pi-rat
Myhvold causes me serious confusion, love him and hate him at the same time.
You shouldn't be able to do so much cool stuff and also be a complete asshat.
------
aet
How many hours is $200k of defense? (roughly)
~~~
jfb
It's in the linked article:
"I’ve spent about 200 hours on the matter and Sabrina about another 80. My
comparable market hourly rate (partner at a top NYC patent firm) would be $750
and a comparable rate for Sabrina (senior associate at a top patent firm)
would be about $500."
~~~
aet
Okay, so that is equivalent to 1 person working 40 hour weeks for 7 weeks. So,
one person pulling $6K a day. ($1.5M/yr) I think you could find legal support
for less than that.
~~~
w3pm
Assuming they could maintain that for a full year, $6K a day is only 2.2MM.
Also keep in mind that these hotshots don't do much of the grunt work, they
offload it to any number of junior associates (which that hourly rate has to
cover, in addition to other business overhead). Still not a bad gig if you can
get it.
~~~
jfb
Keep in mind that a partner at a top firm who bills her time out at $750, is
making a lot more than that, due to the nature of a legal partnership.
------
chenster
The patent troll should be executed.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Systems and Constraints - jger15
https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/systems-and-constraints
======
ihm
Worth mentioning for those who don’t know that Mercatus is a Koch-funded
ideology and policy generator (I prefer this to the more obfuscatory “think
tank”).
------
weeksie
Martin Gurri is fascinating. His book Revolt of the Public is available
through Stripe Press. Worth the read about our current cycle of bang/whimper
crises and how our new communication styles lead to public actions that tend
to have little consequence compared to past uprisings, even though they tend
to dwarf the latter in number of participants.
~~~
lioeters
Thank you for mentioning the book - I put it on my reading list. Below is a
summary:
> Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power
> between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical
> institutions of the industrial age government, political parties, the media.
> The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by
> digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of
> ordinary people around the world.
> Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the
> Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump's improbable rise to
> the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit and concludes with a
> speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can
> bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new
> organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the
> present political turbulence.
------
viburnum
I’m a sucker for any kind of complexity theorizing but I don’t see where this
is going.
~~~
hyperman1
I've always felt the same about all those fractals and chaos books: Pretty
pictures, feigenbaum constant, ... All fascinating, but I never saw any real
application from it.
Now this might be because chaos theory was in its infancy, or because the
books for the public were too dumbed down. In that case, these applications
might also apply here. Anybody an idea?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation - zonotope
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/implication-of-sabotage-adds-intrigue-to-spacex-investigation/2016/09/30/5bb60514-874c-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html
======
knowaveragejoe
Interesting comments about this on reddit, namely:
> If SpaceX had ANY and I mean ANY suspicion of foul play they would have
> called the FBI. The company is not stupid enough to potentially contaminate
> criminal evidence by running their own investigation along that line. So IF
> SpaceX was thinking along those lines. It would be the FBI requesting access
> to the roof. As such I think foul play can be safely removed from the list
> of possibilities. This is likely just the case of an employee not thinking
> though the potential PR headache the request would cause.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/55at14/spacex_asked...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/55at14/spacex_asked_to_look_at_ula_roof_which_has_field/)
~~~
Iv
If you suspect criminal foulplay, you call the FBI. If you suspect blackops by
a foreign government, you call the CIA. And they may keep quiet about it.
I like how Stratfor's leaked glossary presented the FBI:
"Federal Bureau of Investigation, aka the Downtown Gang. Very good a breaking
up used car rings. Kind of confused on anything more complicated. Fun to jerk
with. Not fun when they jerk back."
~~~
maxerickson
It used to be that the CIA had no authority to run operations inside the US.
Has that changed?
Do they routinely ignore their lack of authority at the request of private
entities?
~~~
andyidsinga
I just watch Sicario last night - pretty good movie actually - a central
element to the story is how they operate in US borders.
~~~
maxerickson
Is it based on official documents obtained from the CIA? Or is it a made up
story?
~~~
sprafa
made up but plausible. A large part of the plot is how they need to work with
local agents so they are not "technically" CIA. They are working in some way
as consultants in a very dangerous operation.
------
aresant
Two fascinating theories from the comment section @ Wapo ->
"A large stationary target like a rocket is a simple shot for a sniper with a
50 cal rifle from a mile away. . . It was something discussed 30+ years ago:
to have Special Forces snipers punch holes in the missiles on mobile launchers
that would not be discovered until preparing for launch. Instead of destroying
the system the enemy would have wasted time and effort moving to a launch
location only to find out that they were incapable of launching."
and
"What the article doesn't mention is that ULA buys its engines from Russia and
is a vital part of the Russian rocket program. As a part of ULA's activities,
there are Russian engineers with military training in the country legally
right now. "
~~~
topspin
Something like a .50 BMG round has a large report and the flight time is just
under 2 seconds at a mile, so anything recording audio in the neighborhood
would pick up the distinct crack of a rifle prior to the pad explosion. Some
of the noise can be suppressed with a big enough suppression device but the
sonic boom is unavoidable. Subsonic ammo is simply not workable at these
ranges; that's called 'artillery' and it doesn't have sufficient precision to
ensure hitting the rocket.
You can listen to the explosion here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6isMuPfxcI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6isMuPfxcI)
I hear birds chirping. No rifles.
update: yes, I know Elon mentioned the 'quieter bang' sound and it could well
be related, but it doesn't sound anything like the crack of a rifle round.
~~~
ryanmarsh
I don't know anything about fluid dynamics but I know something about shooting
and being shot at. I agree with your comment. I would only add that rifle fire
sound can be somewhat directional and depending on the temp, density,
humidity, height above ground, and reflectivity of the ground much of the
impulse can be dissipated or distorted.
Surely sensors would have picked up the impact a .50 makes. Although I don't
know why one would need a .50. It's a heavy round with lots of drop and it's
not like the rocket is armored. From what I've read of the relative fragility
of rockets you could get by with a very small round in just the right spot.
~~~
Someone
But you will need accuracy to hit "just the right spot", and to get accuracy
at long distance, you need a heavier bullet
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniper_rifle#Maximum_effecti...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniper_rifle#Maximum_effective_range):
_" The recent trend in specialized military sniper rifles is towards larger
calibers that offer relatively favorable hit probabilities at greater
range"_), don't you?
~~~
ryanmarsh
True, but "heavier bullet" does not always mean "larger caliber". Also there's
no telling at what distance a sniper team would have to be. Maybe they could
be inside of 1km?
Also "just the right spot" could be huge on a rocket. The thing is as wide as
a barn.
------
laurencei
"SpaceX had still images from video that appeared to show an odd shadow, then
a white spot on the roof of a nearby building belonging to ULA"
"The SpaceX representative explained to the ULA officials on site that it was
trying to run down all possible leads in what was a cordial, not accusatory,
encounter"
So they are simply exploring what the white spot/shadow could be? I dont think
that necessarily leads them to think it was "sabotage" \- just a possible clue
in their investigation...
~~~
api
I smell media sensationalism and click bait.
I'm sure the possibility of sabotage or terrorism is being looked at as part
of a larger failure tree, but I see no evidence it's a leading contender.
~~~
Jabbles
Maybe Bezos (owner of WaPo and Blue Origins) is trying to stir it up? /tinfoil
------
sehugg
If you want more intrigue, the Swiss Space Systems CEO was kidnapped and
severely burned just a few days before the SpaceX incident. Not necessarily a
correlation, but points out that you can make enemies in any occupation.
[https://www.thelocal.ch/20160905/swiss-space-firm-boss-
left-...](https://www.thelocal.ch/20160905/swiss-space-firm-boss-left-badly-
injured-in-violent-attack)
~~~
paul
" A leader in space technology, S3 aims to make space more accessible by
creating low-cost, reusable satellite launchers, a development not welcomed by
all in the industry.
Last year the company’s base in Payerne was broken into and equipment damaged,
said the Tribune."
Scary! Is there any more info on these attacks?
~~~
bfe
Looking for more, Paul. This from a Swiss news site says he had previously
reported threats to the police, S3's data center was broken into and flooded
with a fire hose, and that he remained in the hospital in serious condition
with burns on his torso, arm, neck, and face, and would likely need
transplants:
[http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/patron-s3-sauvagement-
ag...](http://www.24heures.ch/vaud-regions/patron-s3-sauvagement-
agresse/story/13258075)
This one speculates on a connection with the SpaceX explosion, but has no new
info:
[http://www.bilan.ch/techno-plus-de-redaction/pascal-
jaussi-u...](http://www.bilan.ch/techno-plus-de-redaction/pascal-jaussi-un-
entrepreneur-derange-secteur-aerospatial)
Swiss Space's web page's last press release is from 2014. There are threads on
reddit and nasaspaceflight also just with speculation and no new info:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/518zy3/pascal_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/518zy3/pascal_jaussi_the_startup_s3s_ceo_savagely/)
[https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31278.140](https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=31278.140)
~~~
eps
So their plans for 2016 is to "open a spaceport" and for 2017 - "assemble a
shuttle". Sounds like either a money laundering setup or a massively overhyped
startup. Combine with the fact that they have Russian version of the site and
it might be safe to assume that the guy had a run-in with unhappy "investors".
PS. The 24heures news article says that his car was stopped when he was
driving through the forest, severly beaten, douzed in gasoline and set on
fire. Now _that_ is pretty damn close to how they settled fiscal disputes back
in post-Perestroika times. I'm pretty damn sure he just took money from wrong
people and didn't deliver what he promised.
------
Symmetry
This seems to be something that happened a while ago, before they traced it to
the upper stage helium tank.
[https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/23/falcon-9-rocket-
explos...](https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/09/23/falcon-9-rocket-explosion-
traced-to-upper-stage-helium-system/)
So yes it's something they considered but there wasn't any actual sabotage -
it was just a tangent in the investigation.
~~~
brudgers
From the linked article:
_The inquiry, led by SpaceX with assistance from government and industry
experts, is still looking into the cause of the breach, which may be only a
symptom and not the root of the Sept. 1 mishap._
That doesn't mean that the root cause is sabotage nor does it mean it isn't.
It just means that root cause analysis has not been completed.
~~~
Symmetry
The root cause isn't known but the fact that they can trace it to a failure of
the helium containment system nearly rules out sabotage as a contributing
factor.
~~~
MertsA
Why do you suggest that rules out sabotage? What better way to cause a rocket
to explode than to rupture a high pressure tank inside the oxidizer tank right
after it was fueled.
------
HillRat
I think it's safe to say that Lockheed and Boeing didn't conspire to blow up a
rocket on federal property -- but damn if the idea of Russia infiltrating
spetznaz into the US defense industry for sabotage aimed at ensuring their
control over the Western world's launch systems isn't a seductive piece of
fiction.
~~~
api
No conspiracy is needed.
The whole thing is very unlikely, but if true I'd say the most probable actor
would be a lone disgruntled employee or other nutbar with a gun. It would fall
in alongside the epidemic of lone nut shootings over the past year only the
victim this time was a rocket.
I'd guess the requisite kind of gun and ammo could easily be obtained from
among all the military surplus and other serious kit available on the gun show
circuit.
~~~
XorNot
This is an oddly victimless crime though. If you know enough to do it, then
you know the pad is clear.
It's almost exactly the type of stupid Putin might go in for if it felt
deniable.
Conversely there have been telescope lenses that needed to be bullet proofed
in transit to stop idiots shooting at them too.
~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
I know you mean that 'nobody died', which is great, but the loss of a 200
million dollar satellite, a 50 million dollar launch vehicle (both
representing tens of thousands of person-hours of work), and several further
person-hours of time wastage investigating this incident, and months of delays
in future launches... all this could hardly be called 'victimless'.
------
FLUX-YOU
>“Particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds
before the fireball goes off,” he wrote on Twitter. “May come from rocket or
something else.”
They should be able to sync the audio/video and figure out where the quieter
bang came from. I can't imagine there was only one camera on the pad. Even
easier if they actually sync the video timestamps with a common time signal.
~~~
hueving
>I can't imagine there was only one camera on the pad.
It's not like this was the launch. It was very possible that most cameras were
not recording.
~~~
phpnode
It's a full dress rehearsal, the only difference between static fire and a
real launch is that they do not release the hold-down clamps and shut down the
engines instead. The cameras would have been rolling.
------
gist
Entirely possible that this is a leaked PR spin being used to try and cast a
more favorable light on the accident by placing blame on an uncontrollable
third party and not SpaceX.
~~~
R_haterade
My priors have this as the most likely scenario.
------
smoyer
If I was any SpaceX competitor other than ULA I would definitely shoot from
the ULA facilities. But I also don't think a trained sniper would be so
obvious.
------
taf2
This is good context
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O_azyt1JhI0)
for the tension between ULA and SpaceX - it's also nice before an election to
checkout the hearings on CSPAn to get a better understanding of the type of
people being elected...
------
tschiller
For those of you wanting to analyze the current evidence yourself, we've got
an analysis board up at: [https://www.opensynthesis.org/boards/6/what-caused-
the-space...](https://www.opensynthesis.org/boards/6/what-caused-the-spacex-
falcon-9-explosion/). Sabotage by a non-employee is currently the most
consistent explanation
Open Synthesis is currently invite-only while we figure out moderation. Send
me an email or apply via the form on the homepage.
There's also an instance you can add/edit information to without an invite or
providing your email: [https://open-synthesis-
sandbox.herokuapp.com/boards/6/what-c...](https://open-synthesis-
sandbox.herokuapp.com/boards/6/what-caused-the-spacex-falcon-9-explosion/)
~~~
SubiculumCode
nice! That is really useful for me to put together the basic facts as now
known without sensationalism.
------
jgrowl
If you're going to go conspiratorial, I'd say that the payload may be the key
here.
------
drudru11
A lot of comments here seem to be fixated on a sniper firing a bullet. What
about a laser?
~~~
aidenn0
If they had IR cameras, then an IR laser would show up, and everyone would
have seen the reflection from a visible light laser strong enough to damage
metal at range.
------
danblick
Newspaper promotes improbable scenario to boost readership
------
pmcollins
If this is the result of sabotage, it puts SpaceX's previous launch failure in
a different context: any entity willing and able to take a shot at and destroy
a rocket from within the confines of Cape Canaveral might also have been able
compromise a strut provided by an outside entity.
I find SpaceX's predicament to be deeply troubling, maybe because if this is
sabotage, it casts a pall on the humanity's ability to make progress.
~~~
sunstone
As I recall, the company that made struts was not testing them properly and
there was more than a few that did not meet the design spec. Tesla went to a
different strut supplier after that.
------
happyslobro
Sabotage seems totally plausible, considering that one company is making
surprising progress towards us becoming a space faring species. Aliens also
seems totally plausible, for the same reason.
If we're going to go nuts over pure speculation, I would prefer that we focus
on aliens. They are much more entertaining.
~~~
davidw
< comic book guy voice > It is clear that you are a shill for the time
travellers who are obviously the ones who are really behind this. < /comic
book guy voice >
~~~
R_haterade
Worst. Shill. Ever.
~~~
hyperbovine
Do not be dissuaded by the downvotes -- as usual around here, they signify
that your comment was genuinely funny.
~~~
jerf
In the 20th century, humorologists thought that the knew the worst kind of
humor, humor so bereft of actual humor that it almost wasn't humor. They
thought it was the "pun".
The 21st century has proved them wrong. There is in fact a lower form of "for
lack of a better category, I guess we'll reluctantly file that under humor".
It is the "reference".
Mere references, lacking any other point of interest, do not do well around
here. I am comfortable with this.
~~~
noonespecial
The reference, once achieving a certain obscurity, elevates itself to the
"inside joke" and is often used as a form of social signaling to promote in-
grouping and comradery.
~~~
happyslobro
xkcd.com/794
------
hbt
ULA has a 100% success rate. [http://www.space.com/30738-united-launch-
alliance-100th-rock...](http://www.space.com/30738-united-launch-
alliance-100th-rocket-launch.html)
Why does spacex have occasional failures? Do they run their experiments with
customers cargos?
Note: I know nothing of the space industry.
~~~
samcat116
1\. Both of the rockets ULA currently uses(Delta IV and Atlas V) are much,
much older than the rocket that SpaceX is launching. These rockets are on
their 4th and 5th iterations, so they've had time to work out basically
everything and aren't really pushing the limits of what they can do. Early on,
these rockets did not have a 100% success rate. 2\. I wouldn't call these
experiments. In the past, all experiments(such as the landing attempts) were
conducted after the customer payload was delivered so it posed no threat to
them. Recently, they started performing static fires with the payload already
integrated to save a couple days between the static fire and the launch. I
suspect that they will stop after this anomaly.
------
kevin_thibedeau
I guess SpaceX will be installing ShotSpotter at all of their critical
infrastructure now.
~~~
R_haterade
I wonder how well that would work given the background noise from rocket
exhaust.
------
r3pl4y
Spacewars, chapter one
------
jjallen
Would really like to hear the sound he refers too. Also to see it graphed on a
decibel chart. Anyone know if it's posted somewhere? Will go and look and
EDIT, but I doubt I'll find it.
EDIT: here I googled that for myself:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maRTEzlSBLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maRTEzlSBLk)
~~~
obituary_latte
Here is a video with some audio analysis
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JHhF3QNC8o8&feature=youtu.be](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JHhF3QNC8o8&feature=youtu.be)
------
zwieback
Or maybe it was a bug in the computer simulation that runs us all?
~~~
Filligree
Look, no. That code is _totally solid_ , trust us a little will you?
~~~
rbanffy
We also run on checkpoints. If a bug happens, we roll the simulation back to
the last checkpoint and you never experience the bug and can enjoy a perfect
universe.
You're welcome.
------
kilroy123
I heard... the Israeli's might not be happy about an Israeli company going to
the US for launching their satellites.
Personally, I'm highly skeptical that this was anything but a mechanical
problem with a new rocket.
~~~
simonh
Where else is a Israeli company going to go to do their launches? It's not
like Irael and Russia are bestest buddies, and Israel has a lot of political
and financial support from the US. That makes no sense whatsoever.
~~~
grkvlt
Well, they could launch in Israel? At least for small (500-800kg) payloads
there's the Shavit [1] civilian version of their Jericho ICBM.
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit)
~~~
simonh
For some uses maybe, but they only launch one every three years or so, in
retrograde low earth orbit only and they're reserved for military and
government projects. And as you say, cant lift this payload anyway.
------
lucb1e
The article clearly paints SpaceX as the newcomer and underdog who is trying
to compete with the big monopolists. I wonder if there is another side to the
story, though. Is anyone involved in the industry who can tell more, or point
to good sources?
~~~
andreasley
SpaceX IS the newcomer and underdog, but one that's advancing very quickly.
The big monopolist in this case is ULA, the "United Launch Alliance", which
was created in 2006 as a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Space Systems and
Boeing Defense, Space & Security.
For years, ULA was only option for US government launch contracts. They had
more than 100 launches – all of them successful except one single minor
anomaly [1].
SpaceX tried and succeeded [2] to get into the lucrative government contract
business, arguing that their launches are five times cheaper (90M vs 460M
USD).
Before that, an interesting meeting of the U.S. Committee on Armed Services
took place [3], discussing ULA's dependency on russian-made RD-180 rocket
engines for their Atlas V launch system.
[1] [http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/ula-traces-atlas-v-
ano...](http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/ula-traces-atlas-v-anomaly-to-
malfunctioning-valve)
[2] [https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/27/spacex-cleared-to-
laun...](https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/27/spacex-cleared-to-launch-u-s-
national-security-satellites/)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ff_5jF_3QU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ff_5jF_3QU)
~~~
lucb1e
> SpaceX IS the newcomer and underdog
Woah, sorry. I never said they weren't.
> which was created in 2006
That sounds rather new to me, considering that space tech has been around
since what, the 60s? If someone told me SpaceX was originally started in 2006
I'd be only slightly surprised, but I'd figure it just took years to attract
expertise and set the whole thing up before we start hearing about it.
All I'm asking is for the other side of the story. ULA is being painted as
evil here and no matter how true every word from SpaceX's side is, I would
always like to read ULA's comments on the matter.
~~~
Sphax
ULA may be new but Boeing and Lockheed Martin are not.
------
vamur
It's called rocket science for a reason. Looking into sabotage usually
indicates that they have no clue what happenned and are looking into saving
face.
Hopefully, Emdrive or a similar technology works out - otherwise, spacefaring
is going to be a risky and overly complicated endeavour for a long time.
------
supergirl
I will just say it without any proof. I think spacex is not competent enough
to solve this. Rocket science is still hard. That is the impression I got when
they said they do not know the cause yet. Rocket exploding on the launch pad
is pretty big fuck up in my mind, but I am not a rocket scientist. They will
learn from this but this is a reality check. Without major breakthroughs they
are no better than russians launching soviet era rockets.
------
sakabaro
I think it's worth noting that we live a post-Snowden world where the worst
conspiracy theories about mass surveillance were indeed true. I wouldn't be
surprised if our own government did this to the advantage of the ULA.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Przybylski's Star - sgt101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star
======
tdy721
Yes Yes Yes! There's the distinction of "Natural Elements" and I've always
suspected that it was a somewhat temporal distinction. While I believe that
the Periodic Table is a Universal Truth, "Natural" vs "Man-Made" elements
always struck me as a Earthly way of looking at things. Not bad, just not the
whole truth.
~~~
jmiserez
Just FYI the periodic table also doesn't tell the full story. Take a look at
the isotope table:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides_(complete)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides_\(complete\))
~~~
tdy721
I really love the Isotope Table. I seem to remember having a chemistry teacher
that mentioned something about the table being wonky or secretive. Total
hearsay.
I like the periodic table because I could verify it. Isotopes? Not so much...
~~~
jmiserez
I don't think there's anything wonky about that table, it's just often not in
the curriculum in high school, and teachers don't want to "confuse" students
with material outside of the curriculum. But for me it greatly simplified
understanding isotopes and radioactive decay.
And why would you think you couldn't verify it? All of the isotopes in the
table were observed in a lab somewhere.
~~~
darkfuji
"it's just often not in the curriculum in high school"
I'm pretty sure that most high school science students have at least seen it
before though.
~~~
ci5er
The Isotope Table? I'm old and rural, but I didn't come across it in high
school until I (an atypical geek) went looking for it specifically.
------
urza
I dont understand, what significance does this star has? Why was it upvoded to
front page? What was the original title? Now it only says "Przybylski's Star"
~~~
ojiikun
original title was "a star that has plutonium in its spectra"
~~~
parenthephobia
The reason it's interesting is that the star appears to contain a variety of
short-lived isotopes, not just of plutonium: e.g. promethium-145, with a half-
life of just under 18 years.
Some as-yet unidentified process is replenishing the star's isotopes. An idea
I've seen[1] is that the radiation from its neutron star sibling, invisible to
us, is powerful enough to trigger nuclear reactions in the star's ionosphere.
1\. "A hypothesis for explaining the origin of Przybylski’s star (HD 101065)"
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11963-008-1005-7](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11963-008-1005-7)
------
givinguflac
Interesting. I wonder what elements are created when a rare star like this
goes supernova. Though as this type is so rare, we may not know if they even
do.
~~~
tdy721
The biggest baddest Particle Accelerators in the 'Verse. I'm fairly certain we
don't fully understand "common" supernovae.
------
Stratoscope
A star can't have have plutonium in its spectra. A single star doesn't have
spectra, only a spectrum.
If you were talking about multiple stars, then yes, they would have spectra
(the plural of spectrum).
To be clear, I don't mean this as a criticism of the submitter. :-) In fact, I
appreciate that the title was changed from the original Wikipedia title to
bring out the interesting part. Just wanted to note a little detail of
spelling/grammar that is easily confused.
Plus, plutonium is only one of the interesting things about Przybylski's Star.
It is a really weird star!
~~~
wycx
I suspect we are confident that Pu is there because there are spectra
indicating its presence, as opposed to a single spectrum.
~~~
Stratoscope
Well, you may have me there. Now I am totally confused about whether it should
be spectrum or spectra.
I suppose that means it's time for me to call it a night!
~~~
wycx
I think of in terms of the data we collect. Make a single measurement over a
range of energies/wavelengths/frequencies and you have collected a spectrum.
Repeat that measurement or make measurements covering different
energies/wavelengths/frequencies and you have some spectra.
For the star from the article, I think it is fair to say that Pu consistently
appears in the spectra that have been collected.
~~~
Stratoscope
Thanks, that's an interesting way to look at it and makes complete sense to
me.
At the risk of sounding like a total nitpicker, I am still a bit confused. I
understand that you may measure the star's spectrum and get one result, and I
may measure it and get a different result, so now we have two different (but
hopefully fairly similar!) spectra for the star.
But does this mean that _the star itself_ now has two different spectra? Or is
it just that we've both measured it imperfectly and came out with different
results?
As another example, suppose we have an object with a mass of exactly one gram.
I measure it as 0.9999999 grams. You measure it as 1.0000001 grams.
Now we have two different masses for the object. Does that mean that the
object itself now has two different masses (plural)? Or does it still has a
single true mass of its own and we've both just suffered from experimental
error?
I hope anyone reading this is not too annoyed - I'm just trying to understand
how singular and plural work here, and to have some fun with the discussion.
:-)
~~~
thaumasiotes
> I'm just trying to understand how singular and plural work here, and to have
> some fun with the discussion.
Hey, that's my kind of discussion :)
There is no one "how singular and plural work here". Singular and plural
inflections are a tool speakers can use to express a dimension of their
thought; syntax isn't capable of fully determining which will appear.
Consider the sentence "my family are all Buddhists". "Family", the subject of
the sentence, is unambiguously a singular noun, with plural form "families".
The verb in the sentence is, also unambiguously, inflected for a plural
subject. It's inflected that way because the speaker wishes, for purposes of
the sentence, to conceive of their family as a collection of several people.
In another context, it would be unsurprising to see "family" with singular
verb agreement.
People may say "spectrum" or "spectra" based on what about the situation
they're describing they want to provide focus on.
~~~
Stratoscope
Many thanks to you as well as wycx, cperciva, and mirimir for engaging in the
conversation. I learned a few things from you all!
I must confess: after my initial comment started gathering downvotes I was on
the verge of deleting it. I'm glad I didn't, since it led to such an
interesting and informative discussion.
I've seen this fairly often on HN, where someone posts a comment that is
either factually wrong, off topic, or just something I strongly disagree with,
and then a very interesting conversation follows from that. I make a point of
upvoting the original comment along with the replies, since after all it was
that comment that sparked the discussion.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What's happened to Twitter? - husky
======
zacharyvoase
It’s down, apparently.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Who Can Name the Bigger Number? - yoha
http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html?
======
jameskilton
Big numbers are fun to try to wrap your head around. My favorite is Graham's
number (which I believe is _the_ biggest number used in a formal mathematical
proof).
[http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-
number.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html)
~~~
Someone
Graham's number is a round off error for zero compared to the lower bound for
TREE(3)
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_tree_theorem#Fri...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_tree_theorem#Friedman.27s_finite_form))
~~~
jameskilton
Thanks! My brain is now melting.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The magic of conditional operator - wglb
http://stas-blogspot.blogspot.com/2011/12/java-conditional-operator-magic.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StasBlog+%28Stas%27s+blog%29
======
wglb
On thought on reading this: Should programs be puzzles?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How I made a Principled decision to quit my Six Figure job | TK's weblog - parth16
http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/09/how-i-made-a-principled-decision-to-quit-my-six-figure-day-job/
======
JoeAltmaier
He decides between one selfish goal and another, and its a "Principled
Decision"? Maybe he means Rational or Objective.
I've quit six-figure jobs with kids at home and a mortgage. Not because I
wanted to 'find myself', but because the founder was evil. I like to think
that was a principled decision.
------
icode
He explains in great detail how he wants to make somthing that matters,
fulfills him and has an impact on society and then he came up with toutapp, a
product for mass emailing???
~~~
acangiano
I wish this attitude wasn't so pervasive on HN. Who are we to judge if toutapp
fulfills him and meets his standard of something meaningful?
~~~
Jach
I'm totally on board with not judging what gets people their warm-fuzzies, so
long as that's what they're claiming it as. Personally I'd just like to see
far fewer things like this whose purpose ends up being to share cat pictures.
If it's being advertised as game-changing, that claim needs evidence; I'm
pretty skeptical and don't mind judging in that case.
------
kayoone
I have the feeling HN gets literally spammed with posts like this. Seems to be
a nice headline/attention grabber for the HN crowd and most are interesting in
some ways but the "Why i quit my super high paying job to start on my own" get
old.
~~~
pfedor
I generally agree with you, but I felt this one post was much more interesting
than your run of the mill "Why I quit ...". He talks about the decision
process and how he tried to make a decision in a systematic way. I think
that's interesting since making decisions about your own life is often hard
and people mostly don't even attempt a rational approach here, they just
follow whatever the strongest impulse they had. Most authors of the "How I
quit" posts just announce they quit and then add some more or less coherent
after the fact justifications.
I'm not necessarily saying that this author's methodology is great, or that
the goal of making life decisions in such rational, principled manner is even
attainable, but it's still interesting that he tried and what he writes about
it.
~~~
oe
Agreed. The post offered at least one way to think about what you want to do
in life. I for one don't have a clue about what I would most like to do. I do
have a sense that my current job isn't it. But I think it would be foolish to
search for a new job or just quit before knowing what the goal is.
------
toumhi
We need a duplicate story detector around here :-)
It's an old HN submission, was posted at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713716> even though there were no
comments at the time, so let's see.
~~~
sp332
RiderOfGiraffes wrote one, but people complained so loudly that he killed it.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DupDetector>
------
Tawheed
Thanks for the comments guys. I just thought I would clarify one thing. My
values list is sorted by most important to least and then certain values,
including "being adored by society" is circled in red.
Now, that's an important distinction. The ones circled in red mean they are in
conflict with "truth" and therefore is a value I have to work to eliminate
from my life.
I believe that everyone has values such as these, where for one reason or
another, you've learned to value it even at a subconscious level -- the best
you can do is write it down, acknowledge it, and then work to eliminate it.
------
bgurupra
Sometimes I wonder , what if there is no free will ( Its not like we know Free
Will exists for sure yet) - This whole charade of using your drive and
determination or the lack there of to do things may be just the way nature
always wanted it to be.You are just the puppet playing out your part
Edit: Considering the amount of blogs/books that are written around "Self
Help" type of topics which might all be a waste of time if there were nothing
like free will - do you guys think about this at all? If so how do you deal
with it?
~~~
Jach
You seem worried about this free will stuff. I suggest checking out:
<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will> and, when you're ready, and if you
haven't grasped the full solution,
<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_%28solution%29>
------
SatvikBeri
I think the fact that he put "adored by society" as one of his values is
admirable. Most of us do have unconscious values that conflict with what we
think is correct, such as seeking validation, or ingrained views on money
being good/evil that may not match our conscious reasoning. By writing
everything down and acknowledging his values, the author is able to recognize
that what drives him isn't necessarily what he wants to follow (see "conflict
with truth") and is able to work around it.
------
alexatkeplar
Comedy if only for the rampant insecurity oozing out of this guy's every pore
------
bdbrash
Stopped reading the article after seeing that one of his values is "being
adored by society".
~~~
michaelochurch
Yeah, my thought when I saw that was "what a fucking eunuch".
If I had to choose between being known for who I am (which, I assure you,
would lead to controversy rather than admiration) and being adored mindlessly,
I'd choose the former. That's just me, and I'm quite happy having neither
because it keeps my life peaceful.
This guy's parents fucked up if he really believes he can "have it all".
Changing the world and being loved by the world (while living) are mutually
exclusive. Jesus got crucified, Lincoln got shot, and so on and so on...
------
rokhayakebe
Well.... That and raising a quarter of a million dollars.
------
hazelnut
the post is from last year. maybe is interessting what happened in the last 11
months :)
~~~
Arjuna
He has some other postings from 2010, as well as 2011:
<http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010>
<http://www.tawheedkader.com/2011>
------
michaelochurch
I felt ill when I saw "being adored by society" as an explicit goal.
This is why our elders think of our generation as a bunch of self-indulgent
wankbaskets. What kind of soft-batch loser wants to be "adored" by society? If
that's important to you, give up on "making an impact" now and figure out a
way to entertain harmlessly.
If you're worth anything, the best you can hope for, from society at large, is
being passively acknowledged as having been right, and that's after a long,
hard fight. Do you think Lincoln had a cozy life? Or Gandhi? Or FDR? Oh,
you'll be admired by some, and have some close friends, but society at large
has three modes. 1. It doesn't give a fuck about you-- that's what 99.9% of us
get. 2. It hates you-- expect that for a stage if you want to be substantial.
3. After immense pain on your part on account of (2), it acknowledges that you
had a point after all. Usually, (3) is posthumous.
Society doesn't "adore", it limits and retards. And if you're trying to do
something real, it will do what it can to throw obstacles in your way. This
isn't personal, and it shouldn't be given emotional significance because this
sort of rejection will befall anyone who wants to make waves, but people need
to be ready for it. People who think they can "change the world" without the
world fighting back forcefully (and sometimes getting dirty) are deluding
themselves. You really can't have it all; sorry.
~~~
hack_edu
This is the inevitable "truth/reality" our author is achieving to discover.
These aren't easy lessons learned when working in finance or having early
success with your first startup.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The War on Cameras - ccoop
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras/print
======
rbranson
As someone who's been arrested for a misdemeanor due to a case of mistaken
identity and basically forced to take a plea entirely because of a falsified
police report, the FOP spokesperson's claim that we must trust the police is
laughable. If it's happened to me, a friendly white guy in a nice part of
town, I can't imagine what happens in less advantageous situations. I sure
wish I would have had a video of the situation at the time.
~~~
duke_sam
When the word of an officer is worth more than the word of a member of the
public being able to record the officer in the course of their work is the
only way to defend yourself. Yes this might lead to an increase in people
getting off on technicalities but saying that is a good enough reason to turn
law enforcement into an entity above reproach is very dangerous.
The ability for the courts or police to shutdown any practical oversight by
members of the public turns changes the power dynamic completely. Any person
is one pissed off cop away from having to deal with being arrested. It becomes
a big game of chance. The (vast) majority of the time we don't interact with
cops/the courts, the (vast) majority of cops are concerned about the general
good and protecting people but even 1% of 1% in a country this big leads to a
lot of hardship.
~~~
salemh
The 1% of 1% is so damaging..it can effect lives, and those around those
lives. The problem, to me, is the "blue line" of protectionist policies of
departments, which, camera's would never be an issue if this was not the case.
------
pyre
Remember that through all of that muddle mess of 'what is really illegal' is
the fact that 'ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.' So if the
prosecutor won't even comment on 'hypothetical situations' then how is a
normal citizen supposed to evaluate these things for themselves? Accidentally
cross the line, and then find yourself in jail as an example to others? Is
this the 'justice' that we want? Throwing people in jail as part of the
process of figuring out where we should 'draw the line?' Just throwing people
under the bus?
~~~
noonespecial
The interface between "ignorance is no excuse" and the vagueness and selective
enforcement of a great deal of law is always a difficult gray area.
I think that the most important thing about a political system is
_predictability_ , not "democracy" or "justice" or some other vague, high
minded ideal. The number one job of our elected and appointed officials should
be providing this predictability.
This is a particularly stark example of what happens when that duty is
shirked. Corruption and incompetence flow into every crevice not solidly
plugged with deterministic law.
~~~
InclinedPlane
I have to disagree. Predictability is quite important, but often the most
brutal regimes are the most predictable, and that's not something I want. I
don't want to know for sure, unquestionably that if I speak out against the
government me and my family will be fed into a wood chipper, no matter how
predictable that response would be.
~~~
khafra
Intermittent reinforcement is the most effective form of operant conditioning.
Unpredictable punishments in a wide gray area will make people stay well clear
of even the shallow end of that gray area.
~~~
aphyr
...which is why nobody speeds.
~~~
khafra
You make a great argument, and I've been thinking about it, because I _know_
intermittent reinforcement/operant conditioning has extremely strong evidence
in its favor. A HN comment from today[1] brought the problem to my mind again,
but this time with a possible solution.
At their roots, operant conditioning and classical conditioning are both
learning mechanisms. Since the time of operant conditioning, spaced
repetition[2] has gained a lot of popularity. It's a further refinement that
depends on beginning with short intervals, and proceeding to longer ones.
The idea this suggests to me is that speeding tickets happen to many people
infrequently enough that the enhanced learning never takes place. Draconian
crackdowns, however, happen frequently and with high salience because of media
coverage--the only time you know about someone else getting a speeding ticket
is when you see them pulled over, and it's hard to feel as personally involved
with that as when you hear all the details of someone's arrest and
imprisonment on the news.
One piece of evidence for media coverage changing behavior is that people buy
lottery tickets; because they've seen lottery winners on the news, the
probability of winning has a much higher salience than it deserves.
[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2030038>
[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>
~~~
aphyr
This is exactly the line of reasoning I wanted to suggest; operant
conditioning, as with all forms of learning, has nonlinear results below a
certain threshold of involvement. We're not good at expectation values,
especially in these cases:
1\. Rare events, like receiving a speeding ticket, are relatively
underweighted. Every time you drive without receiving a ticket reinforces
speeding behavior.
2\. Extremely salient events, like winning the lottery, tend to be
overweighted--possibly because they're so important to our cognition, and we
tell ourselves plausible stories about winning.
There's also a difference between negative and positive reinforcement and
punishment. Receiving a speeding ticket is positive punishment; the lottery is
positive reinforcement. Couple that with differential media coverage, like you
mentioned, and you get significantly different behavior.
------
delackner
The persistent failure of US state and federal government to fix this
situation has a deeply corrosive effect on the public trust. With trust in
public officials plummeting for various reasons, this represents an alarming
threat to the long-term health of the United States.
~~~
rbanffy
Sadly, I can't upvote you more...
------
iwwr
The word of a police officer is taken at a higher value in court, in the
absence of any other evidence. The police having that power and being
entrusted with the collection of evidence means ordinary citizens are already
at a great disadvantage once in court. Surveillance is sometimes the only
resort the public have to defend themselves from abuse.
Not saying that the police are abusive by definition, but when they do act in
that manner (or tamper with evidence), there is little an ordinary citizen can
do to defend himself.
Surveillance has the great advantage that it doesn't particularly hinder
honest officers in the line of duty, it only trips up the abusers.
~~~
Hoff
While certainly useful, video can also be used to misrepresent reality.
Ask Shirley Sherrod about that, for instance.
------
motters
If they're public officials in a public space performing a public duty then
there should be no problem with taking photos or video of them. The recent
case of the death of Ian Tomlinson is a good illustration of how important it
can be for people to be able to independently photograph police. In that case
had a bystander not been taking photos the full circumstances of the case may
never have been known.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson>
~~~
ewjordan
I think the way I'd put it would be that if I could be in any sort of legal
trouble (or if there's any insinuation from an officer of the law that I
_could be_ in any sort of legal trouble) if I just got up and left, I'd damned
well better be legally allowed to record the interaction. It should also be at
least a felony for any officer of the government to interfere in any way with
my recording of such an interaction with them.
I really can't see any reason to oppose such measures, unless a person wants
to make sure police officers have free reign to abuse captives, or lie about
what they say.
------
acangiano
As we've been told many times over, "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". Let's
apply the same principle to our public servants.
~~~
varaon
Simple retort: Really? Why do you close the bathroom door?
~~~
vanschelven
Not sure why this is downvoted. If the argument "nothing to hide, nothing to
fear" is a bad one (which it it), it's also a bad argument to use against the
gov't.
I think there are very good arguments to hold our public officials
accountable, but they stand on their own merit.
~~~
loewenskind
Sometimes the most effective way to show someone how bad their own argument is
is to use it on them.
------
billswift
_"have a news-gathering right as to public conversations that wouldn’t also
apply to conversations that one party expects to remain private. ..., and
either decide that people are free to secretly record any conversation they’re
privy to, or have to draw lines between some conversations and other
conversations that are hard to justify as a First Amendment matter."_
Since anyone can report on anything that is said to them, with "expectation of
privacy" or not, all requiring permission to record from the other person a
conversation you are party to is to make it easy for liars. If A says B said
X, and B says he didn't, then all a recording could do is determine who's
lying. The existence of a recording doesn't constitute a betrayal, the
reporting of private conversation does, _whether or not there is a recording_.
~~~
ScottBurson
Agreed. While it's clear why it's illegal to record other people's
conversations, I don't get why it has ever been illegal to secretly record a
conversation in which one is a known participant. How is that "wiretapping"???
I think if I say something to you, you should be able to hold me accountable
for it. I don't have a problem with that. Does anyone here understand why
these laws prohibit recording of one's own conversations???
------
DanielBMarkham
In a situation like this, where it's obvious that the law has to change, I
become more interested in the systems of people that are misaligned to make
the confusion worse.
It looks to me that if you are an undercover policeman, you cannot participate
in any police work aside from your undercover duties. Likewise, if you have
ever been a "public" officer, you then can't cross over and become an
undercover agent -- not with facial recognition software. There are also
considerations for domestic violence, juvenile, and rape cases. No longer can
you meet or converse with victims in any sort of public forum (interesting
question: can victims of crime also tape their own interviews? How about
suspects?)
All of this means we have a bunch of retraining and re-organizing to do of the
national police force. This is going to be a major change and effects
everything from seniority to career tracks, manpower needs, and court
appearances. Just guessing, I'm betting that it adds a lot more cops than we
had before. Not sure who is going to pay for those cops or if, in the end, we
don't end up in a worse spot from where we started.
Having said that, because of the severity and broad scale of the problem, this
will probably end up being settled at the national level. Probably after some
crisis occurs. Wonder what that crisis would be?
I'd also note that it is the edge cases that are driving the change. There are
probably dozens of cops taped everyday without incident. And probably dozens
that illegally prevent taping. We just don't know. The only things we know are
those things which are publicized effectively.
The point being that it's easy to think in terms of what the perfect world is
or should be. The interesting part comes when real people and systems are
bounced up against necessary changes.
------
nodata
It's worth point out that the title applies only to non-government. There is a
war on cameras used by the public, but there has been an explosion of cameras
used the other way round.
------
Estragon
My brief scan of the law in NYS suggests that recording public officials
without their knowledge or consent is legal here.
[http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/NewYork/ny3%28b%29.htm...](http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/NewYork/ny3%28b%29.htm#art250)
------
Groxx
Non-print single page: [http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-
cameras/sin...](http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-
cameras/singlepage)
------
alanh
Carlos Miller's excellent blog "Photography is Not a Crime" is highly
relevant.
~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I assume you mean this:
<http://www.pixiq.com/contributors/248>
------
z0r
The police must be held to a higher standard than the citizens they regulate.
They should be subject to panopticon.
------
zmitri
The thing that seems so absurd to me is that shows like "COPS" are so
ridiculously successful.
~~~
lhnn
"Those cops knew they were going to be recorded." is the response you'd get.
What they're trying to do is still wrong. Were I a legislator, I would
immediately do one or more of the following:
-change the wiretapping laws to set explicit "No Record" areas or situations, allowing recording of public officials and servants in almost all cases. (Best)
-Allow public servants to be recorded, and citizens must inform servants they are being legally recorded. (Better than current, but not so great)
-require cops to inform citizens that recording is prohibited (bad for soooo many reasons)
~~~
rflrob
> allowing recording of public officials and servants in almost all cases.
I'm tempted to go so far as to say that a public official (especially in law
enforcement) _acting in her official capacity_ should have no expectation of
privacy from recording, though I'm willing to admit that there might be some
case I'm not thinking of.
~~~
celoyd
Three related cases come to mind:
1\. Secrecy in matters like, well, diplomacy.
2\. Protection from reprisal.
3\. Confidentiality of people other than the public servants. A lot of
government work deals with heavily stigmatized things other than crime –
poverty, disease, etc. It’s hard to record a social worker without bringing
unjustly harmful attention to the people they work with.
I strongly agree with your general principle. I just don’t think it would work
without some compromises.
~~~
rflrob
Can you elaborate on 2 a bit?
As to the other points, I should clarify my statement above: I only meant that
they should have no expectation of privacy from the person they're dealing
with. Planting a bug in the police station or eavesdropping on a conversation
to which you aren't a party seem reasonable to leave as illegal. I'm tempted
to agree with other commenters that recording _any_ conversation to which you
are a party should be okay, but I haven't given it enough thought.
For diplomacy, it seems like the people who would be doing the recording would
most likely be other diplomats, and therefore immune from US law anyways.
Case 3, it's easy enough to just say that while the social worker has no
expectation of privacy, their clients do. If someone is having an interaction
with the social worker where someone else's confidential information is
disclosed, the social worker is the one who has messed up here, with the
person recording it being, at most, auxiliary.
~~~
celoyd
You seem to be trying to disagree with a comment that basically agrees with
yours. The points you raise are covered by common-sense interpretations of
what I said.
On point 2 specifically: as hard as it might be to imagine in the US at the
moment, in many times and places people doing legitimate law enforcement are
intimidated by gangs. This ends up being bad for everyone. While it’s rarely a
problem here and now, it ought to be protected against.
------
milkmandan
The public must Miranda the cops now. "Everything you say..." etc.
------
VladRussian
instead of recording on your device, just call a voicemail set up in a state
with no wiretapping law.
~~~
eru
Or to make it legally even more interesting: Always run a (video) phone call
with a group of volunteers, who will act as witnesses. Is this even
wiretapping?
~~~
ams6110
One day soon it will be routine for people's cell phones (or some similar
device) to record every moment of the person's life in audio and video. Almost
everyone will have a permanent record of everything they do, of every
conversation they have had, with every person they meet. I can't recall where
I read about this, it may have been something Negroponte wrote about.
As a society we are going to have to figure out how to deal with this end of
privacy. It's bigger than just law enforcement.
~~~
nitrogen
The movie The Final Cut has some interesting commentary on a similar concept.
In it, a neural implant installed before birth records every moment of a
person's life: waking, sleeping, dreaming, etc.
------
Mizza
Working on an app to fix this. 95% finished. Launching soon.
------
uriel
See also Cato's insightful "Cops on Camera":
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE8Xom38Rd8>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sixth Sense Technology May Change How We Look at the World Forever - ph0rque
http://i.gizmodo.com/5167790/sixth-sense-technology-may-change-how-we-look-at-the-world-forever?skyline=true&s=x
======
timf
The article's right, you have to watch the video to see what this is really
like. Impressive.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Peter Jackson's 48fps Presentation Of 'The Hobbit' Gets A Mixed Response - adahm
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/peter-jacksons-48fps-presentation-of-the-hobbit-at-cinemacon-gets-a-mixed-response-20120424
======
MrFoof
_"It doesn't look 'cinematic', lacking that filtered or gauzy look we're all
accustomed to"_
_"Not all will like the change. 48 fps has an immediacy that is almost
jarring."_
_"...he elaborated his thoughts, and essentially, the crisper looking image
had the odd effect of making everything seem almost too realistic"._
Lighting and set-design issues aside (sets shouldn't feel artificial), these
comments seem ridiculous to me. It would be like a Triumph TR3 or Sunbeam
Tiger owner lamenting over the Mazda MX-5 (Miata), saying that it's not an
authentic British-style roadster unless it regularly hemorrhages its fluids
when stationary in your driveway, occasionally fails to maintain an idle, or
if an artifact of one the builders can't be found hidden in the trunk. Oh,
wait -- people _actually_ made those sorts of complaints.
People dislike change, even when it ultimately is for the better. I'm sure
there were plenty of complaints when the industry moved away from nitrate film
as well. Heck, since this film is digital I'm going to go find the "Death of
the Projectionist" article I'm sure exists.
~~~
waterlesscloud
Film is an artistic medium. Many many many choices are made in the making of
most films that intentionally deviate from reality.
It's completely reasonable to believe that 48fps will not be the right
creative choice for all films.
~~~
MrFoof
I agree. Black and white, sepia-tone, deliberate flicker and visual noise
(including cigarette burns) will all have their place when used appropriately
and to further push well-thought stylistic choices that are brilliantly
executed.
However, those films will certainly be in the minority. To dismiss higher
frame rates on the whole seems goofy.
Additionally, googling "death of the projectionist" yields more articles than
I'd care to mention, including some that honestly lament that nitrate film is
no longer used.
~~~
excuse-me
Higher frame rate doesn't automatically translate as "better"
Our eyes (actually brain) have a natural fusion frequency, images shot with a
relatively long exposure at 24fps - with corresponding motion blur - is
different from shorter exposures at 48fps.
Remember Ray Harryhausen's stop motion monsters? Those are much 'sharper' than
actors, but not necessarily more realistic ( except in the case of Keanu
Reeves)
~~~
jcampbell1
The exposure length could be the same. 360 degrees of shutter at 48fps is the
same exposure as the cinematic standard of 180degrees/24fps.
~~~
excuse-me
IIRC the Red camera has a rolling shutter so is equivalent to a fixed 360deg
shutter
(if I understand cinema shutter terminology correctly ?)
~~~
stephen_g
The two things you posted are completely un-related.
Film cameras generally have a 180 degree shutter, which means that the film is
exposed for half the time each frame is in the gate - which means at 24 frames
per second, the exposure time is 1/48th of a second. A 360 degree shutter
would theoretically therefore be 1/24th of a second at 24 frames per second,
or 1/48th of a second at 48fps (so should exhibit similar motion blur to 24fps
at 180 degree shutter).
The EPIC is perfectly capable of taking any of these exposure times (up to 360
degrees - I'm not sure what the limit is exactly at the low end - probably
something like 1/10000th of a second).
Now, 'rolling shutter' is just the fact that each column of pixels along the
sensor are read sequentially, so there is a slight difference in time from the
first column to the last one being read (called the read-reset time). This can
be really bad on cheap cameras with slow read-reset times, where it can cause
vertical things like light-posts to look skewed when you pan across them
quickly, but the EPIC's read-reset time is fast enough that it's not a problem
(it is similar to the time it takes a film's mechanical shutter to blank).
~~~
excuse-me
You still have an adjustable exposure time between the pixel reset and read,
which you can make pretty small (<1ms)
But the real problem comes from the time taken to read an entire frame. On a
cheap camera this is about the frame time because the electronics is slow, but
on a high end camera it is still often close to the frame time because you
have a lot of pixels and there is a limit to how fast you can read while still
having low noise. Some scientific CMOS cameras get round this by having
massively parallel outputs.
The problem gets worse at 48fps - if it takes close to 1/48s to read the chip
then a moving object will have stretched across the entire frame from top to
bottom. In the worst case a vertical post in a fast pan will be at 45deg. A
24fps camera run at the same pixel clock only has half the effect.
The cameras do have software to try and correct this - basically they look for
vertical edges and de-skew them, but this puts in artifacts that you don't
want in a Hollywood movie. The other secret is to not fast pan at 48fps.
------
jerf
I think it all breaks down into three categories:
* People who like it
* People truly not liking it because they're not used to
it, but someday they'll look back and think 24fps looks awful
* People trying to send hipster social signals by being more
cinema snob than thou
Not sure what the exact breakdown is, but I wouldn't underestimate that third
category.
If it seems like I've not left space for people genuinely and indefinitely not
liking it... no, I haven't. It's a proper superset of capabilities. If for
some bizarre reason 24 fps is truly called for, it can be used. I expect that
to happen about as often as we bizarrely have a sudden need for 12fps footage
in the movies of today, which is to say, never. (No, I don't mean slow-mo, I
mean a sudden frame rate drop for its own sake.)
~~~
lhnn
How about the breakdown of people who like it?
* People who think it actually looks good
* People trying to be so hipster they look down on hipsters who wax nostalgic about 24fps
Seriously, I have noticed the "too real to be cinematic" phenomenon since Blu-
Ray and Spider-Man 3 came out. It looked like I was watching the people 3 feet
away from me, and I don't feel like I'm watching a movie, I'm watching a
Spanish soap opera.
I like 24 fps for the same reason I like deadtree books: the experience.
~~~
jerf
Sorry, I'm _totally_ more metacontrarian than thou. Don't even try.
Let me reiterate the most important point I had, which is that if 24 fps is so
wonderful, directors will choose to use it (after the initial rush has worn
off). Nothing stops them.
But they won't, because if 48fps has any fundamental problems, it's that it's
still _too slow_.
I'm sure you can Kickstarter up some shutter glasses to blink at 24fps if you
get that desperate.
------
skore
> _Terms like "artificating" and "juttering" are terms still best known among
> hardcore tech heads, not moviegoers, and frankly, that's because when most
> people watch movies, they aren't seeing those "problems."_
I suppose they just have to ask my mother "Hey, what did you think of the
first minutes of Quantum of Solace?"
The argument for 48fps is a simple one to make: With faster cuts and pans,
photographing a scene 24 times a second only gets you so far.
24p was mostly an economical decision - made decades ago. Unlike, for example,
digital audio, which is modeled after the maximum detail that the human ear
can perceive, 24 fps was simply set at that limit because that's when people
stopped noticing the flicker - in movies at that time.
I would say that any change as big as this will take a while for directors to
get used to. I don't think it will get quite as ugly as 3D, though, and I'm
not sure why people are trying to make this connection. A lot of digital
content is already in in frame rates far beyond 24 fps, so we're getting more
and more used to this every day. Finally, this new technology is just another
tool - now it's up to the directors to use it in a way that entertains
audiences.
------
BenoitEssiambre
I have one of those TVs that does a good job at extrapolating frames (Samsung
7000 led) and when you turn that functionality on, it does make everything
look more 'fake'.
It makes movies feel more like theater than cinema. When I first got the TV, I
really noticed the makeup and excessive hairspray on men a lot. Also, the
props in sci-fi movies looked like they were foam or plastic (since that is
what they actually are). Iron Man's costume, for example, looked very
plasticy. I don't know why that is. Our brain must be filling up the missing
frames of 24fps such that everything looks more real.
It only took a week or two to get used to it and now I mostly don't notice it
anymore and actually prefer the crisper looking images. It's especially great
for documentaries such as Planet Earth where everything is more life like.
I know some people have difficulty getting used to it because the guy who sold
me the TV told me he was getting some returns with complains of things looking
fake on the TV.
------
ender7
To everyone raising their noses at these cinema hipsters who doubt the
attraction of 48fps: take care. Human perception is a fickle thing and does
not always follow the logical path one might expect.
Consider the uncanny valley, where adding fidelity to an image actually
reduces the perceived pleasure rather than increasing it.
In my experience, even the jump from 24fps to 30fps is enough to lose the
feeling of 'magic' that people are used to in the movies. There's a reason
that most non-reality, non-sitcom TV shows are filmed in 24fps rather than
30fps (the native framerate of television).
It may be that the movie industry will find a way to make movies that take
advantage of the characteristics of 48fps, but it's not going to be like
sticking a new video card into your rig and receiving an instant experience
improvement. The fundamental way that movies present themselves (photography,
scene design, set design, storytelling) will have to change.
------
chops
As excited I am for The Hobbit, I'm also leery of the 48fps. If you've ever
noticed the difference between watching movies on a 120Hz/240Hz, it's
definitely extremely noticeable and distracting. It makes movies look like
reality TV.
Why this is, I don't fully know. The fact that this is _filmed_ at 48 fps
(rather than simple interpolating the extra frames) might make it better, but
I'll just have to see for myself.
What I do know, is that if watching a film at 48 fps is like watching a
typical bluray at 120Hz, I'm going to find it distracting. It really does mess
with the "feel" of the movie. Whether it's simply cognitive dissonance or not
will take time to determine.
Here's a relevant article from last year that really hits home for me:
[http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-
movies.h...](http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.html)
~~~
ComputerGuru
Thanks for that read. It's splendidly written and really hits home - and is
the last straw to convince me to get a plasma instead of an LED for my new
apartment :)
~~~
baq
you can disable those extra features on every tv set i've tried, so it really
shouldn't be the deciding factor.
~~~
ComputerGuru
Actually, I'm talking about the true black.
------
tsotha
Reminds me of people who said CDs would be a flop because they reproduced
sound too faithfully, and consumers would be uncomfortable listening to music
that didn't have the distortions and white noise record players produced.
In other words... BS.
~~~
waterlesscloud
Did people say that? I just remember the other side of it, people saying that
CDs were lower fidelity than good vinyl recordings.
Of course, now we listen to MP3s.
~~~
KaeseEs
People still say that, and there is a tremendous market for things like tube
amps based on the idea that the lower-fidelity stuff 'sounds warmer'. And it
does, because you're passing your signal through a filter than adds a small
amount of mostly low-frequency distortion which some folks have grown
accustomed to.
------
gramsey
Perhaps the negative reactions are simply because most people aren't
accustomed to seeing insanely high resolutions and frame rates in the cinema.
When I first got a high-definition plasma TV (which replaced my 20+ year old
CRT), I felt the exact same way: as if all my movies were ruined, because they
looked like documentaries. Now it feels like a degraded experience to watch
poorer quality films. Perhaps the audiences of 2032 will feel the same about
48 fps/5k resolution.
~~~
SeanLuke
I think this isn't a resolution issue at all. The issue largely has to do with
motion blur. Here's how I understand it (and poorly):
When capturing video at X FPS you thus must hold open the shutter of the
camera for some fraction of the time each frame in order to capture the scene.
You can hold it open anywhere from 0 to 1/X seconds. If you hold the shutter
open too long as a fraction of the frame time, you get too much motion blur
and moving objects look blurry. If you open it for too short of a time, you
have the opposite effect: things look jumpy. Your objective is to find just
enough motion blur to trick the eye into seeing things as smoothly moving from
frame to frame. As a rule of thumb, IIRC that amount is usually half the frame
time, that is, 1/2X seconds.
If you are shooting at, say, 48fps rather than 24fps, and you're using 1/2X
shutter speed to get the right motion blur, the total amount of time your
shutter is staying open (during a length of film) is exactly the same, but for
each frame you're staying open only half as long. Thus each frame is only
getting half as much motion blur in 48fps as in 24fps, and this has an effect
on the psychological "look" of the medium. The "feel" of film is largely due
to its low frame rate, resulting in shutter speeds of 1/48 seconds and
corresponding large motion blurs in each frame. Video has a shutter speed of
1/60 and thus smaller motion blurs in each frame, making it feel more "live"
or "realistic". Move to 1/48 FPS or 1/60 FPS and you're talking very small
motion blurs per frame (shutter speeds of 1/96 or 1/120), resulting in an
exaggerated "live" look. It doesn't feel archival any more, it feels like
you're watching through a window at something going on _now_. And this can
really break the fourth wall.
BTW, the faster shutter speeds have another effect: they make it much harder
to shoot dark scenes. You don't have many good options: your aperture is
already dictated by the look you want to achieve, and all you have left is
upping your ISO, and no one wants a grainy video. Given all the other problems
that the RED cameras have given Jackson's team, forcing them to exaggerate set
colors and makeup etc., I'm surprised they'd add this problem to the pot.
~~~
stephen_g
"Given all the other problems that the RED cameras have given Jackson's team,
forcing them to exaggerate set colors and makeup etc."
This was actually a really strange thing - it comes from a comment in one of
the making of clips but (as a RED owner) it really doesn't make any sense to
me...
The uncorrected preview output from a RED cameras can look quite dull on a
monitor, but after grading the RAW footage we've only found it to have better
latitude and colour rendition than most other cameras. I don't know if it's a
problem with their post workflow or what, but it doesn't sit right...
------
erichocean
The argument for 24 frames per second is that:
a) adequate sound sync is maintained when projecting film
b) reducing the frame rate to the _minimum_ humans need to perceive something
as continuous motion leaves the maximum amount of detail "missing". This in
turn produces a dream-like quality, and frees up the mind to spend brain
cycles on non-visual things, like the story, acting, etc.
(a) is now outdated: we can get rock-solid sound playback at any frame rate
today, thanks to digital projection. Personally, I find playback of 24fps
material on a 60fps LCD monitor to be annoying – there's always that judder.
This makes me wonder if we shouldn't drop the frame rate further, to 20 fps.
This would have a nice even multiple for our 60 fps LCD screens, and also
maximize the dream-like quality we associate with films, but with zero judder.
Anyway, food for thought. :)
~~~
excuse-me
Alternatively you could run your TV at 50h so you can simply convert 24/48 fps
film while saving yourself 4% of the time to make a nice cup of tea
------
icarus_drowning
I googled native 48fps footage and found a couple of tests uploaded to viemo
from the Scarlet-X, and didn't notice much, however, I'm wondering if any
experts on HN could weigh in on whether flash video does any frame dropping or
other degradation that would make such examples different than the actual
experience. Are there any examples of sites that have native 48fps footage at
a high resolution?
Like many other commenters here, I was wary of the use of a higher framerate
based on my experience with 240hz TV's, which look so distractingly hyper-real
I can't watch them for any sustained length of time, but I'm not sure of how
much that has to do with frame-doubling or other "tricks" that might be
applied.
------
huhtenberg
It's an established perception issue. Not only people expect blur from the
movies, but they also associate the _lack_ of blur with lower quality
production.
To explain - the same problem exists with never LCD TVs. Many of them has a
logic for resampling 24fps source and interpolating it into higher frame
rates. In theory, this is supposed to remove the blur and make dynamic
pictures more detailed. In practice, it actually does that, but it also makes
movies look like soap operas. A quick google search brings up ton of
complaints of this nature, and the root of the problem is that soap operas are
shot for TV broadcasting and _at higher frame rates_. Hence, the visual
aesthetics one typically associates with them. In other words, you bump up
FPS, you get the soap opera impression... which hardly the vibe Hobbit should
have :)
------
calloc
I for one am looking forward to 48 fps. I have too often that I am watching a
movie and I can see "juttering" as the camera pans across a scene. I find it
extremely annoying. I have also noticed that it is in various other aspects of
life as well.
There is a traffic light near me that has three lights on it, and there is a
noticeable difference between when the first light goes from green to orange
to red and when the second goes through the same progression. My friends
thought I was insane until I took high speed photography of the same traffic
lights and proved them that it was off by the tiniest amount (don't remember
exact figures). The same thing can be said for PWM'ed LED's, such as the ones
in certain cars...
~~~
reneherse
Here's another example you might spot if you're a commuter: Some weird timing
in the brake lights of some Ford Fusion models. (c. 2010 I'm guessing? The
one's with the cheesy shallow-stamped trunk/license plate area.)
The three areas of brake lights come on at different times, creating a subtle
horizontal flow.
I assume it's due to poor wiring harness design, but IANAEE.
~~~
X-Istence
I am not sure what car you are talking about, but if it has three physical
different lights it may be because of differences in the relays that turn them
on and off that cause slight timing differences, unless it is on every Ford
Fusion...
I too have the same issue that I am able to see slight difference in timing
for certain lights. I've learned to ignore it rather than let it get to me,
but I've got a friend who is extremely sensitive to them and has a hard time
behind the wheel of a car because the timing on LED brake lights in some model
cars causes her physical pain and that causes her to lose her concentration on
the road. Her husband drives her most of the time due to this issue.
~~~
reneherse
Wow, that's a truly unfortunate problem your friend is faced with, especially
since we're likely still in the dawn of the general proliferation of LEDs.
I too notice the odd strobing effect of LEDs when they're in motion or I am:
Christmas tree lights, Macbook Pro sleep indicator, some brake and headlights.
I imagine having that be a cause of pain must be fairly similar to hyper-
sensitivity to scented products/VOCs; one has to go out of of one's way to
avoid commonly occuring things in the typical environment.
I've noticed the "Ford Fusion effect" whenever I've looked for it.[1] Got to
do something to pass time in traffic!
[1] This link is for the sport version, but it has the same (hideous)
sheetmetal as the base model. [http://i.autoblog.com/2009/02/16/in-the-
autoblog-garage-2010...](http://i.autoblog.com/2009/02/16/in-the-autoblog-
garage-2010-ford-fusion-sport/)
------
rangibaby
I am cautiously optimistic that this will NOT be as jarring as the "soap opera
effect" on modern (120/240Hz) TVs -- which for the most part is caused by
hilariously crap interpolation and sharpening filters that TV manufacturers
seem to love these days.
------
erichocean
I've wondered about variable framerates. Higher framerates are very nice when
panning, or during fast motion, but as viewers have noticed, are less "dream-
like" during periods of slow motion.
With the technology that we have, it'd be possible to have 24 fps (or even
lower) during the "slow" scenes, with instant speed up when desired. This
would add one more aspect of the filmmaking experience for filmmakers to
exploit.
------
pgrote
No home video formats support 48fps, though TVs do.
"Both blu-ray and ATSC do not support 48 fps at any resolution. Both do,
however, support 60 fps at 720p."
[http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2011/04/framerates-for-movies-
and...](http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2011/04/framerates-for-movies-and-debacle-
that.html)
Does anyone know if there is newer information or standards planned?
~~~
esonderegger
The folks over in Europe watch their 720p at 50fps, which is awfully close,
but would still require pull-down for material shot at 48fps.
I wouldn't expect any new home video standard formats any time soon. I think
for viewers to see The Hobbit in their home theaters at 48fps, it would
require them releasing the movie as a digital file (still a long way off) and
for there to be both a file wrapper and playback software capable of handling
new frame rates.
------
tantalor
> theaters will need to upgrade the software on their 3D projectors to handle
> 48fps, about $10,000
For a planned software upgrade? Is this some kind of obscene vendor lock-in?
Is that figure per projector or per theater?
~~~
trafficlight
As a general rule, if a product in anyway is meant to be used by Hollywood or
any kind of video production, it's super expensive. Just go browse around B&H
Photo's site for a bit to see what I mean.
------
ramblerman
"Oh no. Not a fan of 48fps. Oh no no no"
Don't know the man, but I'm pretty sure I don't really care for his opinion
now.
------
gwright
I wonder if 3D-48fps is a different experience than 2D-48fps? Perhaps the
effects of 3D and 48fps don't work well together?
~~~
lurkinggrue
Less flicker and should also be brighter. The one aspect of the Hobbit I look
forward to.
------
GB_001
Reminds me of this. <http://xkcd.com/732/> (Hover over the picture.).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Is there a service offering serverless functions with access to GPU? - mlejva
======
ValentaTomas
On a similar note - is there a service offering serverless functions where you
can precisely specify the CPU?
~~~
verdverm
GCloud has the most configurability, pick CPU, platform, accelerator, etc.
Not sure of serverless applies here, but you could setup something on a VM
that makes it "serverless"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Scale Fail: Downtime Is Sexy - timf
http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/4692211550/scale-fail
======
charper
I get the theory behind the talk and I find the idea funny. I find the talk
condescending and not in the slightest funny. I find alot of 'traditional'
developers miss the point and believe there being insulted and what they have
been doing for a long time to be 'wrong' (in no way is it, its just not
gospel) and get all protective and dismissive.
~~~
knowtheory
Absolutely.
He's also totally missing the marketing/social point. When a service goes
down, say twitter, the rest of the internet is _deluged_ with complaints about
the service not functioning.
It is immediately clear what the size and vociferousness of the service's user
base is. So long as Twitter, or Tumblr, or whatever is _usually_ up, their
user base is going to grow on the news of their trials and tribulations.
"Twitter is so incredibly popular that it crashes their servers all the time!"
Unless you're actually a (good) app dev, people don't appreciate that Facebook
and LinkedIn face the same scaling challenges that Twitter does.
=========================================
Second, the petulant tone of this video is really obnoxious. I also agree that
his point is funny, and that the incentives are perverse, but i think he's
setting up DHH and new tech as a straw man as well. It is certainly the case
that chasing novelty has resulted in past lessons being forgotten, discarded
and eventually reinvented, but that doesn't make everything that was done in
the past _correct_.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Apple Messages (iChat) with Android - NatinLA
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mdrsoftware.texber
======
NatinLA
This also works with any chat application which uses XMPP. If you are on
Windows, you can use Pidgin, Trillian, Digsby, etc. On Mac- Apple Messages and
Adium.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
PotCoin Is the Cryptocurrency of the Cannabis Industry – PotCoin.com - At1C
https://www.potcoin.com/
======
mimixco
Proof of stake is probably not a good idea on the blockchain. The fact that
it's been around since 2014 and is still worth less than 2 cents per coin
isn't comforting, either.
Besides, do we need a separate crypto for pot? Could that be just a marketing
angle? By any reasonable standard, Bitcoin solved the primary problems of
cryptocurrency. It's safe to say that it's won -- so far. If one were
interested in privacy-focused coins, you might look at Zcash or Monero but
both of those have security issues which Bitcoin has not -- again, so far.
------
At1C
Would investing give high return, or a black hole sucking in your money.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is It Time for Hewlett-Packard to Go Back to the Garage? - bwsd
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/is-it-time-for-hewlettpackard-to-go-back-to-the-garage-08252011.html
======
mechanical_fish
As a former employee of Agilent, I have to say that the saddest thing about
the HP story is that another company _got away with the name_. To the extent
that the real Hewlett-Packard still exists, Agilent is the real Hewlett-
Packard. (The company spun itself into two parts in the 1990s.)
And so it's painful to read all these stories about how the HP Way is dead
dead dead, about how the company founded by Bill and Dave has been trashed, et
cetera. In fact, the company founded by Bill and Dave isn't quite dead. It
just donated the HP name -- and entirely too many unfortunate employees -- to
this now-completely-different company that has since been run into the ground.
Agilent, as far as I know, is still chugging along. Unlike this thing-now-
known-as-HP, it still makes test equipment, descended from the test equipment
that Bill and Dave built in their garage. I suspect that, in true HP
tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct,
equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally
quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their
particular niches.
~~~
tzs
> I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly
> expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes
> mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical
> laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches
There was an HP minicomputer in one of the EE labs at Caltech circa 1980. It
had the software that ran the EEPROM programmer, and if I recall correctly it
also had the 68k cross assembler you needed if you were building a 68k
project.
The documentation was mysterious and the system was quirky, to the point that
no one actually understood the thing. Everyone just knew the magic commands
they had to type to burn ROMs and such.
The thing was nearly full, and it was getting hard to work with. You had to
upload files, work with them, and then delete them, so there would be room for
the next person.
One day, my lab partner and I figured out that a certain part of the file
name/path was probably a drive name. Out of curiosity, we bumped it up and
issued a command, just to see what the error message was when you tried to
access a non-existent drive.
There was no error. The command worked. It turned out the damn thing had two
drives, but no one had known (and so of course the second drive was all free
space)!
~~~
mechanical_fish
Thank you very much for this pitch-perfect illustration of what I was talking
about. Hysterical laughter: Achieved!
------
cHalgan
The following stroke me as a very strange: "Hurd borrowed heavily from the
founders’ playbook". Really? How? Where? Why? WTF?
Does any of HP-alumnis here thinks that Hurd was a "HP way" CEO?
~~~
mullr
The assumption of "alumni" status amuses me, somehow. :)
But the answer is no.
------
codedivine
Not a bad article, but does not add any new info or interesting analysis.
~~~
bwsd
I totally agree with you. The best part of the article was the thought-
provoking title. :)
The HP I grew up with is (has been) gone and unless they get back to their
innovative roots I don't believe they'll survive. Time will prove me right or
wrong.
------
pnathan
I get the general vibe that pre-Carly HP was an engineering firm, and after
that, it's been an enterprise IT firm.
Would that be a reasonable vibe, or is that wholly skew from reality?
~~~
count
Coupled with the purchase of EDS and the hiring of a CEO from SAP...I think
it's safe to say that they're now an enterprise IT services and software firm.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Virus Explorer – visualize and compare viruses in 3D models - mlejva
https://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/virus-explorer
======
hirenj
It would be great if there was an "expert" mode on this, with a bit more
detail on the coat protein structures. Modern molecular biology is so
abstracted, you often lose sense of the actual scales of things. Being able to
look at things as a whole like this really enable intuition to kick in.
It looks like they've tried to get surface density of proteins right, but I'd
love to know if those densities are about right. This is all important for
understanding viral receptor binding, and the importance of multi-valent
interactions.
------
black-tea
Viruses (in particular, RNA viruses) are great to study if you want to learn
how genomics and the genetic code works. They are much nicer than studying
large organisms because you can understand every part of them. They have just
a handful of genes which correspond directly to proteins found in the
resulting virion.
In fact, viruses like HIV and influenza are very much like compact computer
programs. Every part of them has a particular purpose and interfaces with the
host organism's mechanisms. It exploits the host and forces it to reproduce
the virus. HIV's genome is even compressed using overlapping reading frames.
It almost seems like it must have been designed.
One really cool part of the virus reproduction is that it must get the host to
both reproduce and _express_ its genome (ie. make proteins out of it). These
things happen at completely different parts of the cell, yet somehow enough of
the reproduced genomes end up in perfectly formed virions that the whole thing
keeps working. Fascinating.
------
hliyan
Unrelated to the subject matter: the interface is beautiful and reminiscent of
old fashioned encyclopedic textbooks I used to love as a child (they had odd
names like "Giant Book of Answers"). I would love to read Wikipedia in this
type of format.
------
deytempo
For a second I thought it was going to be 3D visualization of malware source
code
------
Thibaut1
looks like god took a lot of time to design them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Geocities Bootstrap Theme - itamarb
http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap
======
molecule
So we can expect more duplicates since GitHub has switched their Pages TLD
from .com to .io?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022>
------
brandonhsiao
I'm 17; was the internet ever actually this bad? That spinning "HOT" gif next
to "Buttons" is giving me cancer.
~~~
nilkn
The original website for Space Jam (the movie with Michael Jordan) is still
up:
<http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm>
Not quite as bad as the OP's link, but still--that was a high-profile
professionally designed site in 1996.
~~~
thomasfl
This is a real gem! It can't be that much pages left from the ugly-age.
I started out making web sites a bit like this myself i 1995, and it makes me
sad all pages are gone except a few pages left in the internet archive.
------
tuananh
"Site created with Notepad" hehe <http://divshot.github.io/geo-
bootstrap/img/test/notepad.gif>
~~~
Axsuul
"The Right Way". This part made me especially LOL.
------
ChuckMcM
God this is priceless. I appreciate that it wasn't playing a snippet of 8 bit
MIDI music in a short loop which is looped mid-phrase during a key signature
change.
------
cgcdesign
The missing images icon is a fantastic touch, it's only missing an annoying
mouse cursor effect (I'm guilty of using them).
This bought a tear to my eyes, right before the burning, but it's very nice.
Also, did I see rounded corners and the lack of nested tables?
~~~
imissmyjuno
No, but the first thing I did was check to see if every button was a table.
Was not disappointed.
------
iSnow
Wow, I have forgotten just how ugly parts of the early web were. This theme is
pure genius, it reminds me of the olden times :)
That it still is reactive makes it even more surreal.
------
ZirconCode
Many people I know have never experienced the beauty and plethora of colors
the web once was crafted from, finally I can share! Thanks for bringing back
varied palettes and animations!
------
marquis
Can you make the dropdown menu crash my netscape as it tries to load an
applet?
~~~
dopamean
Oh man. I nearly just spit water on my computer.
------
Lexarius
The "Guestbook" got a chuckle out of me. Haven't seen one of those in years.
Then I realized that we just call them "the comments section" now and put them
on every article.
------
telecuda
Missing a RESET button on every form
------
kadavy
Not ugly enough. You need to make the white space less uniform, and the line-
heights less generous.
Just kidding, this is terrible. Great work!
------
pilif
I especially liked what you have done to the form elements. Even more so as
that was completely impossible back then. There was no CSS and form elements
didn't allow much styling via attributes either. Probably because they were
mostly implemented as native controls which in turn don't offer that many
styling options.
------
cpolis
Reminds me of the good ol' days when JavaScript was just used for annoying
cursor effects and the like.
~~~
tomjen3
Don't forget it was also used to prevent right clicks.
------
dstroot
Wow - this is spot-on! I most definitely built a few of these in my day and
even used the same "user construction" .gif. Great trip down memory lane.
Thanks for reminding us what not to do. ;)
------
oakwhiz
It's using the right way to make webpages... but it feels so wrong.
------
heroic
This is what internet should look like again!
------
DanBC
Lots of people say they love this.
Has anyone done the HN redesign yet? There seem to be plenty of choices for
voting arrows. (<http://netanimations.net/arrows.htm#.UWHUTKLrwcA>)
------
mtct
Oh God, my eyes...my precious eyes!
------
realrocker
This is why I got into programming. The web was just too cool back in the day.
------
BIackSwan
Is it just me or does the background lead to a 3D effect? Most visible effect
here - <http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/#buttons>
~~~
Antony_256
It sure does. And, dare I say it, I would like to see someone experiment with
it on a modern design. Or maybe I played to much with my 3DS today and should
go lie down.
------
vidyesh
Seems like we already have a implementation
<http://canhasbitcoin.tk/index.php>
------
account_taken
Thanks for reminding me how cool my geocities pages were. Flat UI meh. I got
the hammer with baloon pants bringing life to my page!
------
cmer
This is awesome. Nothing can go wrong!
------
booruguru
If you showed a teenager this theme, I don't think they'd believe the web was
ever that ugly.
------
siculars
I love this so much. Really brings me back to a simpler more
colorgasmic/motiontastic time.
------
CoachRufus87
This put a smile on my face. Thank you Geocities for first sparking my
interest in coding.
------
SkittlesNTwix
I had a visceral reaction after this page loaded. Well-done on the theme.
------
iambpentameter
You're 6 days too late :)
------
kclay
This brings back so many memories
------
thomasjames
The internet's darkest hour.
------
davidcelis
At least it's responsive.
~~~
beshrkayali
Good catch! Now people can experience this horridness on more devices :)
------
bmmayer1
IN GOD'S NAME WHY
------
afandian
border-radius? Sacrilege!
------
asc123
is it responsive
------
saadazzz
such a troll!
------
Toshio
On behalf of everyone who is old enough to have lived through this hell,
congratulations on the accuracy of depiction.
------
maxpert
hahahahah OMG
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Philadelphia didn't cancel parade during 1918 pandemic. Results were devastating - ajaviaad
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/15/us/philadelphia-1918-spanish-flu-trnd/index.html
======
milkytron
[https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/17/spanish-
fl...](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/17/spanish-flu-lessons-
coronavirus-133888)
This article goes into more detail, and describes how some of the political
corruption in the city resulted in the Spanish Flu having a greater impact.
------
rurban
Compare to spring break in Florida going on right now. And look at the numbers
of seniors living there.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What's it like to not own a smartphone? - d-d
I'm considering ditching my iPhone and deleting all major social media accounts cold turkey, but am wondering if this will have any unintended negative effects.<p>Anyone doing this already? What's it like?
======
impendia
I have never owned a smartphone. I don't really want one; the sight of people
with their noses buried in their phones doesn't really tempt me to follow
suit. I already get distracted easily enough.
That said, I am probably going to buy one soon anyway. More and more, it's
becoming expected socially.
The funniest example: I was at a bar with a bunch of friends. One paid the
whole tab and asked everyone to Venmo him their share. As a non-smartphone-
user, I only have a vague idea of what Venmo _is_. So I reached into my wallet
for some cash, and handed it to him.
He waved it off. "It's too complicated, don't worry about it."
------
murm
I haven't joined any social networks so I don't know how quitting those will
work out for you. However, at some point I found that I was reflexively using
my smartphone to read irrelevant stuff, watching dumb videos, checking
whatsapp for new messages etc. just to kill boredom. I did not like how
addicted I had become to that habit, so a couple of years ago I bought a
simple Nokia phone without an internet and ditched the smartphone. There is a
certain spartan feel to it, and to be honest at first it was kind of rough,
but now I have adjusted. When boredom strikes, I just don't do anything. It
doesn't bother me as much nowadays. By ditching the smartphone I also lost the
ability to listen to music or podcasts when outside home, but surprisingly I
haven't really missed those. Same thing for email, gps, google maps, looking
up random facts etc. Somehow I have just managed without them? I'll call or
text someone if I have something urgent to say, which is surprisingly seldom.
For me it has worked out well, but YMMV.
------
kylehotchkiss
I deleted Facebook cold turkey. I don’t regret it at all. I still enjoy
Instagram. I find the ads on Instagram very relevant and sometimes find cool
new things there (I enjoy everyday carry/outdoorsy topics). I think I’ll
probably delete Instagram in a year or two though, I don’t think Facebook will
maintain it well.
Twitter would be the hardest for me to let go. I enjoy seeing posts from
friends, developers, journalists, and comedians there. Using Jumbo app to
prune any tweets older than a month helps me feel like it’s less a permanent
record on myself.
And finally, the tech I’m most worried about keeping but can’t really let go
of because of family and friends is WhatsApp. They’ll have to make money with
it one day and all the pressure from other governments to decrypt seems like
it might hit a breaking point for them.
------
upofadown
I have never had a smart phone. The flip phone is mostly for emergency or
purely tactical communications.
It means I have two modes. When I am out and about I can fully experience my
immediate surroundings. When I am at home I interact with the online world
using full sized monitors and keyboards.
Smartphones strike me as technologically primitive. I carry a light laptop
with me at all times so I always have access to comfortable and capable
computing. I carry it in a narrow knapsack that stays out of my way.
This works quite well for me. Out is where there are new things to experience.
In is where everything is the same so it is more worth the bother to get out
in a virtual way.
------
philshem
The first step is to delete the social media apps from your phone. The problem
isn’t the phone but its usage.
Sent from my iPhone.
------
yummypaint
I only got a smartphone about 3 years ago. Prior to that it was plain sms and
phone calls. The only lifestyle improvement the smartphone offers for me is
being able to look things up at any time, and being able to provide internet
to my laptop though tethering. It can be difficult to go without internet when
navigating new places. Google used to let you send sms messages to get
directions, but they killed that many years ago. Otherwise experience is
mostly down to which apps are installed and their notification settings. When
i first got the phone i tried social media apps, and my ability to concentrate
noticeably worsened. Removing them and locking down notifications for other
apps restored my overall quality of life to what it was pre-smartphone.
------
shahbaby
I tried switching to a flip phone for a few months. It was an interesting
experience but I wouldn't recommend it.
As another person mentioned, fix the problem with yourself, don't blame the
technology.
Any benefits you gain from fewer distractions is outweighed by how much harder
everyday life becomes.
------
muzani
I got 90% of work/opportunities from Facebook. Quitting FB for a month dropped
leads from 2/month to once every 2 months.
Over 80% of your opportunities come from your network, but over 80% of your
time needs to be spent on actual work. That said, social media isn't your only
way to network, but it really helps if you're not somewhere full of talented
people.
If you're planning on going more into work, keep in mind that mentoring also
comes from your network, and that also includes book recommendations.
But personally I'm stopping with Facebook and most social media, because it is
taking up more than 20% of my focus.
Use the best tool. Phones and social media are the most popular but may not be
best.
------
smarri
I deleted social media and don't miss it at all. I started removing it from my
phone and therefore only checking it at nights on my laptop. Before long I
wasnt even doing that. Make sure to download your content before deleting (if
you want your pictures for example). It would be harder for me to give up
certain messaging apps, ride share apps, maps and travel apps. Only unintended
negative consequence were some people thought I blocked them rather than
deleted my social accounts.
------
ebcode
It's amazing. It can be difficult at times, mostly due to peer pressure, but I
think that part of what's great about it is that it flexes your resisting-
peer-pressure muscles.
------
psv1
You can try this for yourself with zero downsides - leave it at home for a day
and see how it goes. If it's not that bad, leave it at home the next day too
and then don't use in the evenings. Or try to delete some apps and keep the
phone with you.
You don't need a drastic "I'm deleting all my accounts and ditching my phone"
intervention. And in my experience, in the long run big sweeping changes are
far less effective than incremental changes to your habits.
------
tdsamardzhiev
It has the negative effect that your means of communication with other people
(especially “normies”) are severely limited.
Also, many services I’m used to turned to depend on them - taxi, payments,
organization for all kinds of events with friends and colleagues, etc.
In the end, it turned out I’m just blaming social media for flaws in my own
character. Once I pointed these out and started working on them, I started
having a significantly more beneficial relationship with social media.
------
deepaksurti
For almost 2 years, my wife doesn't own a smartphone. She personally finds the
change very refreshing and puts it in a summary as 'I am no longer
distracted!'.
To be honest, I don't know how she makes it work but the only change I see is
those who ask her contact number roll their eyes or worse case the eyes
popping out when they realise she doesn't own a phone!!!
------
crowdhailer
I switched to a dumb phone last year. Nokia 105. I kept my smart phone but
without a sim card in, so I could only use it on WiFi and kept it in a bag
rather than in my pocket.
I really liked what happened. I still could message people or use the apps I
liked but because my smart phone wasn't just to hand I only checked it say 10
times a week.
------
jituc
I got my first smart phone six months ago, Surprisingly it eats too much of
time. For last 9 years I have been using nokia x201 qwerty phone, still it is
my main phone. The main reason I use new smartphone is whatsapp, otherwise all
other tasks can be performed on my dev machine.
------
yesenadam
Have never had a mobile phone. I rely on FB for chatting with friends around
the world, so wouldn't want to lose that, although I quite often have breaks
from there for months. I communicate with FB and email, and in person. Hard to
say "what it's like"..
~~~
d-d
> Hard to say "what it's like"..
Are you ever excluded or written off as crazy for going phoneless?
------
haecceity
I don't have any friends and all I do is program so it's pretty good.
------
doctorshady
I ditched my cell phone a while ago. Your mileage may vary, but if your
friends/employer are prepared to communicate with you without the use of any
sort of mobile device, it's really nice.
------
runjake
Step 1 in the process is to just start leaving your phone at home when you go
out.
Note and address your concerns and behaviors.
Do this for 30 days and re-address your questions and where you’ll go from
there.
------
kxspxr
Ditched my smartphone 2 years ago, have no social media accounts - and no
interest in whatever either is offering. If I don't code, which I do 12+ hours
a day, min. 5 days a week, then I'm doing another activity which requires
solitude and long, undisturbed sessions. Everything I need done, I can do from
a normal phone or my computer.
------
Ice_cream_suit
I have never had a mobile phone.
No issues.
I do have a Samsung Galaxy tablet that I use for reading.
------
sharma_pradeep
tl;dr; Just do it, it's an amazing hack for increased focus, productivity and
peace of mind. I recommend
Personal phone -> A feature phone Business phone -> Smartphone if you're in
primarily customer-facing role(e.g. sales, customer support)
My Story:
3 years back, I gave away my smartphone and switched to a simple feature
phone. I had to get a smartphone for a duration of 6 months in between this
period(when a lot of my day job couldn't be finished without accessing
whatsapp groups/messages and travelling)
For my job as a programmer/founder, I prefer no smartphone at all and use
following formula
1\. For Personal Use: phone on feature phone 2\. For Business Use: iPad with
only business whatsapp, toto app, book reading app(and that too only when I am
not able to lure any other team member to handle it for me)
Location services, cabs, all these things can be handled without smartphone.
Although, it takes little longer and inconvenience but also gives an
opportunity to live in the moment, ask people for help.
------
zzo38computer
I have not had a problem.
------
oneearedrabbit
While there is a correlation between smartphones use and social networks,
fundamentally I consider them as two separate topics. I am not a heavy social
network user, therefore I’ll comment only on the first part.
I downgraded to a flip phone about a year ago. It’s a mostly positive
experience for me. Although, it’s important to say that other people you care
about are going to be to a certain extent affected as well.
I’d like to highlight a few nuances:
\- No ad-hoc access to online Maps means I need to plan my trips including
back up routes and memorize city by heart. I cannot get off a subway, open a
smartphone and figure out how to get to a point B. This is a two-edged sword
and while I can experience surroundings and explore cities, sometimes I need
to ask people for directions.
\- My flip phone’s battery lasts for about a week. It’s generally great, but
sometimes I forget to charge it. It’s not a big deal for me as a flip phone is
already an emergency phone but I communicated to my close friends and family
that if they cannot reach out to me this very moment, I’m still safe and no
one needs to panic.
\- I hate writing text messages on a flip-phone, it’s slow and painful. As a
result I send less messages to people I love. It had a minor impact on how
they feel, but they got used to my downshifting choice in about a month.
\- I used to heavily use Notes app to write down my thoughts. Now, I always
carry a small notebook and a pen as a replacement. Whether I read something in
a book, hear a funny story, make a grocery list, it always goes to a paper
form.
\- I cannot do quick fact-checking and look up something using online sources
anymore, there is no ad hoc internet option. Whenever there is something worth
checking, I make a note in a notebook and get back to this item when I’m in
front of a laptop to do more thoughtful analysis.
\- I cannot make dumb photos. Again, if I see something worth remembering, it
goes to a notebook. It’s not perfect, e.g. when I am at a museum then a visual
media is a much better option, receipts cannot be digitized instantaneously,
which is especially handy at business trips, etc. On the positive side I got
rid of my Dropbox subscription since I don’t have a continuous photo stream
anymore.
\- In a moment of boredom, I cannot skim through messages, news, or articles.
Now I carry Kindle in my backpack; this year I managed to read two to three
times more books than the last year.
\- I cannot use QR codes, e-tickets to check-in. Everything is either paper-
based or I forward them to my wife who uses a smartphone.
\- I don’t listen to music as much as used to during commute time.
\- This could be specific to my flip phone, but sometimes it cannot properly
render text messages from iPhone users. It shows them up as blank.
\- I still keep my smartphone at home and use it as a Google Authenticator
device.
Ultimately, the whole experience is not about the technology, but about
changing addictive unintentional habits.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Quantum gas reveals first sign of path-bending monopole - selimthegrim
http://jqi.umd.edu/news/quantum-gas-reveals-first-signs-path-bending-monopole
======
selimthegrim
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1429.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1429.full)
Arxiv preprint:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.06228](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.06228)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Code management that doesn't suck - mfocaraccio
http://gitcolony.com?ref=cmang
======
ktRolster
The headline is somewhat insulting, because I don't think my current code
management system sucks.....different strokes for different folks, I guess.
The product being marketed is a replacement for Gerrit, though. They have
found a different way to handle code reviews, merges, and also added features
like issue trackers and integrations with other tools. It might be worth
taking a look at, but I tend to prefer free (as in speech) tools over
proprietary tools.
------
leemac
Some of the English is sounds a bit quirky to me ... "Pull Requests like never
seen before"?
Interesting nonetheless as we've been looking for software similar to Gerrit.
~~~
mfocaraccio
We will work on that, thank you for your feedback! :)
------
sytse
I love the features of GitColony. At GitLab we had many similar requests. We
already implemented multiple reviewers, rebasing, marking something as a work
in progress. But many of their other features are also very useful. And the
good news is GitLab support is coming soon.
~~~
mfocaraccio
Thank you Sytse for your words, I do really appreciate them :) GitLab is a
great product and we do think we can help to make it even better with
Gitcolony!
------
mconzen
The pricing is a little weird here. As the team size grows, it gets __more
__expensive per head at every pricing level. Usually, it 's the opposite.
------
BinaryIdiot
This looks interesting. Does it give you the ability to setup rules so, say, X
amount of reviewers must approve a PR before it could get merged? Also what
about protecting, say, master from direct pushes? Github seems stagnant and I
know Gitlab is rapidly working on many of these types of features; it would be
cool to see better support for reviews in general in any of these systems.
~~~
mfocaraccio
Yes, you can do that and many other rules: your CI, open issues and you can
even have linked pull requests from different repositories.
If you have any other questions, just let me know and I'd more than happy to
help :)
------
lobster_johnson
So how does the workflow work, if you're already using Github and want to keep
hosting your projects there? Does it simply pull and push commits via an app
token?
~~~
mfocaraccio
That's correct! Gitcolony runs on top of your Github's repos and we keep
everything synced both ways (we don't lock in any data at all).
------
glibgil
I don't see "distributed" anywhere on the product page. That makes it DOA for
me, but nice effort
~~~
benwilber0
Git is distributed..
~~~
Joky
The product is not "git"...
~~~
mfocaraccio
We are based on Git, in fact you can connect your GitHub Enterprise account
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jeff Jarvis on Why the NY Times Might Have it Backwards on Children and Tech - dreambird
http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/11/24/is-the-new-york-times-asking-the-wrong-question-about-children-and-technology/
======
dkarl
The attitude that culture cannot change the mind and can only be adapted to it
is unjustified. Conventional wisdom really does sway in huge, slow shifts from
one gross oversimplification to another and is now completing a swing from the
_tabula rasa_ back to a belief in a single, unchangeable human nature. We
repeatedly fail to sustain a more complicated viewpoint regardless of the
evidence. How long until we swing back to _tabula rasa_ and laugh at this
current trend without realizing we are laughing at ourselves?
~~~
epochwolf
> The attitude that culture cannot change the mind and can only be adapted to
> it is unjustified.
ADD is a perfect example of this. I was diagnosed with it and I was medicated
through most of school because I really couldn't focus on boring material.
Eventually I learned to focus on things I'm not interested in and I don't need
medication.
~~~
enjo
It sounds like a mis-diagnosis, which unfortunately with ADD has been far too
common. Too often we mistake kids who simply don't want to do things as having
ADD.
I've had fairly severe ADD my entire life. I wasn't diagnosed until my
mid-20's. I haven't had much luck with medication (I can certainly concentrate
100% better, but the side effects have been pretty bad in general). I have
learned to at least manage it better in my adult life. I work on a
10-on/10-off cycle. I still manage to be really productive, even if bosses
that I've had in the past couldn't handle my distraction issues. It's
precisely why I work for myself now.
~~~
epochwolf
> It sounds like a mis-diagnosis
It's possible I still deal with the same issues I did as a kid but I've
learned to manage them most days. I'm certainly not a severe case.
------
epochwolf
> Richtel, to his credit, focuses at the end of his piece on a distracted
> student who can, indeed, focus — not on the books he’s assigned but on the
> video he’s making. Maybe that’s because he’s creating. Maybe it’s because
> he’s working with tools that give him feedback. Maybe it’s because he is
> communicating with an audience.
Maybe he's interested in the video and not on the book? I have several tickets
piled up in JIRA that I really am not interested in. (Really, really not
interested) I'd rather be spending my entire day on hacker news. Instead I
only stop by every few hours to clear my brain between tickets. Discipline is
useful and not easy to learn.
~~~
pessimizer
I've always thought that a diagnosis of ADD was mostly a diagnosis that a
person wouldn't concentrate on what the person dispensing the drugs wanted
them to concentrate on. Looking at the criteria for diagnosis, I could have
been easily categorised as ADD when I was a child, yet I've never had a
problem concentrating. I just wasn't interested in school or schoolwork. In
college, when I suddenly had more control over my personal curriculum, I did
great.
------
die_sekte
>>>@SivaVaid(hyanathan) just said on Twitter: “There are no wires in the human
mind. So it can’t be ‘rewired’ Get a grip.” Right. What can be rewired are
media and education and that’s what we’re seeing happen — or what we should be
seeing happen.<<<
What a load of bullshit. The human brain can change; in fact, it changes all
the time. The problem is that we are changing far faster than our brains can,
which isn't really all that dangerous in my opinion—somehow we continue to
live even though we have lots of unnecessary body parts. In comparison, the
unnecessary parts of our brain shouldn't hinder us all that much.
~~~
dgordon
Which unnecessary body parts are those? The appendix is there to repopulate
the intestines with beneficial bacteria when they get wiped out. Extra
kidneys, lungs, etc., are there because that's what naturally happens with
bilateral symmetry, and provide useful redundancy. I'm having trouble thinking
of other "unnecessary" ones.
~~~
die_sekte
The thing, I'm having trouble too. My anatomy knowledge is kind of bad and I
might just have repeated something without making sure it's right first.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Auditor's response to "Our security auditor is an idiot" (Update 3) - sharjeel
http://serverfault.com/q/293217
======
reitzensteinm
If this is real, I'll be stunned if the auditor keeps his job.
Then again, after working at startups my whole career, maybe I'm just naive
about how messed up the real world is.
~~~
patio11
Customers of a particular gigantic consulting company have to be routinely
dissuaded from "passwords _similar_ to _any_ old passwords should not be
allowed", which is often in bid documents. To a man, when told the requirement
is unsound, they suggest infinite retention of passwords in plaintext plus
Levenstein distance and ask the consultancy why their engineers couldn't come
up with that obvious solution themselves.
The reason for this requirement to repeatedly pop up in bid documents is
misapplication of a poorly drafted standard by people who are theoretically
experts at enforcing it's normative intent.
I would love to throw in an additional anecdote here, but it would violate a
confidence. Pretend that $500k had been allocated to produce a list of plain
text passwords and a combination of bureaucratic inertia, competence issues,
and internal politics made that requirement an unstoppable freight train. That
gives you the flavor of it.
~~~
robtoo
Lots of security standards require passwords to have at least one digit. Lots
of security standards require passwords to be changed every so often.
The end result? A user starts with the password "Seekrit1" when they join the
company, then the next month they change to "Seekrit2", "Seekrit3", and so on.
This is hardly what the security policy intended, so stopping that happening
isn't actually a bad idea.
Obviously storing a complete password history in plaintext (which would even
have to be online for the consultants' plan to work) is ridiculous, but pre-
calculating a bunch of hashes of similar passwords every time a new password
is set would certainly be feasible.
Changing passwords is usually a rare occurrence, but making this at least
slightly computationally-expensive shouldn't be a problem. Of course, the more
expensive the password-hashing algorithm, the fewer "similar" passwords you
would reasonably be able to pre-calculate, which is an odd trade-off to have
to make a call on.
One thing to be wary of, though: by pre-calculating and storing a bunch of
hashes of similar strings, this opens you up to (what might be called) a
related plaintext attack. I have no idea if existing password hashes are
specifically designed to be resistant to this, but would guess not. (edit: I
didn't think this sentence through correctly. Thanks, Joachim)
~~~
brazzy
> Lots of security standards require passwords to be changed every so often.
Which is almost as idiotic as storing a complete password history in
plaintext, because it pretty much guarantees that passwords either (as you
note) follow a simple pattern, or if that is made impossible, are written down
in an easily accessible place.
~~~
fab13n
A very convenient place to store and retrieve them is under a "passwords"
folder in your private mail account or your Dropbox, both of which get
synchronized with your unprotected smartphone...
------
JacobAldridge
When "I have been in this industry longer than anyone on that site" is a
cornerstone of your defence, you've already lost. Also, I know the UK has
really strict laws, but I doubt he'd be able to sue for "liable".
~~~
dredmorbius
It's a flat lie as well.
He doesn't know, and can't know, everyone commenting to HN. At best hes
fabricating. I was going to top post that but checked first to see if anyone
had surfaced that line.
The auditor is an idiot and feels cornered.
Also: "I'm going to assume you do not have PCI installed on your servers".
PCI is an auditing standard. Not something "you have installed on your
servers".
And I guess I'm getting too far ahead of myself, because the OP comments on
this in his serverfault posting.
Classic! "PCI SSC have responded and are investigating him and the company. "
I'd say samarudge did a bang-on job here.
~~~
jhamburger
He should have explained that the servers don't have any more PCI slots
available.
------
dasil003
I can't help but feel there is some kind of social experiment going on here.
I mean I know there are a lot of incompetent people out there, but a security
auditor asking for a list of plaintext passwords is not something that should
take more than an email or two to resolve even in Bizarro world. "Techies"
exhibiting this kind of willful ignorance are usually a bit better and hiding
under their rock.
~~~
InclinedPlane
I take it you've never worked with someone who was truly incompetent. Often
such people have some sort of defense mechanism that allows them to cover up
their incompetence with some degree of effectiveness. But sometimes it shines
right through, and then you end up gobsmacked that it's even possible for
someone to be that ignorant/illogical.
But it does happen, I've seen it too many times.
~~~
dasil003
Sure, but such people can not remain the lynchpin of a PCI auditing operation.
I mean how many WTFs from anyone who has half a clue have to be sent to the
brass at this company and the ones they are auditing on behalf of before
someone thinks "holy shit our entire reputation and business is being flushed
down the toiler on a daily basis?"
It just doesn't pass the smell test for me. I don't know what it is, but
something is missing from this story.
~~~
InclinedPlane
Maybe not forever, but long enough to cause pain in your life? Sure. Perhaps
the company was bought or created by someone with too much money and not much
domain expertise and then they gave their incompetent relative a position
without much oversight. Wouldn't be the first or last time that happened.
~~~
dasil003
Yes, but if your payment gateway is going to shut you off based on this
nonsense you call them up and explain the situation to them and then they
investigate. There are too many parties involved for this kind of willful
ignorance to be the last word.
I dunno, maybe it's true, but for me the story still isn't adding up.
------
yaix
The auditor was actually serious. Wow. I really thought he just wanted to
check the reaction of the admin, to see if he'd actually hand over sensitive
stuff.
~~~
astrodust
The auditor has a hugely inflated ego, something that might be a sign you're
dealing with a narcissist. It's a pretty huge claim to make that you've "been
in the industry longer" than anyone else, but that's the sort of thing you'd
say when you're that kind of person.
Everything they said is surely made up, and if you challenge them on their
facts, they'll attack you in return.
~~~
cstross
Yup. Sounds like a fairly classic case of workplace sociopathy -- the
sociopath who gets promoted because they tell lies and bully the folks below
them into obedience. ( _Not_ the kind of -- much rarer -- sociopath who is
violent or robs banks, but still a royal pain in the ass to run across in a
business context because any attempt you make to deal with them technically
will result in manipulative social retaliation rather than "oh, my bad".)
------
AgentConundrum
Please tell me this is a troll. I mean, I've seen some pretty incompetent
people doing jobs they're not cut out for before, but I really want to believe
this level of incompetence can't actually find jobs.
~~~
fadzlan
Some people excel.... on well... giving good interviews.
Back then, I used to believe that people know what they are doing, but since
I've lived long enough know, maybe not.
You gotta be careful, people like that will come to personality attack when
push come to shove. When facts are against them, it is now time to yell.
~~~
billybob
"Some people excel.... on well... giving good interviews."
The sort of interview that this guy would do well in is a poorly-conducted
one. A simple question like "what does it mean to hash a password and why
would one do that?" or "what is PCI?" would expose his incompetence.
~~~
kgermino
Your assuming that the person interviewing him knew what the answer was
supposed to be. It sounds like the incompetence goes all the way up and he was
probably hired by a businessman who had no idea what PCI even is, much less
the details of proper security.
~~~
billybob
Right. But we're both making the point that "gives a good interview" is
contingent on "isn't given a good interview."
------
Confusion
What's interesting is that the PCI standard seems to be unclear in this
respect. He quotes from the standard:
8.4 Render all passwords unreadable during transmission
and storage on all system components using strong
cryptography.
This seems to leave room for passwords to be encrypted instead of hashed. I'd
even say it suggests they should be encrypted instead of hashed, by not
distinguishing between 'during transmission' and 'during storage'.
At the very least, quoting this isn't going to convince someone that passwords
should not be decryptable.
~~~
Terretta
It's not unclear, and you're right. It has to be encrypted on the wire and in
storage. This paragraph does _not_ say you must hash, or must not be able to
get the plaintext passwords back.
~~~
pyre
That may be, but even if PCI doesn't require you to have the passwords
unrecoverable, I'm pretty sure that transferring all of them in bulk to
someone else via email should violate some part of PCI. Even if that person is
an auditor. The potential for abuse is too high.
~~~
mckoss
Actually, hashed password ARE recoverable, technically. Though it would take a
VERY long time to brute force the original passwords.
~~~
Confusion
In theory, there are infinitely many passwords that map to the same hash, so
not all passwords are recoverable. In practice most passwords will be
recoverable (given enough computing power), because there will only be a
single 'reasonable' match (you will probably find only one for passwords of
reasonable length).
------
hermannj314
From the perspective portrayed in this article, the auditor seems misinformed
about fundamentals in his industry and his response to being called on this
seemed superficial and borderline childish.
It must be difficult to be ridiculed in a public form of your own profession.
Not to mention being called stupid and ignorant for misunderstanding
something. I hope I always have the humility to admit when I'm wrong, but also
have the patience and understanding when other people don't.
------
iuguy
A colleague of mine once had to stand one foot on top of the other and chew
his own lip when an SI's "security expert" introduced himself as an 'old-
school CISSP' just to stop laughing out loud at him.
There are many idiots in the information security industry (I should know, I
are one) - we're doing our best to get rid, but more keep showing up.
~~~
__rkaup__
Can you explain? I have no idea what a CISSP is.
~~~
iuguy
It's full name is the Certified Information Systems Security Professional.
There's a good writeup of the problems with CISSP here:
[https://infosecisland.com/blogview/15450-My-Canons-on-ISC-
Et...](https://infosecisland.com/blogview/15450-My-Canons-on-ISC-Ethics-Such-
as-They-Are.html)
and here:
[http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/07/ethical-problems-of-
ci...](http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/07/ethical-problems-of-cissp-and-
isc2.html)
It's often described as 'a mile wide and an inch deep'. However, it's not
really the example of broad security knowledge it sets out to be and is
considered a joke certification in my niche (technical security).
~~~
pnathan
Interesting. I've been considering working towards it, but if competent
security professionals think it's a joke.... :-)
------
16s
Quite a few managers and auditors really don't understand the difference
between a password hash and a password.
I expect the auditor was asking for password hashes, although he was using the
phrase "plaintext passwords". Who knows, but that part of the story may just
be a wording misunderstanding.
Not everyone speaks geek, and it's important to know when you're talking to
someone who does not ;)
Edit: Not sure why this is being down voted as it is a true statement. I've
had to explain what a password hash is on several occasions. And even after
that, there was still some misunderstanding/confusion.
~~~
sdkmvx
There's still the question of why he would need the password hashes. Assuming
he wanted the plaintext passwords to see if they are 'complex' and 'strong,'
he would have a hard time telling that from the hashes.
5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 and 05b28d17a7b6e7024b6e5d8cc43a8bf7: Which
is a dictionary word and which is a string of punctuation? (I didn't salt :))
~~~
MostAwesomeDude
John says the first one is "password", in under a second. I'll wait for a few
hours to see if I can get the second one speedily. (By the way, this is why
you shouldn't use MD5!)
~~~
ominous_prime
md5 doesn't have anything to with it. sha256 _maybe_ takes 10% longer to
compute the hash.
~~~
kingkilr
Which is useful if you're brute forcing, md5 is also algorithmatically broken
AFAIK.
~~~
tomjen3
Define broken. It is possible to generate (within reasonable time) two files
which have the same md5 sum, which means you shouldn't use it to sign anything
somebody else have given you.
On the other hand collisions between two different files are still not
something you would ever expect to see in the wild so if you are trying to
find duplicated files, then you don't have to worry.
------
techiferous
"any inventive suggestions for how to troll him [the security auditor] a bit?"
Nothing productive could come of that. This situation is not for your
entertainment. Just move along...
------
kaeluka
the Daily WTF - live!
------
keithpeter
As I live and work in Birmingham, UK, I hope this is all an elaborate hoax.
~~~
nagrom
I really hope you're not a security auditor? ;-)
------
dougws
I haven't been in the industry that long, but I've encountered a few "security
professionals"--auditors, penetration testers, etc. All of them have been
totally incompetent; they could tell you the definition of, say, a SQL
injection attack but had no idea how to really analyze a system. On the other
hand, all of the great programmers I've met have had a really good grasp of
security. I'm starting to think that if you don't write code, you're not
qualified to audit it.
------
marcamillion
At first, I thought that this was a bogus post...but it seems to be real - or
this guy is keeping up with the story.
------
Auguste
That security auditor could give a lot of the guys featured on The Daily WTF a
good run for their money.
------
motters
Argument from authority. Nice try.
------
codeglomeration
This sounds more like social engineering to me. My first thought was this was
a hacker who took control of an email address from the security firm, and just
tried to exploit the weakest link in order to get plaintext passwords.
------
blahblahblah
Apparently, neither of these guys paid attention in high school civics class.
Slander involves oral, not written, communication. Libel (not "liable") is the
term for a tort involving false and damaging written communication.
------
jarin
Incompetent people in the security field really need to be called out like
this.
Incompetent developers generally only hurt the company; incompetent security
professionals hurt every single customer as well.
------
antihero
If it's in the UK they may be liable under the Data Protection Act, too.
~~~
sunchild
I like the auditor's take on this:
"I see no data protection issues for these requests, data protection only
applies to consumers not businesses so there should be no issues with this
information."
The Data Protection Act applies to individuals within the EEA trusted circle
nations, full stop. Whether or not the information being requested requires
individual consent under the DPA is a different point altogether.
------
diminish
Dreaming of a world without passwords... Any ideas?
~~~
AppSec
The problem with not having passwords is that it usually requires an authority
to distribute keys (and not retain the initialization parameters for that key,
_cough_ RSA _cough_ ). And that could potentially require a third party having
access to information a lot of people don't want. Or trusting the government
to generate them -- which opens up another can of worms.
Things like OAuth and/or federated login still rely on a password at some
level.
Pick your poison (personally, I wouldn't mind using an RSA Soft Token type
technology with federated access requiring token + pin, but that's just me).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SproutCore 1.5 Release Candidate 1 Released - aaronbrethorst
http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/4280548884/sproutcore-1-5-release-candidate-1-released
======
nestlequ1k
Sproutcore had lots of promise, but it seems really to be struggling. Biggest
issues (that everyone has known for some time) is the huge learning curve,
lack of training materials / docs, and really clunky default ui. I was really
sad to see Erich Ocean's book proposal fall flat. Just seems like Sproutcore
as a dev community is on its last gasp.
I've recently been ramping up on ExtJS and Sencha Touch. Licensing issues
aside, Sencha seems to be spending their time on producing good demos, sample
apps, videos, and fostering a solid user community behind it. The tech is
actually pretty decent as well (though sproutcore had much greater potential I
think).
~~~
scraplab
Amen: I really want to like it, but found the documentation completely
impenetrable. It doesn't help that there's a big refactoring effort underway,
and the entire views system seems to be changing to Template.
I wouldn't write it off already though: the team knows that the documentation
is an issue, and there's definitely a push towards improving it.
<http://guides.sproutcore.com/> for example.
------
kordless
Man, those are some ugly demos.
~~~
wycats
which demos are you looking at?
~~~
saikat
I'm looking at <http://demo.sproutcore.com/> (not sure about OP).
In Chrome 10, I can't get greenhouse to load any of the projects. In the
family tree demo, clicking Add for Male, Female, or Pet doesn't seem to do
anything. Trying to open outline hangs the demo page (and I can't then load
anything else in the demos page without refreshing the page). Sorting by
clicking on column headers in the table_view demo doesn't seem to work (maybe
that's not meant to?).
Hope that helps!
~~~
evilduck
Got family tree to work, you've gotta click the plus sign to create a family,
then click on the family to give it focus, then the "Add Male..." stuff works.
------
prodigal_erik
As a point of pride I don't publish broken web resources, so it's
disappointing to see that they still lack any kind of progressive enhancement
support and don't seem to be working on it.
~~~
gw
SproutCore, as its homepage states, is meant for "desktop-class web
applications," not sprucing up static content. Progressive enhancement is
meaningless for this. If you don't have javascript, the web app simply won't
run. Accessibility is still an important consideration, but that is a distinct
concept.
Principles are important, but principles divorced from context is dogma.
~~~
stewbrew
A message telling people to please turn on javascript wouldn't hurt though,
would it?
------
SudarshanP
Videos at [http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/4214558845/catch-up-on-
the-s...](http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/4214558845/catch-up-on-the-sf-
meetup) may give a better perspective
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Public keys are not enough for SSH security - arunc
https://blog.cloudflare.com/public-keys-are-not-enough-for-ssh-security/
======
oefrha
Reading the first paragraph it's not entirely clear to me if the authors
actually understand public key cryptography or SSH public key auth. (I suspect
they do, but they certainly don't make that clear, maybe because FUD is how
you push a product.)
> If your organization uses SSH public keys, it’s entirely possible you have
> already mislaid one. There is a file sitting in a backup or on a former
> employee’s computer which grants the holder access to your infrastructure.
Public keys are public... You mean mislaid a secret key right? And even if an
attacker gets ahold of a secret key file, it's still protected by a passphrase
(unless of course you use an empty passphrase)...
> Should that happen, how would you respond and revoke the lost SSH key?
By removing that public key from authorized_keys.
Edit: To be fair, I missed this qualifier:
> If someone is able to compromise a team member’s laptop, they could use
> _keys on the device that lack password protection_ to reach sensitive
> destinations.
Okay, not using a passphrase is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean "public keys
are not enough for SSH security", right?
~~~
kbenson
You have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise we might as well say "don't run
SSH at all".
If worrying about a private key leaking is that much of a threat, institute
key rotation policies and have people generate a new key pair every month and
push the public key where it needs to go and remove the old public key a month
after that. Agents allow multiple keys, making this easy to handle on the
client side, and if you don't have a way to track and push keys to servers,
you should. The one month overlap should be plenty of time for people to get a
new key generated even allowing for vacations and most extended absences, and
it's not that hard to fix if someone misses the deadline.
~~~
foota
I'm not really convinced that key rotation is an effective mitigation. Sure,
it helps with some classes of threats, but if you're worried about the ones it
does protect from you should imo be worried about the others as well.
Like, it mostly protects against an attacker trying to get access from an old
machine, but doesn't protect from a device with no disk encryption or weak
disk encryption (likewise with key passphrase) being stolen outright within
the month's window, or an old key being found within a month.
~~~
kbenson
> but doesn't protect from a device with no disk encryption or weak disk
> encryption (likewise with key passphrase) being stolen outright within the
> month's window, or an old key being found within a month.
Well, it also doesn't protect against the key being exposed within that month
and used immediately. That's what makes it a mitigation and not a protection.
But against the example class of threats that were presented ("There is a file
sitting in a backup or on a former employee’s computer which grants the holder
access to your infrastructure.") which seems to indicate leaking of private
keys over long periods (and the long period is what makes it non-obvious it's
leaking), I think it works quite well.
The alternative is to move to a centralized authentication system, but that's
got its own set of problems which makes it more of a trade-off than an extra
set of practices which mitigates the problems inherent with the current
choice. For example, there almost always needs to be a way into the server
without network access for network related problems. You're now have the same
problems inherent with managing local logins on servers (albeit a much smaller
set of logins, maybe one), but maybe it isn't through SSH public keys, and is
much harder to change. Will that get rotated? Will that password get changed
after someone leaves if it was shared with them?
------
stock_toaster
Cloudflare trying to inject themselves into the middle of yet another core
infra component. Shameless.
------
gfodor
Other things you can do for smaller teams:
\- When provisioning keys, ensure that team members put a unique, strong pass
phrase on the file
\- Set up two-factor verification via the google Authenticator PAM module
------
manbash
> Should that happen, how would you respond and revoke the lost SSH key? Do
> you have an accounting of the keys which have been generated? Do you rotate
> SSH keys? How do you manage that across an entire organization so consumed
> with serving customers that security has to be effortless to be adopted?
The problem presented above and the solution they offer seem like miles apart.
The number of ssh keys is likely finite in an organization. It shouldn't be
hard to keep track on those.
Instead, you're supposed to integrate a complex process?
Encrypt your data, add a passphrase to the key, have admins keep record.
Does CF have little faith in admins?
~~~
wbl
Diaclosure: I work at Cloydflare. Administering 1 machine easy. 10 machines
with 100 users a bit more effort. 1000 machines and 10,000 users. Hard. That's
on top of integrating with your LDAP source of truth.
~~~
kbenson
No, it's not. I've written multiple key management and push systems over the
last 15 years. It's a 50 line Perl script, if that, and that's with groups and
server roles.
Scales perfectly fine with hundreds of servers and tens of users, but that's
just with a flat text config file, keys separated in their own dir, and no
parallelization.
I've done LDAP auth and querying before, I don't see this being all that hard.
------
PureParadigm
As an alternative solution to the SSH key security concerns raised here, I use
a Yubikey as a smart card for my SSH access. This way, even if my laptop is
compromised, an attacker has to physically steal my Yubikey (and know the PIN
on it).
If interested, I followed this guide to set it up:
[https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-
Guide/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-
Guide/blob/master/README.md)
------
pnako
I was about to joke "Coming soon: SSH through Cloudflare"... but that's in
fact exactly what it is.
You might be able to save money on Cloudflare by literally just mailing all
your keys to the NSA every week.
------
cviecco44
Exposed private keys are are problem. But there are several open source
solutions for this. I recommend keymaster
([https://github.com/Symantec/keymaster](https://github.com/Symantec/keymaster))
as it is designed with madatory 2FA and a user flow that does not require you
to leave the CLI. (I am one of the contributors)
------
regecks
No real mention of key passphrases, except that a team member might forget to
use one.
It seems to me that the title is not really true for individual users or small
teams - modern OpenSSH passphrases are good enough to protect against theft.
~~~
JoeCamel
What is a modern passphrase? Or modern OpenSSH?
------
29athrowaway
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenization_(data_security)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokenization_\(data_security\))
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Some spectacular SEO surrounding Oscars... - npisenti
http://www.google.com/search?q=watch+oscars+online&oq=wat&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
======
npisenti
Perhaps my favorite: watchoscarsonline. tumblr. com
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssembly - pk2200
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/05/abridged-cartoon-introduction-webassembly/#
======
IvanK_net
They often forget to mention, that WebAssembly is just a low-level programming
language (much lower than C), it has extremely simple syntax (it has just four
data types, no system calls, the specification takes 5 pages instead of 500
pages of C spec). You may call it a "bytecode", but typical bytecodes also
have around-500-page specifications.
Also, its relation to javascript is not any bigger than the relation to any
other programming language (i.e. there is no relation). A WebAssembly VM could
be made as an extension of any environment.
I recommend reading the official paper
[https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...](https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2017.pdf)
(I learned more than about 50 "essays" that I read about WASM in the past).
~~~
paulddraper
Also: WASM is best as a target for languages that usually committee to machine
code.
E.g. it's great for C, but not really for Python.
~~~
moron4hire
Many languages--like Python--are implemented in C, so it's a pretty natural
chain-of-events to get from there to WASM.
------
gavinpc
I'm of two minds about WASM.
There's the Alan Kay attitude that we can build entire systems on top of
minimal VM's, rather than sacrificing power to bake in more facilities. But
even he says that too much time has been wasted by teams reinventing the wheel
(or flat tire) who didn't really have the chops to do it.
The other side of that, then, is the great potential for interop that
Javascript offers. We now have a worldwide platform with a built-in
presentation layer and a highly-optimized interpreter with useful, reflectable
data structures out of the box. ( _edit_ i.e. it's a viable platform for
metaprogramming... the endgame of which is JS-in-JS (see "prepack")).
I would love to see a future in which the browser (and "personal" computer
generally) remained a locus of significant computation. In practice, I suspect
that highly-intensive tasks (mostly AI stuff) will continue to be done on
servers, not because we lack the processing power, but because end users will
have signed away the custody of all data worth processing. If that is the
case, then WASM's role will be to fill a fairly marginal gap, between what JS
can do, and what has to be farmed out anyway.
So ultimately I hope that WASM offers a lifeline to the computing power that
individuals still have. But given the state of JS (after huge investments), it
feels like starting over again.
~~~
throwasehasdwi
Realistically, as soon as WASM is a good alternative to JS a good part of
websites won't use a single line of JS.
Regardless of arguments for and against whether this is a good idea, market
pressure to open floodgates to other languages will be far too high to ignore.
My prediction is that WASM will quickly evolve into a new way to containerize
applications, very close to a full-fledged VM/OS. The market constantly
demands more features and faster execution. The only logical conclusion is
that the web browser will become an operating system.
~~~
thaumasiotes
Something I ask in basically every WASM thread is: what is the conceptual
difference between WASM ("good") and Java applets ("bad")? How does the system
you describe differ from having the browser implement a JVM?
~~~
amyjess
Conceptually? It's not that different, and the only problems with Java were
its implementation.
* Java was plagued with security problems. One area where Java really shot itself in the foot was that unsigned applets were sandboxed, but signed applets had unfettered access to everything, so you had to choose between signing and sandboxing. And then once security concerns became a big thing, Sun responded by killing support for unsigned applets saying it'll increase trust, but what they really did was make the problem worse by killing the sandbox.
* Java was proprietary until long after its star had fallen.
* Java was introduced when computers weren't that powerful. The JVM took forever to start up and would slow down your whole computer while running. Most of us kept Java disabled unless we had to use an applet for something just because of the massive performance hit.
You can make similar arguments about Flash, too: it too had security holes,
proprietary software, and performance issues.
There is one thing I really liked about Java and Flash, though: you could turn
it off. If you don't want a site loading some heavy Flash monstrosity and
eating all your RAM (I had so many issues with Flash killing the RAM on my old
laptop with only 512 MB of RAM), you could just turn plugins off or install an
extension to force you to click to load Flash content. You can't do that with
JavaScript, so maybe WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.
~~~
Canada
> you could just turn plugins off or install an extension to force you to
> click to load Flash content. You can't do that with JavaScript, so maybe
> WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.
NoScript?
------
kowdermeister
I'll find it really amusing when devs outside the frontend world will storm
in, devs who currently hate working with the browser because of JavaScript.
The problem they will face is that a nice UI will still be needed. Since they
will probably hate the DOM even more than than JS now they can just omit it. A
canvas is canvas, right? :)
But then the next obvious problem will kick in. What should we use to
implement a UI. GTK? WxPython? Swing? Tkinter? QT? JavaFX? Great candidates :)
It will just be great. I mean not, but it will happen, because JS and "browser
tech" is considered sub par (not by me, but I keep reading this).
WebAssembly will bring in lots of innovation, opportunities and also create
the next level chaos. We will look back to the tooling hell as the good old
days of frontend development :)
------
moron4hire
In 20 years of software development and trying different platforms, JavaScript
has been the most frustrating and the most rewarding of all of them.
I find a lot of value in using JavaScript as a cross-platform shell. I
personally do a lot of work on all of the major operating systems. I primarily
(a light primary, like maybe 67%, not 90%) work on Windows, but most of my
users are working on macOS. And we're all writing software that eventually has
to run on Android. There is almost never a problem I can't solve using a JS
project of some kind. That's the rewarding part. I feel like my software goes
a lot further on the JS platform than it could have ever gone on any other.
But it's frustratingly slow. A lot of that is the poor quality of a lot of the
libraries that are available. I'm not really keen on writing my own HTML
templating system, but I'm afraid I might have to just to get the performance
targets I want (I static-gen almost everything).
And I often feel like the language is not doing enough to help me. I love
writing metaprogrammable systems, but the lack of easily accessible,
standardized, advanced type information in JS is a big impediment to that.
Sure, I can enumerate all of the methods an object has available to it, but
there is no good way to enumerate the parameters those methods take, their
return type, or even that they _are_ methods, if I ever happen to get a
reference to one of them sans the object from which it came
And yes, I still do object oriented programming. But the functional story in
JavaScript is not any better. With map, filter, and reduce being methods on
Array, coupled with JS's goofy OO semantics where methods can become detached
from their objects if they aren't explicitly bound to them, things become
frustratingly verbose to get basic functional patterns to feel good.
So a WASM that let me build better dev tools, in better languages, without
losing that cross-platform capability, would be a godsend. Having it run in
the browser also is just icing on the cake at this point.
~~~
jbreckmckye
It sounds like you want to program in TypeScript.
~~~
moron4hire
TypeScript and I have had many bouts in the past. It is not the solution to my
particular problems.
------
vivin
> For now, WebAssembly does not support garbage collection at all. Memory is
> managed manually (as it is in languages like C and C++). While this can make
> programming more difficult for the developer, it does also make performance
> more consistent.
Does this worry anyone else? Or I am getting worked up over nothing?
~~~
thaumasiotes
It seems like the normal thing to do would be to develop for a runtime that
does feature GC?
Of all the things you've ever encountered called "assembly language", how many
supported GC?
~~~
tyingq
It is on the wasm roadmap, along with other things that sound more like a
virtual machine, and less like ASM. I assume to allow for dynamically typed
languages without a download of the entire runtime.
------
tamat
after reading many tutorials about WASM I still figured out one of the most
important questions for me:
Would I be able to call JS functions from WASM? or pass callbacks to WASM.
Because WASM sounds like it goes agains the async nature of JS and I have the
feeling that is going to be very annoying to merge both worlds.
Also if I cannot call any JS func from WASM it means I cannot call WebGL or
Audio so I dont know what would I need the performance if I cannot access the
most performance demanding APIs.
~~~
Rusky
Yes, JS and wasm can call each other. In the long run wasm should also be able
to call web APIs directly.
~~~
infogulch
Is wasm also restricted to running on one thread like js?
~~~
Rusky
No, though neither is Javascript. (I am not sure how far along non-WebWorker-
based wasm threads are, but here's the proposal:
[https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads](https://github.com/WebAssembly/threads))
~~~
moosingin3space
Shared-memory threads are something I hope lands in WASM, since they're part
of the reason you'd want to drop down to WASM in an application in the first
place.
------
Slackwise
Oh cool, the text format[1] appears to be s-expressions!
Sounds like an easy dump from AST to text to wasm. Aside from what the Google
Closure Compiler provides, I wonder what benefit, if any, this may give to
ClojureScript. I'm guessing CLJS will just keep Google Closure for its
optimizations, while Google Closure will output either wat files or wasm
files. Unless optimizations can just be done during wat to wasm, which would
be ideal for other language authors who can just translate to their intentions
and not have to worry so much about fancy optimizations. (I'm rambling at this
point. Sorry.)
[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/WebAssembly/Understanding_the_text_format)
------
jorblumesea
Question...
The issue is that JIT js is hard to improve performance on because it's a
dynamically typed language. Even with Web Assembly, something will still need
to compile down into the bytecode to run. So perf is going to depend on that
step in whatever language you write in and how easily that converts and
optimizes into web assembly standards.
Does this mean that strongly typed languages have a performance advantage,
given that they will be able to easily compile down into optimized typed
bytecode?
------
amelius
Since JS is already quite fast nowadays, how much faster will WASM typically
be?
(Yes, I know, it depends. I'm just looking for a rough estimate.)
~~~
throwasehasdwi
The generalish difference between JS and native code languages like C is about
10X. This varies from around 2X to 50X depending highly on what you're doing.
WASM should run at native speeds minus some special CPU instructions like
vector stuff. So about as fast as highly optimized bytecode languages like
Java, maybe 20% slower than optimized C.
~~~
sp332
And vector stuff (SIMD) is being planned.
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/where-is-webassembly-
now-a...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/where-is-webassembly-now-and-
whats-next/)
Edit: an even longer list of proposed features.
[http://webassembly.org/docs/future-
features/](http://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/)
------
ericfrederich
Currently browsers only support JS. If you want another language you have to
transpile to JS or implement your language in JS, etc.
If the browser vendors were going to add another language I would have hoped
it would be something so generic like LLVM instead of this WebASM which is too
tied to JS.
~~~
bzbarsky
LLVM bitcode doesn't make a great interchange format, because it's not really
hardware agnostic, last I checked. Obviously you _can_ run it on hardware it's
not created for, e.g. in an emulator or via some extra transpiling. But now
you're introducing some serious inefficiency into the pipeline.
------
backtoyoujim
Is javascript being used as an ORB and this _possibly_ binary byte code is a
bit of machine readable IDL ?
------
acomjean
Looks really interesting, but How does one debug the web assembly code?
~~~
hmottestad
Same way you would C code. Tell the compiler you want to compile for
debugging, and then connect your debugger to the running program. Marks in the
code will tell your debugger what things are called and which line in the
source code you are on.
JS today is often transpiled anyway, so you have to use some mapping to the
source code to do debugging (eg. source maps).
~~~
acomjean
Thanks
I figured the built in browser debuggers wouldn't work so well for this.
~~~
khedoros1
The debuggers would need to be modified to support it, but I don't think
there's a reason that you _couldn 't_ debug wasm inside a browser, if they
were built to understand the debug annotations in the wasm code.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Should a Startup in the messy middle change TOS on every turn? - maartn
We seem to closing in on market-fit. Should we book a lawyer every time we change routes to update our TOS and contracts? If not, what is best practice to go about this?
======
an_opabinia
It’s a colossal waste of time. An obvious failure mode.
But I think you already know that.
The reality is, as a programmer, you’re never going to convince your non-
programmer cofounder to stop wasting time and money on dumb shit.
At least it’s just $10k on a lawyer. Some people blow $100k on branding. Other
$60k on executive recruiting. Wait until you get bigger and these people are
booking $240k a year in expenses, putting their wives and girlfriends on
payroll, renting offices and apartments downtown...
~~~
jedimastert
Are you ok bud?
~~~
morelisp
Literally nobody who remembers programming before the startupocene is ok
anymore.
~~~
nknealk
> startupocene
You've coined a term. I love it.
~~~
Raed667
Google says it has only been used once before:
[https://medium.com/@arunabhdas/2020-the-golden-age-of-
startu...](https://medium.com/@arunabhdas/2020-the-golden-age-of-
startups-5f5c62d2e39)
------
lukevdp
Probably depends on your deal size and risk. If you are selling puppy photo
software for $10/month it is a different situation to 200k enterprise deals.
Your contracts and insurance coverage exists to protect yourself from risk.
Identify your risk (severity and probability of adverse events) and act
appropriately.
~~~
Jugurtha
> _If you are selling puppy photo software for $10 /month it is a different
> situation to 200k enterprise deals._
Coming from the latter. We build custom turn-key ML products for enterprise.
Usually, meetings are with legal, security, strategy, and CEO/COO/CIO/CFO. We
constantly push to get end users and subject matter experts to the table, for
they are who we are building for. Lawyers to fine tune the contracts, clauses
for support, exclusivity periods, geographic locations, and defining
competitors. Non disclosure agreements, etc.
Repeat clients are frequent, which simplifies things as we already had gone
through the process, had clearances, and built trust, relations, and a
reputation.
Deal size in the ball park on average, but we're building tooling that
considerably reduces the time a project takes us.
------
thinkingkong
When you say "change routes" do you mean changing your API or application? Or
change the direction of the business? Either way your initial ToS should be
_way more resilient_ to these types of changes at this stage of the business.
Resiliency + risk profiling for these changes are the name of the game. There
are no hard rules, just overlapping bands of probabilities. ;)
~~~
maartn
Thanks. You're right, our TOS should be more resilient than this. With "change
routes" I actually mean "experiment with business models" and maybe some
directional adjustments.
It's the "overlapping bands of probabilities" (sounds like a Boards of Canada
album) that seems very hard to put in black and white...
~~~
thinkingkong
Drop your contact info and Ill connect with you.
------
mikece
Unless the answer to "What would you say y'all do here?" is constantly
changing I don't see why the TOS should be changing. To use Patreon as an
example, while the details of how their systems are built and the business is
promoted is likely in a continual state of flux, _what_ they do is somewhat
fixed so the terms by which someone interacts with the business should be
somewhat fixed as well. Unless you're making a big change to features or the
nature of how users are to relate to your business (eg: when Slack pivoted
from being a video game company to a group chat company) I think making TOS
changes (even if it's what everyone else is doing) speaks to instability,
leads to a lack of trust, and generally gives the impression that the company
doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.
~~~
maartn
Thanks. It's not so much the TOS (should've phrased it better) but more the
contracts. We're combining hardware with a software service and are
experimenting with one-off sales with life-time (basic) service, premium
service subscriptions, no-sale just subscriptions, deposit + subscription,
etcetera. There are things, like the obligation to return the hardware at the
end of a subscription, that we now have in the TOS. But if we want to
experiment further we might need to add the obligations of every new business
model in the TOS. Thanks to all the comments here I now understand this should
not be in there but in the contract. This is exactly one of those "best
practices" I'm looking for!
------
maartn
Thanks for all your answers. It really helped to create a framework of what
legal mumbo to put where.
We've decided on the following stack:
\- General Terms of Service. This will describe what benefits customers can
expect from us and by which general means we deliver this e.g. our core
service but also support, the amount of effort, etc; what requirements
customers need to fulfill before we can deliver our service (like a working
internet connection), that customers may only use our service for what it is
meant for and shouldn't try to hack our shit; that customers will have an
obligation to pay for these deliverables and how long we are willing to wait
for payment, what we do when they don't pay and other nasty stuff; How we
communicate, where you can find pricing information and what happens in case
of disruptions and calamities, what liabilities we accept and how we promise
to handle complaints and disputes; other stuff that needs to be said like how
we handle privacy sensitive data and which legal jurisdiction applies.
\- Terms of service concerning generics for a certain type of business model.
This can be quite short and wil lay on top of the general TOS. E.g. in case of
a subscription model, how subscriptions can generally be started, how we
prolong them and how customers can cancel. Which requirements a customer
should fulfill before a subscription can be delivered. (like a working
internet-connection) Where to find the equipment that can be used to receive
our service.
\- Customizable customer contracts for different target markets and business
models. Again these lay on top of the business model TOS which lays on top of
the general TOS so this can be really short for a simple contract and expanded
at will.
I'm convinced this is a very workable method for us and will give us the
flexibility that we need in this phase while still adhering to our lawyers
advise.
------
protomyth
Yes. If you are making promises to users in your non-TOS site text, you might
want to run that by a lawyer too. Patreon is getting its butt handed to them
because they didn't understand that. Getting your TOS checked after the
legislature has met might not hurt either.
~~~
paulcole
> Patreon is getting its butt handed to them
In what way specifically?
Also, assuming they are “getting their butt handed to them” it’s only because
they are huge and successful. If they were a failure nobody would care. And if
they had kept up with TOS updates and still ended up a failure would they be
saying, “boy glad we dropped that $5k on a lawyer.”
If you get big enough you can overcome _any_ legal misstep you made in the
early days whether it was accidental or malicious.
~~~
DanBC
> In what way specifically?
Patreon said disputes had to go through arbitration, and couldn't go through
class action law suit.
Patreon removed a creator. That person's patreons all went to arbitration.
Patreon declined the arbitration, and went to court to convert all those
individual arbitration cases into one big class action.
The court said they couldn't do that, and the reason the court said that was
because of the ToS drawn up by Patreon.
So now Patreon has to go to arbitration on thousands of cases, and has to pay
the fees. The fees bill is a couple of million dollars.
~~~
paulcole
Facebook paid the Winklevoss twins like $50 million. Had they gone to a lawyer
on day 1 and asked what to do the advice would've likely been, "don't steal
their idea."
Get big enough and then use somebody else's money to pay off your multimillion
dollar mistakes. Or go out of business and it won't matter anyway.
~~~
strgcmc
The trick is getting big enough and keeping the mistakes small enough. What if
$50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook?
A risk that has a 1% chance of wiping out 100% of your company, vs a risk that
a 10% of chance of costing you 10% of your company, are not the same even
though the net "expected value" is nominally 1% for both.
~~~
paulcole
> What if $50 million was enough to bankrupt/kill Facebook?
If if's and but's were candy and nuts then we'd all have a merry christmas.
If $50 million could bankrupt FB then the Winklevoss twins would have never
got that much.
------
vikramkr
Obligatory not a lawyer disclaimer. How much is changing to require constant
changes to your TOS? And, what contracts are you trying to change? Contracts
with your customers? You want them to resign a contract with you every time
you change something? You say "closing in on product market fit," but its not
clear if that involves small iterative changes that are boosing traction or
big product and direction pivots, and those probably involve very different
approaches
------
vmception
Should? Yes.
Do the means of not doing it justify the ends of moving super quickly and
likely never encountering problems and getting liquidity and cashing out all
the liquidity leaving only an empty shell for customers to sue and never be
able to collect from? Yes.
~~~
maartn
jŭs′tə-fī″: To demonstrate or prove to be just, right, or valid. (I guess
you're going for "valid") ;-)
Spoiler: We're naive and want to make the world better! (yes, I've seen all
Black Mirror episodes AND we have weekly drinks where we think up scenario's
where our company is the villain) But we need to protect our business not
swindle our early customers.
------
ponker
You should have a ToS from the start that can cover every business model from
ExxonMobil to Apple. Just some bog standard bullshit to throw up on the site
while you do whatever the hell you want to.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The IMDb API v2.0 - Garbage
http://www.imdbapi.com/
======
vyrotek
Service Unavailable
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Woopra live analytics 1.1.1.0 released and more invites sent - thorax
http://www.woopra.com/blog/2008/04/26/woopra-beta-1110-released/
======
thorax
I have to say I'm sold so far, which is why I'm posting this. This really
feels like the way things should be for traffic monitoring.
I'm trying this out on <http://bug.gd> at the moment, as they increased beta
allowance at the same time as this release.
It makes me feel like the site is a lot more like a high-traffic BBS. You get
to see live what features people are bouncing around and the "Sysop chat" tool
is really interesting. I think the biggest risk is that people will think that
the site owner isn't really there and it's one of those fake "Speak to a sales
rep now!" popups.
But I have to say, woopra is impressive-looking and very fast (in this build
at least).
------
ajbatac
i've signed up for them since last month and until now, the website is in
pending status.
~~~
jawngee
It's been a couple of months for me.
~~~
ajbatac
Just after this post, my site got approved.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why Android isn't gaining on Apple in the Enterprise - evo_9
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/28/why_android_isnt_gaining_on_apple_in_the_enterprise_.html
======
pinaceae
Working for a company that serves big pharma, I have the following
observations:
The iPad is _the_ game changer for the mobile worker (pharma reps). Companies
are taking away their sales reps MS laptops/tablets and replacing them with
iPads. Why?
1., Unbreakable compared to classic hardware. Both in hardware as in software.
No moving parts, light, powerful enough, so easy to use that reps can't claim
anymore to be baffled by it. Cheap. No enterprise MS tablet PC comes close.
2., Far lower TCO, as the IT overhead is far lower. Virus Scanners? Custom OS
images? Gone. A fully controlled, curated environment. Even if a user installs
something, it will not break the system or steal your data. If an iPad gets
stolen/lost, remote wipe and buy a new one. Log in, restore, done. Apple
suddenly allows for bring your own hardware - the wet dream of enterprise IT.
3., Completely homogenic hardware, _globally_. This is the most important
point. Wherever you buy an iPad, from Brazil to Korea, it is exactly the same.
Same hardware, same OS. With notebooks? Lenovo, HP, Dell. And they change
their models all the time, warranting a new driver here, a different OS image
there.
4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural
successor - for the above points.
Now, what about the MacBooks and iMacs? Looking at my company, once the iPad
is in, those follow. If the majority of users is on iOS, there are no benefits
of being on Windows. Most admins like Unix-style anyhow, and OSX is a great UI
for that.
Managers are the ones left, and here the MacBook Air is gaining traction. It
is sleek, light, and works. Plus, IT can standardize on it. Also, as people
create slide decks, Keynote is seriously cool shit. Those presentations work
seamlessly on iPad, whereas PPT breaks. Strong incentive there to switch.
The last big footholds of MS in the Office are Excel and Outlook. But both are
available on OSX, and some argue in better shape than their Windows brethren.
The biggest gap of Apple is Excel on the iPad. Whoever releases a fully
compatible iOS Excel version/clone will accelerate the demise of MS in
enterprise desktops.
Servers are completely different discussion, the MS
Exchange/Sharepoint/Dynamics/SQL Server behemoth is here to stay. This
battleground will shift due to SaaS.
~~~
EnderMB
> 4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural
> successor - for the above points.
I can't speak for the pharmaceutical industry in America, but from what I've
noticed in the financial industry in the UK a lot of people are ditching their
Blackberry's and are moving to either Android or, surprisingly, WP7. One of
the large financial services companies I've worked with is switching all of
its employees to WP7 this year, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is where
Microsoft find their area.
~~~
Duff
WP7 is probably a good choice if you're a big Microsoft dev shop and are
actively developing custom tools. I've been told that development for WP7 is
pretty easy for existing .Net programmers.
All of this is great news for the industry -- a robust market is a good thing.
------
potatolicious
I feel like there really only one primary cause of iOS's (unexpected)
enterprise success: it's a prestige phone.
We can wax poetic about the democratization of corporate IT processes, or
specific technologies, but IMO those are all herrings, or minor causes at
best.
At the end of the day, Apple introduced an incredibly prestigious product at
the very highest end of the market. It had cachet and desirability, and when
your SVP buys that drool-worthy envy-of-the-office phone, he damn well wants
to use it with his email, and damned what IT thinks of it.
I suspect Android's success in the enterprise space hinges on a similar
product - if someone can come up with the "oh my god I must have it" phone in
Android-land, the enterprise support will follow.
~~~
jsz0
In my experience that's pretty much the exact opposite of how enterprise IT
works. That's why we tend to end up with so much miserable hardware/software.
It's usually a calculation of cost/technical adequacy/ease-of-support. User
preference or usability in general is not a big concern. Many companies have
only recently begun to replace BlackBerries on a large scale. If you were
correct we would have seen huge adoption of the iPhone 3G in the enterprise 4
years ago or maybe the iPhone 3GS 3 years ago. It's a trend that has really
picked up only in the last 2 years or so on a large scale.
We have an IT company that is outsourced to handle all this stuff for us and
they only deploy iPhones. They recommend replacing BB/Android devices via
forklift upgrade. They actively do not support Android. If you're using
anything other than BB/iPhone you're on your own. This is just one company out
of probably thousands that provide similar services so maybe it's not a common
policy. It was pretty sobering to me though. It reminds me of the Mac in the
enterprise in years past. If you somehow managed to sneak one in the backdoor
you wouldn't actually be allowed to use it. If this is becoming a common
policy for Android devices then Google has a huge uphill battle. These types
of companies aren't going to be re-evaluating their policies very often.
~~~
beatle
Another reason: updates
No one, not even Google, the carrier or the manufacturer can guarantee if
you'll be able to install a security update on that Android phone you deployed
to 2,000 sales people 6 months ago.
------
VengefulCynic
I've often heard it said that (nearly every time Apple in the Enterprise comes
up) the conventional wisdom is that Apple doesn't experience larger gains in
the enterprise because of the culture of secrecy whereby it doesn't give
advance information to large corporate buyers any more than it does to the
average consumer. It's something of a surprise to me that this wasn't
mentioned in this article.
Doubly so because a number of the other vendors of Android devices (Samsung,
Sony, LG, ASUS) have a much more favorable history on releasing information
about upcoming products so that enterprise support can be ready for them.
Also, a lack of that culture of secrecy would seem to be more favorable for
sharing more technical information up-front for deeper integration with
corporate partners. Whereas I don't get the impression that Apple really views
any enterprise customer as a partner, but rather as another customer.
~~~
alttag
Conversely, Apples does have a history of long-term support for the products
they do release, so in that sense, the future is extremely predicable ... more
so than other players in the mobile space. The predictability of support is
perhaps more valuable than the predictability of new shininess.
~~~
cageface
This is much more the case for Apple in mobile than in their other products.
The churn from OS 9 -> X, PPC -> Intel, and multiple breaking changes to APIs
etc over the same time period made supporting Macs at the "enterprise" level
quite challenging.
------
abruzzi
As a member of an enterprise IT, and one that has been involved in out testing
and decision making I'd put it down to three things:
1\. Android support for Exchange is generally awful. I can't speak for ICS,
but many of the android phones we tested wouldn't do calendar sync, or would
randomly stop receiving emails, requiring hard resets, or would have little to
no global address lookup. In contrast, iOS has had very good exchange support
since at least iOS 3, and it is rock solid.
2\. Android still doesn't work with our Cisco VPN, iOS has since at least v3.
3\. Beyond the internet and PIM software, we have been more successful finding
quality apps. Too many apps on both platforms are lightweight things without
much use in a business environment, but there are some decent application to
be found on iOS (the Omnigroup apps come to mind.). There is also better
support from business focused companies like VMware, ESRI, Autodesk, and all
the conferencing companies like WebEx.
~~~
michaelcampbell
I must be walking under a silver lined cloud; I've had an original droid since
launch day over 2 years ago, and now an ICS Galaxy Nexus since launch day, and
the Exchange integration has been better than my Windows PC, by and large.
I've never had any of the issues you mention. I don't doubt you've had them,
but I have not. I frequently get "dinged" on my phone for new email before
Outlook. (I will admit that deleting a mail on outlook takes up to 5 minutes
to "be gone" on the Android.)
But never any calendar issues. Never any dropped mails. Never any needs to
"hard reset". Lookups work as well on my phone as they do on outlook, for me.
------
stoked
The fragmentation mentioned in the article to me highlights one of the main
reasons why enterprises shy away from Android. On iOS, there is ONE
email/calendar client with a known set of features/limitations. On android,
almost every manufacturer has their own email client and their varying feature
sets and bugs are not documented anywhere. For example:
<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4760> How many posts in
there are from google employees stating that it's not their problem because
the email client the person is complaining about isn't written by google?
------
newbusox
I feel like one of the major changes in a Steve Jobs-less Apple is going to be
an increased emphasis on the corporate market. This was historically one of
the major differences between Apple (focused on end-users) and Microsoft
(primarily focused on corporate enterprises--Paul Allen has a lot to say about
this in his recent biography). To see Apple succeeding in this market is
pretty exciting for them.
------
swasheck
our company wont go android because of the inability to remote wipe and the
open android app store.
~~~
tensor
You can remote wipe (among other enterprise things) using google apps for
business and the google apps device policy app.
[http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...](http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=190930)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Slack Rate Limit – Limited to a Workspace? - mrburton
What I'm trying to understand is the rate limited restricted to a workspace? e.g., if two companies use an application, does that mean the application can send 1 message a second, regardless of the number of workspaces or is it 1 message a second for /each/ workspace?<p>I wonder how rate limits impact the growth of an application over time.
======
mtmail
Asking the obvious: did you contact Slack's support team?
~~~
kull
Great point . Their support is outstanding, I am getting replies in 30 min on
Sunday evening.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The iPad Game That Took 9 Years to Finish, a Masterpiece - bertan
https://www.wired.com/2012/07/the-act-ios-game
======
bertan
I remembered this game and decided to play again after years. The sound is not
working, so I wondered what happened to the company behind. Unfortunately, it
is shutdown and the game was actually pulled from the store [1]. I can still
download and play it on the latest iOS, but it is a pity that other people
can't.
[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/react-
entertainment#...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/react-
entertainment#/entity)
------
wodenokoto
Needs a [2012] in the title.
Does anybody know how to play the game today?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
If Trump Is Impeached, It Might Be the End of America - dsego
https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/if-trump-is-impeached-it-might-be-the-end-of-america-b7a2243399b7#.lyvbho728
======
m0llusk
The linked article includes a remarkable 62 instances of "Trump" if the title
and the word "Trumpian" are counted.
------
paulpauper
more likely congress will stonewall him than impeach
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship with the Obama White House, in Two Charts - jonbaer
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/
======
coreyp_1
Nice visualizations. Disturbing information.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
YC applications open for summer 2010; note earlier deadline - pg
http://ycombinator.posterous.com/applications-open-for-summer-2010-note-earlie
======
daeken
PG: Would you consider funding a startup aiming to take on a massive but
completely monopolized market, e.g. desktop OSes? Being one of the developers
on a completely new OS, I frequently wonder about how it could be
commercialized and pitted against the likes of MS, and it seems that it would
be effectively untouchable from a funding perspective, with the way things are
now.
I know investors like risk, but it seems like the chances of success are such
that 99% of the time, you're going to be throwing your money way. Any insight
here?
~~~
billclerico
that's sort of a vague question. some of history's biggest monopolies have
been the most vulnerable to disruption (telecom, anyone?).
i don't want to speak for PG, but I think when YC considers applications they
weigh risk against potential return. m$ certainly has demonstrated there is a
tremendous market for desktop software (though with the onset of cloud
computing, perhaps it is becoming obsolete).
~~~
daeken
I perhaps made it a bit too vague in an effort to make it applicable outside
my specific case (I work on a pure-managed OS focused on desktop/mobile
applications). Even though I fully believe in the project, the chances of it
ever becoming the Next Big OS (TM) are slim to nil, so I'm curious if any sane
investor would touch it. Obviously there's a profit to be made with it in
certain niches, but I don't know if that would be big enough for anyone to
fund it.
------
chrischen
I really hope there is significantly more engagement this time. I'm not real
good at explaining things the first time so a question-response type situation
would give me a good chance to properly explain my self a one-time application
wouldn't.
I do have a question for Paul Graham though: should I assume you guys know
nothing about previous applications?
~~~
pg
That's a good assumption, though we sometimes look at previous applications.
------
alanthonyc
PG's point about the size of the YC founders pool makes me curious what the
effects of hitting some kind of Dunbar number will be.
~~~
pg
I wonder about that too, but we may not hit a limit. I think limits like
Dunbar's number are consequences of hierarchical structure, and the YC founder
network is completely distributed.
~~~
Alex3917
Dunbar's number generally applies to communities that are organized around
content or ideology.
So for example, a web forum gets too large for everyone to agree on what's on
topic or off topic, so it splits in two. Or a democratically run government
can't agree on whether the society should be gemeinschaft or gezellschaft.
The YC network is more like a dating site than a polis, so while there may be
some limiting factor I don't think it would be Dunbar's number.
~~~
alanthonyc
_The YC network is more like a dating site than a polis_
Is this true? I may have a utopian view of things, but my impression is that
of a community that helps each other out in order to make this new model of
work succeed.
If my impression is accurate, then I can see how the society could change or
break down once it gets past a certain size. Cliques, subgroups, etc. could
form.
I see this support group structure as one of the main reasons to apply to YC.
The money would be useful, but the support would be invaluable.
~~~
Alex3917
"My impression is that of a community that helps each other out in order to
make this new model of work succeed."
In YC when you have a problem you generally find another startup who can help
and then pair off with them to work alone, like on a dating site.
Alternatively, there other seed programs where all the startups sit around a
big table and talk about each person's problems one at time. This is more like
a polis, because different discussions create value for different people.
The latter exposes you to more new ideas, but it also wastes enormous amounts
of time. (And a lot of these new ideas don't end up sticking because you
haven't already tried yourself and failed first.) I think the YC model
probably maximizes your chances of success after three months, but only if you
already have a pretty good chance of succeeding. If you still have a bunch of
missing skills you need to fill in, then looking into non-YC options might
make more sense.
~~~
alanthonyc
I see. Thanks for the feedback, it's nice to know a little bit more about it.
------
arfrank
The apply link in the footer below is now dead as it links to the w2010.html
page. Should be s2010.html
Also clickable link to the apply page at: <http://ycombinator.com/s2010.html>
------
follower
Should "It will take place in Mountain View, CA from July through August 2010"
actually say "June" rather than "July" given point #4?
~~~
pg
Fixed, thanks.
------
bretpiatt
I like the effort to move the date and sync up with the other programs out
there. It really feels like everyone should get together like the colleges
have with application deadlines and acceptance notification back to
applicants.
~~~
pg
We're hoping this move will cause that to happen de facto. The fact that YC
etc have cycles with similar, fixed dates makes it structurally like college
applications, so customs should be similar. It is much worse to use exploding
termsheets in that context than in something asynchronous like VC series A
rounds.
~~~
araneae
Unless something like early admission happens...
It's advantageous to be early in the cycle, so you could have a continual
creep up of deadlines, and continual asynchrony.
~~~
pg
In fact one of them already has something they call early admissions. I can't
imagine why any startup would think it was to their advantage to limit their
options that way, though, so as far as I can tell it is just a negative IQ
test and thus nothing to worry about.
~~~
rms
It probably makes sense for those founders living in that specific geographic
area that can't move for whatever reasons.
------
paraschopra
Hi PG, I really want to apply to YC this time. I browsed through the
application but I am not sure if you will consider my case for the
application: single founder and based out of India?
~~~
ewjordan
From <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>:
Can a single person apply for funding?
Yes, but the odds of being accepted are much lower. A startup is too much work
for one person.
Do we have to be US citizens?
No, as long as you can get here for at least three months. We've funded many
startups founded by non-citizens.
Can you get us visas?
No, sorry, we don't do that. You'll have to figure out visas for yourself. If
you know people from previous YC-funded companies who came from outside the
US, we suggest you ask them for advice. They understand the options better
than we do.
~~~
levesque
So basically what one can do is apply, then if accepted arrange the details
for coming during the said three months in the US?
------
discolemonade
It would be interesting to see stats on the composition of groups that YC has
funded since inception; ie, percentage of all programmer groups vs
programmer/biz guy vs all biz guys, etc. Any insights PG?
~~~
pg
I would say about half the groups have one or more non-programmers. I remember
2 that had no programmers, though I may be forgetting some.
The optimal configuration is one or two programmers plus one person who can
sell really well. Best of all is when the person who can sell is also a
programmer.
~~~
discolemonade
Just out of curiosity, how did those groups with non-programmers develop their
product? Did they go out and find programmers? What did they spend most of
their time doing?
~~~
pg
One group found programmers, the other (in the current cycle) is doing
something that doesn't require significant amounts of hacking, at least at
this stage.
------
hypermatt
"submit successive drafts of your application as you modify it"
My favorite quote, I like that. I've never been a big fan of college
applications in one shot.
------
danielzarick
PG- Will there be RFS ideas again? I'm not necessarily looking for ideas, but
it is always interesting to see what you and the crew are thinking about.
~~~
gridspy
Yes, there are a few interesting RFS ideas from 16 August 2009 :
<http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html>
------
pmjordan
Engaging with applicants before the deadline seems like a great move. From the
stories from previous YCers it sounds like this sometimes happened already,
but it's good to have it spelled out.
Oh, by the way Paul: the "Apply" link in the footer is still the W2010 one,
which now 404s. It shouldn't stop anyone serious about applying, but... :)
------
dzlobin
PG, Just how much of a minus would it be that both founders would have to
return to college in the fall? Given they can reasonably continue to work in
school.
------
lloydarmbrust
I can't imagine how the YC partners have time to make this happen, but then
again, I'm not sure how they fulfill their current responsibilities.
------
samd
"Are any of the following true? ... (e) None of the founders are programmers."
Isn't that basically automatic disqualification?
~~~
pg
No; we've funded a couple groups that didn't have any programmers.
~~~
samd
That's interesting and surprising. What did those groups do; go out and hire a
programmer, find a technical co-founder after getting funding, or did they
outsource what they needed?
~~~
pg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077170>
------
kuvkir
Just out of curiosity – is there any list of YC participants of past years?
~~~
chrischen
<http://ycombinator.com/faq.html> There's a list. I'm not sure if it's
comprehensive. I know there's another list somewhere out there that also
details the status of the companies. Can't seem to find it right now.
~~~
ig1
[http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-
combinator...](http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2009/12/analyzing-y-
combinator.html)
------
DanielBMarkham
Woohoo! I think I actually think I might be in a good spot to apply this time
around.
------
gkoberger
Good luck, everyone! :)
------
benologist
Fantastic news and timing. :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Guide to Business Development 2.0 - naish
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/business_development_20.php
======
mixmax
From the article: "Besides being annoying, cold calling is no longer
effective"
A friend of mine does this for a living, and he earns around $20.000 a month
and has a 30 hour working week. In a previous startups I cold called potential
customers myself and closed roughly 1 in 20.
I don't know where the author gets his numbers from, or if he moves in
radically different cirsles from me, but I strongly disagree. I would say that
cold-callling is one of the most effective sales methods out there. Depending
on your product of course.
------
jgrahamc
"Cold calling is dead"? Uh, no it's not, and neither is direct marketing or
spam. None of these things are dead because they work.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Sexiest Startup CEOs Alive - sambeau
http://www.businessinsider.com/sexiest-startup-ceos-2013-10?op=1
======
sambeau
I feel I have to make this clear: I submitted this because I'm appalled by it
and I feel it merits discussion by the startup community — not because think
it is a worthy piece of journalism.
I find it shameful that this is the one time I've read about all the female
CEOs shown here: all 19 of them.
Edit: Miscounted 20 female CEOS but there's 19.
------
dragonbonheur
They forgot Jeri Ellsworth of Technical Illusions and Tan Le of Emotiv, as
usual. Not much journalism if they can't keep up with the news. What does sex
have to do with startups anyway?
~~~
forktheif
I think it's what does sex have to do with getting clicks? And the answer is,
a lot.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Simple Open Source 3D Online Multiplayer Battle Game Using Node.js - yoshiokatsuneo
https://paiza-battle-ground.paiza-user.cloud/
======
yoshiokatsuneo
And, here is an article how I created the simple game:
[https://engineering.paiza.io/entry/paizacloud_online_multipl...](https://engineering.paiza.io/entry/paizacloud_online_multiplayer_game)
~~~
webdva
Inspiring. Good work.
------
warent
Whoever "rj" is I'm "WWWWWWW...." and laughing so hard at our eternal battle
------
atomical
Kind of like bzflag?
------
mberger
I appreciate that there is a certain sense of accomplishment that comes with
doing something 'from scratch' but why wouldn't you use
[https://phaser.io/](https://phaser.io/) or any of the other
libraries/frameworks for HTML5 development? It's built for almost exactly this
type of game. Does anyone know if there is a framework for turn based strategy
for HTML5? Phaser seems to have more of a real time and physics focus.
~~~
andypants
Phaser looks like it's for 2d games, not 3d.
~~~
onion2k
It's rendered in 3D, but the physics are 2D.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Facebook to launch new App for teen memes - elamje
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/18/facebook-lol/
======
elamje
I haven’t heard of a new app product since Messenger was spun off. Seems like
big news, even though it seems that many hate Facebook
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Pfizer blocks its drugs from being used in lethal injections in prisons (2016) - Tomte
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/13/pfizer-blocks-drugs-lethal-injections
======
siruncledrew
Yet they gave doctors a free pass to lethal drugs:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/pfize...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/pfizer-agrees-to-truth-in-opioid-
marketing/2016/07/05/784223cc-42c6-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition - moritzplassnig
https://blog.github.com/2018-10-26-github-and-microsoft/
======
bad_user
Nat Friedman has cofounded Xamarin, he understands Open Source and I'm sure
he'll do well as CEO of GitHub. I'm cautiously optimistic about it.
Microsoft could pull a Skype of course, but on the upside this might turn out
to be a good thing, as in this climate many businesses, operating at scale and
giving away so many freebies, are struggling and GitHub could have been the
next SourceForge.
Who knows, maybe they'll even open source it. Fingers crossed.
~~~
rajacombinator
What does “pulling a Skype” mean in this context? I remember when they bought
Skype it was “bad.” But do people really use Skype any less now than before?
~~~
behringer
Skype is a shell of its former self, everybody has moved over to facebook or
discord. The few friends I have who did still use Skype as of a few months ago
have migrated to Wire. I only know one person that uses it now and they only
use it because they still have a real phone number attached to it.
~~~
partiallypro
I've hardly ever known a single person that has ever used Skype. I actually
used to really like Lync when I worked for a company that used Office
365...but hated when they Skypified it. Microsoft Teams seems pretty awesome,
but I haven't had the chance to use it. Skype does have a lot of business uses
that it doesn't face any competition with...but they are features most people
don't use.
~~~
ocdtrekkie
After leaving Google Talk behind, Skype was my primary chat app for a few
years, but a lot of people I used to talk to on it have primarily moved to
Discord at this point.
I still like Skype more than Discord, but chat apps are wherever your friends
are.
------
ken
> GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the
> deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s
> experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to
> build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.
Whenever I see a product claim it's "for you", I cringe. You just can't put
something on the web or on TV and say "for you" and have it mean anything
useful.
What I always loved about GitHub was that it was the underdog, so they
naturally built tools so that a couple of developers in a garage (well, cafe)
could have access to the same type of tools that a Fortune-100 company has
(and has to pay companies like IBM big bucks to install and maintain). It's
using technology to help those with fewer resources, which is to me the entire
purpose of technology.
Almost everything I've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been to
help enterprise developers at big established companies. Creating giant
workflows and integrating with legacy systems and such. The little things that
individuals use are slipping through the cracks. When I reported that the
milestone date-picker went away for Safari users, for example, they just told
me "Sorry".
"Developers" has become a dirty word. It's a weasel word that companies use to
try to convince me they're talking about me, while actually talking about
someone and something completely different. If you can't be more specific than
that, you're almost certainly wasting my time.
I miss the GitHub whose homepage had logos of little startups I'd barely heard
of, and direct links to new and interesting repos. Now they've got IBM and SAP
and Walmart logos. It's clear that the "developers" they're targeting no
longer includes me.
~~~
bad_user
> _Almost everything I 've seen from GitHub in the past year or two has been
> to help enterprise developers at big established companies._
Companies eventually go after companies willing to spend money, otherwise they
don’t survive because consumers and startups are cheap and don’t want to spend
money on such productivity tools and services.
That or they could’ve shoved ads down your throat, or bundle spyware in the
archives people download.
As they say, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Next time when you like a
service that brings you value, pay for it (using the royal you here).
~~~
marmaduke
I don’t think this is true. I paid for a personal GitHub plan for years to
have the private repos and to support them, back when it was a simpler place.
If 100k devs around the world did the same, they’d have enough plenty of money
to do what they were doing then.
Instead they insisted on endless growth, hosting All The Projects without
bound or limit and I’d say that’s what puts them in hot water, needing crazy
amounts of money that individuals can’t provide.
~~~
Kalium
OK! Let's work some numbers on this. 100k devs times $7mo personal account
times twelve months. 100 000 * 7 * 12 = 8 400 000
$8.4 million in gross revenue a year. Out of this has to come all operational
costs, all salaries, all benefits for staff, all other overhead, and so on. At
west coast tech rates, that's low-30s number of people. Assume lower, since
AWS and similar isn't exactly free. Do you think GitHub could have done every
single thing they did at the time you have in mind with a double handful of
engineers and sysadmins and managers? I must admit, I'm a little skeptical.
Staffing a solid ops organization capable of 24/7 coverage takes at _least_ a
dozen people.
I haven't even touched on taxes.
Business plans can easily be a thousand a month or more. GitHub has an
offering of $21 per user per month, also for business. In either case this
almost certainly offers significantly greater overhead that the individual
plans do. You can get the same revenue numbers with significantly lower load
with a third the number of users! Not to mention that you have fewer customers
for the same amount of revenue, which makes support higher-touch but much
easier in important ways.
With this in mind, it's easy to see why a group like GitHub might want to
consider investing in supporting businesses. There's so much more margin
there. Especially when you consider that their predecessors did not, and
GitHub out-competed them in part due to the extra revenue that comes from
strong enterprise support.
Services like GitHub don't get to sit still. Or else we'd all still be using
SourceForge.
~~~
marmaduke
The margin per user argument is fine but I’m lamenting that it leads to a sort
of digital gentrification.
Personally, from GitHub, I didn’t want 9 9s or infinite bandwidth or feature
creep or even to use it at my day job (Jira/Jenkins/prayer).
SourceForge is a scarecrow argument btw, it’s the MySpace of its sort.
~~~
Kalium
I don't understand. In what way is GitHub's increasing focus on the customers
that pay the bills forcing you out? I understand that you don't care about
maximum uptime or SSO or the vulnerability detection system, but are they in
some manner making it impossible for you to continue using GitHub? Or are you
displeased because you feel GitHub could be paying attention to the needs of
users like you, instead of big corporate users? Perhaps you feel it's grown
Jira-grade complicated, and is no longer suitable for personal projects?
Sourceforge is exactly like MySpace! Sourceforge once ruled the roost. It was,
for many people, the only game in town. It got complacent, and thought it
could stay top dog while only really caring about the not-particularly-
profitable users or if there was a good way to make more money from the
services it offered.
Competitors innovated, found other business models, and did much better. Now
we have GitHub! Which has learned from the missteps of Sourceforge. One of
which was failing to invest in features that high-margin customers value and
will happily pay extra for.
~~~
marmaduke
No one is forcing me out, and I still pay a subscription (kudos to GitHub for
not raising the price over the years even if the exchange from my currency to
USD has made it slightly more expensive)
My original comment was an argument that the reorientation towards business
clients was not an inevitability as the parent comment said it was. this
mindset says products for rational, aware individuals (here, developers) are
not worth building anymore since the margins aren’t high enough. If these
individuals aren’t worthwhile clients anymore than they are only data to be
traded.
~~~
Kalium
Thank you for for clarifying! It's nice to know that you're not being forced
out of anywhere by digital gentrification.
There is a very reasonable point that this should be enough for any company
not addicted to endless, pointless growth. This is, after all, the ideology of
a cancer! Customers should be respected, rather than treated as data-
generators fit only to be traded upon. You have made this point wisely and
well.
I think it's worth considering why a business might consider limiting its
investments in competing for a pool of low-margin customers of limited size.
Historical examples suggest that confining your investments to just this
customer pool will often end with your customers being attracted away to other
providers who have the resources to produce a superior offering. As a result,
what should be a healthy and sustainable mindset of building for rational,
aware individual consumers can easily lead to being out-innovated and out-
competed.
An intelligent reader will note at this point that there is a lot of
uncertainty in the previous paragraph. This person is right! There is a great
deal of uncertainty at hand, as with all things in markets. With that said,
the above scenari is more likely than not, and the expected gains from chasing
high-margin customers are generally larger than the expected gains of opting
to focus exclusively on low-margin ones in the face of competition.
To such services as GitHub, the consumer offering is not a way to collect data
to be monetized. Indeed, the experience for single consumers is critical - it
shows the key features and accustoms users to the product. A high-quality
offering for rational, aware individual consumers is of paramount importance
because it is where the real customer funnel starts.
------
frou_dh
TFA mentions the community "paper cuts" issue tracker[1]. I'd love to know
what's so hard about the standout top-voted issue[2] that it hasn't been
implemented since being logged in 2014.
[1]
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop...](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc)
[2]
[https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/283)
~~~
masklinn
Probably nothing, just that it wasn't interesting to the devs (e.g. they don't
feel that is a paper cut) and/or was not pushed/promoted by management,
leading to nobody working on it.
Plus I'm guessing many/most GH employees aren't looking at this, this kind of
listings is generally a bummer/PITA, and fixing them is a thankless job: once
you've done so, all you get is "finally, took you long enough".
~~~
frou_dh
More like "Finally, thank God" (the implementer becomes a God for the day).
This is the paradox of GitHub. The product itself is closed-source, so the
outsiders cannot do the work to implement that feature themselves, no matter
how much they want it.
------
tenderlove
This is some great FrontPage news
~~~
ksec
what's the Outlook for GitHub ?
~~~
tenderlove
After the merge, we'll probably branch out and become an even better
SharePoint for developers
~~~
mattkevan
The pace has been surprisingly Clippy for an acquisition of this size.
------
nanna
My reservations about Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub are not that they
might ruin it or whatever, but that I've no interest in adding to the value of
any Microsoft product by being their user.
For the same reason I use a Gnu/Linux operating system. Truthfully there are
things that I imagine MS or apple might do better, but that's beside the point
for me. It's a political stance.
~~~
marcosdumay
If you start a project somewhere, choose a competitor.
FOSS development is way too much concentrated on GitHub already, it's
unhealthy. But there is no problem in most people not thinking like you
either.
Overall, I think the acquisition was good, if no other reason, just because
there are enough people that dislike MS for pushing some diversity on the FOSS
hosting game.
------
Walkman
The title in this case is not very clear because it's out of context. Should
be something like "the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete" to be more
factual and instantly understandable.
~~~
moritzplassnig
Yes, good point. Updated the title.
------
sevensor
So when I write a project in C, will Github show me a popup recommending I
switch to C# for a faster, safer development experience?
Microsoft feels like an untrustworthy friend to me -- I'll go to a party at
Microsoft's house, but I wouldn't let Microsoft hold my wallet.
~~~
mmirate
To be fair, a (hypothetical) non-morally-bankrupt hosting provider would do
just that but for Rust instead of C#.
------
jyriand
I remember that GitHub was paraded as boss-less company. But now they ended up
in big pile of hierarchy.
------
Svoka
Just a friendly reminder: Corporations are not humans. Corporation's acts are
driven by profits. Last decade Microsoft CEO was describing Linux as
"communism". Some say, till this day Microsoft would go after hardware
manufacturers who use Linux for patent fees, having covert patent war vs
Linux. [1]
I really like how Microsoft is now, all open, free, unicorns and rainbows.
Hell, they're producing some terrific open source themselves and support
community.
But lets not forget - corporations are not people. Next CEO may use Github to
put obstacles on OSS movement's way. Just because it is good now, doesn't mean
it will be good tomorrow, or in 10 years.
P.S. Personally, I really happy where Microsoft is heading right now, and I
think they're doing terrific job with their open source projects. You go
Microsoft. I hope OSS way would be successful enough so MS would embrace it
even more... But you never know.
EDIT: [1] I'm aware that Microsoft recently joined Open Invention Network
patent pool. But there're criticism that contributed patents are not important
ones. I tried to find ExFAT patents, but couldn't in OIN list. Also, it is
really hard to find full OIN contributed patent list. Here's US patent numbers
MS going around asking money for, couldn't find any confirmation of all of
them being contributed 5579517 5758352 5745902 6286013
~~~
robinhood
Well. It's almost a philosophical dilemma at this point.
You can either fear the future and hence never enjoy what's good _today_. Or
you can forget the future and actually enjoy the present.
GitHub didn't exist 15 years ago. Something better will probably be there in
15 years from now.
If GitHub changes direction and becomes a bad citizen, we'll go elsewhere.
~~~
pessimizer
> If GitHub changes direction and becomes a bad citizen, we'll go elsewhere.
Unless they buy and shut down any alternative that gathers more than a
thousand users.
------
sys_64738
Wonder if they'll decide to open source Windows via GitHub.
~~~
vezycash
Dream on
~~~
Klathmon
It's not without precedent!
With .NET Core [0], and ChakraCore[1] (Edge's JS engine) both being open
sourced. And them having thrown the entirety of MS-DOS [2] up under the MIT
license, and making a bunch of new tools and stuff under open licenses
(VSCode, TypeScript, msbuild, etc...). I honestly wouldn't be surprised if
they started making a push to open up many parts of Windows.
Already some devs on the Edge team have said publicly that they are working on
open sourcing the whole rendering engine from Edge, and seeing that they are
moving toward having Windows be more of a "platform" and less of "software you
buy", it makes sense that it could eventually become an open source (or at
least "open core") product.
I don't think it will happen this year, but I do think that if MS keeps going
in this direction, it's more likely than not to happen eventually.
[0] [https://github.com/dotnet/core](https://github.com/dotnet/core) [1]
[https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore](https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore)
[2] [https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS](https://github.com/Microsoft/MS-DOS)
~~~
tracker1
Was hoping to see MS-DOS 6.22 :-(
I think MS in the past few years has made huge strides...
~~~
sys_64738
They recently release the source for MS-DOS 2.x or was it 3.x...
------
shmerl
Interesting joining OIN was driven by GitHub acquisition.
Did MS confirm that them joining OIN includes non aggression with exFAT and
ActiveSync patents?
------
adamnemecek
Please fix search. A simple deduction would go a long way. So many times are
there 30 pages of the same file.
~~~
adamnemecek
Deduction = deduplication
------
kyleperik
Honestly I'll be happy no matter how this turns out. If this deters developers
as a result, it should open up more potential for new platforms. If it does
great, then open source as a community will continue to grow and be backed up
by the credibility of Microsoft.
------
0xfeeddeadbeef
Nitpick: Nat Friedman's GitHub profile [1] does not have STAFF badge yet.
[1] [https://github.com/nat](https://github.com/nat)
------
zzo38computer
I sometimes view projects on GitHub, but do not use it (nor do I use git at
all; I prefer Fossil) for my own projects, so I am unaffected.
------
spork12
The benefits or Microsoft owning GitHub seem to keep rolling in. The visual
studio integration has gotten much better already and I'm excited to see how
they begin to integrate github into Azure.
~~~
arethuza
A lot of the Azure documentation has been in GitHub for ages - made me wonder
if MS viewed them as an acquisition target more than a year ago.
------
walrus01
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
~~~
alpeb
Yep, but the other way around. Open source was Microsoft's fiercest enemy, and
now it's managed to root deep inside the company, eating it from the inside
out, turning Microsoft into something very very different than what it was 15
years ago. We won!
~~~
usr1106
Everybody does open source now. IBM, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, you name it.
One way to look at is that code is no longer that interesting, data is more
important.
Does any of those share their data under an open license?
------
aerialcombat
Crossing fingers...
------
whoopdedo
I'm keeping a close eye on repos such as py-kms.
------
lrvick
How long before GitHub moves to Azure?
Having it in RackSpace and AWS is bad optics, but they also must know Azure is
not stable enough for something as large and visible as GitHub.
I expect this to be the first integration they try. Stockpiling the popcorn.
~~~
partiallypro
"but they also must know Azure is not stable enough"
In what universe is this true? Azure is the backbone of large things in
corporate America, especially in banking and healthcare that you never even
think about. Things a lot more important than someone's repo being
inconvenienced.
Any migration will be painful, but to say Azure as a service isn't up to the
task is just nonsense.
~~~
marenkay
From practical experience, I would say Azure is a moving target currently.
Things beyond virtual machine and networks feel like moving targets.
For the sectors you cited that might not matter since those will not be using
cloud resources but rather the common virtual machine workload.
------
dustinmoris
> Ultimately, my job is to make GitHub better for you.
Who asked you to make GitHub better though? It's pretty darn good already. I
fear that the new CEO will try to make things better when they are already
good. I'm really scared that GitHub will end up like Azure DevOps, perhaps get
merged or shut down entirely when they feel they have feature parity.
Currently there is no great GitHub alternative IMHO and for selfish reasons I
wish Microsoft could just leave it. The most I am scared is to wake up one day
and see the most ugly "Metro" UX applied to GitHub.
~~~
sjroot
I have slowly moved most of my projects to GitLab. The UX is a little
different, but you also get unlimited private repositories for individuals and
organizations.
~~~
btasovac
Thanks for sharing this! I'd love to hear if you have more feedback on how is
GitLab's UX different. Particularly, what do you think GitLab could do better
here?
~~~
fefehern
Not OP, but is there a way to preview Markdown when writing up your project's
Wiki as you are typing?
Alongside this, is there also a way to change the order of Wiki Pages?
~~~
sytse
The wiki edit screen has a Markdown preview tab
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouq7mwgazyyv6nc/Screenshot%202018-10-26%2008.21.06.png?dl=0)
but it disables typing.
I think you can override the default index of pages with a custom one.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Developers Wanted: Non-Profit Video Calling App - miajavs
Developer Job Posting - Ameelio.org<p>About the Organization<p>Ameelio is in the early stages of developing the first-ever free prison communication platform that will challenge the dominance of private prison telecommunications companies. Come join a mission-oriented organization committed to developing technology that helps people! Learn more here: ameelio.org<p>What We’re Looking For<p>Experienced back-end and front-end developers to join a small, high-performing group of industry professionals to build Ameelio’s Connect application; a service that allows free-world users to make video calls and send e-messages to their incarcerated loved ones. As a start-up, we’re looking for self-driven professionals who have the ability to take full ownership over workstreams.<p>If You’re Interested<p>Please reach out to [email protected] and let us know! Specifically, please provide us with the following:<p>Statement of interest focusing on your skillset
Estimated effort and required hourly rate
Link to your linkedin profile or hard copy resume
Link to your Github profile or examples of your work<p>We will confirm receipt of your email within a few hours. If it’s a good fit, we’ll (1) provide the first version Connect requirements, (2) schedule a phone interview and (3) provide access to Ameelio’s github repo.
======
tdeck
I thought the major players in prison telecom (including video) were terrible
and overpriced because they pay massive legal kickbacks to prisons for
allowing them to operate exclusively. What's your plan to enter a "market"
like that?
~~~
miajavs
Great question - we believe strongly in decoupling people from profit, which
is why we are positioning the company as a nonprofit. Following the policy
lead of NYC that has made phone calls for their incarcerated free, we are
attempting to move quickly to enter the market in cities and states like San
Francisco and Connecticut that are implementing similar policies.
~~~
tdeck
Makes sense, thanks for replying!
------
e-clinton
The point of prisons is not just to punish but rather to help “fix” people.
Should your app play any role in that? At the moment, money is what keeps
patients from spending tons of time on the phone (amongst other things). Can
call points be a reward for doing well inside? Perhaps you get extra points
when you visit the prison library or if you take classes to learn a craft? Not
to complicate your plans, but feels like an opportunity that might help get
support from policy makers.
~~~
miajavs
Really appreciate the comment. We are committed to making prisons places of
rehabilitation. An important and proven aspect of re-entry and decreasing
recidivism.
------
karmakaze
Being a non-profit, will the Connect application both client and back-end
software be open-source?
Also how can estimated effort be provided without having (1) first version
Connect requirements?
~~~
miajavs
Happy to send first version requirements ahead of the effort estimate to
interested parties that reach out. Thanks for the call out!
------
whb07
Why can’t they use any number of the video / chat apps available?
~~~
miajavs
There are a number of reasons but primarily, there are differentiating work
stream and security needs that need to be built around the video calling
itself.
------
quickthrower2
Is part time available?
~~~
miajavs
Absolutely!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Comparison of Four Algorithms Textbooks (2016) - kerneldeveloper
https://porgionesanke.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/a-comparison-of-four-algorithms-textbooks/
======
brudgers
The criticism of Knuth's use of MIX seems a bit off because:
\+ Assembly language level instruction execution is a good way of talking
about the running time of algorithms at a finer level of detail than Big O
notation. Finer grain than Big O is helpful when analyzing and optimizing
programs.
\+ MIX is a good abstraction of the Von Neumann architecture and that's where
the analysis of actual programs occurs.
\+ MIX programs are still accessible to a general auidence 50 years after they
were written. No actual programming language available in 1967 is still
similarly accessible to such a degree.
\+ MMIX is the successor of MIX...but in so far as learning MIX is an issue,
it's more complex child probably is not an improvement.
The art of MIX is that it keeps the reader's focus on the fact that computer
programs ultimately load registers, read memory, execute mathematical
primatives, and branch no matter what object-oriented, functional, or type
safe abstractions a high level language might offer.
~~~
hodgesrm
This seems to be a point where reasonable people may differ. I generally go to
Knuth when I'm really stuck--not just how to do something but sometimes how to
frame the problem so it can be solved. In that sense MIX does not make much
difference since it's the discussion and backing mathematics that are most
interesting.
On the other hand outside of OS and embedded systems people very few people
regularly look at assembler, so for many people it's no longer an effective
lingua franca for sample implementations. It's a bit like reading Principia
Mathematica in the original Latin--sure, some people can do it but it's not
the best way to transfer information to a broad audience. Personally I would
be happy with some variant of C--the syntax is very broadly understood and the
language is close enough to the hardware that implementation concepts come
across clearly.
~~~
brudgers
I've got nothing against C. C was not around when Knuth published the first
(1968), second (1969), and third (1973) volumes. [1] By inventing a
programming language, Knuth was able to avoid syntactic changes between
versions (e.g. K&R C looks odd for someone who started with one of the ANSI
C's).
At the time, 'best practice' might have been Algol 60 or maybe Algol 68
because they were what it meant to be a standard language in those days even
though implementations varied widely.
[1]: Whether C would have been a reasonable choice the time of the fourth
(2011) volume is another matter.
~~~
todd8
Neither Algol 60 nor Algol 68 were very good choices, but it was basically
them or FORTRAN which were used back then in published algorithms.
Algol 60 was the forbearer of most modern programming languages. However,
implementations of Algol 60 were all a bit different and even after the the
revised report came out a few years later there remained serious ambiguities
in the meaning of common Algol 60 constructs, see for example [1]. Other
aspects of Algol 60, for example the use of call-by-name argument passing
semantics, made it not entirely suitable as a means of communicating
algorithms.
Algol 68, had, for many years, essentially no conforming implementations. The
language was remarkably orthogonal, every aspect seemed to be fully
generalized and usable everywhere in the language, but it was too complicated.
At least, it had a concept of I/O, which Algol 60 lacked. Some algorithms were
published in Algol 68, but I didn't see many of them.
In this environment, Knuth's books were quite valuable. The algorithms, while
not structured or written as we see them now were clear and unambiguous and
were written for a time when compilers didn't perform advanced code-
optimizations; Knuth's careful designs included optimizations that we would
leave to compilers today when talking about algorithms.
Eventually, Pascal came along and it became possible to publish algorithms in
an easy to read and unambiguous way. (It was still uncommon to see code
formatted in any consistent way. See Wirth's own books!) Pascal wasn't
perfect, but it was easy to understand and implementations were portable and
widely available.
[1] Knuth, The remaining trouble spots in Algol 60*,
[https://atlas.cs.virginia.edu/~asb/teaching/cs415-fall05/doc...](https://atlas.cs.virginia.edu/~asb/teaching/cs415-fall05/docs/algol-3.pdf)
------
dsacco
I’m surprised, but I like this (I typically don’t like or agree with textbook
comparisons, but I think this tour is mostly right). The Sedgewick text,
_Algorithms_ should be in there too but the author apparently didn’t read
that.
My own experience basically agrees: I’ve read and enjoy Skiena, it’s written
in clear style and it’s the “cover to cover” text for a working developer or
for interview practice. But I also have TAOCP and CLRS on my shelf, and I
haven’t read either of them. I’ve certainly _used_ both of them a lot, but I
simply haven’t read all of them because I use them more as reference texts.
Personally I find it bothersome that these textbooks are written with
idiosyncratic pseudocode. In my opinion, many of these authors lose their
grasp of common implementation difficulties if they don’t provide students
with working code that will compile and run. It’s easy to throw down the
theory and some okay-ish pseudocode while in effect saying, “...and the rest
is just a minor implementation detail, which I leave as an exercise to the
reader...”
~~~
nurblieh
The Sedgewick text is quite good but even better are his classes on Coursera!
Very accessible and built around practical exercises.
~~~
rashkov
I found the assignments to his class to be really weird and challenging. The
first one had you fill in a few functions of a half-complete percolation
simulation, but without having written the other part of it, it felt like
having to reverse engineer and guess at the solution. There was no real way to
measure your progress. Either it runs or it doesn't, and there's no
incremental progression towards a solution.
I'm curious if anyone else experienced this or could point out where I went
wrong. I really wanted to do the class and I liked the lectures, but i started
it after finishing Gardner's Stanford algorithms Coursera class which had some
of my favorite exercises ever. They had you write an algorithm in it's
entirety, gave you sample data sets to check against, and let you write it in
any language. Compared with that, Sedgwick's assignments were like coding with
one hand tied behind my back.
------
placebo
Honestly, I'm blown away that someone has actually read cover to cover Knuth,
CLRS, Dasgupta and Skiena. Is this a common thing? Has anyone here done
something similar? For years I've had the textbooks of CLRS and Skiena at home
(and a pdf of Dasgupta) but they are used only in the event I need to drill
down to understand a particular algorithm to solve a particular problem. I
feel that the most effective use of my time is to have a birds view of the
landscape (i.e understand the categories of algorithms and the problems they
solve) and dive down only when I actually need to know the nitty gritty to
implement a solution for a real problem. I can understand the joy of learning
them all just for fun, but who has the time? I wonder if he did all the
exercises too... :-)
~~~
sigjuice
Where does it say that he has read all these books cover to cover?
~~~
mathgeek
Generally when someone writes a review this in-depth, this is assumed. Not
always accurate, of course.
------
hackermailman
Many grad level algorithm courses still use Dexter C. Kozen's book The Design
and Analysis of Algorithms, Springer-Verlag, 1992. It's a timeless book with
clear analysis.
There's also this excellent free draft on analysis of common undergrad
algorithms for parallelism [http://www.parallel-algorithms-
book.com/](http://www.parallel-algorithms-book.com/)
TAOCP is more than an algorithms book, Knuth even have strategies for writing
lengthy programs from scratch, how to build test libraries, how to optimize a
program to make it cache memory friendly ect.
------
gregfjohnson
I became curious about quantum computing a few years ago. Googling around, I
came across the QC chapter in Dasgupta. I found their description of the topic
to be excellent, exactly what I was searching for. They provide a substantive
presentation of QC, as contrasted with many "pop sci" hand-wavy
impressionistic descriptions of QC. They tactfully avoid a few of the
extremely difficult proofs, but they do give a solid mathematical underpinning
for the subject. And, they convey in prose what the point of the whole thing
is. Also, they forthrightly express the mysterious nature of what seems to be
going on here. (If you have an N-qubit quantum computer, the universe seems to
somehow maintain and manipulate a vector of 2^N complex elements as a quantum
computation proceeds.)
They give a brilliant presentation of Shor's factorization algorithm, and how
quantum computers offer an amazingly natural way to do FFT's (a key aspect of
the Shor algorithm).
I would not contest the OP's questioning of the choice of a chapter on QC in
an undergrad algorithms textbook. I would, however, offer the standard "your
mileage may vary" caveat to the OP's very negative characterization. I had no
idea what QC was about, and this chapter provided me with a great "on-ramp" to
understanding what QC is all about.
------
dfan
It's odd to me that the author describes CLRS as graduate-level. It (back when
it was CLR and in its first edition) was the text in my undergrad Introduction
to Algorithms class (taught by L!).
I agree that Sedgewick belongs in this comparison, but I can't fault the
author for not having read it. I think it's the book I would most easily
recommend to others; it's quite clear and has lots of very nice
visualizations. I do think that Skiena deserves a special mention for
explicitly being about how to come up with your own fundamental algorithms and
data structures rather than just plug an existing one into your program.
~~~
arthurjj
CLRS was also the undergraduate textbook at my school, RIT. I didn't think it
did a very good job of explaining algorithms if you didn't already have a good
grasp of them.
Skiena on the other hand does a nice job of both describing the algorithm in a
straightforward manner and also getting you into the algorithm headspace.
------
chipkey
Kleinberg/Tardos book that I am reading right now needs trimming for brevity.
A good math text editor could, probably, easily lop off 1/3 of it without
affecting its content. Otherwise I prefer it to most other algo books because
its proofs are closest to how mathematicians approach their proofs. By
contrast, I am confused as to why CLRS contains proofs at all. At the
beginning of the book, the authors say something to the effect of actual
proofs being too messy/hard so they simply wave their hands through them. But
if most any intro discrete math books can do these proofs, why can't CLRS? To
me it's a turn-off.
------
AlexCoventry
Which book/website has the best exercises for developing algorithmic problem-
solving skill? I've started working through Skiena's exercises, but haven't
really looked at much else.
~~~
dsacco
If you're actually interested in drilling algorithm exercises - in which you
map a problem statement to a particular algorithm and time/space complexity,
then implement the solution - competitive programming websites are the best
way to practice. There's a good number of them now, including TopCoder,
LeetCode, CodeForces, SPOJ, HackerRank, etc. You can typically sort the
problems by difficulty or solution acceptance rate. Working through these
problems requires:
1\. Breaking down a problem statement into a heuristic pattern,
2\. Analyzing the best, average and worst case complexities of possible
solutions,
3\. Mapping the heuristic(s) to the data structures and algorithms with the
most optimal complexity,
4\. Implementing the code and having it successfully run, with runtime
performance feedback.
I think the aforementioned competition websites are better than things like
Project Euler because solving the problem requires running actual code instead
of just giving a correct answer. That makes them much more interactive (and
harder, in my opinion), because you might have to obey particular performance
or complexity constraints, and you can receive feedback about how efficient
your solution is.
I wouldn't say that practicing these problems will make you a better software
_developer_ , in the sense that you can develop maintainable software to solve
business problems in a team setting with a large codebase, and I make no
comment on whether these sorts of problems are optimal filters for tech
interviews (that's a dead horse). But much like mathematics, programming (and
specifically algorithm analysis) is not a _spectator sport._ You can't
efficiently learn the material just by reading it, you have to do it, just as
mathematical maturity comes about by solving many mathematical problems in
different domains. To that particular end, I would say that competitive
programming is about as perfect a formulation of practice as you can get for
improving algorithmic problem-solving skills.
~~~
AlexCoventry
> I wouldn't say that practicing these problems will make you a better
> software developer
I know. Apart from it being fun, I'm mostly interested for the social-proof
value in interviews. I don't want to beat the dead horse either, but it's
definitely a socially useful skill.
Thanks for the suggestions.
------
asnyc
Skiena is very good - Algorithms are lucidly explained - Actual code is
provided - Its relatively newer but highly recommended
Have read only parts of Knuth / CLRS - They are good, but for real problems
analysis , would prefer Sienna
------
vidoc
I'd actually add one thing: coding style.
Shame on me for admitting this! In fact, despite having personal CS favors
like everyone, the painfully obvious subjectivity of the whole matter has
always striked me as entirely futile to be taken into account for basically
everything. I even worked for years of uninterrupted peace with people who
would, for example, prototype pointer arguments of c/c++ functions gluing the
wildcard to the type, then space then boom variable name. I've always been
cool with this, even reading things like glibc's code.
This liberalism however has two exceptions: my own code obviously, a
dictatorship where merciless enforcement of inflexible and rigorous coding
style is accepted. But unfortunately, in algorithm books too! I know it is
completely idiotic but I'd be in denial not to admit how much of a total turn
off the coding style of code in algorithm books can be to me. Segdewick for
example, such a wonderful book, the prose is excellent, the content really is
outstanding (probably one of the most comprehensive I own), the editions I
have even has a superb typeface and paper quality, unfortunately the C coding
style of this book has this effect on me which makes me want to close the book
immediately. I feel the same deep pain every time I have to look at it (which
does happen a lot since it _is_ a great book really!). I'm actually jealous of
those more advanced human beings who are able to make an abstraction of that
when reading a coding book!
------
uptownfunk
I've used dasgupta in my ug algorithms class at Berkeley, which was actually
taught by papaD one of the coauthors. I love the text because it is so
concise. A great book to get started on algorithms. A good exercise is to
implement them in the language of your choice.
------
twblalock
As a self-taught developer, I prefer the Skiena book. The topics are ordered
in a way that make sense to me, and the examples are practical.
However, the other books are probably a better match for a standard university
algorithm course curriculum.
------
rosstex
Can we get a comparison of Algorithms undergrad courses? :)
------
jimmcslim
I have Knuth's series on my bookshelf. It looks great!... especially since I
haven't broken the bindings by actually reading any of it...
------
rootusrootus
This is an interesting read because Dasgupta is what the current OMSCS
algorithms class is using.
------
antonvs
I didn't realize there were that many textbooks that just covered four
algorithms.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Introducing Pro Meteor Guide - arunoda
http://meteorhacks.com/understanding-meteor-internals.html
======
joshowens
Can't wait to read more, great start!
~~~
arunoda
Thanks :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What are the best blogs and websites for mobile app developers? - giorgosera
I'm looking for ways to get informed about mobile app development news, new services and and tutorials. (both iOS and Android)
======
prateekj
Check out [http://www.raywenderlich.com/](http://www.raywenderlich.com/). One
of the very best tutorial sites out there for mobile app development! Appcoda
is nice too, although it's only for iOS.
------
xauronx
I don't know if you're an iOS guy but I've been listening to the iPhreaks
podcast. There have been a couple pretty enlightening ones.
------
asapargali
Also there is great good screencasts for iOS at nsscreencast.com
------
fbpcm
I subscribe to objc.io, iosdevweekly.com and nshipster.com.
------
Zigurd
Huh, all ios so far. Maybe me and my coauthors should start and Android
developer blog.
~~~
mattquiros
There's actually such a thing. :D
[http://android-developers.blogspot.com/](http://android-
developers.blogspot.com/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Etiquette around altering commits in pull requests on GitHub - sbank
Say you own a project and have some idea of how you want code and commits to be structured. In comes a pull request that doesn't live up to that. No problem. Sometimes you can ask them to correct a few things and merge away, but at other times there will be too many things and, well, you don't want to come off as a person that is hard to deal with.<p>What do you consider appropriate etiquette regarding changing their code and/or commit messages and doing a manual merge where you pull down their branch and go to town? How this is usually done is that they will be the author of the commit and you will be the committer (Git feature), but a lot of the code might be yours, and the commit message might be yours as well. Basically, you are changing their code and wording, but they retain the main credit for the work and you stand merely as the committer of the code.<p>I have seen this happen on a several popular projects, and I can understand why. My question is: Is the author/committer feature of Git enough to indicate that the person might not have written all the code or even written the commit message? What I fear is that the code, or even the commit message, ends up being something that they would not want out there under their name when all is said and done, and that this way of managing a project will scare people away.<p>So I'm curious about people's take on this, because I've seen it happen on several projects, and there's even been blog posts here on HN about this practice.
======
ArtDev
If it was a small fix, I couldn't care less if I don't get credit for my
contribution.
However, if its a significant amount of code, it would be considerate that the
project maintainer to merge the changes first, then modify in a subsequent
commit. That my two cents.
~~~
sbank
I lean towards merging as is and fixing afterwards. Or doing a manual merge
locally, fix whatever needs to be fixed, and then push to master. There is
just something about changing other people's commits that doesn't sit well
with me. But maybe there is something about the author/committer feature of
Git and how it's intended to be used that I'm not understanding.
------
J_Darnley
If a patch is incorrect, why are you applying it? What makes a github feature
different to this? If a patch is incorrect you get the other person to do it
over.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Clojure and Complexity (2011) - GetSSL_me
http://lisp-univ-etc.blogspot.kr/2011/11/clojure-complexity.html
======
discreteevent
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++
programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."
\- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author
Steele seemed to be trying to encourage those who saw the glass as half empty
to see it as being half full. The article makes some valid points but surely,
from a high level, clojure can only be seen as a glass that's very nearly
full.
~~~
PuercoPop
But then if Lisp is the goal, why stop at halfway to it?
~~~
spacemanaki
Because selling C++ programmers on Java was hard enough ;)
The full discussion that quote is from is a very interesting read:
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/m...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/msg04045.html)
Guy Steele suggests that even though some of the people working on Java at the
time might have been ok with closures, it was a hard sell when programmers
used to manual memory management in C++ were worried about whether things were
allocated on the stack or the heap and how much control they had over them.
Thus you get the awkwardness that is anonymous inner classes in Java, which
are effectively closures, but by another name and papered over with
boilerplate.
"Actually, the prototype implementation *did* allow non-final
variables to be referenced from within inner classes. There was
an outcry from *users*, complaining that they did not want this!
The reason was interesting: in order to support such variables,
it was necessary to heap-allocate them, and (at that time, at least)
the average Java programmer was still pretty skittish about heap
allocation and garbage collection and all that. They disapproved
of the language performing heap allocation "under the table" when
there was no occurrence of the "new" keyword in sight."
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/m...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-
html/msg04056.html)
Reading through this thread is delightful, I developed quite a lot of respect
for Mr Steele.
------
moomin
A quick analysis of the article from the point of view of an ordinary Clojure
programmer: 1) Yes, it's tied to the JVM (or JS). This is a huge trade-off and
not without its costs, but it's one Clojure programmers are happy to make. 2)
You can't do reader macros: true, Rich Hickey dislikes them because of the
nasty effects they have on re-use. However, Clojure now has reader literals
which fill in _some_ of this gap. Again, a trade-off. 3) He doesn't like []
and {}. I don't really understand why: paredit copes perfectly well with them.
I never actually need to parse ))]))}) in my head. 4) Over-reliance on
recursion. Possibly true, but a decent generator macro would probably address
his issue. (And we're quite close to having one.) Bear in mind you _can_ have
mutable private state in Clojure, it's just rarely used. 5) Lazy sequences
complect sequences and streams: true. Lazy sequences are not, in fact, perfect
for all use cases. That's why reducers and async got introduced. 6) It doesn't
feel like a LISP: if that means it doesn't feel like elisp, you're not going
to catch me crying. 7) It didn't have a killer app: now it has several.
Overall, many of the criticisms are valid, but a) some are design decisions
with practical trade-offs* b) some have been addressed since the article was
written
*I mean seriously, using the JVM is a huge negative in certain ways, but does anyone believe Clojure could have got off the ground if it didn't? Rich Hickey tried other approaches for years before this one worked.
------
moomin
Of course, since the article was written, we've had Storm, Riemann and
Cascalog. That's 3 killer apps on the platform. I don't think Clojure is going
away anytime soon.
~~~
plinkplonk
Two of those (Storm and Cascalog) created by the incredibly talented Nathan
Marz. Just shows how much a few talented early adopters can push a programming
language forward.
------
kenko
"Rich argues, that defining both lists and vectors with parens (in Lisp list
is '() and vector is #()) is complecting."
Really? That strikes me as, well, kind of absurd.
The author of the linked post complains about the use of exceptions over
conditions, but you can define conditions using dynamic scope anyway:
[https://github.com/bwo/conditions](https://github.com/bwo/conditions)
------
goldfeld
I wonder, where does Scheme fall in on this whole, uhm, scheme? Especially
w.r.t. this part:
"[Clojure] doesn't have facilities to control the reader in the same way CL
does: actually, in this regard Clojure is very different from Lisp — it hardly
provides facilities for controlling any aspect of the language — and this
control is a critical part of Lisp's DNA"
Or, is Scheme as good for stratified design as CL?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Digg Scrapes Facebook for Diggers' Real Identites and Photos - michde
http://www.pcworld.com/article/240793/digg_scrapes_facebook_for_diggers_real_identites_and_photos.html
======
michaelpinto
You know what's sad about this? My bet is that there's nobody left who cares
anymore.
Back in the day Digg was a Slashdot killer and I loved that site more than
anything else. Then over time they seemed to forget that it was their
community that was the "social" in social news.
Then slowly fame ruined the Digg management team, that or they just were
uninterested. The first blow was that they removed shouts -- but the users
hung in there. And then slowly web 2.0 came into bloom and some of the stars
of the system migrated first to Twitter and later to places like Reddit.
I still love that site with all my heart, and keep rooting for them like the
last loyal fan of a baseball team that has no hope of getting to the playoffs
this season -- or ever. Digg at this point reminds me of the Amiga in the 90s:
The fans loved the platform but what they loved was what was in the past.
~~~
skeletonjelly
It's been mentioned on reddit before but it's come full circle. Compare the
frontpages of reddit and digg. Granted, digg get their content from publishers
mostly.
~~~
alxtye
Reddit has a lot more to it than the front page. Sign up and the front page
shows whatever you make it show.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Programming is hard. That’s precisely why you should learn it - pedrodelfino
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/make-your-hobby-harder-programming-is-difficult-thats-why-you-should-learn-it-e4627aee41a1
======
mrout
Programming is easy.
~~~
NotSammyHagar
"Dieing is easy. Living is hard."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Spyjax - Your browser history is not private! - lupin_sansei
http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/tools/spyjax/
======
tyohn
This seems like a panacea for tailored advertising or big brother ~ you
decided. Ok, so I join/register for a web 2.0 web site (or any web site) and
of course I give them my name, address, email, etc. and for fun let's say they
grab my browser history. Now they could gather information about me by doing a
Google search and of course every time I revisit the site they could re-gather
my browser history ~ put all that info into an ever growing database and now
you have the ability to tailor advertisements. Come to think of it maybe I
should start a site that does this ~ anyone want to help :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How to escape your boring life - andrewlynch
http://www.mattabbo.com/blog/how-to-escape-your-boring-life
======
incision
_> 'Some of us deal with BEE requirements, others with a lack of experience.'_
It seemed a bit aloof to give a dig to programs meant to address the harm
caused by decades of Apartheid in a post on 'how not to be bored'.
However, in the context of follow up anti-boredom suggestions which include _'
work as a glorified slave'_ on a _' super yacht'_ and backpack around the
world it does not seem out of place at all.
What a clown.
~~~
mattabbo
quick to judge. where are you from?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: GoJava – Server/desktop Java bindings to Go packages - vendakka
https://github.com/sridharv/gojava
======
scosman
I'm looking forward to when this exists for every almost language. Go added
"c-archive" build mode in 1.5. There is no reason gobind couldn't support any
language which can work with c libraries (ruby, node, etc).
~~~
vendakka
This exists for Python [0]. The reverse is also interesting (Go ->
Java/Python/Ruby) and once I get some spare time, I'll play around with using
libjvm to load and call jar files from Go.
[0] [https://github.com/go-python/gopy](https://github.com/go-python/gopy)
~~~
rhodysurf
Its awesome. The problem is that only specific types are supported by a bunch
of these types of libraries. In the case of gopy you cannot do anything with a
nested slices in structs which limits things a bit.
~~~
vendakka
Yes this is definitely a little limiting. I'm also experimenting with a
slightly different binding method, where passing pointers to structs is
disallowed (gobind currently allows pointers to structs). All structs are only
passed by value, which solves a lot of the underlying problems and allows for
slices and nested structs. I'll have something tangible in a few weeks and
might switch out the dependency on gobind.
EDIT: edited for clarity
~~~
rhodysurf
Thats awesome news, Thanks for the explanation!
------
namelezz
Since GoJava generates jar binding, does it mean other JVM languages can use
the jar to call Go too?
Edit: Java has generic Go doesn't, how do the bindings work for generic?
~~~
vendakka
Yes. The only constraint is that the jar will only work on the architecture it
was built on.
~~~
meddlepal
Still pretty awesome and that's not really a big deal. I'm going to guess most
Java these days is running on x86_64 or ARM.
------
_JamesA_
Go would benefit immensely from the ability to bind to JDBC drivers for
database access.
~~~
dguaraglia
What makes you think so? Go has pretty solid native drivers for most SQL
databases out there:
[https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SQLDrivers](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/SQLDrivers)
------
alpb
In case the author sees this, more documentation would be great.
~~~
vendakka
Yup. I'll put together some more docs and usage examples this weekend.
Edit:
[https://github.com/sridharv/gojava/issues/6](https://github.com/sridharv/gojava/issues/6)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Next browser campaign: last week of fundraising - Ambrevar
Next (https://next.atlas.engineer) is an Emacs-inspired web browser written in
Lisp aiming at giving power users a tool they can hack and enjoy to browse the
Internet (at last!). Check out the homepage, it has some pretty cool videos and
code snippets already!<p>It's still at the prototype phase and the GNU/Linux port is only experimental,
but a crowdfunding campaign was started a month ago to put full-time development
into getting a stable and polished version! It got extended for one last week:<p>https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/next-browser-nix-support<p>To Emacsers and Lispers looking for a (Lisp) hackable browsers, feel free to
join and support the adventure!
======
zzo38computer
Hopefully it will be good, because other web browser is full of stupid stuff.
I dislike "If the user does not supply a protocol in a URL, https will be
assumed." But I also dislike assuming http too. I think if the user does not
specify the protocol it should be treated as a relative URL.
Jump to heading look like good idea though. History tree look like good idea
too. But about buffers, I would like to have a "duplicate buffer" command.
~~~
Ambrevar
Well, in the end all this is 100% customizable, so you have full decision
power when it comes to creating "duplicate buffer" commands, protocol
assumption and much more.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Convert Markdown to a Mind Map - gera2ld
https://markmap.js.org/
======
dnpp123
Cool!
Slightly related, I also like:
[https://www.diagram.codes/](https://www.diagram.codes/)
~~~
Heliosmaster
I guess it was done on purpose, but essentially it reminds me of the syntax
for graphviz: [https://graphviz.org/](https://graphviz.org/)
~~~
mikeholler
This was my first thought as well. I use graphviz quite a lot for these sorts
of diagrams, and I really like it. Their site, reference materials, etc. need
updating though.
~~~
grafwiz
I use it too but I wouldn't mind a non-ugly layout renderer!
~~~
WorldMaker
There's an interesting art to knowing when neato or twopi are better choices
than dot for layout rendering. Graphviz is interesting because there are
multiple layout renderers and "non-ugly" is a graph-by-graph art form between
the different renderers and different renderer hints in the graph file (spring
constants and what-have-you).
I've had some successes and a lot of failures over the years.
------
robenkleene
I make an app for macOS that makes it easy to make offline viewers for
documents like this ([https://repla.app/](https://repla.app/)). Would anyone
be interested in having an offline viewer for this? E.g., being able to drag a
`mindmap.md` file to the app icon, and have it render the mindmap and
automatically update when you make changes in your text editor.
(I'm aware there are other ways to do offline views like this, happy to
explain the relative pros and cons of Repla's approach versus others as I see
them, if anyone is curious, just ask!)
~~~
robenkleene
Thanks for the input! I'm also looking at supporting Mermaid diagramming
[https://mermaid-js.github.io/](https://mermaid-js.github.io/) I'd love to
hear if people have other good use cases for this model, e.g., of having a
plain text file you edit in a text editor accompanied by a rendered web
document view of the same file.
~~~
mycall
Main problem I've had using mermaid for large flowcharts is that the SVG gets
cut off on the edges sometimes.
------
grafwiz
This is beautiful that's it but this is nothing considered to graphviz. If
Graphviz had a decent, just non-ugly renderer it would be much more popular.
Eg. Mind maps aren't trees- they are bigraphs, this is limited to trees.
Someone needs to plug in this renderer with Graphviz.
~~~
klibertp
> Mind maps aren't trees- they are bigraphs
Yes! So many of the mind-mapping software is limited to just trees, plus
there's no way of styling some paths differently, the interface is far from
ergonomic, in short: I couldn't find an interactive tool for drawing complex
relationships between many kinds of content (I want to be able to put an image
in one place, then paste a bit of some documentation in another, then connect
them in some way, then repeat this 100 times and _then_ have the tool "auto-
layout" all the content.)
Here's the thing I'm currently trying to create:
[https://github.com/piotrklibert/awesome-
config](https://github.com/piotrklibert/awesome-config) \- I need it in SVG so
that the links are working, plus it would be nice to be able to show/hide
portions of the graph. I'm currently using Gliffy, but it's getting slower and
buggier with every box added.
Any advice on what to use for things like these?
~~~
grafwiz
Not sure what gliffy is but Graphviz can conceptually draw the same thing. You
can have box shapes and colors for nodes and edges both. However, the
rendering layout itself is usually unpleasant. You can have some control but
it's really suboptimal. As I said, Graphviz is both simple and very powerful
so no reason to not use it to represent data in concept. Plus it goes in your
VCS.
~~~
klibertp
Gliffy[1][2] is a web app for drawing diagrams and schematics of various
kinds. You get a large library of shapes - most of UML, classic flowchart,
some UI mockups, swimlanes, now also the root of a mindmap - and a few tools
for connecting these shapes to each other; the connections are real
connections, not lines, ie. they follow after the shape if you move it, and
they know when they intersect and can render a "hop" where needed. You get a
lot of freedom in styling the diagrams (change color, thickness, a curvature
of lines and color, background, font, font size, etc. for boxes and text), and
the UI is not that bad. It, however, seems to have some performance issues,
because after a certain size the experience degrades and you need to reload
the page every now and then.
I know and like pure-text diagramming solutions, but they don't work that well
for diagrams designed to span multiple displays in width or height. Or put
another way - my editor, as glorious as it is, is not designed for rapid zoom-
in/zoom-out on various parts of an 80000x80000 rows/cols text file. I want to
be able to work in an interactive environment, where I can rapidly switch
between the overall outline view and the focused, detailed view of just a few
nodes. Moreover, I need to able to embed (and preview if possible) different
kinds of content, from syntax-highlighted text to images to videos, plus it
should render natively in a browser (hence the SVG).
My use case for this is putting together a knowledge-base (think Wikipedia,
just for my personal data), which would use direction, color, line thickness
and kind (dotted, dashed, etc.) to bind related subjects and show the
relations between them in 2 dimensions. Feature-wise Gliffy is close to what I
have in mind, but it doesn't handle a scale big enough to be called a
"knowledge-base" \- "infographic" is the most it can produce.
[1] [https://www.gliffy.com/](https://www.gliffy.com/)
[2] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/piotrklibert/awesome-
confi...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/piotrklibert/awesome-
config/master/haxemindmap.png) (made with Gliffy)
~~~
charlieflowers
Some of what you want is offered by Miro.com. It’s not driven by text files
though.
------
fsiefken
Org-mode has an exporter for the Freemind mindmapping tool. Freeplane is a
fork of Freemind
[https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Home](https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Home)
------
cuillevel3
This looks beautiful, but I guess it's only useful for acyclic maps?
References would be great.
Just learned, that I'm looking for a 'cognitive map'.
~~~
garmaine
It’s my own pet peeve that basically all mind map software assumes acyclic
structure. Makes it pretty useless to me.
------
melicerte
Interesting project. Thank you for sharing. I noticed when using the try it
out that the map on the right is not updated when adding a new sub-level to
one of the flowers. When downloading the html, the sublevel are correctly
rendered. I have not tried the SVG download.
I'm running latest Firefox under Ubuntu 19.10
~~~
kljuka
Same problem (TypeError: t.children is undefined). And none of the navigation
links work then any more. I'm using Firefox on Windows 10.
------
GhostVII
Nice, I always wanted to make something like this for my school notes but
never got around to it. One thing that could be useful is if it would let you
write longer paragraphs of text, which could be expanded on-demand. Ex.
# Fruits
## Orange
Oranges were first grown in...
## Banana
Bananas originated in...
Then the mind map would have Fruits -> [Orange, Banana], and you could click
on Orange or Banana to expand the full content of the note. This is how I
format my notes at least.
~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Yeah this breaks down if you use anything more than a few words per node,
because it has no wrapping. I think even if you had the text blocks wrap at a
sane width (20% of screen-width or something) then it would be more better, or
expandable/modal blocks like your idea.
------
pimlottc
Interesting. It would be good to have a more complex example as a guide for
how the markdown should be structured.
~~~
HumblyTossed
So far I just think it's headers and lists:
# This
## This branch
### This sub branch
### Another sub branch
## This other
## And another
## One more
### This one has a branch
\- one
\- more
\- thing
### and another branch
\- what
\- is
\- this
~~~
Bedon292
Had to go to other pages to find docs butt you can nest the lists too.
\- melon
- test
- test2
- and more
- and more
------
pisipisipisi
Reminds me a neat Windows program from beginning of the century:
[https://www.mind-mapping.org/index.php?title=B-liner_2002](https://www.mind-
mapping.org/index.php?title=B-liner_2002)
------
m4r35n357
Pasted markdown into text area, nothing happened. No button to activate.
------
visarga
These mind maps look like MindNode which I think are the best looking.
~~~
ericax
Yes. Looks like the author made his own with D3 [1]. It does look very nice. I
especially love the colors.
[1]: [https://github.com/gera2ld/markmap-
lib/blob/master/src/view....](https://github.com/gera2ld/markmap-
lib/blob/master/src/view.ts)
------
speedgoose
It's simple and great, I like the animations. One small issue: I zoomed out a
lot and I never found back my mind map. You may need to implement bounds to
the zoom.
------
Multicomp
Hey all - are there any of these systems that can be used offline to take
markdown files and export them to SVG, PNG?
I have a couple wild ideas for CLI and/or CICD usage, but I'm not familiar
enough with reading JS to know if I can just copy something locally and expect
it to work, or if I would need to install a bunch of dependencies.
------
ericax
This looks like really nice! Are you using a open sourced mind map rendering
library, or did you write your own?
It visually looks really familiar, but looking at package.json there only
seems to be d3. I've looked at a bunch of options for rendering mind map, so
I'm particular curious.
~~~
nojvek
They are using only d3
~~~
ericax
Thanks, I looked at the code later and confirmed that too. The visual style is
very similar to MindNode, but it's rebuilt using d3.
------
faraggi
Pretty cool! I suggest adding a github link to
[https://github.com/gera2ld/markmap-lib](https://github.com/gera2ld/markmap-
lib) in the about page and homepage.
------
nilsandrey
Thanks, it's great. I'm a fan of mind mapping[1] to express some ideas.
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map)
------
webjockey
This looks cool. Is anyone planning to create a SaaS based on this?
------
joombaga
Something similar I used to use to design PBX call flows:
[https://code2flow.com/app](https://code2flow.com/app)
------
stats111
This is great. Is there anyway to have it set vertically?
------
geekodour
I made something several years back:
[https://markmymind.netlify.com](https://markmymind.netlify.com)
------
markstos
Would be nice if it supported circular references.
------
stared
Looks really nice, thanks for sharing!
For me, it is though more like "a dynamic table of contents" (at least, I
would use it in that way).
------
rohan1024
Cool project. One suggestion you could roll out an online service where one
can publish mind maps using some random urls.
------
sturza
Can i create a mindmap from my notion pages?
------
brna
I am not sure how I will use it, I will need to edit my markdown docs for this
to make sense, BUT it is just beautiful!
Thank you!!
------
indysigners
It's absolutely fantastic and very timely for an new IA project of mine.
Thanks so much, Gerald (Gera2ld)!
------
meagher
Another cool one is [https://swimlanes.io](https://swimlanes.io)
------
thereyougo
That's awesome!
Do you have examples for cool this you did with it? I'd like to get some
inspiration
------
robbintt
I noticed it doesn’t handle quotes correctly, try the following and the quote
will become a child node.
``` # header
Body
>quote ```
------
chvid
Buggy on Safari (SVG doesn't always show / updates correctly).
Otherwise great work.
------
baq
i like that it's done in JS.
i've been using this for a while: [https://plantuml.com/mindmap-
diagram](https://plantuml.com/mindmap-diagram)
------
tunesmith
Can a child have multiple parents?
------
cyptus
nice! would be awesome to export the input markdown again from the
downloadable html file.
------
Jahak
That's awesome!
------
aurelien
Really great Thanks!
------
bojanvidanovic
Really nice tool!
------
ValisTuring
Great work!
------
lappet
beautiful! I love it.
------
motohagiography
Calling them mind maps recalls why they failed, when they are really digraphs,
taxonomies, and basic ontologies.
Having worked with these for a while, some people actually think their job is
to be the stewards and gatekeepers of knowledge that can in fact be easily
encoded into a taxonomy and ontology to make it scale.
I love these, and every tool like this is fundamentally subversive. Just don't
be surprised when someone tries to discredit it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rate my startup: Evocatus.com - wen
Evocatus helps you find taste products you love and discover some new ones along the way. You can share what your favorite tastes are and see what others have recommended. We have meticulously gone through thousands of taste products and new ones are being added everyday. Have you ever wondered what your friends are tasting? What taste to share with your significant other on your anniversary? Which taste goes well with this box of chocolate? We created Evocatus to make finding great tastes easy and fun! Whether you are a chocolate connoisseur, cigar aficionado, beer brewmaster..., Evocatus is where you want to begin your next taste adventure!<p>Currently, our taste product collection includes beer, chocolate, and cigar. We have many exciting products coming up including sauce, wine, tea, coffee, cheese, ice cream, specialty soda... . The site is still an early version and we are building a lot of great features which include a mobile app.<p>Please take a look around the site and any feedback is greatly appreciated.<p>http://evocatus.com/
======
mikerhoads
Clickable: <http://evocatus.com/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bizarre GPS Activity Means Drivers Near the Kremlin Are Always at the Airport - nradov
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/01/bizarre-gps-spoofing-means-drivers-near-kremlin-always-airport/
======
AndrewKemendo
I've worked with these systems enough to know that it is trivial for a state
actor to spoof GPS and GLONASS timings.
The best way to tell is to compare signal strength and "satellite location" of
the timings you are receiving both near and far from the system. To reliably
spoof the signal you need a variance some order of magnitude greater than what
you are getting from satellite timings, which is pretty low by the way. So I
don't think it would be that hard to verify.
~~~
nradov
Is it technically feasible for cheap consumer devices to foil or at least
detect such spoofing?
~~~
AndrewKemendo
Yea. You can list/detect then ignore certain signals, which would foil it.
Wouldn't be that hard.
You can build a simple module: [https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/gps-
basics](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/gps-basics)
I'm guessing you can probably get good data from phones too but I haven't
looked into it.
------
angry-hacker
So theoretically, how hard would it be to build a jammer that jams the whole
city? Is what Russians are going advanced or easy to replicate? Couldn't you
halt whole regions since so many things depend on GPS?
GPS attacks during the wars? Of course, Americans can turn it off entirely and
this the reason EU, Russia and China built their own.
~~~
toomuchtodo
You are limited only by your technical resources and broadcast power.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
U.S. Attorney issues statement defending prosecution of Aaron Swartz - ximeng
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2013/01/us-attorney-aaron-swartz-statement.html?page=all
======
jacquesm
already here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5071706>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rust: Not So Great For Codec Implementing - lossolo
https://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=1246
======
ekidd
Personally, I've been happy with Rust for writing an MPEG-2 subtitle decoder.
I posted about this earlier here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753201)
For me, the biggest advantages over C/C++ were:
1\. Rust's compile-time checks, run-time checks and fuzzing tools make it much
easier to write secure code. Since decoders are a notorious source of bad
security bugs, this is a big plus in my book.
2\. Rust's dependency management makes it rather pleasant to rely on 3rd-party
libraries. The combination of an immutable package repository and semver makes
it easy to trust that things won't break. And in my experience, the number of
3rd-party libraries is relatively small compared to more popular languages,
but the quality tends to be fairly high (especially relative to npm).
3\. The tooling is surprisingly nice for a young language. cargo has solid
defaults, Visual Studio Code provides auto-completion and tool tips, and there
are good libraries for basic logging, argument parsing, etc.
4\. Rust makes it relatively easy to write fast code, as long as you use
references and slices when appropriate.
Downsides include the learning curve (about a week or two for a C++ programmer
to start feeling semi-comfortable), and slower compile times for large modules
or ones using lots of parameterized types. My coworkers will write Rust, but
they tend to say things like, "Rust is _intense_."
------
davemp
> And that’s why C is still the best language for systems programming—it still
> lets you to do what you mean (the problem is that most programmers don’t
> really know what they mean)
Honestly after a ~1yr of embedded C co-op/intership experience, I'm familiar
enough but not too entrenched to say that C is not that great for
embedded/systems. When you're dealing at the hardware architecture level you
need more detail than C (or any PL) can reasonably provide.
C doesn't "let you do what you mean", it has no knowledge of special
registers, interrupts, timers, DMA, etc. Companies have coped with a slew of
macros that are just ugly to write with and make testing much more difficult
than need be. If the language had actual support for embedded you'd see
support for architecture strictly as libraries (which may be possible in C but
certainly not ergonomic or supported by the culture around the language).
Library architectures would make writing simulators and embedded unit tests
__MUCH__ simpler.
Not to mention the minefield that is the undefined sections of the C spec. A
lot of people "mean" for an integer to rollover, but that's undefined and the
C spec doesn't care about what you "mean". [1]
Just today I meant for a constant lookup table not to be overwritten by the
stack (I had plenty of unused RAM), but unfortunately C doesn't care what I
meant. I had to dig around and find an odd macro to jam that data into program
space--effectively hiring some muscle (gcc) to break the spec so it behaved
the way I wanted. [2] I run into this sort of thing all the time. I know the C
spec. I know my hardware. C doesn't care and needs to be beaten up. The only
real benefit of C in these situations is that it's a huge sissy and people are
really good at beating the piss out of it now.
I'm not very familiar with rust, but if it makes an honest effort to be
ergonomic for embedded (might need to be forked). It will eventually crush C.
[1]:
[https://blog.regehr.org/archives/213](https://blog.regehr.org/archives/213)
[2]: [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/Named-
Address-S...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/Named-Address-
Spaces.html)
~~~
flavio81
> And that’s why C is still the best language for systems programming
I think the only reason C is very popular for systems programming is that it
allows you to do most of what you could do in assembler, but in an easier-to-
work way. So basically C is an "acceptable, easier-to-use assembler", but far
from ideal, because of the reasons you point out.
Honestly, the popularity of C itself is due to the success of UNIX, not due to
any particular quality. On the other hand, the K&R "The C Programming
Language" book is a classic, a well written book which surely does a great job
of introducing the language.
But back then in the late 1960s, a new language called ALGOL-68 was specified,
back then a _very_ advanced language which had powerful features even for
2017. The problem is that nobody dared to implement the full language. CPL was
a stripped down implementation of Algol-68, this was then stripped down even
more to BCPL; then it was extremely stripped down to B (only one datatype),
then Dennis Ritchie kept most of the syntax and added other data types and C
was born. C was never designed from the ground up to be the best systems
programming language possible; only to be able to work for Dennis Ritchie &
friends' "toy" operating system, UNIX, a very stripped-down MULTICS.
I think the "UNIX-Haters Handbook" has a section devoted to C criticism.
~~~
WalterBright
> Honestly, the popularity of C itself is due to the success of UNIX,
I beg to differ. C was a fairly obscure language until MS-DOS came out. C
turned out to be ideal for programming on DOS, and DOS programming was far and
away the most programmed system in the world for a decade and a half.
MS-DOS also made C++ into a major language (via Zortech C++). When ZTC++ came
out the penetration and popularity of C++ went through the roof.
(Yes, I'm tooting my own horn a bit here. But I honestly believe it is ZTC++
that got C++ its critical mass.)
MS-DOS made C and C++ into the juggernauts they became.
~~~
turboturb
In my part of the world, we used the Borland compilers for MS-DOS, Turbo C and
Turbo C++. Turbo Assembler and Turbo Pascal was also popular. Never heard of
Zortech C++ before
~~~
WalterBright
Borland decided to develop TC++ because of the success of ZTC++. (I know some
of the people involved.) Before ZTC++, C++ was a niche language, and Borland
was having great success with Turbo Pascal. ZTC++ came out in 1987, and TC++
in 1990.
After the success of ZTC++ and TC++, Microsoft changed direction and decided
to develop a C++ compiler, too. I heard (but was never able to confirm) that
Microsoft had earlier been developing their own object oriented extensions to
C called C*.
~~~
p0nce
Coming from Turbo Pascal TC++ was a bit underwhelming. When I tried it didn't
colour syntax, there was those weird #include and compin=ling felt so slow. So
my first contact with C was pretty negative :\
------
eptcyka
Whilst unrelated to the article, my complaint about codecs in Rust is that
they seem to be slow. Whilst the reason for this might be the immaturity of
the libraries that I've used, but they've always been slower than their C
counter-parts. The native JPEG decoder spins up 4 threads to decode the same
amount of frames at 3x the time as the libjpeg-turbo does. There's a similar
story for the FLAC decoder.
I don't think that any of this has anything to do with the language itself,
it's just that it takes time for things to mature. As for the issues outlined
in the article - the language is different enough from C and C++ that one just
has to accept the fact that you cannot write idiomatic C and C++ in Rust and
expect it to be comfortable, performant or safe. However, with Rust, I'd say,
that one can achieve 99% of what one can achieve in C today. The only thing
that Rust is missing currently is the ability to arbitrarily jump around the
call stack due to the way destructors are implemented, but there's a way to
mitigate this and it's being worked as far as I was aware.
~~~
pornel
Decoding in libjpeg-turbo is mostly implemented in ASM. Rust, like C, is
slower than hand-optimized SIMD ASM.
~~~
mrec
If anyone's interested, this is the (epic!) discussion thread for "Getting
explicit SIMD on stable Rust":
[https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/getting-explicit-simd-
on-s...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/getting-explicit-simd-on-stable-
rust/4380/334)
It still wouldn't compete with really good hand-tuned asm, but it might help
reduce the perf/usability tradeoff a bit.
~~~
phkahler
I'd just like to see 2,3, and 4 element vectors as a first class citizen in C,
C++, or Rust. These are incredibly common for so many things it's hard for me
to understand this omission. I want to be able to pass them by value and as
return values from function. I want to do operations like a=b+c with vectors
without creating classes or overloading operators. For a lot of people the
SIMD instructions are about parallel computation, but for me they represent
vector primitives.
~~~
nwmcsween
It doesn't really make sense in C as any modern optimizing compiler will turn
it into SIMD. IIRC rust needs explicit SIMD due to bounds checking.
~~~
burntsushi
There are thousands of vendor intrinsics and no compiler that I'm aware of is
able to just automatically use all of them in a reliable way. The idea that
"Rust needs explicit SIMD due to bounds checking" is very wrong.
~~~
nwmcsween
Because SIMD ins throughput is highly processor specific? Rust will also not
'automatically use all of them' there is no magic abstraction would make any
compiler use some of the really fancy and useful SIMD ins.
~~~
burntsushi
I don't know what you're talking about unfortunately. My statement about
compilers and SIMD isn't Rust-specific. My point was that "rust needs explicit
SIMD due to bounds checking" is factually wrong.
~~~
nwmcsween
No it isn't, it is one of the reasons that rust is getting SIMD, if it cannot
eluide the bounds checking then obviously it will not vectorize the code in
question.
~~~
burntsushi
I'm one of the people working on adding SIMD to Rust, so I'm telling you,
you're wrong. If you want better vectorization and bounds checking is standing
in your way, then you can elide the bounds checks explicitly. That doesn't
require explicit SIMD.
~~~
nwmcsween
How do you safely elide bounds for something the compiler cannot reason about?
How would Rust handle SIMD differences when trying to generate specific code
as you would in C?
~~~
burntsushi
> How do you safely elide bounds for something the compiler cannot reason
> about?
Who said anything about doing it safely? You can elide the bounds checks
explicitly with calls to get_unchecked (or whatever) using unsafe.
> How would Rust handle SIMD differences when trying to generate specific code
> as you would in C?
Please be more specific. This question is so broad that it's impossible to
answer. At some levels, this is the responsibility of the code generator
(i.e., LLVM). At other levels, it's the responsibility of the programmer to
write code that checks what the current CPU supports, and then call the
correct code. Both Clang and gcc have support for the former using conditional
compilation, and both Clang and gcc have support for the latter by annotating
specific function definitions with specific target features. In the case of
the latter, it _can_ be UB to call those functions on CPUs that don't support
those features. (Most often the worse that will happen is a SIGILL, but if you
somehow muck of the ABIs between functions, then you're in for some pain.) The
plan for Rust is to basically do what Clang does.
The question of _safety_ in Rust and SIMD is a completely different story from
auto-vectorization. Figuring out how to make calling arbitrary vendor
intrinsics safe is an open question that we probably won't be able to solve in
the immediate future, so we'll make it unsafe to call them.
And even that is all completely orthogonal to a nice platform independent SIMD
API (like you might find in Javascript's support for SIMD[1]), since most of
that surface area is handled by LLVM and we should be able to enable using
SIMD at that level in safe Rust.
And all of that is still completely and utterly orthogonal to whether bounds
checks are elided. Even with the cross platform abstractions, you still might
want to write unsafe code to elide bounds checks when copying data from a
slice into a vector in a tight loop.
[1] - [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/SIMD)
------
StavrosK
Since the link is a bit slow, here's an IPFS version:
[https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmYrdKpWbHCuNPUrBd6MPFrcTqPBW55w...](https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmYrdKpWbHCuNPUrBd6MPFrcTqPBW55w1AFHdw4toUt8MM/)
~~~
tambourine_man
Nice to see IPFS links popping up
~~~
StavrosK
I agree! Are you running a local node? I was thinking that a browser extension
that automatically redirected URLs like ".*/ip[fn]s/\w+" to the local daemon
address would be pretty useful.
~~~
atbentley
Check out ipfs station if you use chrome.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-
station/kckhg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-
station/kckhgoigikkadogfdiojcblegfhdnjei)
~~~
StavrosK
Fantastic, that's exactly what I wanted, thank you. It doesn't seem to like my
remote node, but I'll figure it out.
------
Animats
The only legitimate complaint there is that it's tough in Rust to get two
arbitrary mutable slices into the same array. Rust wants to be sure they're
disjoint, to prevent aliasing. For some matrix manipulation, this is
inconvenient.
It would be easier if Rust had real multidimensional arrays. If the compiler
knows about multidimensional arrays, some additional optimizations are
possible. For example, if you want to borrow two different rows, that's fine
as long as the row subscript is different.
~~~
myusernameisok
> The only legitimate complaint there is that it's tough in Rust to get two
> arbitrary mutable slices into the same array. Rust wants to be sure they're
> disjoint, to prevent aliasing. For some matrix manipulation, this is
> inconvenient.
I've only looked into Rust briefly, but I thought this was the point of unsafe
blocks? You can roll your own multi-dimensional array data structure using
unsafe blocks if you're certain what you're doing is actually safe.
~~~
jeeyoungk
Unsafe allows you to dereference raw pointers and foreign-function calls, but
you cannot go around the borrow checker, which is what's causing annoyance.
That said, you can create raw and dereference raw pointers, which lets you to
do the above.
~~~
vvanders
If you take a ref into a pointer that lets you work around the borrow
checker(and I've bitten myself just about every time I've done it now that I'm
used to the borrow checker).
------
Sean1708
_> And don’t tell me about Bytes crate—it should not be a separate crate_
I'd be interested to hear the author's reasoning behind this, if it does what
they want then why not use it? It's small and well written, so I don't think
vetting it should be a problem.
The rest of the article seems quite sensible, that comment just strikes me as
a little odd.
~~~
zanny
There is a real change in mentality you have to go through if you transition
from a fairly strict C/C++/ even Java background to trying out Rust. In the
former languages, adding dependencies rapidly becomes a painful experience,
whereas Rust does much better dependency management and automatic building
than even Python (where you need a requirements file or something similar to
go pull down all the deps).
With Rust, you really should just use crates. The std is meant to be limited
to just the most used code and that which should not change for the sake of
keeping the ecosystem stable.
~~~
ditonal
> even Python
Off topic, but it shouldn't be better than "even Python", because Python has a
really, really broken dependency system. Far more so than Java, which has
Maven/Gradle which are both infinitely better than the pip/virtualenv
disaster.
People complain about things like shading in Maven being complicated. What
they might not realize is that pip doesn't even try to address conflicting
dependencies, it will just silently give you the wrong version! You ask for
A==0.2 and it will give you A==0.1 if another dependency asked for A==0.1
first. And it won't even warn you even though it's straight up broken
behavior. Virtualenv makes packaging annoying since it's almost vendoring but
not quite. To totally understand the packaging system forces you into the
world of eggs, wheels, disutils, conflicting versions, condas, etc.
Sorry for tangent, just thought it was funny you would hold Python up as a
standard of dependency excellence when it's probably the worst overall
ecosystem of major languages.
~~~
zanny
My language development went from C -> C++ -> Java -> Python. So when I got
there and figured out pip was a thing (or easy_install back in the day) it was
a major innovation at the time.
Additionally, for anyone coming from almost all compiled native languages, a
native environment like Rust with better dependency management than Python
(which, as you say, and in retrospect, is pretty broken) is a bit of a mind
screw.
~~~
k__
The Python devs I worked with always envied me for npm. I asked them if they
don't have something similar with pip, but seems like npm is a whole different
level.
Cargo should even be better than npm.
On the other hand I always asked myself if they couldn't simply use Nix?
~~~
steveklabnik
I can't simply use Nix; it doesn't support Windows.
~~~
k__
It doesn't run on the Linux subsystem?
~~~
steveklabnik
I hear it sorta works, but nix-shell doesn't.
Regardless, while it's cool and useful, it's not really actual Windows
support.
~~~
k__
true.
Didn't take you for a Windows guy, hehe
~~~
steveklabnik
Historically not! If you managed to dig up my old /. account you'd see "M$"
and all that. Lots of growth and change since then, ha!
It's due to video games... but I'm actually enjoying Windows 10.
------
AceJohnny2
Codecs are actually a wonderful test-case for Rust: they're a frequent source
of vulnerabilities because they have to deal with arbitrary input, they
usually have to perform fiddly sub-byte and/or array manipulation, and their
pressure for maximum performance mean they have to make as efficient use of
the hardware and memory as possible (and any mistake lead back to the first
point)
So even if you don't agree with some of the author's points, his use-case is a
good test for the suitability of Rust as a Systems Programming Language.
~~~
Gankro
Yes, let us never forget how many exploits there are in _trivial_ codecs like
ICO and BMP, because they're written in C(++):
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775794#c0](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775794#c0)
~~~
nnethercote
BMP isn't so trivial, largely because it's been extended multiple times while
never having a proper spec.
[http://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/rev/bbc1c59e460a27b2092...](http://searchfox.org/mozilla-
central/rev/bbc1c59e460a27b20929b56489e2e55438de81fa/image/decoders/nsBMPDecoder.cpp#10-83)
has some of the gory details.
~~~
tinus_hn
And .ico is just .bmp with some extras.
------
steveklabnik
A lot of good comments on Reddit, with answers/solutions/discussion of the
points brought up here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6qv2s5/rust_not_so_gr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6qv2s5/rust_not_so_great_for_codec_implementing/)
These kinds of experience reports are _so_ valuable. (I've been following the
whole series and they're very interesting.) Even if solutions to these issues
do exist, if people can't find them, well that's a problem too.
~~~
mook
Seems like (from that Reddit thread) a lot of the things are in progress in
the nightlies. I wonder if that means the nightlies are holding Rust back
(because it relieves the pressure to actually ship features for use by normal
developers).
~~~
steveklabnik
Trust me, being available only on nightly does not reduce pressure :)
Most of our users use stable, and want to stick to stable. There's just some
use-cases that need features we haven't finished designing yet, such is life.
~~~
mook
Might very well be; I have the luxury of not looking a nightlies at all :)
it's just been frustrating how often problem reports get a response that the
solutions are in the nightlies. I suppose it's possible that it's more meant
as "it's being worked on" rather than "this is not a real issue, stop
complaining", but the acknowledgement that it's actually an issue for people
using release builds seem to be missing whenever nightlies are brought up in
these sorts of responses.
Contrast this with other languages (C++, Python, Ruby, Go) where I have no
idea what features are under development until they hit a stable release.
Compare to JavaScript, where stable releases are so slow people built
transpilers ;)
This could also be because I'm interested enough in Rust to occasionally land
on the first-party discussion forums, of course (probably helped by how open
the language development is). I'd say it's also young, except that it now has
a release number much larger than 1.0 and doesn't really get to claim that
anymore.
~~~
kbenson
> I suppose it's possible that it's more meant as "it's being worked on"
> rather than "this is not a real issue, stop complaining", but the
> acknowledgement that it's actually an issue for people using release builds
> seem to be missing whenever nightlies are brought up in these sorts of
> responses.
I think that's the right assumption, because it's an acknowledgement that the
issue actively being worked on to the degree that they have at least a partial
solution implemented, as opposed to the "someone is working on that" response
language developers sometimes give which usually predates that and could mean
someone is reading literature and surveying the field and no code has actually
been written.
As you note, because development is so open, nightlies are easily accessible,
so people might incorrectly infer that they are being recommended to use them,
or that the problem is solved. I think what the devs are attempting to
communicate is that it's close, and if you want you can test it out to see
what it's like and give feedback. This might be a case of similar groups with
_slightly_ different context (lang devs / lang users) interpret a statement
differently. From what I've seen, the Rust devs see fairly responsive to
communication issues when pointed out, so maybe this will result in some
change (or perhaps they are acutely aware of the issue already and instituted
changes have not shown benefit, at least yet).
~~~
mook
Yeah, I appreciate that nightlies are an option. It's just frustrating how
often that option is trotted out without the caveat that it isn't a real
solution. (This is again basically reacting to a particular Reddit comment
linked above, but those sorts of comments are things that are more memorable.)
Actually interacting with rust-related people, whatever their capacity
(developer, user, etc.) tend to go pretty well; it's just that once in a while
a random comment shows up that seems dismissive of actual problems people are
reporting.
You're probably right though, it's just that people have different contexts
and I'm reading more into things than intended. Again, rust development is
extremely open (which is great) and these things just tend to not be visible
for other languages, rather than not happening.
------
ainar-g
The link doesn't seem to work for me at the moment. Here is Google Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qOUhWkj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qOUhWkjzMY0J:https://codecs.multimedia.cx/%3Fp%3D1246&num=1&lr=lang_de%7Clang_en%7Clang_ru&hl=ru&gl=ru&tbs=lr:lang_1de%7Clang_1en%7Clang_1ru&strip=1&vwsrc=0)
------
modalduality
Not a Rust expert, but some thoughts on the negatives.
> Compilation time is too large
Can you try compiling incrementally? [https://blog.rust-
lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html](https://blog.rust-
lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html). Might still only be on nightly.
> And, on the similar note, benchmarks.
I agree, profiling as well isn't as full featured as in more mature languages.
Clojure, incidentally has great benchmarking due to being on the JVM.
> Also the tuple assignments.
Can't you just do
fn main() {
let (a, b) = (5, 2);
println!("{}, {}", b, a);
}
>There are many cases where compiler could do the stuff automatically.
I think this will be solved with the new non-lexical lifetimes RFC. Also a
problem I had when starting, I generally assume referential transparency.
~~~
kllrnohj
> Clojure, incidentally has great benchmarking due to being on the JVM.
Eh? Benchmarking on the JVM is notoriously difficult bordering on impossible.
There's things like Google Caliper but test runs take forever due to
attempting to force JIT warmup and doing GCs after every run. And the
project's own wiki tells you the results are basically meaningless for a
variety of reasons.
Benchmarking things like C++ or Rust are trivial by comparison since when you
call method foo() it's gonna do pretty much the same instructions every time.
Highly consistent, highly repeatable, highly benchmarkable. Call method foo()
in a JVM language and there's not a single person on the planet that can
reliably tell you what's going to get executed on the metal.
That's why you typically profile JVM languages rather than benchmarking them.
~~~
mcguire
Benchmarking is pretty meaningfree in the best cases. The JVM isn't any worse
in this regard.
The JVM is slow in many regimes due to things like JIT warmup. Rather than
accepting that many JVM people are hypersensitive: thou must only benchmark in
the JVM's best case scenario.
~~~
kllrnohj
> Benchmarking is pretty meaningfree in the best cases.
That's completely false. Benchmarking is a core staple of building &
evaluating performance-sensitive libraries or other routines. It doesn't work
(well) in non-deterministic languages which reduces its usefulness scope, but
in things like C++ it's highly useful and reliable for evaluation of libraries
and monitoring for regressions.
> The JVM is slow in many regimes due to things like JIT warmup. Rather than
> accepting that many JVM people are hypersensitive: thou must only benchmark
> in the JVM's best case scenario.
Well it's not _just_ the JIT that's a problem. It's also things like GC
passes. Does that get included in the results or not? Do you force GC passes
between runs? How about finalizers? The answers to those questions depends on
the state of the rest of the system and the expected workload, it's not
something you can just trivially answer or even accommodate in a framework
since most of the behavior is up to the particular implementation, which can
then further vary based off of command line flags.
------
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
None of these seem related to codecs as opposed to the author's preference for
how s/he likes to code.
Not that this isn't super valuable feedback, but the title is misleading.
------
gwbas1c
I tried Rust for the first time a few months ago. One of the things that
really impressed me was that it was very easy to just get started. Even though
the language is very different than I'm used to, I was able to "just jump in"
without jumping through a lot of hoops. I was working with 3rd party crates
very quickly.
One thing that I think does need improvement is the error handling. Far too
many idiomatic examples just panic for error handling. There's no good way to
just group errors by a higher-level classification and fall through to a
generic error handler. As a result, the choice is between panic on error, or
very detailed and verbose error handling. There's no middle ground.
~~~
biokoda
> There's no middle ground.
Not at all. This is what the ? operator is for (was try! before).
The idiomatic rust way is to have your own Error type that implements From for
other Error types that you may encounter (io::Error, Utf8Error, etc.).
Then you can simply just write let result = dosomething()?; for any operation
that may fail. If an error happens, function will return with the error.
I don't think you can do it any cleaner, given the constraints Rust is
operating under.
~~~
moomin
The From is The Right Thing, but it can be hard to convince people used to
unchecked exceptions and costless casting of this. (I say costless, you pay
for it every time you don't cast...)
------
simias
Some of the complaints are perfectly fair (compile time, powerful but unwieldy
macros). Other complaints seem a bit odder to me:
> _While overall built-in testing capabilities in Rust are good (file it under
> good things too), the fact that benchmarking is available only for limbo
> nightly Rust is annoying;_
Okay, but what are you comparing it against? Neither C or C++ have builtin
benchmarking or even tests.
> _If you care about systems programming and safety you’d have at least one or
> two functions to convert type into a smaller one (e.g. i16 /u16 -> u8)
> and/or check whether the result fits._
I don't understand this one at all. What's wrong with "as"? And if you need a
checked conversion just write a small wrapper function? Again, if you're
comparing to C or C++ I'd argue that Rust's semantic are friendlier and a lot
less error prone at the cost of increased verbosity. C will implicitly cast
and promote integer types without asking any questions, Rust makes it
explicit.
I understand C promotion rules and I've still managed to get it wrong on
occasions, to the point where I now force myself to make all casts explicit in
C like I would in Rust. At least this way the intent is obvious, as I think it
should be.
> _Also the tuple assignments. I’d like to be able to assign multiple
> variables from a tuple but it’s not possible now. And maybe it would be nice
> to be able to declare several variables with one let;_
So unless I'm missing something something like:
let (a, _, b) = (1, 2, 3)
> _Same for function calling—why does bitread.seek(bitread.tell() - 42); fail
> borrow check while let pos = bitread.tell() - 42; bitread.seek(pos);_
Yeah, that's always been a minor annoyance of mine too. I intuitively think
that
a(b());
should be treated like
let tmp = b();
a(tmp);
That is b() would terminate and release its borrows before a is even
considered and "tmp" would live until the end of the block.
I'm guessing that there must be a good reason why it isn't so however.
Note that in C and C++ parameter evaluation order is unspecified so calling
functions with potential side effects in parameter lists should be done very
carefully. The compiler won't ever stop you though, don't worry. I'm sure the
foot will grow back eventually.
> _Borrow checker and arrays._ [...]
Now this whole section feels a lot like "I'm trying to code in Rust like in C
and it doesn't work and it frustrates me". Which is fair, messing around with
arrays in C is a lot easier than Rust, there's no doubt about that. C also
makes it massively easier to spectacularly shoot yourself in the foot if you
mess up.
Yes, if you need uninitialized arrays and these sorts of things you need to
use unsafe. But that's mostly optimization and you probably don't want to
start implementing your codec with that type of code. After all maybe the
compiler will be clever enough to see what you're doing with the buffer and
not actually run the init code. And if it doesn't you're free to add the
unsafe code later, once your codec works, you have good tests and it's time to
optimize more aggressively.
>And that’s why C is still the best language for systems programming—it still
lets you to do what you mean (the problem is that most programmers don’t
really know what they mean)
Ah, so after the Sufficiently Smart Compiler we have the Sufficiently Smart
Coder. That seems like quite a definitive claim for somebody who didn't know
about "split_at_mut" in Rust a few lines earlier. Maybe the author should
experiment a bit more with the language before making bold statements like
these?
It's not rare to find security vulnerabilities in codecs and they tend to be
extremely exposed. Maybe it's worth the hassle of making array manipulation
slightly less convenient for the sake of security?
>type keyword. Since it’s a keyword it can’t be used as a variable name and
many objects have type, you know.
All languages have reserved keywords, that's strictly in bikeshed territory.
Of course when you get to a new language with a new set of reserved keyword
you have to learn new habits. You never name anything "struct", "class",
"switch" or "break" in C or C++ because you're used to have these keywords
removed. Rust lets me name variables "class" but not "type". Oh well.
>Not being able to combine if let with some other condition (those nested
conditions tend to accumulate rather fast)
I tend to agree with this one, although I guess it could become messy quickly
if you mix refutable lets with regular boolean conditions.
~~~
cwyers
> Now this whole section feels a lot like "I'm trying to code in Rust like in
> C and it doesn't work and it frustrates me".
Who's fault is that?
Rust seems like an attempt to take a lot of foreign concepts to C/C++
programmers and dress them up in ALGOLy syntax. If you look at Rust's
influences page[1], there's stuff from ML, Haskell, Erlang... and yet Rust
code examples I've seen all look like "slightly weird C++." If Rust wasn't
meant to be written like C/C++, it could spend less time aping it and more
time looking like languages where you expect to come across ADTs and the like.
1) [https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/influences.html](https://doc.rust-
lang.org/reference/influences.html)
~~~
pcwalton
Well, like it or not, one of the primary audiences of Rust _is_ C and C++
programmers. They're the people who write low-level code. There's not much we
can do about that; we might as well serve our customers as well as we can.
~~~
cwyers
> we might as well serve our customers as well as we can.
Sure, but what part of serving them involves dragging them on Hacker News when
they try and write C-like code in Rust?
~~~
pcwalton
I don't think we should be upset with people for their legitimate
frustrations. But I do think we should be honest with the basic limitations of
what we set out to do. A safe language that has dynamic allocation without GC
simply has to have a borrow checker, and as far as we know that borrow checker
has to have some limitations. Those limitations prevent some kind of code from
being written in the same way it was written in C.
------
AndyKelley
This article is practically selling Zig. It has all the good stuff mentioned
sans traits, and none of the bad stuff. The only new bad thing Zig brings to
the table is immaturity. Zig is a much more modest incremental improvement
over C whereas rust is trying to introduce this new big idea of the borrow
checker.
~~~
hinkley
Watch out for the inevitable copycat product called Zag that steals all your
users by saying they zigged when they should have zagged.
------
schneems
Site is down for me. Mirror?
~~~
steveklabnik
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901856)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What Trump's Win Means for Cybersecurity - jonbaer
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/security-news-week-trumps-win-means-cybersecurity
======
coldtea
Trump's win means almost nothing in most areas, like Obama's win didn't stop
police brutality against blacks.
There are tons of private and aggregate interests at play in policy making,
and the President is just a single, and not even the most interesting,
influence point, just the one that is most visible.
~~~
hourislate
While I agree that the President is just one person, what bothers me is that I
can't ever remember having someone elected to the highest office in the nation
without any experience.
It's troubling listening to Trump talk about world affairs and other issues
without getting this sick feeling that he is completed bewildered. Then he
seems to surround himself with people who don't have clue either.
It's quite frightening and I feel like America shit the bed and now we are all
going to have to sleep in it.
I really hope it all works out because there is just so much at stake for
everyone.
~~~
coldtea
> _While I agree that the President is just one person, what bothers me is
> that I can 't ever remember having someone elected to the highest office in
> the nation without any experience._
Trump aside, experience is overrated in politics.
Fresh people get elected to major positions all the time. For the main role of
being a President, few things can prepare you. And for all the details, there
are tons of advisors etc. to help you.
Whether Clinton, Obama, Trump etc, they are all clueless to the most pressing
issues of today and especially tomorrow (with respect to climate change,
technology, jobs, etc). Heck, most are clueless even after having been
Presidents. At best, they are at the mercy of their advisors and policy
influencers, and the best we can hope is that they have good intentions.
I also think it's best to have a wide angle view of society and the world from
different aspects (not that Trump has that), than to have experience in
backroom discussions and Washington dealings.
~~~
sigmar
>Fresh people get elected to major positions all the time. For the main role
of being a President, few things can prepare you. And for all the details,
there are tons of advisors etc. to help you.
It is nice for the president to at least know the legal framework he/she will
be restricted by.
~~~
coldtea
> _It is nice for the president to at least know the legal framework he /she
> will be restricted by._
It's not like the President will draft any law themselves...
~~~
sigmar
The president's job is enforcing all of the laws set by the legislative branch
and he needs to know where his authority begins and ends.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
AI Bots Directory [continuously updating] - riverwang
http://bot.am/t/ai-bots-directory-continuously-updating/83
======
dang
We've banned this site and all the accounts involved in ring-voting this post.
If you'd like to be unbanned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and
come clean with us.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
HiddenApp goes AWOL? - helipad
Remember HiddenApp, the app which helps vigilante Mac owners find their stolen laptop? It might have gone missing.<p>Recently a friend noticed a charge on his credit card statement. "Flipcode Ltd" was not a familiar name. A little googling later, it appears Flipcode is the company behind HiddenApp. They had a promo around Christmas 2010 where you could get the app for free, and enjoyed viral fame when someone liveblogged the hunt for their stolen Mac.<p>Worryingly, HiddenApp appears to have fallen off the radar. They don't have a contact page, but the Privacy page includes a business name and phone number. Sadly for my friend, the phone rings off. The postal address is a PO Box, which though not uncommon, doesn't help us locate them. A Companies House lookup reveals only the address of their online accountants. This wouldn't in and of itself be worrying, unless you needed to get hold of them.<p>There has been no response, automatic or otherwise, to emails in over a week. The website copyright footer says 2010. The more you let your imagination run away with you, the worse the situation looks. With no blog posts in almost two months, and no activity on Twitter since June 1st (which mentions an address in Watford, UK), @replies have gone unanswered. It's hard to identify any company activity in the support forum.<p>Whilst HiddenApp may well be alive and well (it seems to function OK), you have to wonder whether it's safe to use a service that itself has gone incognito. Had we not investigated, we might not have discovered the inactivity until it was too late. Indeed, does it even work with Lion?<p>If security is freedom from care, anxiety or doubt, right now there's enough cause for concern to move away from HiddenApp. Has anyone heard from Flipcode? Should we be moving towards Prey?<p>Summary:<p>No email response
No phone response,
No tweets,
No blogs,
No address,
No forum activity
======
mattvot
Love Prey. The amount of times I've lost my phone while out and about, to find
it was home all along is appalling.
Go with Prey, it's open source so if the company goes, you can still use it.
------
rafteklansing
Had never heard of Prey - wish I had! I just removed Hidden off my Mac. I've
always been a bit wary of stolen tracking services (inc. Undercover), but the
fact this service is open source shows a transparency level not seen from
these other companies. Thanks for the tip.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Awesome lists instant search - netgusto
http://awesome-lists.net
======
netgusto
It's a searchable index of the items of all the "Awesome lists" listed on
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome).
~~~
kevindeasis
Hey netgusto, great work! I'm building an awesome list for full-stack
development and design. If I wanted these to be added to your list do I just
make a pull request?
[0] [https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-
fullstack](https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-fullstack)
[1] [https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-
ui](https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-ui)
~~~
netgusto
Hello kevindeasis,
you'd have to make a pull request to
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)
(make sure to read and comply with their contribution guide) since the lists
indexed on [http://awesome-lists.net](http://awesome-lists.net) are obtained
from this repo; once that's done, your lists will be automatically available
on awesome-lists.net (after the next index update).
Nice lists you got here. Watch out for these minor problems though:
* [https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-fullstack](https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-fullstack)
* Agular => Angular
* you should rather use unordered lists IMHO
* I think links on headings won't be indexed as you expect them to be; could you normalize and put the link in an item just as for the other sections ?
* [https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-ui](https://github.com/kevindeasis/awesome-ui)
* Some formatting problems on **Font Resource** (bullet points unrecognized)
* Heading `###Writing` not recognized
* You should normalize lists and not include wrap list items in paragraphs IMHO
Thanks !
~~~
kevindeasis
Awesome, thanks netgusto!
I'll to do that within this week or next week.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: AirBnB for spouses - viable? - bwkake
Say I need my house cleaning supervised but my wife is away, why can't I rent a well reviewed wife on an SpouseBnB type of site?<p>Do you think this will work?<p>If I start this off as a weekend project, what legal aspects do I need to worry about?
======
benologist
You'd need to worry about the bit where 80% of your customers will be looking
for hookers, and the other 20% of your customers will be hookers.
That said, a hooker-slash-cleaning service....
~~~
gadders
You get hookers to clean your slash?
NB: This joke makes more sense for Brits.
------
highlander
Back up a level...do you really want to pay someone to watch the other person
you paid to clean the house? Why not just hire a reliable cleaner that can
work without supervision?
------
systemtrigger
I think you should sort out the nomenclature before you write the business
plan. Renting a wife implies sex not house cleaning.
------
mooism2
"AirBnB for spouses" sounds like wife-swapping at best, prostitution at worst.
------
codegeek
"rent a well reviewed wife "
Now that phrase could have 100 meanings. You probably don't want to use that
as a tagline for sure.
------
DanielCole
I think the challenge I see is "wife" when really you're talking about general
services. TaskRabbit already address the service sector and you can hire
someone to perform a number of tasks to help you manage your life.
On the upside, prostitution is a huge industry which equates to a large total
addressable market.
------
jpau
I think such a thing would require a large adoption to work, but the use cases
are too bizarre and already have work arounds. For your example, why not a
friend, family member, or neighbour?
------
helen842000
"Say I need my house cleaning supervised"... really? You run into this problem
a lot?
Then again, does it work both ways? Say I need the couch sitting on... :)
------
krisneuharth
I think Vooza already tried this.
------
gregorym
Can't you clean yourself?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Automated Program Repair - matt_d
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/12/241055-automated-program-repair/fulltext
======
derefr
One case where this is already eminently possible, is automatically keeping a
codebase's dependencies up-to-date. We already have CI scripts that find out-
of-date dependency specifications and notify the developer of them. It's not
far from there to having said CI script generate a PR for an update to said
dependency, hypothetically apply it, and then actually merge it in if all the
tests still pass. (And, rather than just giving up if the absolute-newest dep
version doesn't work, such a system could easily be extended to bisect the
dep's version history to find the newest version it _could_ update to without
breaking the build, perhaps constrained by the dependency's version-constraint
string.)
~~~
QuinnWilton
You can do this with Dependabot [0], recently acquired by Github.
We use Dependabot, and I love it for our backend repositories, but anything
with node dependencies ends up being easier to manually update (because there
ends up being so many dependencies that get updated every day, that opening a
PR for each one essentially launches a denial of service attack on our CI
system)
[0] [https://dependabot.com/](https://dependabot.com/)
~~~
nwah1
Their homepage states:
>Live, daily, weekly or monthly updates
>Choose to receive update PRs live, daily, weekly or monthly. We make an
exception for security patches, which you'll always receive immediately.
~~~
QuinnWilton
Configuring it to open pull requests less frequently doesn't help, since
dependencies still get updated one by one, rather than in batches. I've found
it easier to just run an interactive yarn upgrade every so often.
------
michael-ax
e.g. the true state of AI today suffers from our pedestrian ability to
actually specify what we're trying to do?
~~~
nine_k
Actually specifying what we are trying to do is nearly the whole of the
programming.
Describing things correctly and with all necessary detail is genuinely hard,
because building a _mental picture_ required for that is hard, even with all
the information tools we have.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NLP's ImageNet Moment: From Shallow to Deep Pre-Training - stablemap
https://thegradient.pub/nlp-imagenet/
======
narrator
I was at a deep learning conference recently. The topic of how AI can improve
healthcare came up. One panelist said that a startup they were working with
wants to help doctors use AI to use NLP to send claims to insurance companies
in a way that won't be rejected. Another panelist said that he was working
with another startup that wants to use AI and NLP to help insurance companies
reject claims.
I think in the future we'll see their AI fighting against our AI in an arms
race similar to the spam wars. The one with the most computing power and
biggest dataset will win and humans will be at their mercy.
~~~
jahabrewer
> One panelist said that a startup they were working with wants to help
> doctors use AI to use NLP to send claims to insurance companies in a way
> that won't be rejected. Another panelist said that he was working with
> another startup that wants to use AI and NLP to help insurance companies
> reject claims.
Sounds like GAN in meatspace.
~~~
vokep
Yep, They compete endlessly, while we enjoy hyper-accurate decisions on these
things, leading to greater efficiency of both.
~~~
bigiain
Yes.
But quite possibly "greater efficiency" according to a fitness function that's
not accurately mapped onto "keeping humans alive"...
I wonder if this'll end up in an equivalent state to the "tank detection
neural net" which learned with 100% accuracy that the researchers/trainers had
always taken pictures of tanks on cloudy days and pictures without tanks on
sunny days? ( [https://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-
tanks](https://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-tanks) )
Who'd bet against the doctor/insurer neural net training ending up approving
all procedures where, say, the doctor ends up with a kickback from a drug
company - instead of optimising for maximum human health benefit?
~~~
Rainymood
>But quite possibly "greater efficiency" according to a fitness function
that's not accurately mapped onto "keeping humans alive"...
Since when was this ever the case? Especially in America? The US healthcare
system is NOT built around providing adequate care for everyone, as far as
I've read/heard.
Full disclosure: West-EU citizen here
------
rusbus
For more detail plus working code, lesson 4 of the fast.ai course uses this
technique to obtain (what was at time of writing) a state of the art result on
the imdb dataset:
[http://course.fast.ai/lessons/lesson4.html](http://course.fast.ai/lessons/lesson4.html)
By training a language model on the dataset, then using that model to fine
tune the sentiment classification task, they were able to achieve 94.5%
accuracy
~~~
jph00
Well spotted - this is where I first created the algorithm that became ULMFiT!
I wanted to show an example of transfer learning outside of computer vision
for the course but couldn't find anything compelling. I was pretty sure a
language model would work really well in NLP so tried it out, and was totally
shocked when the very first model best the previous state of the art!
Sebastian (author of this article) saw the lesson, and was kind enough to
complete lots of experiments to test out the approach more carefully, and did
a great job of writing up the results in a paper, which was then accepted by
the ACL.
------
cs702
The title is a little too click-baity for my taste ("has arrived," huh?), but
I think the OP is unto something.
It is now possible to grab a pretrained model and start producing state-of-
the-art NLP results in a wide range of tasks with relatively little effort.
This will likely enable much more tinkering with NLP, all around the world...
which will lead to new SOTA results in a range of tasks.
~~~
zawerf
Do you have links for these pretrained models? The only one I am aware of is
OpenAI's where they fine tuned a Transformer architecture for 1 month on 8
gpus:
[https://blog.openai.com/language-
unsupervised/](https://blog.openai.com/language-unsupervised/)
[https://github.com/openai/finetune-transformer-
lm](https://github.com/openai/finetune-transformer-lm)
~~~
sebastianruder
You can find ELMo here:
[https://github.com/allenai/allennlp/blob/master/tutorials/ho...](https://github.com/allenai/allennlp/blob/master/tutorials/how_to/elmo.md)
And ULMFiT here:
[http://nlp.fast.ai/category/classification.html](http://nlp.fast.ai/category/classification.html)
~~~
cs702
For those who don't know, Sebastian Ruder is a coauthor of the ULMFiT paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06146](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06146)
------
acganesh
Pretrained models have enabled so much in CV, excited to see similar shifts in
the language world.
A great supplement is Sebastian’s NLP progress repo:
[https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-
progress](https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-progress)
------
neuromantik8086
Not to be too obtuse, but isn't WordNet (you know, the project that inspired
the creation of ImageNet) "an ImageNet for language"? It seems kind of weird
to bring up ImageNet within the context of NLP and not mention WordNet once.
~~~
sebastianruder
WordNet (as you probably know) is a database that groups English words into a
set of synonyms. If you consider WordNet as a clustering of high-level
classes, then you could argue that ImageNet is the "WordNet for vision",
meaning the clustering of object classes. The article uses a different meaning
of ImageNet, namely ImageNet as pretraining task that can be used to learn
representations that will likely be beneficial for many other tasks in the
problem space. In this sense, you could use WordNet as an "ImageNet for
language" e.g. by learning word representations based on the WordNet
definitions. This is something people have done, but there are a lot more
effective approaches. I hope this helped and was not too convoluted.
~~~
neuromantik8086
Does WordNet know that the word "ImageNet" refers to both a database and a
pretraining task? :)
~~~
wodenokoto
No, it does not know that, or anything else about "ImageNet"
[http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?c=8&sub=Change&o2...](http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?c=8&sub=Change&o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&i=-1&h=&s=imagenet)
------
andreyk
TLDR the standard practice of using 'word vectors' (numeric vector
representation of words) may soon be superceded by just using entire
pretrained neural nets as is standard in CV, and we have both conceptual and
empirical reasons to believe language modeling is how it'll happen.
Helped edit this piece, think it is spot on - exciting times for NLP.
------
JPKab
Definitely excited by this, but wish the article was a bit more detailed.
~~~
jph00
The ULMFiT, ELMO, and OpenAI Transformer papers are all quite readable and
linked from the article. Sebastian and I also wrote an introduction to ULMFiT
here: [http://nlp.fast.ai/classification/2018/05/15/introducting-
ul...](http://nlp.fast.ai/classification/2018/05/15/introducting-ulmfit.html)
~~~
JPKab
Thanks!
------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> In order to predict the most probable next word in a sentence, a model is
required not only to be able to express syntax (the grammatical form of the
predicted word must match its modifier or verb) but also model semantics. Even
more, the most accurate models must incorporate what could be considered world
knowledge or common sense.
So, the first sentence in this passage is a huge assumption. For a model to
predict the next token (word or character) in a string, all it has to do is to
be able to predict the next token in a string. In other words, it needs to
model structure. Modelling semantics is not required.
Indeed, there exist a wide variety of models that can, indeed, predict the
most likely next token in a string. The simplest of those are n-gram models,
that can do this task reasonably well. Maybe what that first sentence above is
trying to say is that to predict the next token with good accuracy, modelling
of semantics is required, but that is still a great, big, huge leap of
reasoning. Again- structure is probably sufficient. A very accurate model
modelling structure, is still only modelling structure.
It's important to consider what we mean when we're talking about modelling
language probaiblistically. When humans generate (or recognise) speech, we
don't do that stochastically, by choosing the most likely utterance from a
distribution. Instead, we -very deterministically- say what we want to say.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to observe "what we want to say" (i.e. our
motivation for emitting an utterance). We are left with observing -and
modelling- only what we actually say. The result is models that can capture
the structure of utterances, but are completely incapable of generating new
language that makes any sense - i.e. gibberish.
It is also worth considering how semantic modelling tasks are evaluated (e.g.
machine translation). Basically, a source string is matched to an arbitrary
target string meant to capture the source string's intended meaning.
"Arbitrary" because there may be an infinite number of strings that carry the
same meaning. So what, exactly, are we measuring when we evaluate a model's
ability to map between to of those infinite strings chosen just because we
like them best?
Language inference and comprehension benchmarks like the ones noted in the
article are particularly egregious in this regard. They are basically
classification tasks, where a mapping must be found between a passage and a
multiple-choice spread of "correct" labels, meant to represent its meaning.
It's very hard to see how a model that does well in this sort of task is
"incorporating world knowledge" let alone "common sense"!
Maybe NLP _will_ have its ImageNet moment- but that will only be in terms of
benchmarks. Don't expect to see machines understanding language and holding
reasonable conversations any time soon.
~~~
DoctorOetker
I fully agree and while you probably word it much better than me, I made a
somewhat similar argument at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961233)
if you are interested...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Undecidable Problem in SIP - petithug
http://blog.marc.petit-huguenin.org/2014/08/an-undecidable-problem-in-sip2.html
======
zitterbewegung
Even though it seems that you can create pathological SIP rules that are
undecidable could you reduce a subset of the problem if you are only allowed
to do a set of forwards and then you have a graph where you can detect cycles
with a simple cycle detection algorithm?
------
userbinator
I think this article is a bit alarmist...
_Now, let 's say that we want to implement CTS in SIP. The CPL language is
not powerful enough for that but we can define a very simple extension_
...
_And because we previously proved that SIP with CPL is Turing-Complete_
...
_Note that at least some SIP systems are not necessarily Turing-Complete -
here we had to add an extension to our very limited system based on CPL to
make it Turing-Complete._
In other words, he had to create a completely theoretical extension, which
AFAIK doesn't actually exist, just to show that it _could be_ Turing-complete?
If there's a real extension in use or set of extensions that could make it
Turing-complete, why didn't he just choose that?
------
tlarkworthy
Its not NP to determine if the max-forward reach zero. Just simulate it until
it reaches zero or not... QED
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why we can't process Emoji anymore - tpinto
http://gist.github.com/1707371
======
oofabz
This is why UTF-8 is great. If it works for any Unicode character it will work
for them all. Surrogate pairs are rare enough that they are poorly tested.
With UTF-8, if there are issues with multi-byte characters, they are obvious
enough to get fixed.
UTF-16 is not a very good encoding. It only exists for legacy reasons. It has
the same major drawback as UTF-8 (variable-length encoding) but none of the
benefits (ASCII compatibility, size efficient).
~~~
pixelcort
The problem with UTF-8 is that lots of tools have 3 byte limits, and
characters like Emoji take up 4 bytes in UTF-8.
~~~
pjscott
How many tools have 3-byte limits on UTF-8? The only one I can think of right
now is MySQL. (The workaround is to specify the utf8mb4 character set. This is
MySQL's cryptic internal name for "actually doing UTF-8 correctly.")
~~~
jrabone
MySQL is one of the worst offenders for broken Unicode and collation problems
arising therein. Neither it nor JavaScript deserve consideration for problems
that need robust Unicode handling.
~~~
mikeash
I actually switched my (low traffic, low performance needs) blog comments
database from MySQL to SQLite purely because I could not make MySQL and
Unicode get along. All I needed was for it to accept and then regurgitate
UTF-8 and it couldn't even handle that. I'm sure it can be done, but none of
the incantations I tried made it work, and it was ultimately easier for me to
switch databases.
~~~
pjscott
As an ugly last resort, you could store Unicode as UTF-8 in BLOB fields. MySQL
is pretty good about storing binary data. (I dread the day that I'll have to
do something more advanced with Unicode in MySQL than just storing it.)
~~~
mikeash
I no longer recall whether I tried that and failed, or didn't get that far.
Seems like a semi-reasonable approach if you don't need the database to be
able to understand the contents of that column. But on the other hand, SQLite
is working great for my needs too.
------
ender7
Apropos: <http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding>
TL;DR:
\- Javascript engines are free to internally represent strings as either UCS-2
or UTF-16. Engines that choose to go USC-2 tend to replace all glyphs outside
of the BMP with the replacement char (U+FFFD). Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari
all do this (with some inconsistencies).
\- _However_ , from the point of view of the actual JS code that gets
executed, strings are always UCS-2 (sort of). In UTF-16, code points outside
the BMP are encoded as surrogate pairs (4 bytes). But -- if you have a
Javascript string that contains such a character, it will be treated as two
consecutive 2-byte characters.
var x = '𝌆';
x.length; // 2
x[0]; // \uD834
x[1]; // \uDF06
Note that if you insert said string into the DOM, it will still render
correctly (you'll see a single character instead of two ?s).
~~~
notJim
I'm relatively comfortable with this stuff, but I am confused by your
response.
First you say that engines will "internally" replace non-BMP glyphs with the
replacement character, but then you give an example that seems to work fine
(and I think would work fine as long as you don't cut that character in half,
or try to inspect its character code without doing the proper
incantations[1].)
So, I guess what I'm asking is, at what point does the string become
"internal", such that the engine will replace the character with the
replacement character?
[1]: As given in the article you linked to.
~~~
Kaworu
I dare not try and reexplain the discussion in this bug report as my
understanding feels insufficient, but the entire discussion at
<http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=761#c14> (note, I've linked to
the 14th commment in the discussion, but there's more interesting stuff above)
talks about it. At the core is a distinction between v8's internal
representation of strings and it's API vs. what a browser engine which embeds
v8 might do.
------
praptak
Sometimes you need to know about encodings, even if you're just a consumer.
Putting just one non 7-bit character in your SMS message will silently change
its encoding from 7-bit (160 chars) to 8-bit (140 chars) or even 16 bit (70
chars) which might make the phone split it into many chunks. The resulting
chunks are billed as separate messages.
~~~
fwr
On iOS, using any non-basic Latin character in SMS makes it switch to 16 bit,
even when there is no reason for that to happen. It's a thing that most
foreign language speakers must live with.
By doing this full of excuses write-up, this guy wasted a substantial amount
of time that he could have spent better researching the issue. Your consumer
doesn't care that Emoji is this much or that much bits, it doesn't matter for
him that you're running your infrastructure on poorly chosen software - there
is absolutely no excuse for not supporting this in a native iOS app,
especially now that Emoji is so widely used and deeply integrated in iOS.
How is that a problem they are focusing on, anyway, when their landing page
features awful, out of date mockups of the app? (not even actual screenshots -
notice the positions of menu bar items) They are also featuring Emoji in every
screenshot - ending support might be a fresh development, but I still find
that ironic.
~~~
speednoise
This was an internal email: <https://medium.com/tech-talk/1aff50f34fc>
~~~
jonny_eh
So Node.js already fixed the issue, nice!
------
pjscott
The quick summary, for people who don't like ignoring all those = signs, is
that V8 uses UCS-2 internally to represent strings, and therefore can't handle
Unicode characters which lie outside the Basic Multilingual Plane -- including
Emoji.
~~~
bbotond
Honestly that's a shame.
~~~
masklinn
It was fixed back in March though.
------
driverdan
If you search for V8 UCS-2 you'll find a lot of discussion on this issue
dating back at least a few years. There are ways to work around V8's lack of
support for surrogate pairs. See this V8 issue for ideas:
<https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=761>
My question is why does V8 (or anything else) still use UCS-2?
~~~
est
because counting 2 bytes is much faster for computers than counting vary 1, 2,
3 or even 4 bytes.
~~~
speleding
This is not a real issue because counting code points in an UTF8 string is
easy too: the encoding is cleverly defined such that you just need to check
the number of bytes that have the top bit cleared. Since UTF8 strings are
generally shorter it can even be faster than counting UTF-16 if you don't know
the length in advance.
------
gkoberger
Took me a bit to realize that this is talking about the Voxer iOS app
(<http://voxer.com/>), not Github (<https://github.com/blog/816-emoji>).
~~~
whit537
Yeah, I was worried there for a sec. :^)
------
hkmurakami
_> Wow, you read though all of that? You rock. I'm humbled that you gave me so
much of your attention._
That was actually really fun to read, even as a now non-technical guy. I can't
put a finger on it, but there was something about his style that gave off a
really friendly vibe even through all the technical jargon. That's a definite
skill!
~~~
jgeorge
DeSalvo's source comments have always been an entertaining read. :)
------
beaumartinez
This is dated January 2012. By the looks of things, this was fixed in March
2012[1]
[1] <https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=761#c33>
~~~
Cogito
I wonder if this has been rolled into Node yet.
[edit] Node currently uses V8 version 3.11.10.25, which was released after
this fix was made, but not sure if the fix was merged to trunk
[edit2] actually, looks like it has, though I can't identify the merge commit
------
ricardobeat
Please, if you're going to post text to a Gist at least use the .md extension:
<https://gist.github.com/4151124>
~~~
ctrlaltesc
Which enables an even more readable layout with gist.io
<http://gist.io/4151124>
------
pbiggar
A couple of reasons why it makes sense for V8 and other vendors to use UCS2:
\- The spec says UCS2 or UTF16. Those are the only options.
\- UCS2 allows random access to characters, UTF-16 does not.
\- Remember how the JS engines were fighting for speed on arbitrary
benchmarks, and nobody cared about anything else for 5 years? UCS2 helps
string benchmarks be fast!
\- Changing from UCS2 to UTF-16 might "break the web", something browser
vendors hate (and so do web developers)
\- Java was UCS2. Then Java 5 changed to UTF-16. Why didn't JS change to
UTF-16? Because a Java VM only has to run one program at once! In JS, you
can't specify a version, an encoding, and one engine has to run everything on
the web. No migration path to other encodings!
~~~
cmccabe
_UCS2 allows random access to characters, UTF-16 does not._
I'm not sure if that's really true. On IBM's site, they define 3 levels of
UCS-2, only one of which excludes "combining characters" (really code points).
[http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=%...](http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.aix.nls%2Fdoc%2Fnlsgdrf%2Fiso10646_ucs-2.htm)
If you have combining characters, then you can't simply take the number of
bytes and divide by 2 to get the number of letters. If you don't have
combining characters, then you have something which isn't terribly useful
except for European languages (I think?)
Maybe someone more familiar with the implementation can describe which path
they actually went down for this... given what I've heard so far, I'm not
optimistic.
~~~
pbiggar
OK, I cracked into the V8 source to take a look at what actually happens. It
looks like the implementation does use random access for two-byte strings.
However, it also uses multiple multiple string implementations (ASCII, 2 byte
strings, "consString" (I presume some kind of Rope), "Sliced Strings" (sounds
like a rope again, but might be shared storage of the string contents for
immutable strings)), so they could likely use other implementations with
whatever properties they choose.
See
[https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b2...](https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b27f6ae2fa8f/src/objects-
inl.h#L2469) and
[https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b2...](https://github.com/v8/v8/blob/3ff861bbbb62a6c0078e042d8077b27f6ae2fa8f/src/objects-
inl.h#L2555).
~~~
cmccabe
Ugh, I just realized this whole article is a farce. v8 added UTF-16 support
earlier this year. Its support for non-BMP code points is now on par with java
(although it has many of the same limitations)
------
languagehacker
We seem to be seeing this more and more with Node-based applications. It's a
symptom of the platform being too immature. This is why you shouldn't adopt
these sorts of stacks unless there's some feature they provide that none of
the more mature stacks support yet. And even then, you should probably ask
yourself if you really need that feature.
~~~
fusiongyro
According to Cogito, this was fixed in March:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834731>
I want to agree with you simply because I don't like Node, but it's hardly
fair to damn something over a bug that was fixed 9 months ago.
------
freedrull
Why on earth would the people who wrote V8 use UCS-2? What about alternative
JS runtimes?
~~~
marshray
Because Unicode was sold to the world's software developers as a fixed-width
encoding claiming 16 bits would be all we'd ever need.
~~~
dmethvin
Yes, and several C/C++ conventions and types seemed to make that a safe
choice, for example wchar_t. Let's face it, collectively we really screwed
this one up. It's the biggest mistake since Microsoft chose the backslash as a
path separator in DOS 2.0.
~~~
magic_haze
It was actually IBM's fault: they used '/' to denote CLI args in the apps they
wrote for DOS 1.0, which didn't have any concept of directories. From Larry
Osterman's blog [1]:
> Here's a little known secret about MS-DOS. The DOS developers weren't
> particularly happy about this state of affairs - heck, they all used Xenix
> machines for email and stuff, so they were familiar with the *nix command
> semantics. So they coded the OS to accept either "/" or "\" character as the
> path character (this continues today, btw - try typing "notepad c:/boot.ini"
> on an XP machine (if you're an admin)). And they went one step further. They
> added an undocumented system call to change the switch character. And
> updated the utilities to respect this flag.
[1]
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx)
~~~
dmethvin
Larry has that wrong, IBM wasn't to blame.
IBM licensed DOS from Microsoft. Microsoft bought DOS from Seattle Computer
Products QDOS. That software got its command line switches using "/" from CP/M
for compatibility reasons; originally, both CP/M and MS-DOS were available for
the IBM PC.
CP/M borrowed the convention primarily from RT-11, the OS for the PDP-11,
although it wasn't consistently followed there. Programs on RT-11 were
responsible for parsing their own command line args, and not all of them used
the same convention.
Inside Windows itself, most APIs accept either forward or backward slashes in
paths (even both in the same path) without any special incantation. The
problem is mainly at the application level where the whole forward/backward
slash thing gets messed up because technically you should accept either one
from user input and most app code expects one or the other.
------
eps
They control their clients, so they could've just re-encoded emojies with
custom 16bit escaping scheme, make the backend transparently relay it over in
escaped form and decode it back to 17bits at the other end.
Or am I missing something obviuos here?
------
kstenerud
Small nitpick, but Objective-C does not require a particular string encoding
internally. In Mac OS and iOS, NSString uses one of the cfinfo flags to
specify whether the internal representation is UTF-16 or ASCII (as a space-
saving mechanism).
------
dgreensp
The specific problems the author describes don't seem to be present today;
perhaps they were fixed. That's not to say this conversions aren't a source of
issues, just that I don't see any show-stopper problems currently in Node, V8,
or JavaScript.
In JavaScript, a string is a series of UTF-16 code units, so the smiley face
is written '\ud83d\ude04'. This string has length 2, not 1, and behaves like a
length-2 string as far as regexes, etc., which is too bad. But even though you
don't get the character-counting APIs you might want, the JavaScript engine
knows this is a surrogate pair and represents a single code point (character).
(It just doesn't do much with this knowledge.)
You can assign '\ud83d\ude04' to document.body.innerHTML in modern Chrome,
Firefox, or Safari. In Safari you get a nice Emoji; in stock Chrome and
Firefox, you don't, but the empty space is selectable and even copy-and-
pastable as a smiley! So the character is actually there, it just doesn't
render as a smiley.
The bug that may have been present in V8 or Node is: what happens if you take
this length-2 string and write it to a UTF8 buffer, does it get translated
correctly? Today, it does.
What if you put the smiley directly into a string literal in JS source code,
not \u-escaped? Does that work? Yes, in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
~~~
jruderman
The invisible smiley was a font system problem, fixed in Firefox 19 Aurora
(assuming you're on Mac).
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=715798>
------
dale-cooper
The UCS-2 heritage is kind of annoying. In java for example, chars (the
primitive type, which the Character class just wraps) are 16 bits. So one
instance of a Character may not be a full "character" but rather a part of a
surrogate pair. This creates a small gotcha where the length of a string might
not be the same as the amount of characters it has. And that you just cant
split/splice a Character array naively (because you might split it at a
surrogate pair).
~~~
masklinn
Which, at the end of the day, doesn't really matter since a code point is not
a "character" in the sense of "the smallest unit of writing" (as interpreted
by an end-user): many "characters" may (depending on the normalization form)
or will (jamo) span multiple codepoints. Splitting on a character array is
always broken, regardless of surrogate pairs.
~~~
dale-cooper
Yes. What i'm saying is that it would feel less error prone if the character
object was actually a codepoint. It's a leaky abstraction, you shouldn't need
to handle something that is tied to the internal representation of strings in
the jvm. Can one "character" span multiple codepoints? Do you have an example
of this?
~~~
masklinn
> It's a leaky abstraction, you shouldn't need to handle something that is
> tied to the internal representation of strings in the jvm.
And I'm saying it doesn't really matter, because unicode codepoints are
already a form of "leaky abstraction" which you'll have to handle (in that a
read/written "character" does not correspond 1:1 to a codepoint anyway).
Unicode is a tentative standardization of historical human production, and if
you expect _that_ to end up clean and simple you're going to have a hard time.
> Can one "character" span multiple codepoints?
Yes.
> Do you have an example of this?
Devanagari (the script used for e.g. Sanskrit) is full of them. For instance,
"sanskrit" is written "संस्कृतम्" [sə̃skɹ̩t̪əm]. If you try to select
"characters" in your browser you might get 4 (सं, स्कृ, त and म्) or 5 (सं,
स्, कृ, त and म्) or maybe yet another different count, but this is a sequence
of _9_ codepoints (regardless of the normalization, it's the same in all of
NFC, NFD, NFKC and NFKD as far as I can tell):
स: DEVANAGARI LETTER SA
ं: DEVANAGARI SIGN ANUSVARA
स: DEVANAGARI LETTER SA
्: DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA
क: DEVANAGARI LETTER KA
ृ: DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC R
त: DEVANAGARI LETTER TA
म: DEVANAGARI LETTER MA
्: DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA
Note: I'm not a Sanskrit speaker and I don't actually know devanagari (beyond
knowing that it's troublesome for computers, as are jamo) so I can't even tell
you how many "symbols" a native reader would see there.
~~~
dale-cooper
That's quite interesting, i had no idea! What i was hoping for was some kind
of term for one character or symbol and use that as a unit, but perhaps it's
impossible to create an abstraction like that.
I'm curious if a Sanskrit speaker would see each of the codepoints as a symbol
or not.
Edit: thinking about it, i guess if you asked a Sanskrit speaker how long a
word/sentence was, you'd get the answer..
~~~
masklinn
> What i was hoping for was some kind of term for one character or symbol and
> use that as a unit
There is one, kind-of: "grapheme cluster"[0]. This is the "unit" used by UAX29
to define text segmentation, and aliases to "user-perceived character"[1].
Most languages/API don't really consider them (although they crop up often in
e.g. browser bug trackers), let alone provide first-class access to them. One
of the very few APIs which actually acknowledges them is Cocoa's NSString —
and Apple provides a document explaining grapheme clusters and how they relate
to NNString[2] — which has very good unicode support (probably the best I know
of, though Factor _may_ have an even better one[3]), and it handles grapheme
clusters through providing messages which work on codepoint ranges in an
NSString, it doesn't treat clusters as first-class objects.
> i guess if you asked a Sanskrit speaker how long a word/sentence was, you'd
> get the answer..
Indeed.
[0] <http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#grapheme_cluster>
[1]
[http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Grapheme_Cluster_Bounda...](http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Grapheme_Cluster_Boundaries)
[2]
[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Strings/Articles/stringsClusters.html)
[3] the original implementor detailed his whole route through creating
factor's unicode library, and I learned a lot from it: <http://useless-
factor.blogspot.be/search/label/unicode>
~~~
dale-cooper
Very interesting, going to read through that guys blog. Thanks for the links!
------
eloisant
Maybe nickpicking but I don't think Softbank came up with the Emoji. Emoji
existed way before Softbank bought the Japanese Vodaphone, and even before
Vodaphone bought J-Phone.
So emoji were probably invented by J-Phone, while Softbank was mostly taking
care of Yahoo Japan.
------
adrianpike
Here's the thread in the v8 bug tracker about this issue:
<http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=761>
Is there a reason that the workaround in comment 8 won't address some of these
issues?
~~~
dgl
I don't think it's needed anymore.
If you read closely you'll see the original linked message is from January and
there's an update on that issue from March when a fix was made in V8.
------
clebio
Somewhat meta, but this would be one where showing subdomain on HN submissions
would be nice. The title is vague enough that I assumed it was something to do
with _Github_ not processing Emoji (which would be sort of a strange state of
affairs...).
~~~
ladon86
Not that strange, Github implements much of the Emoji set using different
shortcuts, see the reference here:
<http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/>
Before I read the article I guessed that maybe the icon set had some licensing
issues for Github. Luckily, not so! (:smiley:)
~~~
clebio
That was basically my point. It would be strange if they _stopped_ processing
it.
------
pla3rhat3r
I love this article. So often it has been difficult to explain to people why
one set of characters can work while others will not. This lays out some great
historical info that will be helpful going forward.
------
cjensen
UCS-16 is only used by programs which jumped the gun and implemented Unicode
before it was all done. (It was 16 bits for awhile with Asian languages
sharing code points so that the font in use determined whether the text was
displayed as Chinese vs Japanese vs. etc). What Century was V8 written in that
they thought UCS-16 was an acceptable thing to implement?
Good rule of thumb for implementers: get over it and use 32 bits internally.
Always use UTF-8 when encoding into a byte stream. Add UTF-16 encoding if you
must interface with archaic libraries.
~~~
masklinn
> UCS-16 is only used by programs which jumped the gun and implemented Unicode
> before it was all done.
There's no such thing as "all done", Unicode 1.0 was 16 bit, Unicode 6 was
released recently.
------
evincarofautumn
Failures in Unicode support seem usually to result from the standard’s
persistently shortsighted design—well intentioned and carefully considered
though it undoubtedly is. It’s a “good enough” solution to a very difficult
problem, but I wonder if we won’t see Unicode supplanted in the next decade.
All that aside: emoji should not be in Unicode. Fullstop.
------
FredericJ
How about this npm module : <https://npmjs.org/package/emoji> ?
------
xn
Here's the message decoded from quoted-printable:
<https://gist.github.com/4151707#file_emoji_sad_decoded.txt>
------
mranney
Note that this message is almost a year old now. The issue has been addressed
by the node and V8 teams.
------
shocks
Very informative, great read. Thanks!
------
alexbosworth
Fixed a good while ago for node.js
------
masklinn
Wow, the first half of the text is basically full of crap and claims which
don't even remotely match reality, and now I'm reaching the technical section
which can only get even more wrong.
~~~
masklinn
To whoever the downvoter was: no, seriously. For instance in the first few
paragraphs:
* emoji were invented by NTT DoCoMo, not Softbank
* even if that had been right Softbank's copyrighting of their emoji _representations_ has no bearing on NTT and KDDI/au using completely different implementations (and I do mean completely, KDDI/au essentially use <img> tags)
* lack of cooperation is endemic to japanese markets (especially telecoms) and has nothing to do with "ganging up"
* if NTT and au/KDDI wanted to gang up on Softbank you'd think they'd share the same emoji
* you didn't _have_ to run "adware apps" to unlock the emoji keyboard (there were numerous ways to do so from dedicated — and usually quickly nuked – apps to apps "easter eggs" to jailbreak to phone backup edit/restore)
That's barely the first third.
------
sneak
TLDR: node sucks
~~~
tptacek
It's v8's fault, and v8 does not suck.
~~~
prodigal_erik
Unicode 2.0 added surrogate pairs in 1996. Unfortunately, the first versions
of both Java and JavaScript predated this and got strings horribly wrong, and
now any conforming implementation of either is required to suck. The Right
Thing would be for almost everyone to work with only combining character
sequences, except for a rare few who need to know how to dissect one into its
codepoints and reassemble them correctly (just as people don't normally need
to extract high or low bits from an ASCII character).
~~~
jrabone
No. Combining characters and NF(K)C/D normalisation rules are a different
problem entirely - consider the "heavy metal umlaut" (ie. Spın̈al Tap) where
there is no lossless conversion possible - only “n" followed by U+0308
~~~
prodigal_erik
They're facets of the same problem. I shouldn't routinely be dealing with
either surrogates or combining marks; unless I have a specific reason, it's
only an opportunity to make a mistake that hardly anyone knows how to
troubleshoot. "n̈" should be an indivisible string of length one until I need
to ask how it would actually be encoded in UTF-16 or whatever.
~~~
jrabone
But that's the point - there is no such character. Given the Unicode
consortium have added codepoints for every other bloody thing under the sun,
I'm amazed that there isn't one for n-diaresis but there you are.
Add a small number of people who for artistic reasons decide that they want to
make life hard (Rinôçérôse I'm looking at you) and you just have to accept
that the length of your string might not equal the number of codepoints
contained therein...
------
csense
A two-character sequence for a smiley face that should be compatible with
everything in existence:
:)
Problem solved. Why is this front page material (#6 as of this writing)?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Can I do a POC at my current employer and then start my own company - throwaway236893
I work for an insurance company. I have an idea for a product that might be very valuable to other insurance companies. I am thinking about proposing a POC to my manager to implement this solution. If I do this and it is successful, would there be issues if I decide to leave to create a startup based around my idea?<p>My employment agreement does not include a non-compete, although there is a conflict of interest clause.<p>Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
======
greenyoda
If your employer wants to move ahead with the project you start, there would
definitely be a conflict of interest if you left to develop the same product
on your own. You'd also have the issue of potentially using trade secrets from
your employer.
In any case, if you get sued by a large company with lots of lawyers, your
business will probably die even if the lawsuit has no merit - you could be
bankrupted by your legal fees before the case ever reaches trial.
Also, unless your manager is the CEO or CFO, they're probably not authorized
to negotiate deals like this for the company. They'd have to get your proposal
approved at the highest levels.
As with all legal matters, you need to consult an attorney who practices in
your state, and you need to do that before you make any contact with your
employer on this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Placebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves - prat
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17993-placebo-effect-caught-in-the-act-in-spinal-nerves.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
======
josefresco
I recently read an article (or maybe it was 60 min) that highlighted the
distressing (to drug makers) increase in placebo effectiveness over the last
couple decades. Big pharma's best drugs are now having trouble beating out
placebos. Anyone have the source?
~~~
gambling8nt
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912> was a Wired article on that topic
on HN two months ago; perhaps that's what you are remembering?
------
prat
I recently watched an episode of house (medical TV show) in which house used
the (probably) well known mirror box method to relieve pain in the phantom
limb of an amputee. That just reinforces the possibility that pain may be more
of a psychosomatic symptom than we think.
This is from Wikipedia article for phantom limb
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb>
"One particularly novel treatment for phantom limb pain is the mirror box
developed by Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues (Ramachandran, Rogers-
Ramachandran & Cobb 1995). Through the use of artificial visual feedback it
becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and to unclench
it from potentially painful positions. Repeated training in some subjects has
led to long-term improvement, and in one exceptional case, even to the
complete elimination of the phantom limb between the hand and the shoulder (so
that the phantom hand was dangling from the shoulder)."
~~~
sp332
Ramachandran gave an excellent TED talk, including detailed analysis of the
mirror box.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind...](http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html)
------
zackattack
Pharmaceutical companies have big financial incentives to keep this kind of
information out of the public consciousness.
~~~
JabavuAdams
Not really. Placebos are cheap to make, and require the user to believe --
i.e. benefit from marketing.
In our society, I could see the following: the $10 sexily-marketed placebo
pill / treatment must be better than the $2 knock-off, so people buy the $10
pill. Okay, they likely won't be buying $50k / year treatments, but all of a
sudden the meds only cost cents to produce.
Pharma => Apple
~~~
Semiapies
Or, you know, they could exploit the actual pain-killing mechanism discussed
in TFA...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple iPhone 6 Plus Bent By Teenagers At Apple Store - hack4supper
http://metro.co.uk/2014/09/29/teenagers-film-themselves-bendin-iphone-6-plus-devices-at-apple-store-4885728/
======
hack4supper
Here is the link to the actual video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9U-NmsgCO8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9U-NmsgCO8)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you price a product when in a market for custom-built s/w - digital_ins
We're trying to play in the world of custom software for natural language processing. In one single line: we provide an API that will allow a business to voice-enable their apps: Like a conversational, domain-expert Siri for their business.<p>But we're struggling with understanding how to price. Some have suggested the TAM (time & materials) model, and we've read most of the software pricing material there is out there. Others have suggested benchmarking ourselves against competitors, but this is tough because competitors are too nascent (as a result, there's very little publicly [and legally] discoverable data). :-(<p>We've just started b2b outreach and are very afraid that if we price too low, we will lose credibility re our tech (and it really is cutting-edge stuff we've built).<p>How would you go about thinking about this problem?
======
ddingus
What is it worth to them?
If you have very little to work on, then most all of your value perception
will be in the eyes of your prospects.
Have you segmented your prospects yet? Who are the targets, and what are they
all about?
Go and case study with a few of them. Present the use case and planned
functionality along with what benefits you see.
Then ask them to model what those mean. They will have some risks and costs on
their end too. How do they weigh all of that?
Once you have a good idea of what return they may get, you can price on that
and actually have some meaningful basis for your pricing, depending on the
level of investment required on their end to really get the benefit.
And be up front with a friendly prospect or two. What would they pay?
They won't really know, and neither do you. Make the mutual investment to find
out and use early access, some input on the technology, etc... as an
investment on your part to encourage them to do the same.
Secondly, doing this means really understanding what they are about and how
they make their money. Each rough segment will have it's own dynamics, and
ideally you find there are some common ones.
------
pandaFish
Pick an overly high price, and if you run into resistance, work your way down.
Position yourselves as being "in beta", with a successful customer(even if
it's your team). Start at $10k, and do everything you can to get the your
customer to be successful.
If people object to the price, respond with the value your product, not
discounts.
The more people pay for something, the more they are going to like what they
bought, and the more likely they are to use the service.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Open Web Application Security Project - sharemywin
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page
======
eterm
I found their top 10 really approachable. Of course I knew some of the more
common things such as SQL-injection and knew of other things but didn't know
their name such as CSRF.
It was great to formalise independent knowledge into a common language I could
discuss with colleagues, and the examples were things you could take straight
from the PDF to the workplace. I don't work in infosec and it really helps to
have clear guidance to give to less security minded people to say not just
that it really _is_ bad if people can inject javascript or cause arbitrary
redirects or make arbitary requests from the server, but to give clear
indication of how bad relative to each other.
It also gives some ideas for how to find issues which is of use for anyone
hoping to bag a bug bounty, although there are some more useful resources now
for that such as Yaworski's "Web Hacking 101" [1] which should also be
essential reading for any web developers who don't quite understand _that
security stuff_ well enough to find bug bounties but still want to keep aware
of the kind of ways their platforms may fall prey to security bugs.
Getting back to the top 10, I look forward to it's release this year. It is
important to keep up with changing trends in web application security. The
release candidate notes that CSRF has dropped because frameworks now include
csrf protection configured in the defaults, in part because of the work that
groups such as OWASP do.
If you work in web application development you owe it to everyone else to get
a cursory education in web application security. If you are not doing that you
are an externality cost that everyone else has to bear.
[1] [https://leanpub.com/web-hacking-101](https://leanpub.com/web-hacking-101)
(It was available free from hacker one for a while, I'm not sure if they still
run that offer.)
------
sharemywin
Someone in another thread mentioned this and found it interesting. Never heard
of it before.
[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2017-Top_10](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2017-Top_10)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Amar Bhide "In Praise of More Primitve Finance" - skmurphy
http://www.bhide.net/financial_crisis_2008/bhide_praise_of_primitive_finance.pdf
======
skmurphy
Core Proposal:
Let’s revive the radical idea of narrow banking and tightly limit what banks
(and any other entities that raise short term deposits from the public) can
do: nothing besides making loans--after old-fashioned due diligence--and
simple hedging transactions. The standard would simply be whether the loan can
be monitored by bankers and examiners who do not have PhDs in finance.
Anyone else: investment banks, hedge funds, trusts and the like can innovate
and speculate to the utmost, free of any additional oversight. But, they would
not be allowed to trade with or secure credit from regulated banks, except
through prudent loans whose collateral and terms can be monitored by run of-
the-mill bankers and examiners.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I'm Skeptical of Lean Startup Methodology - zabramow
https://medium.com/project-365/im-skeptical-of-all-lean-startup-methodology-a67fb5a937dc
======
zabramow
I've never heard people who advocate lean startup not qualify their
endorsement with, "Now, I don't advocate EVERYTHING that lean startups
preaches."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What Happened to Big Data? - mcknz
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/10/what_happened_to_big_data.html
======
miobrien
Is it me or do other people agree that Slate's headlines just keep getting
more clickbaity?
~~~
taheca
yeah.. honestly I got half way through the article and just closed it and came
here to see the comments.
hopefully we can get some bright minds to weigh in on this because all I got
out of this article is that the person who wrote it is focused on the net
results with no clue whatsoever into all the work that is needed on the back
end of "big data".
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Writing Space Invaders in Go - sausheong
https://sausheong.github.io/posts/space-invaders-with-go/
======
indescions_2018
Great stuff! But I actually think implementing Space Invaders is much easier
if done as a true "bitmap". An array of bits in memory. Rather than a sprite
sheet.
Animation is just flipping the bottom rows. Collision detection is pixel
precise. Rendering effects can also be optimized.
But the draw to bash shell looks like its running at high frame rate. Could
this usher in a new dawn of terminal gaming?
~~~
sausheong
You're probably right, I'm just mucking around with various things, didn't
really thought too much about optimizing the code. The frame rate on the
terminal is basically as fast as iTerm2 can display the image, I can't really
control it (except maybe make it slower). It looks rather fast on the GIF
because I cut down the number of frames in the GIF, but the actual game runs
more reasonably.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
India-US panel: Access to medicines may be under threat - giis
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/450341/india-us-panel-access-medicines.html
======
known
80% raw materials for medicines are imported from China
[http://m.bbc.com/news/business-30330898](http://m.bbc.com/news/business-30330898)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Building enterprise focused startups that dont suck - satyamag
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/10/building-an-enterprise-software-company-that-doesnt-suck/
======
AlexBlom
Agreed, the author misses some very important points. Regardless of adoption,
quite often the buyer is not the user, and the user is very rarely the early
adopter.
There is nothing wrong with serving all audiences, and creating software that
doesn't suck (in fact, you should), but with poor sales teams, presentations
and RFP's you will struggle for adoption in enterprise, period.
Hacker Centric cultures are huge and are very important imo, but it remains
key to understand the increased weight on a strong Business Development team
in enterprise.
Dealing with enterprise is not easy. Generally speaking, whatever software you
are selling is displacing something else (even if that displacement is
administrative assistants). Thus there is a high degree of complexity, process
changes etc. that change how the game must be played vs. B2C
------
ap22213
I don't think the author understands the dynamics of the enterprise market.
The companies mentioned in the article are definitely not the rule, and I
don't see a trend here. I'm guessing that those companies don't have wide
adoption across the largest of companies either.
First, the person with the purse is not usually the end-user. Therefore,
features, capabilities lists and slide decks are generally more valuable than
product design.
Second, the person with the purse is not usually the bringer of new tech. The
decision-maker isn't usually the company's earlier adopter. Large companies
select and condition for certain types of people to fit certain molds. That
person typically has had, "pick your battles carefully" drilled into them, and
they tend to avoid making unnecessary risks.
Third, companies only begin to change when they're under pressure, and at that
point, their internal software systems aren't usually their primary focus.
Large companies only make big changes in software when they see others
succeeding at it, when it's mandated, when the ROI is obvious, when the
employees are uprising over it, or finally, when they want to seem the
industry vanguard.
Fourth, FUD still rules in the enterprise. It's much easier to fall back on
the tried-and-true than to take a risk with uncertain results. And, if the
tried-and-true comes from the 'best thinkers around' (e.g. the high-end
academics and other big company employees), they're easily adopted. Try to see
how hard it is to get a REST API adopted in the enterprise, and you'll
understand.
Fifth, enterprise procurement can be dominated by RFP processes that generally
tends to favor big lists of things other than usability and openness.
Sometimes it's who is the cheapest. Other times, it is who is most secure. Or,
who is the most reliable. It's rarely which product is the most well-designed.
Sixth, enterprises are _extremely_ process driven and have custom workflows
for everything. The employees are very attached to those workflows. It usually
takes a team of fast-talking consultants to piece together a Frankenstein
monster system from available APIs to get those workflows to work. It's better
to change the workflows at the beginning, but that rarely happens (then you
have training issues, which is a whole other issue).
We will only see better designed enterprise software when the small companies
that are using them now become big companies and have that mindset written
into their corporate principles list.
~~~
qq66
The author's company has at least $10m in revenues.
------
mgkimsal
As with others, I think the author is missing some things.
With most of the SaaS 'enterprise' systems out there, you're often not
replacing anything up front, but early adopters are free to try some parts of
a service, demonstrate ROI, then angle for a wider rollout. This is the
opposite of most traditional "enterprise" software evaluation/deployment
cycles.
The ability for individuals or departments at companies to use bits and pieces
of services (imagine one dept at 'bigco' using box.net, for example) is what
gives these SaaS players any chance at all of getting their foot in the door,
and it's a good strategy. It's far less about 'sucking' from a 'checkbox
feature list' standpoint, and more about grassroots adoption.
Years ago I was on a team that developed an LMS for a distance learning
institution. It checked off quite a lot of feature-list checkboxes - had far
more features than most other open source packages out there at the time -
but... it was a top-down system, designed _solely_ to be used by all levels at
a school org. It fit that institution just fine, but for anyone else to try to
adopt it at their school, was just too difficult. We could have tried to do
long sales cycles to other institutions, but didn't (for a lot of reasons).
Moodle was being released around the same time, and while we had far more
features that teachers wanted, Moodle was something any teacher could install
and use just for their own classroom, without any external dependencies.
History has shown that Moodle's really taken off - it got a lot of early
adopter support from people who wanted/needed it, but didn't have the ability
to affect change in their whole enterprise.
------
purephase
This article resonates with me particularly strongly right now. I'm knee-deep
in an ERP implementation and, on all fronts (costs, software capabilities,
end-user satisfaction), the author hits the nail on the head.
I've been uncomfortable throughout the implementation believing that, in 2011,
there must be a better way. Kudos to the start-ups and companies fighting for
this space. A lot of money and opportunity.
~~~
mindcrime
It resonates with me as well, as I'm the founder of an enterprise focused
startup. Some of what the author says jibes with the ideas I was already
working on... the point about customer support, in particular. Remaining
engaged with the customer and helping ensure that their use of our software is
successful, will be crucial to our success, IMO.
As for User Experience... I care so much about that, that my first co-founder
is actually a UI/UX person, as opposed to a backend developer or a
bizdev/sales/marketing person. Emphasis on User Experience will be woven deep
into the DNA of the company...
~~~
AlexBlom
I'm working again in enterprise startups, and one of our huge selling points
is the huge difference in UX / UI.
------
Duff
The premise of the article is wrong -- "Creating amazing products, not amazing
RFP responses"
Innovation and "amazing" are concepts completely alien to enterprises,
particularly government. Corporate people have certain motivations, government
people have other motivations. Maybe they need to comply with "strategic
sourcing" procedures. Or funnel all procurement through a procurement group
incentivized to get large % discounts from "list" or "state contract" or "GSA"
pricing. Or maybe they need to run all of the business through some BS
minority/woman/veteran owned company to hit some quota.
RFP responses matter, maybe more than the product.
At the end of the day, if you want to sell to enterprises, you need to know
your way around the market.
~~~
martincmartin
_At the end of the day, if you want to sell to enterprises, you need to know
your way around the market._
This is absolutely true, however, it's also true that you need to create
amazing products. Enterprises are very conservative. There's a lot of "no one
was ever fired for buying IBM" style decision making. An established product
has a huge CYA advantage over entrants. To be more attractive, you need to be
not just a little better, but a lot better.
I work at Endeca, and for our e-commerce search engine, increasing conversion
rates is a huge selling point. Note that I'm in Engineering, so I don't have a
strong handle on the day-to-day operations of the sales team, but there _is_ a
lot of communication between sales, PM and engineering, so I feel I know
enough to comment.
~~~
Duff
Usually smaller or companies entering a new market influence a VAR or
enterprise vendor who have a gap in their portfolio.
If you're a services company, it's essential -- you basically subcontract
through the "mother" vendor's contract.
Cisco is doing this with their blade servers. They partner with EMC and
NetApp, especially at entrenched IBM/HP customers where vertically integrated
vendors like EMC are at a disadvantage.
------
baran
IMHO, the "bottom-up" approach is the game-changer in the enterprise market.
With the freemium model, software can be basically given to the user; then,
ASSUMING you have a strong product, that person will become your promoter
within the organization. Get to the CIO through that user, if they are not
enough keep building critical mass. Eventually the CIO will listen.
Right now, the enterprise has mis-alignment with the buyer and the user.
Whatever can be done to bring that into proper alignment will in the end
benefit the user.
------
Maro
This article is bullshit. It suggests the Enterprise Software and its
associated Sales can be fixed by changing the vendor's behaviour. But
historically vendors became the way they are because of their large, slow,
complex inefficient clients.
Also, open source is not a game changer. Proof: it's been around a while, and
nothing's changed. It's just a new checkbox ("feature") that the client
demands. Sure open source is great, but I know from experience that it doesn't
fundamentally affect this situation.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc’s Collapse - steven
https://backchannel.com/the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-bizarre-collapse-a0766a5442d7#---199-286.jihd0r4lo
======
conradev
I wish BitTorrent Live was made open source. There are a number of companies
working on "P2P CDNs" for live streaming[1][2][3], but all of their work is
proprietary. The companies' sales pitches are usually around efficiency: it
allows providers to pay for less CDN capacity.
I'm more interested in the decentralization aspect. It makes live streams hard
to censor and easy to distribute.
The closest open source equivalent we have is PPSPP (Peer-to-Peer Streaming
Peer Protocol), or RFC 7574[4]. Unfortunately, the reference implementation,
libswift[5], was seemingly abandoned a few years ago. In addition, PPSPP only
deals with a stream of bytes, and while it was made with video in mind there
is no implementation that handles video well: making different swarms for
different quality levels, intelligent chunking, perhaps even deterministic
encoding[6].
[1] [https://www.peer5.com](https://www.peer5.com)
[2] [https://viblast.com/pdn/](https://viblast.com/pdn/)
[3] [https://www.streamroot.io](https://www.streamroot.io)
[4] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574)
[5]
[https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO](https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO)
[6]
[http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf](http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf)
~~~
hackerboos
It's not just P2P-CDNs it's all live streaming video, HLS and MPEG-DASH. Open
source tools for these technologies are sparse.
Even good HTML5 players that match YouTube's feature set are few and far
between.
Bitorrent Live is excellent btw. One of the best performing video apps on iOS.
~~~
_sieh
I think this may be because:
\- Doing adaptive bitrate like YouTube does means doing many transcodes.
\- Transcoding is either extremely CPU intensive, bandwidth heavy or low
quality.
\- Transcoding in realtime requires further compromise on the above, to the
point where distributing the transcode over multiple machines is necessary.
\- There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon, browser supported protocol for
live DASH. Static is easy enough but live is more difficult, especially when
you add seeking, pausing etc.
\- The above means you need both a backend and a frontend system.
\- Running a system like this is very expensive. The entities interested in
running it and able to do so are usually willing to pay for it.
All this said, Emby[0] can stream a transcode and perhaps its stack would be a
good place to start.
[0]: [https://emby.media](https://emby.media)
------
empath75
Bittorrent is an amazing protocol, but it seemed like creating a 'Bittorrent'
company is like trying to start an "Http" company.
~~~
api
They should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built
a killer product around that.
~~~
orasis
Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for.
By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people
don't want to pay.
~~~
zigzigzag
Yeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant,
so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes
sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you
look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional
CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.
~~~
icebraining
_BitTorrent is a shit way to move files_
How so? As far as I know it's actually pretty efficient.
_If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it 's all
professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy._
And when the first CDN appeared, they were also hardly used. That approach
would disqualify any business except copycats.
~~~
StavrosK
Not only efficient, but also supports file integrity, resuming,
parallelization, etc. It's a fantastic protocol.
~~~
abricot
Exactly - I live in an area where lots of people have 50+ Mb symmetric
connections, and BitTorrent gave us all a dream that we could all use those
connections without everything having to be transferred over the backbone.
------
swang
so let me get this straight:
receive controlling interest of a company with $33million in cash reserves by
using a $10million promisory note to gain shares.
proceed to spend $18million in cash, some of which is spent to pay your
buddies.
when time comes to pay $10million promisory note, shrug your shoulders, and no
actual penalties are involved for not paying up.
am i missing something? sounds like a great scam.
~~~
rasz_pl
how does buying 500Mil chain of stores with its own cash reserves sound to you
then?
[https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-
grea...](https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-
private-equity-heist-of-all-time/)
~~~
will_hughes
For those not aware of the current situation: Dick Smith Electronics went
bankrupt about 12 months after this article.
They were like the Tandy or Radioshack of Australia at first, and followed a
similar path - killing off their electronics hobbyist roots, and became pretty
much a generic consumer electronics store.
------
a_brawling_boo
One good thing that came out of the disappointment of bittorrent inc is the
open source syncthing which I believe was inspired by bittorrent sync's
failings.
~~~
m-p-3
I'm glad it exists, but it's definitely not as intuitive to set up.
~~~
btgeekboy
I wish they would improve the story around the official distributions.
I'm attempting to migrate away from an aging, single user, files-only OwnCloud
instance to Syncthing, and the end user client is not nearly as painless.
Syncthing distributes CLI binaries for a bunch of platforms, which is great.
But there's no unified GUI for end users that's officially sanctioned.
Instead, there's a bunch of 3rd party repos that one hopes they can trust.
And, glaringly, zero iOS clients. (I'm working around this by adding a WebDAV
server to my always-on system, but it's a workaround for sure.)
------
NelsonMinar
What a crazy twist for a startup that was doomed from the start. But the
article doesn't really do a good job explaining how Johnson and Delamar were
given control of the company. I get that Accel wanted out, but why just hand
it over to a couple of bros with a plausible plan? I feel like there had to be
deeper relationships involved, or else one hell of a pitch deck.
~~~
loader
Whenever I read stories that involve guys like these that come in swinging and
think they can change things and end up just spending everyone's money, I've
always wanted to label this behavior and you got me thinking ...
"Broxecutives".
~~~
jungletek
CE-BROS?
------
WorldMaker
I had been wondering a bit about the reason for the BitTorrent / Resilio split
and this article did a decent job painting some of the picture.
------
discardorama
For some reason, this reminded me of "Pied Piper" of "Silicon Valley" fame.
~~~
touristtam
Pretty much. Let's hope the next season doesn't develop in such a dreaful way.
------
Scaevolus
I wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale
of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell?
Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from
Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They've all invested tens of billions
in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to
recoup the costs.
~~~
wmf
The economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically
simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want
transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.
~~~
lucasgonze
As former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that
transcoding is a big deal.
Streaming bandwidth _is_ super pricey, and the money is enough to really
matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses.
Bittorrent Live gets that right.
However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own
format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this.
Check out Zencoder for the real competition.
Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at
all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat,
and, uh, questionable copyright.
~~~
wmf
Twitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become
the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming.
On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this
thread.
~~~
evgen
Lucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...
------
riter
I used to know and work with Delamar at a startup but for the music industry
and ringtones... also, with similar concluding results. SMH.
------
newscracker
BitTorrent was, and is still, remarkable technology. Not focusing on the
ethics and costs of piracy (that affects one part of what BitTorrent is used
for), it has helped all kinds of content (entertainment and otherwise) have a
massive reach globally (and across country borders) like nothing else has. I
only feel sad for Bram Cohen in this whole series of events, and more so
considering his condition (Asperger's syndrome) and how much he would've just
put up with (in silent frustration) while others ran the show. In this
article, I was surprised to see no mention of uTorrent, the BitTorrent client,
and how it changed from the time it was bought by BitTorrent, Inc.
P.S.: Off topic, but I dislike these Medium hosted sites with large blurry
images on page load that come into focus later.
------
wnevets
Weren't they the ones to buy the beloved uTorrent client and ruined it with
adware?
------
vcool07
I think it would've worked if they had started off in a SAAS model, like, pay
$1 for exchanging 1GB of data, $10 for 10GB of data and so on. At the time it
launched there was still requirement for moving data across sites , but no
reliable way. For ex: most software/trailware/shareware came in CD ROMS
bundled in magazines !
------
shmerl
Kind of a similar story happened to Diaspora Inc. It didn't manage to become a
product or a company. But technology was good and open and it lives on today.
------
mr_spothawk
bt television is sorta sweet.
~~~
mr_spothawk
what the hell is "one America news"?
------
LeoPanthera
Very clickbaity title. This refers to BitTorrent Inc, the company, not the
file sharing protocol.
~~~
draw_down
Well, that's probably why it says "BitTorrent Inc" in the title?
~~~
kbrackbill
The original title was "Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent failed"
------
fieryskiff
Meta, but did backchannel change the title, or did the submitter? It seems
like a weird editorilization, from the current "The Inside Story of
BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse".
"Unbelievable story of..." feels very click-bait to me.
~~~
grzm
Backchannel could have changed the title, wouldn't be the first time a title's
been changed somwhere. The URI includes "the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-
bizarre-collapse" which makes me believe otherwise however, unless they've
been flip-flopping the title, or A/B testing.
------
orasis
BitTorrent Inc was ethically shady from day one. Call me old-fashioned, but
the investors got what they deserved by trying to profit off of piracy while
pretending to be legitimate.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
OCaml Resources (2006) - laex
http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/ocaml-class/home.html
======
implicit
OCaml/js_of_ocaml is presently my favourite AltJS stack.
OCaml syntax is super idiosyncratic and doesn't resemble anything, but, once
you retrain your eyes, the underlying semantics are terrific.
js_of_ocaml imposes very minimal code overhead (6k-ish). Sourcemaps work
great, and OCaml values are mapped into JS in a very straightforward way. You
can read them in a JS debugger.
Ocsigen's lwt library is also the best "callback hell" solution I've found.
~~~
lindig
Could you recommend a project to look at? I'm familiar with OCaml but found
Ocsigen as a whole impenetrable and would be interested in something more
library than framework.
~~~
mercurial
You have opium [1], which is considerably lighter and more traditional (no
Eliom stuff).
1: [https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium](https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium)
~~~
rgrinberg
I think the GP wanted something with js_of_ocaml. Nevertheless, as the author
of Opium, I am grateful for your recommendation :)
------
eatonphil
I started writing OCaml in college after hearing a talk by Jane Street [0],
one of the most outspoken corporate supporters of OCaml.
After getting past the steep learning curve (about a weekend of pedal-to-the-
metal debugging), I really got a feel for how beautiful OCaml semantics really
are.
If you're looking for a solid and familiar OCaml stack, check out OWebl [0].
Always looking for helping hands or other support.
[0] - [https://www.janestreet.com/](https://www.janestreet.com/)
[1] - [http://meetowebl.com](http://meetowebl.com)
------
pron
There's a very good (and multithreaded!) implementation of OCaml for the JVM:
[http://www.ocamljava.org/](http://www.ocamljava.org/)
~~~
616c
Well, if you are the quasar/pulsar guy I think you are, I will take you up on
your praise then.
And because of my guess, what do you think of the performance?
~~~
pron
I am, and thanks :)
I haven't got to the point of doing any benchmarks, but according to the
author, it is slower than plain OCaml. I've only written a couple of toy
programs (a Swing GUI in OCaml!)
I am, however, very impressed by the implementation. The author wrote an OCaml
library that emits Java bytecode, and then modified the OCaml compiler to emit
bytecode. He then ran the compiler on itself, and got an OCaml implementation
on the JVM written completely in OCaml (plus some runtime classes in Java).
The author, who used to work at INRIA told me he's now working on a startup
using OCaml-Java.
~~~
616c
I also think it is interesting, once I put 2+2 together, you pointed out the
OCaml Java runtime from Xavier is not open source ... yet. It will be, but it
is binary only at this point.[1]
I want to make a joke about the F/L/OSS spirit of this guy, but the whole QPL
thing has been repeated a la Shen in circles where I read and seems to have
left a sour taste in the mouth of some, like this guy.[2]
Still, I am in place to judge OCaml devs or the community around them, as they
seem increasingly awesome. I am a novice, but a CS undergrad in my hood
specifically said check out OCaml when we discussed functional langs because
of the Jane Street videos. And before that, my only expsoure to what OCaml
was, let alone is or even coding it, was the eMule software package.
Anyway, good to see you on the field. If you are paying attention to this, I
certainly will! [1]
[https://github.com/xclerc/ocamljava/issues/22](https://github.com/xclerc/ocamljava/issues/22)
[2]
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/62704](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/62704)
------
jaegerpicker
OCaml is a hard sell for me. I want to really like it but everytime I start to
play with it, I drift back to F#, .net core, service stack, and all the other
open source projects are really hard to compete with. The Syntax is similar to
OCaml (really really close IMO) and other then it's ties to Microsoft it's
seems to be all upside with F#. Is there a compelling lib or advantage of
OCaml over f#?
~~~
tel
Functors tend to be the big thing that's missing, right? F# just had to drop
the feature because of compatibility with .Net packages, as I understand, but
it severely cripples the module system.
MLs are such that the value-level stuff and the module-level stuff are more or
less independent. So you can go a long way just liking the value-level stuff
without really caring about the status of the module-level stuff. But it's
also a pretty big motivator for the design of ML. F# is at least weirdly
missing out here.
~~~
cwyers
Can you provide an example of how functors make Ocaml code different from F#
code in practice?
~~~
tel
Sure. I'm not super familiar with F#, but I can state things which depend upon
functors.
A good example is the Set.Make functor in the OCaml stdlib. Elements in a Set
must be orderable for efficiency's sake, so to construct a Set you
parameterize it over a module specifying not only the type but also its
ordering.
module type Set = sig
module type OrderedType =
sig
type t
val compare : t -> t -> int
end
module type S =
sig
type elt
type t
val empty : t
(* ... *)
end
module Make :
functor (Ord : OrderedType) -> S
with type elt = Ord.t
end
Here the OrderedType module signature represents any type that also has an
ordering. The S signature represents the result signature of calling the Make
functor which is passed any OrderedType-substantiating module and uses it to
construct the (Set.S with type elt = Ord.t) module.
------
more_original
This page is from 2006!
I guess the official homepage [http://ocaml.org](http://ocaml.org) would be
better for up-to-date information.
------
locokoko
I recently looked at OCaml and quite liked it, but I was wondering if there is
any SLIME/Geiser (these are the lisp and scheme IDEs for emacs) equivalent for
it? I know there is tuareg-mode, but as far as I can tell it is not nearly as
convenient as SLIME. Any ideas?
~~~
ufo
I don't know what you are looking for when you compare things to SLIME but I
was quite satisfied with the setup they suggest in realworldocaml:
[https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wiki/Installation-
Ins...](https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wiki/Installation-Instructions)
* OPAM for package management * Utop for a REPL * merlin for autocomplete and type queries * ocp-indent for aotomatic indentation
~~~
unhammer
[https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-user-
setup](https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam-user-setup) tries to make the setup
even easier
------
ricccardo
I've been developing in Haskell for a while and I recently had to learn OCaml
to help TA for a course in my university.
I couldn't shake the feel that I was learning "Haskell Light". No pure/impure
code (I/O, mutable references, exceptions), no monad syntax sugar, less syntax
sugar for pattern matching, much smaller base library, plus surely other
differences that my current level of expertise of Haskell is hiding.
Perhaps the simpler semantics make it easier to translate to js (I know
haskell->js transpilers are very complex and I'm sure lazy evaluation has a
lot to do with it), but in terms of language features, what am I missing in
Haskell that makes you more productive/helps you write clearer code in OCaml?
~~~
ihm
OCaml's module system (and conventions associated with it) give a few
advantages over Haskell.
\- There are good conventions for naming and argument order (and named
arguments!) so I don't have to memorize a bunch of different APIs. This is
made possible by the module system. It could probably be solved in Haskell
with better tooling.
\- Modules allow you to, for lack of a better word, make your code more
modular. Modules are essentially the same thing as what people use objects for
in Java. They let you abstract implementation and program against a particular
interface (i.e., a collection of types and values) easily in a way you can't
really in Haskell.
~~~
ricccardo
Can you give a specific example? If you need abstract interfaces, what's wrong
with Haskell's type classes?
~~~
creichert
OCaml modules have many similar characteristics to Haskell type class[0]. One
of the primary differences being that the Haskell type classes handle
dictionary passing automatically and support ad-hoc polymorphism. This can be
achieved with ML modules but requires bit more labor.
Haskell type classes can make it a bit easier to encode (and infer) interfaces
but assume a single implementation per data type. ML modules do not make this
assumption and support a higher degree of modularity as a result.
Robert Harper has some extremely good writing out there on this topic (and
many more): [https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-
mat...](https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-matter-most/)
[0] - [http://www.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/papers/mtc/main-
long.pdf](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/papers/mtc/main-long.pdf)
------
tejinderss
How does Ocaml compare with F#? Now that .net is open source and supports
multi platforms, is it fair to compare these 2 languages?
~~~
mercurial
OCaml has no corporate support and a limited standard library. It does not
benefit from the larger MS ecosystem. It does not have multicore support (not
until the end of the year if all goes well). On the other hand, it is really
fast, it has some great features (functors, mostly) not found in F#, a really
good package management story, and some great libraries (eg, lwt). It can also
boast of having one of the most developed unikernels out there (mirage) and
can generate sane Javascript via js_of_ocaml.
That said, it's definitely an even harder sell than F# in the corporate space.
------
melling
I can't find the time to learn a language for fun. I need to find a way to
incorporate it into my daily routine. There just aren't enough hours in the
day to play.
Anyway, I've got a couple side projects, one of which is website in Go. How's
OCaml for web development?
I also saw oCaml for iOS but it didn't seem to be up to date:
[http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to-
iphone.html](http://psellos.com/ocaml/compile-to-iphone.html)
~~~
programLyrique
There are ocsigen ([http://ocsigen.org/](http://ocsigen.org/)) and opium
([http://rgrinberg.com/blog/2014/04/04/introducing-
opium/](http://rgrinberg.com/blog/2014/04/04/introducing-opium/)), OWebl
([http://meetowebl.com/](http://meetowebl.com/)), xbreed
([https://github.com/mk270/xbreed](https://github.com/mk270/xbreed)) and maybe
others... See also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235204)
~~~
melling
Yeah, I'm sure there are lots of small projects. Are any widely used that have
matured? I don't want to play with someone's part time project.
~~~
programLyrique
ocsigen is used in production (by Facebook for an internal project, for
instance). There is a more complete list on the website.
------
fithisux
My only skeptikism with OCaml is that OPAM (latest packages) does not work on
windows and does not cooperate with msys2 (lates libraries) or another port
solution like winbuilds.
I have to install msys2 and keep compiling by hand.
Even if a source solution that kept updating even if I had to compile
regularly, would be preferable.
This is my only hesitation.
~~~
avsm
The [email protected] working group has just started this week to
sort this out properly. Now that OPAM itself is fairly mature on
Linux/BSD/MacOSX, we can tackle this properly.
Please do feel free to join the group and give your 2 cents about the
direction that this should take: [http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/wg-
windows](http://lists.ocaml.org/listinfo/wg-windows)
------
dlandis
I did a couple small projects in OCaml and I loved the syntax and style of
programming, but I think there would pretty much always be a better language
choice for a serious project, regardless of what type of program you are
writing. Also, the standard library leaves a lot to be desired and parts of
the ecosystem (e.g. docs, and OPAM) are pretty rough. The standard library has
a lot of gaps so you end up implementing a lot of low-level functions that
will seem tedious and inefficient if you are coming from a more mainstream
language with a rich ecosystem. Using the Jane Street's Core library helps a
little bit but still leaves a lot of gaps. It's still a fun language though,
but I don't think there would be a compelling reason to choose it nowadays for
a new project.
~~~
mwcampbell
> there would pretty much always be a better language choice for a serious
> project
The Mirage library OS is a pretty serious project. Facebook also uses OCaml
for Flow and the Hack type checker. And of course, Jane Street Capital uses
OCaml.
But I'm guessing what you mean is that OCaml is a very non-mainstream
language, so it will be rejected for most corporate projects just because it's
so foreign.
~~~
dlandis
> But I'm guessing what you mean is that OCaml is a very non-mainstream
> language, so it will be rejected for most corporate projects just because
> it's so foreign.
Rather than snidely guessing what I meant, why not just read the rest of my
comment or ask for clarification like an adult? Also, I'm not denying there
are a few odd projects here and there that use it successfully -- as well as
Jane Street, of course, who are almost synonymous with OCaml. But like I said,
although it is a very nice (and educational) language, I just don't feel like
it is "best of breed" in any particular area. Not sure what that has to do
"corporate projects", etc.
~~~
mwcampbell
> Rather than snidely guessing what I meant, why not just read the rest of my
> comment or ask for clarification like an adult?
You're right; I'm sorry.
------
lesterpig
I'm studying this language right now at a french school, with INRIA
researcher.
And, well... I'm not really satisfied with it. OCaml produces a small amount
of code, but is really slow and hard to understand. Sometimes, it looks like
obfuscated code!
Documentation and libraries are not polished, and I would recommend Haskell
instead of OCaml. Good for research and some algorithms, bad for applications.
And... God... "This page was last updated on 17 June 2006."
~~~
superboum
Same feeling, and why are they ignoring EVERY programming convention ? One
more thing I really hate is there are many way to the same basic thing, ie.
declaring a new function or doing a pattern matching. Finally, standard
libraries are not well named (List.split will not do what you think) nor easy
to use (List.last ? Nope !).
~~~
implicit
This is very consistently my biggest problem with OCaml: it just doesn't
follow conventions set in other ecosystems. I predict this is the sole reason
it could never be "the next Java."
It's worth noting, however, that I've had very, very few problems with the
semantic properties of the language. I think the slog is worth it for that
reason.
~~~
rbehrends
> This is very consistently my biggest problem with OCaml: it just doesn't
> follow conventions set in other ecosystems.
Well, the reason is that Caml predates those ecosystems; the original Caml was
released nearly a decade before Java [1], and ML itself dates back to the
1970s.
[1]
[http://caml.inria.fr/about/history.en.html](http://caml.inria.fr/about/history.en.html)
~~~
implicit
Right. I mean only to say that OCaml's superficial strangeness is regrettably
offputting.
Talk of syntax is almost always history and religion, not science.
------
jarcane
I was as recently as today quite curious to find that there was an
implementation of Ocaml 2.00 for RISC OS, but alas, it seems to have been lost
to the internet.
------
pjmlp
Caml Light was my introduction to the FP world back in the day. Very nice
experience.
------
m0skit0
404 on some links
------
zak_mc_kracken
This is just a list of resources to learn OCaml, there is nothing about
convincing skeptical people here.
Also, this page is almost ten years old.
Not sure how this kind of post ever makes it to the front page.
~~~
amirmc
Useful/interesting discussions are sometimes reason enough to upvote.
~~~
r0naa
Very good point, most of the time when a post with a "sensationalistic" title
makes it to the front page I immediately go to the comments section first.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ccat – syntax highlighting cat - jingweno
https://github.com/jingweno/ccat
======
mavidser
There's also the "python-pygments" package which provides awesome syntax
highlighting. You can alias it to ccat too:
alias ccat='pygmentize -g'
~~~
a3n
Brilliant!
While I was reading the ccat page I was wishing it was a colorized less,
rather than a colorized cat.
Then I thought to read the man page for less, because sometimes what you want
is already there. And it does handle color, but only if they're escaped
colors. Oh well.
Then I saw your comment, tried pygmentize on a python script, and there's some
nice colored code, that scrolled off the terminal.
Then I piped that into less, just to be grumpy. Yep, it's all white ... but
wait, what are all those escape characters?
...
pygmentize -g myScript.py |less -r
The colors! The colors! And in less, no less.
~~~
gh02t
You can use vimpager instead of less to get highlighting if you want.
~~~
a3n
I usta do that, but there were occasional quirks. But then, I have occasional
quirks and I'm still allowed out of the house.
------
shurcooL
This is pretty cool, and nice demo gif. Thanks for making it!
Honestly, the biggest advantage for me over all other proposed alternatives is
that it's a pure Go binary, so I can just do this:
go get -u github.com/jingweno/ccat
On any of my machines. One predictable command will fetch the source, all
dependencies and build it without any configuration.
I use Go as my primary development language, so I'm more likely to have it
installed than any other tools that are not go-gettable.
------
alfiedotwtf
Not to diminish OP's project, but I pipe most things to vim to get all my
standard highlighting goodness:
cat file_name | vi -
~~~
oops
I do something similar except with "view" aka "vi -R" aka read-only mode.
A couple things I like about "view":
1\. No warning screen when using "view file.c" if you or someone else happens
to have the same file open for editing.
2\. No "unsaved changes" prompt when quitting "view -" (or in other words, no
need to force-quit with :q!)
Edit: Also worth noting is that "view file.c" vs "cat file.c |view -" gives
vim a better chance of getting the syntax highlighting right since it knows
the file extension.
------
tanderson92
alias ccat='supercat'
([http://supercat.nosredna.net/](http://supercat.nosredna.net/))
My dad and I wrote virtually this same tool 8 or 10 years ago. The program
uses arbitrary regular expressions to match and colorize any file you desire
to write a set of rules for. And it ships with some common rules too. This was
before pygmentize was very popular (or around at all).
Those who don't google search are doomed to reinvent..
~~~
hurin
> Those who don't google search are doomed to reinvent..
Not to be critical - but you are also forcing people to reinvent by having a
custom-rule parser, rather than wrapping an existing lexer library.
------
albinoloverats
I've been using source-highlight[1] to achieve the same result.
[edit]: alias ccat="source-highlight --out-format=esc --style-
file=/usr/share/source-highlight/esc.style --failsafe -i "
I'll have to see how this compares.
[1]: [http://www.gnu.org/software/src-
highlite/](http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite/)
------
codychan
Why not use `less` instead of `cat`? Besides it is very easy to use
`pygmentize` and `source-highlight` to get syntax highlighting result.
------
userbinator
Seeing as it also reads multiple files and/or standard input, I am reminded of
this:
[http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/](http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/)
"cat isn't for printing files with line numbers, it isn't for compressing
multiple blank lines, it's not for looking at non-printing ASCII characters,
it's for concatenating files."
Why not make it just a syntax highlighting filter? Or is the "cat"
functionality too trivial to be factored out, and thus it has grown to include
other things? I suppose it's a bit of a philosophical question...
~~~
smorrow
Maybe it's like grep. `grep asterisk` is different from `cat asterisk |grep`,
in that it knows which file it's in and which line number of that file the
match is on.
------
DblPlusUngood
Another solution for machines with vim installed:
vim -u /usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.vim <file>
less.vim makes vim behave like less with syntax highlighting.
~~~
MikeTLive
only two days back i added this alias:
alias vless=/usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh
after finding it on a search for a colorized pager
------
tomweingarten
I'd just hoped someone would make this last week! Only I was hoping it would
be named catfancier:
[https://twitter.com/tomweingarten/status/592751132788838401](https://twitter.com/tomweingarten/status/592751132788838401)
------
AdmiralAsshat
Do people cat sourcecode to read it? For anything larger than a five line
shell script, I'd assume one would open it in vim or emacs.
~~~
a3n
My synapses, my circumstances and random() sometimes lead me to use any of
cat, less, vim, view, grep and probably others that don't come to mind at the
moment.
------
prakashk
I use the highlight package[1] that comes with Debian/Ubuntu. With that:
highlight -O ansi file.ext | less -R
highlight -O xterm256 file.ext | less -R
highlight can also convert the input to other formats: HTML, XHTML, RTF,
LaTeX, TeX, BBCode or SVG.
An alternative to `less -R` is the `most` pager [2].
[1]
[https://packages.debian.org/jessie/highlight](https://packages.debian.org/jessie/highlight)
[2]
[https://packages.debian.org/jessie/most](https://packages.debian.org/jessie/most)
------
beberlei
This is unfortunate, there is already a "ccat" command short for "ccrypt cat"
installable through "ccrypt" on debian based systems.
------
ryanartecona
Huge missed opportunity to name this thing `scat`, and claim the poop emoji as
a logo.
------
kiddico
I've always used vimcat. It's pretty damn slow, but I don't mind.
~~~
tekromancr
Same here! I never had issues with it being slow, however. Maybe I just
haven't tried to vimcat a file that was large enough to matter.
~~~
kiddico
Anything over like 20 lines for me takes a second or so. Then again the
machine is like 175 miles away and its a core 2 duo... so I suppose that's
reasonable.
------
kerny
I'm using vimcat for this. Available as part of vimpager
[https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager](https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager)
------
kmfrk
Big fan of hicat myself:
[https://github.com/rstacruz/hicat](https://github.com/rstacruz/hicat).
------
pankajdoharey
What i usually have done for years is this :
sudo apt-get install python-pygments; alias ccat='pygmentize'
then :
ccat program.js
ccat loader.rb #etc...
------
xupybd
Been using this for a while
[http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4325](http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4325)
------
boomlinde
A syntax highlighting pager might be more useful to me. cat is a tool that I
only use for plumbing, and I rarely want coloring control codes anywhere but
stdout.
------
amelius
I'm so glad my brain does the syntax highlighting for me.
~~~
chrisan
Some people also say they are glad/happy to code in Notepad.exe
Brains do a lot of things, but there is a limit somewhere or at the very least
a trade off of speed. Simple things like syntax highlighting can help you find
what you are looking for faster.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why You Should Use Rule-Based Passwords - jkeesh
http://thekeesh.com/2013/01/why-you-should-use-rule-based-passwords/
======
nacker
The idea must be in the ether! I just spent the last two days obsessed with
this, having decided to make another stab at Bitcoin.
I now have a neat method worked out that I can do on the fly in my head, and a
little Python script to check it.
Sorry I don't feel like sharing any actual tricks/code, but here are a few
examples. Whatever the site address, it spits out a password from 13 to 20
characters in length. If anyone can explain my algorythm, I might even send
you a Bitcoin!
<https://news.ycombinator.com> -> 0$$onew$vwqitt&10
<http://slashdot.org> -> 4$$guola$fwqivt&13
<http://arstechnica.com> -> 25$bars$jwdibt&15
<http://www.theverge.com> -> 4$$gthe$twggt&11
<http://www.ibm.com> -> 49$tibm$jwcint&17
<http://www.wired.com> -> 81$fwir$swfid&18
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chloe Middleton did not have coronavirus - s9w
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/27/chloe-middleton-the-coronavirus-death-that-wasnt/
======
s9w
This was a big story a couple of days ago, even here on HN. Used to spread fud
about sars-cov-2.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22684242](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22684242)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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