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scaling_mia_the_pile_00_HackerNews

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Should you payoff your mortgage? - stilloo https://medium.com/@stilloo123/dave-ramsey-dilemma-should-you-ever-payoff-your-mortgage-2e6875c60439 ====== stilloo Want to know what people think? Would be great to know both the arguments.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Weeblies aren't wobbling: Launches AdSense for Dummies and Pro accounts - immad http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/06/weeblies-are-no.html ====== Mistone great write up. There approach and mentality thats at the heart of the value YC provides. They are pushing the ball forward with new features and nearing profitability, thats awesome all around. ------ acgourley Weebly is the best online WYSIWG I've come across, but I've run into several issues (even in firefox). One big problem I had was trying to help someone create a site when they had some (not sure) version of IE. I understand that for a rich site like this, IE will be buggy. But they either need to fix it or tell IE users to upgrade / download firefox. ------ breck Just used Weebly for the first time. Amazing job. I really like how easy it is to throw GMaps in there, contact forms, and so forth. Just recommended it to a couple non-tech friends. ------ bmaier Somebody at the LA Times is incredibly receptive to PR people: first friendfeed profile and now weebly. Great scores guys! ~~~ drusenko We don't have any PR folks, just us :) ------ pistoriusp It doesn't work in Safari. It appears that the WYSIWG editor doesn't work. ~~~ drusenko We're working on full Safari 3 compatibility... You should have gotten a message when you log-in, though, letting you know that Safari doesn't quite work yet. ~~~ tom I got the message and was asked if I wanted to forge ahead anyway. So that worked for me. Glad to hear you're working on Safari 3 compatibility. For many new Apple owners, Safari is it. ------ immad tc: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/weebly-adds-adsense- sup...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/weebly-adds-adsense-support-for- drag-and-drop-cash/) ------ DXL Whoa, isn't a 50% cut a bit too much for Weebly? ~~~ immad "Some more tech-savvy users might balk at the prospect of having 50% of their revenues paid to their hosting site, but Weebly isn’t really made for this kind of user in the first place." ------ RobertL Good going guys. I love articles like this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Full Help – Self-hosted help desk and knowledge base software - fullhelp https://www.fullhelp.com/en?ref=hacker-news ====== zaroth Very nice launch. I probably will buy this in the next week or two to power a product I will be launching myself soon. The non-recurring pricing model makes it almost too cheap, but it’s right in the sweet spot of pulling out the corporate card and not even thinking about it. $129 is cheap enough for the all but the tiniest projects. I do like the simplicity of a single price point with no tiers or feature table, but it’s hard to shake the thought you’re leaving a lot on the table, or almost even disqualifying yourself from someone looking for a “premium” solution. I might suggest a $499 and $1999 version which offer merely higher tiers of support, just to see if anyone buys it. Pick some price which feels almost outrageous to you. At the very least it would anchor the $129. At $129 the support should be limited to forums and self-help only. docs.fullhelp.com - “Powered by FullHelp”. Dogfooding doesn’t get better than this! I didn’t see an active live chat widget though? You should be highlighting this as your product demo effectively. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! Thanks for checking it out! The software can be used by multiple companies or product simultaneously so one license may be enough. Of course, multiple licenses can be purchased if that's necessary just so you know For the live chat, there's a live working widget on the landing page (fullhelp.com), it's located at the bottom right corner. From there, you are able to initiate conversations and also browse the knowledge base site. The software has a Restful API which is used for the dashboard. Dogfooding there also! haha Edit: Also, thanks for the pricing suggestions, sounds like a good approach. ------ repeek Very cool. We are current HelpScout customers -- my biggest complaint with HelpScout is our inability to properly gate our knowledge base behind our application's authentication -- the only choices are private (must have HelpScout account to access) or public URL. I could see this being a viable alternative, but it appears to be missing a key feature for us, analytics. As an B2B SaaS app, we have support SLAs that mandate specific response times. HelpScout makes it easy for us to report response times. We can also tag support themes to help focus product development; being able to see metrics around theme frequency is very important. Analytics also tell us which Knowledge Base articles are most popular as well as phrases users search so we can be sure we surface the correct article. ~~~ fullhelp Hi! I agree. Analytics is something that will surely be added, along with SLA management which is also missing. Knowledgebase sites have basic analytics which tells you how many visits, session and what are the popular articles, collections, and categories, but nothing more at the moment. Thanks for checking it out and your feedback! ------ jstsch Test driving it, like it a lot! Some initial feedback: * I sent a support request by email with two screenshots. The first screenshot did not show up in the web view (the cid: remains in the HTML source). * A demo account with lots of dummy data might be useful for a quick glance at the product. * Might want to add a Letsencrypt wildcard SSL domain for [https://.demo.fullhelp.com](https://.demo.fullhelp.com) * Missing language string when creating an article: Title.created * There is a non-deletable dummy note attached to a customer from a certain Peter Richards ;) * Typo: shoirtly -> shortly * Theming: this is quite a big feature, so understandably a bit rough right now, perhaps offer a blank template .ZIP file to get started? * I'd like to be able to modify language strings, but perhaps this goes via the theming ZIP Looks quite cool! ~~~ fullhelp Hi! Thanks for taking the time to check it out and the feedback! For the theming feature, I was thinking of adding a way to export the installed themes, that way the user can download the theme being used and apply any customization and re-upload as a new custom theme. A blank template for new designs is an excellent idea. I've also created a small node based command-line program that syncs local development changes to the live knowledge base portals. This helps a lot with testing and previewing the themes. I've not released it just yet, I plan to do so with an MIT license on GitHub. It is similar to Shopify's Themekit ([https://shopify.github.io/themekit](https://shopify.github.io/themekit)). This is what I use to work on theme designs. For knowledgebase language strings, you are right, that's possible at the moment through the theme locale files. ------ scrollaway Looks very nice. I know you decided against selling this as a SaaS but please reconsider. That you _are_ self-hostable is a selling point that will drive potential hosted customers to you. It's the same story with Gitlab: I love that it's open source and self- hostable. I prefer they take care of the hosting for me, but it's good to know if they go under, I can switch to the self-hosted version and there will be very few workflow changes for my team. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! I will be considering it, you are right. Some people just don't want to bother with the technical stuff that comes with managing servers and/or installing the software. I'll definitively consider a SaaS version. Thanks! ~~~ dominicr Something to consider is that often I'll test drive a product with a few people on the cheapest possible plan, or free trial, for a month or two before rolling it out. Being able to do that really quickly, without setting up hosting, is a big benefit. If a customer can jump in straight away for a month long trial it might increase sales. Also, I'm not in the market for this right now but I keep a list of products I've seen and liked. The need to sign up for your demo stopped me looking at it. Consider if you can remove that crucial barrier to people seeing your app. Something like read only, a preset user, or generate an account automatically with a disposible email address. ------ 0XAFFE Looks nice, maybe you can add an existing account to your demo-system, so that I do not need to register myself an account. Edit: And maybe point out, that the Documentation ([https://docs.fullhelp.com/](https://docs.fullhelp.com/)) is actually the software you are presenting. I did not realize that immediately. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! You are right, a demo account will be great! I'll be working on it, thanks! ------ PakG1 Congrats, new help desk options are always cool. I can see this being great for web-based businesses, which I suppose is the target from what I can see. For my needs, I unfortunately need help desk software for a corporate environment. That means I need asset management integrated into the help desk software. We are currently setting up GLPI + OCS Inventory NG because we couldn't find any other options that had good asset management. That being said, GLPI is _clunky_. It's not my first choice, but I couldn't find many options out there that integrated asset management. I feel like as more and more web-based businesses grow, traditional help desk requirements are being left behind (perhaps helped by some organizations going BYOD). Bit jealous of all the people who need help desk software but don't need integrated asset management. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! The software is focused on web-based businesses at the moment, mainly because it makes it simpler. However, I'm always open to suggestions. I'm not familiar with the asset management part, but I will definitively check it out and see if this is something that can be added, either built-in or as separate add-on or application. Just like you, there are other people that may benefit from it, especially when you say there aren't many options with a good integration. ------ usaphp Great product. Do you not worry about someone copying your code and selling it as a saas? I am selling premium Wordpress plugins and it’s incredible how many people try to purchase my plugin and then offer it as a saas ~~~ fullhelp Hey! It's always a concern for me. I'm looking for ways to detect such cases and that way terminate the licenses, which will prevent the user from downloading any release. Another approach that may work (just an idea), is to secure the documentation and allow access to it to logged in users with one valid license at least, but this has some disadvantages like the affected user experience. A legal notice is always an option. ~~~ RobAley Don't block access to the docs. I always go through the docs first before purchasing software, it cuts through the marketing messages and helps me understand if the software does exactly what I need. No available docs = no purchase. ------ fullhelp Re-post as suggested by a moderator due to problem with account and post visibility. I'm Gerardo, a web developer based in Puerto Rico. Full Help is a self-hosted help desk and multi-knowledge base software created for small businesses and freelancers. The backstory: I was using Help Scout and Zoho Desk before considering creating something like Full Help. Both services are excellent, the problem with Zoho Desk is that it is more focused on large businesses, with complex requirements. I gave a try to Help Scout, and I was impressed. It was simple and perfect for companies of all sizes. My main issue with Help Scout was the pricing and the limitations of each plan, especially on the lower ones. It was expensive (and still is for me). Another problem for me with Help Scout was the lack of customizability on the docs sites. The only way I was able to customize the look and feel of the knowledge base sites was through custom CSS and JavaScript. I wanted to get my hands dirty with my own HTML and site structure, but that wasn't possible at that moment (and still isn't I think). I then started considering creating my own help desk, something small (yeah right); something that could give me the flexibility I wanted and at the same time, lower the costs. I started working on a knowledge base management system in my free time that allowed me to create several knowledge base sites that I needed for multiple projects and products. I finished it in two months or so, can't remember exactly. It worked and got the job done. I was using a regular email account for customer conversations and the knowledge base system for customer documentation, etc. I was missing the integration I had between the knowledge base content and customer conversations. With Zoho Desk and Help Scout, I was able to quickly search the docs and insert a link into the email/chat message, along with other useful features. Also, I was considering selling it as a hosted service at that time, and for me, the knowledge base system alone wasn't enough for a commercial business app. Then started the second stage, creating a "simple" communication management system. Something that could receive and send emails and could be integrated with the knowledge bases. I started working on it by first designing a flexible and scalable database structure for the conversations feature. I wanted something that could allow the possibility of adding other conversations channels in the future. The conversations section was finished, and everything was working as I initially wanted. It was receiving and sending emails (powered by Mailgun), and I had the integration between conversations and help content. Good! Remember when I said, "something that could receive and send emails"? The other guys had live chats, something trendy these days. It wasn't smart to release a cloud help desk solution without live chat support, right? I added the live chat and while I was on it, developed a widget where customers could chat with support agents, and browse the knowledge base content from within the same widget, without leaving the main website. But, wait! This is a cloud business solution, we need teams! I rolled a full team feature with role-based permissions and an invitation system. (currently, only "Account owner" role is present on the software; more roles coming soon!). In conclusion, the small knowledge base system turned out into a big application with lots of useful features created to provide a full help desk software that's focused on small businesses and freelancers. There are lots of other useful features planned, like more conversations channels, Single Sign-On, Integration with third-parties, and many more. The software is a single page application. The UI is powered by a versioned Restful API. The API can be used for integrating the help desk with existing software, without hacking the core. About the codebase: It was developed with Laravel 5.7 using the Test Driven Development approach (Can't live without unit and integration tests!). The codebase follows today's standards. I'm a fan of thin controllers and thin models, so the logic is mostly split between service classes, presenters, and models (when necessary). Anyone that understands the Laravel framework will be comfortable working with the code. As I've mentioned before, my initial plans for Full Help was to launch a small cloud-based help desk service, mainly focused on Puerto Rico and other Latin countries. I decided to release it as a self-hosted solution because of the lack of good options along with the cloud space being crowded. Regarding the distribution/sale method: I opted to go with a custom made checkout system mainly because of the flexibility and better brand integration/control. There's also an affiliate program which is currently private, with plans on opening it to the public in the future. The checkout requires an account registration (which some people don't like, unfortunately). This is for better license management (like renewals) and to give the user access to all his orders and invoices. I have plans on adding an app store (not anytime soon) where the user can purchase knowledge base themes and other extensions or services. What are your thoughts, comments or suggestions? Any feedback regarding the software itself, landing page, pricing or anything is much appreciated. Thanks for your time! ~~~ vbsteven Very Nice! Congrats on launching. I'm definitely checking this out soon for support in my freelance gigs. I like the pricing model, I'm intending to do something similar with my next product. Selfhosted, pay once, use forever, optionally renew after 1 year for updates. I wish more software was like this. Only I'm also adding a SaaS option for people that don't want to bother with hosting. You seem to have written the licensing/checkout/renewal yourself. How much time did you spend on it? I'm working on solving exactly this problem with my product and I would love to have a chat about your experience/problems regarding this. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! It's a good pricing model which benefits both ends. A SaaS option for people that don't want to bother with technical stuff is a good idea. I've created the checkout/licensing and renewal myself because of the flexibility and not depending on other external companies. The licensing system is quite simple, the software doesn't ask for license verification at the moment. The system will allow the downloads based on the license the user selects. The license system is integrated with BitBucket. On each release BitBucket sends a POST request to a secure endpoint with a prepared ZIP file containing the app files. On each release, a new entry is created on the licensing system indicating the version and other details. Licenses are tied to the major release version number (e.g., "1" in v1.2.0). When v2.0.0 is released, new licenses are tied to the v2. Users will only have access to minor and patches releases until a renewal is made. That's a brief description of how the system works. For the checkout, I've created two Laravel packages (currently private) for sale statements (quotes, orders, invoices, etc) and another package for the affiliate program. I'll be releasing them with MIT license on GitHub. Sure! Feel free to send me a PM on Twitter @gerardojbaez or an email to g[at]gerardobaez.com. I'll be happy to help. ~~~ arcdigital I see you even built in a coupon system. Any chance you have a coupon for us on HN? :) ~~~ fullhelp Sure! Use "hackernews" for a 23% off :-D ------ veb Super super awesome launch! I love your landing page, and have been looking for something _exactly_ like this for a product I am launching soon. I'll be in touch! Great stuff. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! Feel free to reach out to gerardo[at]fullhelp or support[at]fullhelp.com anytime you want. ~~~ veb Sweet! Thank you. :) ------ tjbiddle Looks fantastic! If you had integration with a phone number (And tell me what calls I missed + voicemails left), analytics on all tickets and calls, and on the support button integration for my website - if it had live chat, leave a message, and suggested articles from my public knowledge base, and added 1-click deployments to AWS/DigitalOcean/etc. - Then I would switch from ZenDesk ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! Those are all great suggestions! Some of them are already present, like the live chat, leave a message (the same as live chat which fallbacks to email if the user gets disconnected) and article suggestions from a knowledge base (manually configured with JavaScript). All the other suggestions are great and will definitively consider them. Edit: I suggest to sign up to the newsletter at fullhelp.com to keep up to date on releases. :-D Thanks! ------ fmos Looks great and really uncomplicated. The demo works flawlessly, including receiving email attachments. Good job! Love the readability and content of the license terms as well. In particular the parts on software modifications. One feature that is a show-stopper for our workflow is the possibility of shared drafts, i.e. where an email response can be prepared and stored by one person and later reviewed, perhaps completed, and sent by someone else. Do you think this is something that you might consider adding in the foreseeable future? edit: btw, might serve as a differentiation over Zammad [https://github.com/zammad/zammad/issues/629](https://github.com/zammad/zammad/issues/629) ~~~ fullhelp Hi! Thank you! :-D The license is based on DuetApp's ([https://duetapp.com/](https://duetapp.com/)) version. I liked its simplicity and asked the creator if it would be OK with him to use his license as a starting point. Shared drafts sound like an interesting feature and one that seems easy to implement on Full Help. I've added it to my Trello board. Thanks! ------ pxtail Your project looks very promising. I'm not sure if this feature doesn't exist or I cannot find it anywhere on demo account, but: what's missing for me is fine grained ACL/permissions management. In our company we are using [https://www.bookstackapp.com/](https://www.bookstackapp.com/) as knowledge base solution for multiple clients/projects (separate installation for each). Main requirement is to be able to control which user or group can access particular document or group of documents. Is it possible to achieve something like this using your project? ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! There are role-based permissions implemented, but they are only for team members on the help desk. ACL/permission for knowledge base sites is not present at the moment but may be a good addition for a future release. I have added it to the Trello board. ------ tmikaeld I really like the Knowledgebase feature, which is currently missing from our Zammad setup (also open source helpdesk). I'm guessing it's based on PHP/SQL since you mention Wordpress? What are your roadmap for the software? I think a demo would bring a lot more sales. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! Yes, it's based on PHP/MySql (Laravel 5.7 to be precise). For the roadmap, the goal is to provide a complete self-hosted help desk solution. A complete alternative to existing cloud-based offerings. In terms of development, there are many things still on the Trello board. Things like Single Sign-On, Metrics, Integration with third-party apps like Trello, Stripe, PayPal (for conversation context), enhancements to the live chat, etc. Thanks for checking it out! Edit: you can checkout the demo here: [https://demo.fullhelp.com/en/register](https://demo.fullhelp.com/en/register) ------ rahimnathwani This looks awesome. Please prioritise reviewing your pricing/hosting model. If you want to serve your users well, you will want to work on this full time. Making enough money will make it more likely you can do this. Even if your objective is to be much cheaper than your competitors (and serve people who can't afford them), you can still offer this as a SaaS product, but: \- have a lower monthly price than the competitors you mentioned (even 50% lower) \- charge much more for plans that include features important for large customers, but which smaller companies can easily live without (e.g. SSO) ~~~ fullhelp Hey! Thanks for your suggestions! I will definitively keep that in mind. ------ 5_minutes Love it! Like the fair pricing scheme and no monthly subscriptions. Keep it going and we might move from helpscout’s overpriced bloated tool. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! :-D ------ whycombagator Looks pretty decent. Was strongly considering crisp.chat but this looks promising. Just an FYI, after test driving the knowledge base in the demo (creating an article etc) clicking on "View site" yields a "NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID" error. I had to manually update the url to [http://](http://) in order to view the knowledge base ~~~ fullhelp Hi! Thanks for checking it out. The demo domain is missing a SSL certificate for the knowledge base sites. That's something that needs to be fixed. ------ kekub Is it possible to write a bot using the rest api? Are webhooks available when new requests come in? I work in a big company and our main issue from my perspective is, that it takes up to a few hours until a ticket was dispatched correctly. It would be easy to automate this process but our ticket system does not offer any kind of interface. ~~~ fullhelp Hi! Not at the moment but both are planned. Webhooks will come first as this facilitates, even more, the integration between other systems. Thanks! ------ _1tan My current employer is currently using a self-hosted instance of Zammad.org. Might be interesting to compare the two. ~~~ fullhelp Zammad.org looks great! It seems to be missing knowledge base portals based on another comment. However, it looks a good solution. ~~~ aymeric You have a healthy attitude towards competition. ~~~ somberi I came to comment on this. Love your attitude and how you have fielded every suggestion and criticism sportingly. Keep it up. ------ NewsAware Neat. Would have a comment/feature request for the backlog after playing with the demo: I will be uld have expected autosuggest behavior in both the frontend search as well as in various admin input fields and actually waited for suggestions to appear before realizing this isn't in there yet. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! Thanks for checking it out and the feedback! I will make sure that future versions have the autosuggestion behavior on search fields and any input field on the admin side that requires it. ------ jaden This looks great! One minor corner case I noticed: If you click "Need help?" on the lower right with a small viewport (I had Chrome dev tools open), the modal content and title bar gets cut off, even when scrolled to the top, meaning you can't close the modal. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! The help widget isn't working that great on small viewports, you are right. On iOS, there's also the issue of autozoom when text fields are focused. This is something that will be addressed for the next release which is planned for this week. ------ jppope Really badass product. Well done. I will be buying in ~2-3 months ~~~ fullhelp Thank you!! :-D ------ leesalminen Awesome launch, congratulations! Looking forward to the day that we can ditch ZenDesk and use a self hosted option. ~~~ fullhelp Thank you! :-D ------ nvr219 I did a search in the docs for "report" and nothing showed up. ~~~ fullhelp Hey! I don't think that word is present on the few docs created. Try "requirements" which should show two results: [https://docs.fullhelp.com/en/search?query=requirements](https://docs.fullhelp.com/en/search?query=requirements) ~~~ ullarah I may be wrong, but they are most likely asking if there is a reporting module (KPIs?) with this product? ~~~ fullhelp In that case, the knowledge base dashboard has several statistics ([https://imgur.com/5Z60SWl](https://imgur.com/5Z60SWl)). Help desk reports are not present at the moment but is something that will be added definitively. ------ zelon88 I use HESK for this purpose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The relationship between social media use and well-being - j_s https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel ====== lsc I feel the 'social media is bad for you' thing, but for different reasons. I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason. For me, the problem with social media is a fundamental lack of self control; I get into 'someone is wrong on the internet' discussions, and for me, those are the 'addictive but not pleasant' aspects of social media. For me, a conversation is not fun if we aren't arguing in good faith ; if we can't acknowledge one another's good points and rhetorical flourishes, it is just not fun, and I end up feeling frustrated and rejected. The unhealthy part is that I feel the discussion is unfinished, and walking away takes a tremendous act of will, and even then, my mind keeps coming back to the conversation. I hope it is just a matter of practice; I mostly have left other mediums with these sorts of unfufilling conversations, or at least learned to restrain myself from participating in the most obviously unproductive conversations. I think the big difference with social media is largely cultural; lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture, and our shared vocabulary doesn't run much past "you are wrong " and there isn't the social pressure to be civil like we have here, or to be smart, like there was in the heyday of kuro5hin. ~~~ Swizec > lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or > academic culture I think this hits it. Many (most?) people just aren't used to having people disagree with them. Let alone voice those disagreements and be expected to defend their beliefs and explain _why_ they think they're right. For many people the way they think is correct, just _is_ correct. It's not something that needs defending or even investigating. It's just how things are. Perhaps the problem is fundamentally how many different people social media exposes us to. And maybe if you weren't exposed to that in your formative years, it's a hard thing to get used to. ~~~ platz Framing that difference as a "lack" the other person has, may be right, but creates a sense of superiority over that person which also seems wrong, for certain people that are aware of their differences (they may not be "lacking" anything"). Some people are emotivists ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism)), which means that for them preferences _are_ moral positions in themselves, not just reasons _about_ the morality of preferences. it is “… the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” In other words, emotivism holds that there can be no way of rationally justifying one’s claims about controversial issues. I think this view describes a great many number of people; though it's true that academia, STEM, and rational enlightenment thinking tends to filter it out or select against it. ~~~ Swizec TIL! I've never heard of emotivism before. And I don't think that's what I was pointing towards. My comment is about the idea that people aren't used to having their beliefs investigated or challenged. No matter what the basis is for their existence. It's more a lack in their environment than in themselves I think. You can't get used to defending your beliefs until you're exposed to people and ideas that challenge them. I mean it's fine if your defense is "That's what feels right". But it's not fine if your response to "I think you're wrong" is to think you're being attacked and it makes you feel superbad. ~~~ platz sure, though I think emotivism is pertinent here, for example > "I think you're wrong" is to think you're being attacked This is exactly what the emotivist thinks because challenging an idea means challenging a preference which is directly challenging the moral character of the individual. There is no ability to discuss things in a detached way for them; this seems to check out anecdotally. Is that "not fine?" \- I certainly don't like it, and I don't think it's fine for people i choose to interact with, but my first step is to understand it, if only because there are so many people like this. Folks will continue to act like this despite my desire to see the opposite behavior, so it's good to be prepared and not self-deceive what other people are really like. > My comment is about the idea that people aren't used to having their beliefs > investigated or challenged. I think I get where you're coming from. someone people not used to something could be said to having a deficiency in dealing with that situation and presumably with more experience they would change their behavior. But I think there may be a slight difference in what I was saying, which includes some overlap with your point, but also allows for people who are quite familiar with being challenged, but yet immediately disapprove of such behavior anyways, due to the explanations above. ~~~ braveo Having an opinion or idea doesn't make it correct or worthy of attention by other people. If I come across someone who really thinks that way, they get dismissed and I lose 100% of any shred of respect I may have had for that person. I don't care if that's considered closed minded, the mindset is wrong, fullstop, and it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of thinking skills. The idea you've described here can be true _sometimes_ depending on the subject matter, but it is not nearly true all the time, and if someone is unable to recognize that, then I cannot trust anything they say, and it's not worth the mental or emotional energy to engage them. ~~~ platz > Having an opinion or idea doesn't make it correct or worthy of attention by > other people. Very well, but I don't believe that is what I described or claimed. ~~~ braveo I didn't mean to imply that you did, my point is that someone being being "an emotivist" isn't understandable, and it doesnt' mean the people around them should be inclusive of such an outlook on life. ~~~ platz Ok, I didn't say that such people should be accepted, description is not prescription. ~~~ braveo yep, no argument there, I was just weighing in with my (admittedly strong) opinionon the matter. ------ overcast I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of these sites, and it's easy to see why someone would think less of themselves. It's good to be social, but these networks are not the answer. ~~~ davehtaylor >They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either. ~~~ rconti So many people complain about this, and I just don't get it. Maybe if I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem? When I'm stuck at my desk and I see someone posting vacation pictures from Spain, I say "man, that looks nice, I wish I was there!" And that's it. Maybe it makes me think about where I want to go next, but it doesn't send me into some existential crisis. I wonder if there are personality types more prone to being affected by stuff like this? If anything, I'd think _I_ would -- certainly prone to depression, particularly in my younger years. But I just don't care. I wonder why that is, and what is different among people who are affected by these things differently. ~~~ enraged_camel The entire idea is that the effect is subconscious. Sure, seeing one person post vacation pictures from Spain won't affect you then and there, but over time as everyone posts awesome pictures you will inevitably _feel_ that something must be lacking in or wrong with _your_ life. ~~~ rconti I don't know. I see all of these people complaining about these effects, and it simply doesn't bother me in the same way (not to say it couldn't possibly have a subconscious effect). But I feel as if it caused the same effect in me as it causes in others, I'd be talking about how I'm going to "take a break" from $socialnetwork for a month, and how much better I feel, and so on. But I don't. It's just a tool. I use it and enjoy it. If I didn't, I wouldn't. ------ brightball 100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be. ~~~ toomuchtodo > The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with > people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends > from college. [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail- end.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html) "It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left. The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%. So what do we do with this information? Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here: 1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else. 2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia. 3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious." ~~~ Expez Incredibly poignant and insightful post. Thank you! ------ seanwilson Just for some balance but I don't understand the hate for Facebook, I use it fairly often and it's been a positive impact for me. I use it occasionally to connect with people I've just met, see what friends are up to, send messages to meet up and keep in contact with people out of the country. I've connected to people I otherwise wouldn't have through it, got closer to people I know through it and met up with people because of it. I'm completely aware that people only share the best slices of their life on it and it doesn't depress me. I think if you let Facebook consume your life and it somehow impacts you a lot you need to think about why that is and not blame Facebook. You could get equally obsessed with hackernews comparing yourself to other users and clamouring for upvotes. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386) > We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social > network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental > health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results > showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with > well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in "likes clicked" > (clicking "like" on someone else's content), "links clicked" (clicking a > link to another site or article), or "status updates" (updating one's own > Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%-8% of a standard > deviation in self-reported mental health. So it's not a causal link then? If it's not there's surely many reasons why having low well-being would make you spend more time on social networks (e.g. you'd go out less so have more time to spend on social networks)? ~~~ frenchy > ... I don't understand the hate for Facebook ... I suspect that any hate of facebook has a fair bit to do with the fact that it is 1) pervasive, 2) a fairly closed system, and 3) comes with a lot of strings attached. The fact that it's a closed system is really the crux of the issue, everything else just kind of accentuates the problem. Here's an example of why facebook's existence is annoying My local climbing gym, for example, has a website, but instead of posting information there, they post most of their updates (like competition dates) on Facebook. Without having a facebook account (and regularly checking it!) there's no way to keep up-to-date on these postings. Now, if you create a facebook account, there's no good way to tell people "don't send me messages here, just email me", so now you have to keep an eye on your facebook messages, otherwise your friends will get annoyed that you're ignoring them. Facebook doesn't implement IMAP or anything though, so your also stuck going to their website regularly, or install their software on your phone and saying goodbye to your once-long battery life. ------ jgrahamc "Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being." This is not a surprise. I quit Facebook specifically because of the endless stream of "my life is amazing" posts of people beig happy without any balance. Reminds me of those awful Christmas letters people send round about how wonderful their entire year had been and how _amazing_ their children are. ~~~ rconti Serious question: Would you prefer to not receive those Christmas letters? Or is it more tolerable because it's only once a year, so the benefit of staying in touch is greater than the cost of the annoyance of the letter itself? ------ borplk Only on internet forums like this I see people claiming about quitting facebook and so on. I don't see the signs in the real world. Having said that I too almost never used it from the beginning. I didn't need so many years to figure out why I'm not going to like it. I was on it in the early days just as a techy interested in internet technology then I gave it up and never looked back. Mind you it has become only more socially costly to not be on it. A few times I tempted to get back in again at least in a limited capacity (just having a basic profile so people can message me if needed). But didn't. I have also heard harsh comments and so on. Like one person said (not directly to me) ... "what do you mean?!! don't you have any friends?". More than anything what I find annoying is this expectation from the society that every person in the world must subject themselves to the invasion of Facebook for their convenience and amusement. I don't go around ordering everyone must eat at my favorite Pizza joint. Why should the people be pressured to some private social network? If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding. ~~~ gvurrdon > If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more > understanding. Definitely. If it operated in a Manner similar to Mastodon then FB would be a lot more tempting to use for the limited purposes I feel I need access. All I would like to use it for is to get an RSS feed of news from various clubs and to be able to reply to such posts (e.g. to confirm that I'll attend an event they've advertised). Unfortunately, FB disabled the RSS feed some time ago and to use rss-bridge ([https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss- bridge](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge)) requires configuring proxies or trying to solve captchas. Even browsing the public page for an event will shove login boxes or random captchas in my face, and the more it is rammed down my throat the more I wish to avoid it. ------ rybosome I removed the FB app from my phone and have the willpower not to use a browser to check it. Stopped short of deactivating my account so that I can still get the occasional message on Messenger. After the insanely contentious, toxic US election and cry of grief and fear from the left over the results, I got so burnt out with getting on FB and seeing so many reasons to be angry and afraid. Cut myself off completely and after a short time I completely forgot about it. The urge to check FB is totally gone, I feel like I'm missing nothing. It was a great decision, only wish I had made it sooner. ~~~ sandov you can deactivate your profile (i.e. You can't log on facebook) without deactivating your messenger account. I did this and chat normally from messenger.com, but can't log on facebook.com ------ huangc10 Sometime in the next few yrs or so (if not already), I suspect we'll see many research papers related to social media and suicide rates. Furthermore, it'll be interesting in cross examining this data with cultural views ie. Western culture vs. Asian culture where social media has really taken off. ------ castle-bravo facebook's business is advertising, and the more time people spend on facebook, the more valuable facebook's ad space is. If depressed people spend more time on facebook instead of getting out, then it's in facebook's interest to have their product make people depressed. If angry people spend more time writing rants on facebook, then it's in facebook's interest to make people angry. I may be confusing causation with correlation, but I am willing to bet that the reason facebook's product has repeatedly been shown to cause harm is because the harm is good for facebook, not by accident of design. The article linked below describes some of the anti-features that make slack addictive. I have no reason to believe that slack and facebook are not aware of the addictive power of their products and do not cynically designin their products to enhance their addictive potential. [https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason- slack](https://medium.com/@satyavh/the-real-reason-slack) ~~~ rogual I wonder how many of these design decisions were actually made consciously, and how many are just the result of things like blind A/B testing. If your scientific test shows you that feature set A has better user retention than feature set B, you don't need to worry yourself over why. ------ pdelbarba I've definitely noticed this myself. Friends that I've known to be depressed almost always posted very frequently on Facebook and those that had some negative life event occur almost always seemed to post way more than usual in the following months. It got to the point that back when I used FB, I would make a point of asking old friends how they were doing when I noticed an uptick in their posting habits. ------ orschiro For me, Facebook is the new yellow pages telephone book that contains all addresses to people I may want to contact. That's about it. I do not see any other value in Facebook. ------ cknight My use case is going to be in a minority, but I find Facebook vital for keeping in touch with friends and especially family back home. I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own. I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online. It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question. ------ drenvuk I know that it's easy to rag on Facebook specifically but it should be noted that this effect most likely exists in all forms of media where the user is able to compare their lives to someone else's. Even while using this site I doubt I'm immune to finding someone who's accomplished something cool while I'm still hacking away on the same thing from last month or whatever. It's just seems better for my health to live my life instead of seeing someone else live their's. Hell, maybe some day my accomplishments will make someone else feel bad about their lack of any. I mean, even Caesar cried when he read about Alexander's conquests. ------ leepowers Social media is a game, just like MMORPG's are games, and slot gambling is a game, or call of duty is a game. For some reason a large chunk of society has been convinced that social media is the "real" game and more normative than all other games. Overplaying any game is bad for the mental health of the player. Relatedly, a game becomes unhealthy whenever the game becomes the center of the player's life. This applies equally to WoW, Civilization, Facebook, or Twitter, or any other game. So, social media is a game that can be fun to play, but it shouldn't be a component of the player's identity. ------ M_Grey I don't understand the appeal of FB; we have other means to be connected with the people we care about. I've never understood the appeal of broadcasting yourself to the entire planet either... it's bizarre. ------ educar I strongly feel that social media must become a pull based model instead of a push based model - so like RSS where I subscribe. On the client side, we should use simple machine learning and filtering to show content that is truly useful to us (I love to know what is happening is my sister's life). The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they could do the machine learning on their side but these for-profit ad driven corporations do not have the users best interest in mind. They just want to get us hooked. Ghost can have this feature! ~~~ apozem I'm with you- I love RSS and hate Facebook's news feed. Unfortunately, that is one of the biggest reasons why the masses chose Facebook over Twitter. > Facebook, meanwhile, continued to add to the variety of posts available to > their algorithmically generated feed. Yes, the early adopters who had gone > to the trouble to tune their feed complained, but the real beneficiaries > were users who didn’t want to go to the trouble of making sure they saw > something interesting — whether related to friends and family or not — > whenever they visited Facebook. And, starting in 2009, those users had even > less motivation to get Twitter working: Facebook was good enough. [https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed- twitter/](https://stratechery.com/2016/how-facebook-squashed-twitter/) ------ stevehiehn Ironically, I find the only internet interactions that stress me out is not FB or twitter its when i post on hacker news (like this:)) I think mostly because i care and also people here can be very confrontational. ~~~ sandov When I use facebook, I get angry at the stupidity of people. On HN I feel humbled because of how smart people are here. ------ kirykl I quit Facebook because it warped my perception of others gratification, making it appear instantly achieved for everyone and everything but me. The cumulative impact of a constant feed of this was incredibly demotivating. ------ abalashov I can certainly agree with the study abstract and most posts here, but would add a twist: social media use is depressing, but falling out of touch with faraway friends is even more depressing. I've been on and off FB over the years, and what I've found is that the only thing worse than being on FB is not being on FB. There are many people I'd just never talk to if I didn't use FB, and I do think the connection is something I'd miss -- with some of them. It's even worse when you're struggling through serious financial problems and/or a divorce, or some event like that. Nobody really wants to be your friend, and nobody wants to hear about it. Online: (a) One is more likely to find others in the same boat sooner or later, although those people are also more likely to have turned into embittered cranks/ideologues. But at least it's someone. Divorce IRL is a very lonely experience; just when you are most psychologically vulnerable and could really use a friend, you become radioactive. Double if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur, since your already existing problems have just leapt from "minor-league brush fire" to "apocalyptic conflagration seen from low orbit". (b) While, one's not going to post much about these types of issues on social media in general, it allows you to keep conforming with your wider circle. You can keep on riding this carousel of wide-eyed, facile, optimistic communication on trivial or theoretical topics. It's much harder IRL, where it's harder to conceal that actually, real talk, things are really, really shitty. ~~~ lacampbell The real thing with not having FB and connecting with friends is FB chat. A lot of people don't use any other IM service except for FB chat. ~~~ abalashov Indeed. Outside the US, WhatsApp is often the gold standard, but in the US, FB Messenger seems to be the standard messenger of most ordinary portals, notwithstanding the teens and 18-24s off in Snapchat/Kik/whatever land. ------ esemor I was reluctant when I removed my fb account about six months ago but it felt like it was what I needed as it intruded on what I really wanted to focus my time and energy on. A few weeks in I was amazed at how I did not miss the social network at all and surprised that the contacts that previously only contactef me on fb now wrote email and text messages. ~~~ omnimus Same here. Deleted account just before end of 2014 (facebook changed their data policy). We did it with couple of friends and were amazed by the effect. After two weeks we realized we all feel better and we never needed fb. None of us came back (just more our friends left). Really the only pain for me were fb events. In my country fb events are the most important calendar to the point that many of the venues/places put events just on fb. The problem is that i organize events from time to time and its impossible without account. Its also getting pretty hard to make fake account (they require copy of ID for new accounts now). The events are even more pain because they dont have api. Its on purpose. Venues for example cant have automated posting of events from their site. You have to make events in the fb ui. They are read only so people started opposite aproach, they post ebents on fb and consume them in their site. Its limiting and just againts everything internet used to be about. ------ dhruvkar Anecdotally, I completely fall in this category. I had a Facebook account from 2006-2010. Never missed it in the last 6 years. I don't really use other social networks either (HN counts?), email & phone is generally more than enough for me. However, also anecdotally, my mom and brother seem to thrive on it. It's a part of their daily ritual, and the few times they've decided to get rid of Facebook, they claim (and seem) to be missing a part of their identity. They don't live "amazing" lives, and most posts are pretty ordinary. >5,208 adults from a national longitudinal panel maintained by the Gallup organization So, anecdotally, I do think that there is a subsection of the population for which this this a positive influence. Or they've found a way to use it positively. It may help to study narrower bands of populations to determine if this holds true across the board. ------ tutufan Deleted mine a few months ago, and I do think I feel better. Only regret is that I probably can't get hired by Facebook now... :-) ~~~ eunoia Didn't get the job but I interviewed with FB a couple years ago. Flew me out to the Bay for a day of whiteboarding. Haven't had an actual FB account in 4 or 5 years. I'm sure they were aware but to their credit no one ever asked me about it. ~~~ rconti I wouldn't be surprised if nobody looked or noticed. Perhaps they're a big enough organization to check on this stuff, but the average interviewer has better stuff to do, and likely doesn't care. ------ moonka >These results then may be relevant for other forms of social media. Does this mean they only studied Facebook, or did they look at other social media networks as well? It seems to me that it is the former, but I'm not sure. I imagine different networks would have different effects based on the way people use them. ~~~ zzalpha Facebook only based on my reading. ------ shivagit Being overly obsessed with the social experience of the internet in general is detrimental to one's well-being, in my opinion. You can't live a full life if you spend most of your time interacting with people on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, FourChan, Instagram, etc. It's just not the social experience we evolved to enjoy. Also there's the danger that you're being subtly manipulated by the moderators or programmers of such sites, or the wider community. Are these 'people' you talk to really real? You can never know for sure. In the end, if you want a quality social experience, you have to get out of your basement and enjoy the company of people in real life. ------ Redditshill I think my experience and satisfaction with Facebook has steadily decreased in a linear relationship with how many friends I have on my friends list. My guess is because: 1) the more friends I add, the more likely I am to add _that_ guy on Facebook. The guy who always posts very annoying political posts, or the guy who posts very smug+condescending posts. 2) I find myself comparing with my friends, especially when they post pics of them on vacation or news of some promotion. 3) I spend too much time worrying about how to curate posts and post stuff that a. impresses people and b. doesn't offend anyone. I probably just care too much what others think, but that's my 2c. ~~~ 5thaccount I think it is simpler than that - we like most people because we really don't know them that well, and the inverse si true as well. We all have quirks that other people might find distasteful. As an easy jump off point, the pr0n habits of people vary wildly, and I'd wager if everyone knew what someone was into... The more you know about many people, the more chance there is that a part you uniquely find distasteful will emerge. On top of that, the modern world in general, and SM specifically, has melded the public world, the private world and, most annoying of all, the inner world into a single, undifferentiated miasma. All these posts I see of people who can't work with Trump voters, or the religious right, or gay people or whatever shows how this melding causes real problems, even if it alleviates others. We now know too much about people, and that isn't a universal positive. ------ hrasyid Shouldn't we be more critical about the methodology? For example, it's not clear to me how it proves that the correlation is due to causation. ------ debt I am curious what's the point of being connected all the time? It's a question I've been asking myself since the U.S. election. So I can have access to a bunch of garbage people post on the Internet? So I can chat people quickly? There's like a handful of truly useful things on the Internet. Most of the useless things though take up 90% of time on it. I'm failing to see the value at this point. ~~~ colmvp I never played WoW because I was afraid of how far I'd fall into an addiction. Having read "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," I was rather relieved to read game developers who have said they have willingly abstained from WoW for the same reasons. Even device- makers and tech leaders are cautious about introducing their own devices to their children. The book, along with others like Hooked, remind me that we have to be very careful about the technology we use on a day to day basis, because it effects our brains in a way we might not want it too. Our brain and willpower is being tested against the skills of thousands of incredibly smart and talented designers, developers, product managers, et al. Having chosen to abstain from apps like Facebook or social media websites, I don't feel like I lost anything. If anything, I've regained more time and mental space for things like getting deeper in my career. I'm not a luddite, as I am still a big believer in the productivity and information gains via the internet and computers. But our attention is a resource that a lot of companies want. And yet, I only feel like it's more recently that we've begun to question whether the benefits these companies give to us is worth the change in ourselves. Because of mindfulness, I have recognized the need to distract myself (via Twitter, Reddit, E-mail, Whatsapp) is sometimes a symptom of not wanting to deal with something that is hard or uncomfortable (e.g. paperwork, making a decision, etc.). Yet we know that become deep at something we care about, we truly do need focused time (Deep Work by Cal Newport is a worthwhile read). So I think it's really in our best interest to only choose apps that provide a lot of benefits with only marginal drawbacks to our mind, and to be very careful about how often we use them. ~~~ cableshaft Game developer here who abstained from WoW and pretty much all MMOs or Free2Play shenanigans. Although I happily put plenty of hours into single player RPGs (currently Persona 5 and Breath of the Wild). But those have an ending, and they don't require me to schedule my life around them in order to play them. In fact they let me drop in and out of them very quickly, since they suspend and I don't have to connect to any networks. ------ madiathomas My mental health improved dramatically when I deactivated facebook. I use instagram and Twitter sparingly these days. For some reason, I am unable to use facebook sparingly. When I am active, it is the first thing I check in the morning. I only use facebook after writing exams and deactivate as soon as I register for a new semester. ------ midhunsezhi I deactivated my facebook account and deleted my whatsapp account a little over a month ago and with the amount of free time i got, I decided against the use of instagram as well. This article makes me feel not so antisocial anymore, thank you! :D ------ 013a I'm curious: Which aspects of Facebook cause this? Do other social networks, like Insta or Twitter, exhibit this behavior? In a way, this and studies like it are damning to Facebook's core mission to connect everyone in the world. ~~~ dankoss This is just my speculation, but I think the utility of facebook declined when external linking took over user created posts on facebook. I don't go to facebook because I want to know how my friends feel about political news; I go to facebook because I want to know what they are up to. I think Instagram and Snapchat got this right, because even though you can regram something or paste a screenshot, that's not the default way to interact with the platform. I would check facebook a lot more often if they had an option to hide all external links / images. I know there are browser plugins that enable this but they're not on mobile. ------ tdaltonc If anyone here is feeling like they spend too much time on Social Media, I recently made Space a set of apps to help with that. [http://youjustneedspace.com](http://youjustneedspace.com) ------ gnrlbzik I have quit facebook for most part, use messenger to sometime send messages to friends, it opened up lot's of free time. I still use Instagram, but that is so much more manageable and less invasive. ------ surrey-fringe Interesting how much of an echo chamber HN is wrt social media use. I certainly agree, but most people I know would tell us that it's great for keeping in touch and organizing events. ~~~ sandov It certainly is, but I think it's a nice contrast to have in comparison with your day to day friends that are not hackers and wouldn't understand why you left facebook. You just should have in mind that the average HN user is pretty far from the average person. ------ skolos Looks like this might be effect related to social apps which are used as a log to brag about your awesome life. Should be less of an issue with Twitter and maybe Snapchat. ------ j_s Time to put together a study on the relationship between HN use and well- being! ~~~ rconti I actually find communities like this far more depressing than your average social network. I _can_ go on the vacation my friend is on, but I cannot acquire the expertise of thousands of other brilliant professionals in every niche I see here. ~~~ castle-bravo All you can do is learn. In the immortal words of Rush: "Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme." ------ elastic_church I've worked on social networks for several venture backed companies, and I opted out of their use half a decade ago. Drug dealers aren't users. I like the opium analogy. Socially acceptable as long as the East India Company is forcing it down our throats. (But at least we'll get Hong Kong out of it!) ------ DannyB2 I have never been on FaceTwit. Never missed it. (either of them) I've occasionally wondered if I should. Its amusing to read both about and from people (here in comments) being happier without it. There was a point I worried that one or both of them would become a mandatory authentication mechanism for other sites.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The world's 13th-best Donkey Kong player has something to prove - brissmyr http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/18/5167656/the-worlds-13th-best-donkey-kong-player-has-something-to-prove ====== jchung For those who haven't seen "King of Kong", it's an excellent film. Strongly recommended.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sciteco – a modern TECO based on Scintilla - fjl http://sciteco.sourceforge.net ====== fjl oops, it seems sourceforge doesn't like traffic.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
In space, no one can hear you kernel panic - pcr910303 https://increment.com/software-architecture/in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-kernel-panic/ ====== informatimago Unless you write it in CL, in which case you get a debugger REPL, and you can debug it hundred of million of km away. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZK0tW8EhQ)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The new boomtowns: Why more people are relocating to ‘secondary’ cities - wallflower https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/the-new-boomtowns-why-more-people-are-relocating-to-secondary-cities/2018/11/07/f55f96f4-d618-11e8-aeb7-ddcad4a0a54e_story.html ====== esotericn I tend to think that a lot of migration trends are obscured by currency-based accounting rather than looking at numbers of people and their preferences. I don't know a lot about the US, but here in the UK, in a city like London I don't think it's useful, for example, to say people are being 'priced out'. What's actually happening is that those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it's just full. You have suburbs full of families that will never move out, and if they do move out, will just rent the building out rather than selling. The indirect effect of that is that prices go up, but you're really just seeing that the commuter belt of semi-detached homes is full and that's that. It's common to talk about knocking down homes or building more homes or whatever. The thing is that for the most part, only non-residents actually want that (because for them the choice is between high density or not living there). If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you're just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats. It's a strict downgrade in every sense of the word, even if the square footage is the same. No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house. So yeah, the answer is to go elsewhere. Go to a city that actually welcomes newcomers. Places like London are no longer income-based, they're wealth- based. Starting from scratch here you're at an enormous disadvantage. ~~~ cenal Having lived in a home and in high density high rises I couldn’t disagree more about the perspective that it’s a downgrade. 24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages. A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry. Big communities tend to have nice amenities that you’d only find in a country club all inclusive. Maintenance of the high rise unit is often included in the fees or rent. These communities tend to get better access to interconnect technologies like fiber. There will tend to be more options for healthy foods, increased opportunities for walkable restaurants and other forms of entertainment as the population density of the area increases. And more... Basically, my preference 10/10 times would be to live in a high density tall building over a single family home in a neighborhood. ~~~ esotericn Repeating my post from below: I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs. Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'. ~~~ meddlepal I think you're getting downvoted here or at least misunderstood because in America, suburban apartments are usually very nice in their own regard. So people don't see them as downgrades unless you actually need the space of a full house (eg. For raising a family) ~~~ esotericn Possibly. I think the misunderstanding comes from making a comparison that I obviously haven't attempted to, and that no reasonable person would (basically, a strawman). I can't see how a suburban apartment can be as nice as a suburban house unless you're making a cost argument. Yes, perhaps an apartment at price X is better than a house at price X. (Perhaps at price X a house doesn't even exist). The point is that someone who already owns a decent home doesn't have to make that decision, and that describes huge swathes of the city. The financial decision is for newcomers who are attempting to push these people out (or push them in to inferior conditions). If you have a 4 bedroom semi in Zone 4 London then I cannot see an equivalent apartment. It doesn't even make sense to me. No apartment block on the same street could be nicer. Only if you compared it with, say, some skyscraper in the City does it make sense to even talk about it, and that's a complete lifestyle change. ~~~ Retric Saying it’s suburban housing, or detached homes is a pure straw man argument as people can move from a suburban home to an apartment in the city very easily. If you can sell a house, move to an apartment and net X00,000 $ that’s very attractive. So price difference are really part of the equation. Also, people might prefer a detached home for ~30 years when having kids, but their is a constant stream of people exiting that life stage. How and where to downsize is a real question people deal with daily. ------ throwaway713 I see this going one of two ways. Either tech decentralizes and spreads out into places like Atlanta, Austin, and Nashville, or these jobs continue to further concentrate in SF/NYC/Seattle and the other cities fall way behind. In the first case, I think it's likely that inequality will continue to increase across the U.S. and the median American will be worse off for it; i.e., there will be a positive feedback loop where winner cities take all. In the second case, I think inequality will decrease, and the tech industry (and similar "big city" industries) can play to each region’s cultural strengths. I think this inter-city competition would be a positive effect and lead to accelerating innovation across a variety of different fields. Judging by recent Amazon/Google news though, I fear the first case is more likely to happen. ~~~ Cyclone_ I agree, I'll also note that it seems with all of the modern communication tools that satellite offices in secondary and tertiary markets wouldn't be as big of a deal now as it would have been 20 years ago. ~~~ closeparen It’s also no longer necessary for satellite offices to duplicate headquarters functions. The work done at HQ is infinitely reusable. HQ has near-perfect visibility into the goings-on at each office, so they no longer need independent decision making capability. And the economics have changed to favor quality over quantity: 100 top engineers are better than 1,000 cheap ones. Where are you find the highest concentrations of top talent? ------ jorblumesea For how long, I wonder. Many of those cities are intensely adverse to new taxes and public works that make larger cities livable. If they keep growing, they'll end up in a similar if not worse situation as the coastal cities. A big reason the coastal cities (LA, SF etc) are unlivable is due to a lack of investment in mass transit and housing. ~~~ chroem- >new taxes and public works that make larger cities livable I thought people are moving specifically because large cities are _un_ liveable. The article actually cites a more lax regulatory and tax environment as one of the reasons for why people and businesses are moving. ~~~ jorblumesea Sure, and then the realization that cities need to pay for things like infrastructure and transit to support their growing (and increasingly dense) population, and either way a a possibly unlivable situation develops. High taxes/high rents, or low taxes but zero infrastructure or support. No US city has managed to figure out the formula. That low tax situation has only lasted because there was previously no need for real serious spending. ~~~ nawitus Wouldn't the cost of infrastructure scale with the increased tax revenue from the increased population? I would also assume that infrastructure is actually cheaper per capita if population density increases, which would imply lower tax rates. ~~~ jorblumesea It depends on how the infrastructure is funded. In some states, that budget is based on property taxes. In some states, income and state taxes. It's not really a one size fits all problem. In some cases, the money is there but the voter will is not because there's a real "tax is theft" movement in many states. ------ xte I do not know nearly nothing about USA real estate market however in most part of Europe the number of people think cities as a workplace or an interim location for students, young workers or people who can't afford anything better is skyrocketing, in few EU countries there is already a reasonably developed "distributed economy" but in others (like Germany, Italy, Spain) there isn't so many choose small towns because being distributed means also have far less services and "urban comfort" nearby. I suspect that this situation start to be common in any western/developed world. Perhaps the USA are a bit late since their cities are generally "newer" than EU so they are probably "less compressed"/with a lower mean density that allow more green spaces and generally a little bit better mean life quality (something like you do not need 10' to go from A to B + 20' to find a park place around B or it does not take 40' for 15Km trip in peek hours). ------ c3534l People have been moving out of high-cost urban centers to cheaper areas since at least the 50s. And the "secondary" cities the author mentions are quite massive cities. Second, the authors narrative that people are moving "from coastal cities to “secondary” cities" is not factually accurate in the narrowest sense: LA, NYC, and San Francisco (which was a secondary city not that long ago) continue to have population growth. People are still moving to these cities, except NYC which has leveled off a bit. And most of the secondary cities the author mentions are also coastal cities, they're just different coastal cities. The only phenomenon is one that's as old as the industrial revolution: increased urbanization. ~~~ jjjensen90 In fact Phoenix is on the list of "secondary cities" and is the 5th largest city in the US. ~~~ dawhizkid “Secondary” is not a matter of size but about socioeconomic influence ------ jacobmoe The conversation here is interesting to contrast with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18403497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18403497). ------ secabeen In the US, a lot of these secondary cities are in states run by conservatives. As someone who cares about reproductive rights, that concerns me. I have a friend who had her amniotic sac rupture while in Arizona, and had to wait 72 hours before she could have the no-longer-viable fetus removed. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I worry about what laws I would be subject to in states like that, even if the city or neighborhood I lived in was populated with people who valued those rights in the same way I do. ~~~ AlexB138 There are plenty of people who feel the same way about the laws in New York and California. Having strong talent pools, and economies, in cities with different political climates means more people can live somewhere they're politically aligned and still have decent jobs. ------ dawhizkid $1500 for a 1 bedroom in LA seems like a good deal? ~~~ fiblye The point is people are getting more for less elsewhere. For people working normal jobs, California wages don't even begin to cover California costs. ~~~ dawhizkid I guess it depends on what you value. I pay more than $1500 in SF for half a house, but I don’t have a car and my commute downtown is very easy on public transit. I don’t have a lot of stuff so don’t need a big, new place either. If I saved 25% on rent by moving to a city with non-existent poor public transit (like Atlanta) I’d just end up paying close to what I pay now by upgrading my living situation (new construction apt and no roommate) and factoring in a car and commute time. ~~~ fiblye It also very much depends on your situation. If you're a single young tech worker, SF is great. If you've got kids or you're not working in tech, SF is the kind of place most people will actively avoid. ~~~ cinquemb Yeah, very much situation dependent. I started working remotely while in the US and then decided I would just move out of the country. 2br apt for 750$ per month. I paid that much for a room in Boston in a Apt that I had to share with 2 other people that was old and had no amenties… yeah not going back to that. My working motto now is "make my money in/from the US, spend it elsewhere". ------ simonebrunozzi Outline: [https://outline.com/KzcRSa](https://outline.com/KzcRSa)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Internet is HUGE you're only seeing a tiny fraction of it - ragnarkar https://medium.com/@GimmeSerendipi1/the-internet-is-huge-and-search-engines-and-social-media-are-only-showing-you-a-tiny-fraction-of-fef6a333c0c ====== shartshooter I love the concept a ton, as of right now it's not executing to what I was hoping for. Landing on a bunch of _Five ways to X your Y_. Looking forward to seeing it improve	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Me on Covid-19 contact tracing apps - generalpass https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html ====== feral This is a weak argument from Schneier. Most of his concerns (false positives, false negatives) also apply to contact tracing done by humans, which he advocates at the end of his article. If a medical professional interviews you about your contacts, you have to remember who they were. If you forget someone, or didn't know their name, that's a false negative. Someone you report you had coffee with, but who doesn't get the disease, is a false positive. Apps have different limitations, and need adoption to be useful, and that's a problem societies will have to consider. There's also legit privacy concerns. But the very broad argument made in that post is silly. You just don't need to stop every transmission to stop the disease. Even stopping 70%, via a range of measures, is about enough. You can tolerate some errors. ~~~ mellow2020 The dichotomy isn't between the app or a medical professional guessing, based on contacts, whether someone might be infected and whether they should self- quarantine. The dichotomy is between guessing infection based on contacts and testing for infection. ~~~ feral You may be misunderstanding the purpose of contact tracing? It's not to guess whether a patient you have is infected. It is to find the people that patient has infected before those infect more people. If things are being run properly: 1\. Someone shows up with the disease. (Tests positive, or clinical.) 2\. You find their contacts, either by app or interview or both. 3\. You tell those contacts to quarantine, hopefully before they've become infectious, breaking onward spread. 4\. If they test negative and don't display symptoms, they stop quarantine. Unless you mean to test everyone every day? Sounds good, but then you need way more tests than countries have been able to make so far, and they have to be very sensitive and specific too, even before someone is infectious. ~~~ yummybear Regarding 3) - should they quarantine regardless or just if the get ill? ~~~ fragmede It it depends on the pandemic. The reason COVID-19 has upended the world is that our usual metric "if they get ill" doesn't work. It doesn't work in this case, because many people with the virus show no signs while they are contagious, with some (many?) never showing signs they were ever sick. Worse, because COVID-19 is new, we are still learning details about it performs. The current recommendation to quarantine for 14-days is based on what little we _do_ know - which is that people exposed to the virus may show no symptoms for 14-days. There are cases of it taking more time, and there are also cases of it taking shorter time, but 14-days is what's currently recommended. Because we're still learning how the virus performs, testing is _far_ from foolproof. A test that says negative for the virus just means that the test says negative. The swap could have missed the virus even though a person has it. Thus, if reopening is to avoid a second wave of cases, they must quarantine until either the 14-days are up (and even then), or we (humanity) learn enough more and are able to give tests that are more widely trusted. "Quarantine regardless" is pejorative - it makes it sound like quarantine is just for the sake of it. With more knowledge and better technology, the 14-days could possibly be reduced, but the quarantine is one of the oldest medical technologies we have - an empirical test for "do you have the virus". ------ quicklime > Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently > alerts you of a contact. What should you do? ...the alert is useless. This feels like the mask debate again. It doesn’t _guarantee_ safety, so it’s useless. But there are plenty of things you could do. You could carry on but avoid visiting your elderly parents, and cancel your plans to attend a crowded event. You could start walking or driving to work instead of taking the train. Or work from home more often. It’s not a choice between quarantine or complete freedom, there are grey areas in between. Get one of these alerts? Start taking more precautions. Get many more? Start taking more extreme caution. ~~~ mstolpm Some of the problems: If you get an alert, are you personally responsible if you aren't going to self-quarantine immediately and perhaps infect others after being notified? What use would a tracing app have if anyone could ignore alerts at will, because s/he has no symptoms and is afraid of job loss if quarantining? On the other hand: What about people not using the app or just disabling bluetooth because they are afraid of being helt responsible? What if your employer, your supermarket or your health insurance demands that only users of the app are served/welcome? Are they allowed to check that you conform, even if the use itself is volontary? I'm not against a tracing app, but lots of unsolved questions aren't even discussed openly. ~~~ tastroder > I'm not against a tracing app, but lots of unsolved questions aren't even > discussed openly. Weird, I see the points you made brought up in many discussions that are tad more professional than a Twitter argument. Your first point is addressed by the fact that these apps are developed in tandem with health authorities. You don't just get locked away for two weeks because your phone popped up a notification. Just like there's stages for isolation there's ways to make this more compatible with regular life and still maintaining an impact on hindering the spread of this pandemic, e.g. getting you tested quickly instead of automatic isolation. Of course from an epidemiological standpoint one might argue that immediate isolation would be advisable but I doubt that would go over well in most democracies. The job loss argument seems like the economic impact argument brought up a lot over the last few weeks. On a population scale, an asymptomatic superspreader is likely far more expensive than somebody not going to work for a few days until they got tested so it could/should be addressed by policy makers. If your politicians can't figure out how to make mandatory sick leave happen during an active pandemic I'm not convinced a contact tracing app is the problem. The debate on voluntary or mandatory usage will surely be interesting, though I don't see how making it mandatory would not lead to people actively avoiding it's use and thus lessening the efficacy. ~~~ AlanSE > On a population scale, an asymptomatic superspreader is likely far more > expensive than somebody not going to work for a few days until they got > tested so it could/should be addressed by policy makers. If your politicians > can't figure out how to make mandatory sick leave happen during an active > pandemic I'm not convinced a contact tracing app is the problem. That's pretty much the endpoint of the discussion. We've already established there is no magic bullet for this. Even the most promising therapeutics, in the best case, will not return us to normal by the fall. Source - [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic- Innovation](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Pandemic-Innovation) We are counting on vaccines, but the timelines already have a huge amount of optimism backed into them. We can hardly stand 18 months more of this, but yet rollout may drag on longer than that if the trials encounter setbacks. If we don't ramp up and improve testing then we're screwed. No matter what else happens, that banishes us to isolation with no end in sight. Thankfully, testing is one area where we can and probably will come up to snuff in the summer months. That doesn't get us back to normal or normal-ish. The app would be a tremendously powerful tool. If you take this seriously, then you will value even meager tools that help move the needle in the right direction. People still holding out hope for that magic bullet are delusional, and they need to wake up to reality. ------ pimterry Don't these arguments apply equally well for manual contact tracing? There will be very significant false positives and negatives there too. I would expect that a contact tracing app can actually make a much more accurate list. Trying to accurately remember who I was near and for how long over the last X days is difficult (given that I'm not confined in my house, of course) Even with intensive manual research, working out who it was that cycled behind me for 5 minutes this morning or who I coughed next to at the cheese counter is going to be remarkably difficult. Apps can plausible cover some of those cases. We'll need to tune the alerts for acceptable precision & accuracy, as a function of the signal strength & duration of each contact, but that seems like a tractable problem, and again seems very similar to judging the risk of manually collected contact events. Despite all these possible inaccuracies, AFAICT contact tracing has been shown to be very effective, and is a well respected technique. I don't see anything here about how apps will be significantly worse. This assumes a significant install base of course, but I think that's tractable. ~~~ jerf "Don't these arguments apply equally well for manual contact tracing?" No. They mostly _apply to_ manual contact tracing, certainly, but they do not apply _equally well_. A human being doing it is much smarter. They _do_ take into account the fact that someone was on the other side of a wall. They are not limited by whether or not someone installed the app. They can use their brain to solve little local issues that the app can't even perceive which cumulatively add up to a huge difference. The app has a few advantages over the human, too, but I don't think it's that surprising at all that when it's all summed up and accounted for it ends up heavily Advantage: Dedicated Human. The modest advantages are trashed by the massive disadvantages. ~~~ pimterry I agree there's cases that humans will handle better, but there's also cases where the apps will do better too, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a wash (soon hopefully we'll have some actual research on this!). For example, in most situations where you're near an anonymous stranger, manual tracing is going to have a lot of trouble. That's a _lot_ of cases. You're almost certainly not going to be able to hunt down the person you sat next to on the metro for half an hour, or a stranger who came into your shop to ask some questions yesterday. Apps plausibly could trace them. That's before you start thinking about simple forgetfulness. Who did you sit next to in the company meeting a week ago? Assuming people actually use contact tracing apps (TBC...), then many of those otherwise untraceable contacts can be picked up. ------ TechBro8615 I’m glad to see Schneier come out with an opinion against these apps. Up until now, it’s seemed like the privacy community has been almost _excited_ about the idea of these tracking apps. Maybe because it’s a cool academic problem? I don’t know. Take this DP-3T project for example. It’s really interesting tech, and a great group of people behind it. But the government doesn’t care for this nuance of what is privacy preserving tech and what is not. For now, maybe at the beginning, privacy will be emphasized. But the important part is conditioning citizens to be okay with the underlying idea of technology assisted self- surveillance, and compliance with notifications on their phone telling them to stay inside. Schneier raises the point of false positives, which is important with regards to this idea of conditioning. What do you do when you get a notification that someone “nearby” tested positive? Do you take time off work and isolate yourself in your house for two weeks, just because some beacon passed within two meters of you within the past two weeks? Even if you have no symptoms at all? Just because you got a notification on your phone? This just seems unrealistic to me. My other worry is the classic “slippery slope.” Maybe people are okay with these apps in their current form, if they’re privacy-preserving. (Personally, I doubt anyone outside tech can recognize the difference anyway, but let’s assume the wider populace takes its lead from us). Isn’t there a risk that eventually people will forget about the underlying details and privacy will be deemphasized? “You were okay with TrackingApp 1.0, why wouldn’t you be okay with TrackingApp 2.0?” If we give an inch now, will the government take a mile later? Who’s to say the emphasis on privacy will remain in place? Heck, it’s not even clear whether it will be in place from the beginning. The NHS is already saying they don’t want to use it, choosing instead to build their own centralized solution. Again — it’s extremely concerning to me to see the general vibe of excitement coming out of the tech community around these apps. I’m really disappointed and would expect to see more skepticism. So, kudos to Schneier for going against the grain here. ~~~ peterwoerner We already gave an inch and the government took a mile. Closing down state parks and playgrounds. Making it illegal to play with the kids next door. I was probably pro tracking app a month or two ago, but the draconian measures taken by some governments (Michigan, Wisconsin) has changed my mind. Its going to lead to abuse abuse abuse abuse. ~~~ sanderjd I don't understand this argument. It's not like governors _want_ to take that mile. They have literally no incentive to shut down playgrounds (in fact, politically, the incentive is the opposite), besides uncertainty around what does and doesn't matter for fighting the epidemic in their state. It continues to look like we got lucky that kids aren't really affected much by this, so maybe it would have been fine to leave playgrounds open and keep having play dates. There were indications of that early on, but also a high risk it wouldn't pan out. Playgrounds are _exactly_ the kind of thing that are problematic for the spread of this illness: high-touch surfaces of the kind that this thing sticks to. If there were playgrounds for adults, they would be the most important things to shut down (indeed the closest thing to that - bars and clubs - will probably be the very last things to reopen). On top of that, kids cough a lot and put their hands in their mouths and just generally spread their fluids around. This would all be really bad news _except_ that it doesn't seem like kids spread this much, for whatever reason. But we just got lucky with that, and taking that risk would not have been smart at the beginning of this. Going back to my first point: I don't understand the logic of this argument at all. Why do governors want to lock people inside? What is the benefit? I share concerns over government breaches of privacy, because I don't want politicians abusing their trove of information on people to hang on to power. I don't see how this is similar to that at all. If politicians in the US were using this to cancel elections where they're on the ballot, then I'm with you, that's worrisome, but that's not what's going on here. These governors are accepting a political hit on the bet that it is going to keep more of their people alive. Lay out for me the argument for why you think these leaders _want_ to take this mile having been given this inch; why do they _want_ to close down state parks and playgrounds and cancel your playdates? What do you claim is in it for them? ~~~ aws200 I think politicians do have an incentive to lock down as much as possible. It appeals to their ego to do something authoritarian, and the power balance shifts from voters feeling free to voters anxiously hanging on the lips of politicians to find out when their new masters will allow them to go out again. There very powerful psychological forces at play here, people are literally trained like dogs in these situations. As an example, in Germany the CDU approval ratings shot up during the crisis, people apparently have Stockholm syndrome. ~~~ sanderjd This is very very thin when balanced against putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work and making some other very large number of people homeschool teachers at the same time they are full time employed. I am deeply skeptical that there is any governor in the US who thinks this is great politics. I really think they're just trying to do the best thing for their people. Recognition of this is why you see their approval ratings up. ~~~ aksl I cannot comment on the US, because I don't live there. In Germany, however: Information flow was poor and deceptive: 1) First, actual masks are purportedly useless, now homemade toy masks are mandatory. 2) While the population was locked in and many people lost their jobs, the government health authorities could not be bothered to report new cases in the weekend. Of course one cannot force a civil "servant" to work. Work is for the plebs and civil "servants" have job security as long as the ECB can print money. 3) There is no effort to determine if for example supermarket workers have a higher number of cases. They are in contact with hundreds of people every day. Zero information. 4) Actual antibody studies are lagging and take an extraordinary amount of time. Now the economy is down, bailouts for the rich will happen, the politicians, civil "servants" and state television parasites are secure and the general working population is screwed. Same as in 2008. ------ eli No offense to Bruce Schneier but he seems to be making an argument based on the apps' epidemiological value, an area that is outside his expertise. Surely all contact tracing methods have false positives and false negatives. Do they all have "no value"? Technologists have a duty to explain the limitations of the technology, but I don't think they should be drawing conclusions and making public health recommendations. ~~~ dchyrdvh Yes, they all have no value. Let's assume someone got bankrupted by a hospital over a severe coronavirus case. This means that someone has been wandering around for weeks infecting others. Let's assume there is a chain of 10 contacts between me and that someone. The probability of virus transmission is 1% (and I'm generous here) because more people wear masks, because people avoid talking and generally avoid interactions. Probability of transmission over 10 links is 10^-20 and we may stop right here, unless we plan to study quantum particles. Now let's assume I get a notification that I might have been infected over the past few weeks. The probability that the app is correct is abysmally low. But even if I get infected, I'm unlikely to get sick and I'm unlikely to transmit the virus to others because masks, social distancing and because I already assume I'm infected. So yeah, this app would be useless and is only good for surveillance. ~~~ SketchySeaBeast > The probability of virus transmission is 1% (and I'm generous here) because > more people wear masks, because people avoid talking and generally avoid > interactions. Probability of transmission over 10 links is 10^-20 and we may > stop right here, unless we plan to study quantum particles. If that were truly the case why are there still transmissions? Wouldn't that imply that in a matter of 5 months it will be impossible to get the disease strictly due to the timeline and required links? ~14 days of transmissible * 10 transmission events / 30 days in a month = 140 days before no more mathematically possible transmissions. Wouldn't that require us being repeatedly exposed to every person on the planet to keep those numbers to a possible level? ~~~ dchyrdvh Because there are multiple paths and the virus really spreads like a wave frontier in a 10 dimensional space of human to human contacts graph. The virus also spreads in a non uniform way: it's not about the distance between two interacted persons, but about the nature of their interaction, whether they weared masks and so on. The virus also really likes to stick to surfaces, like door handles or plastic wraps, and this vector of transmission is very difficult to trace even manually. Think of credit cards. The virus floats in the air like smoke if someone coughed and others may catch it this way. An app can't account for that and instead builds a social graph of interactions. The app would notice a lot of people crowded in a parking lot and would assume the virus was transmitted between those 50 people, but it wouldn't know that all those people sit in their cars, so the app just made the transmission chain 50x less useless. A few more such gatherings and the relevance of tracing drops to those sub quantum levels of homeopathic medicine. ~~~ lurquer But, if it can save just one person... ~~~ dchyrdvh That wouldn't justify surveillance. ~~~ lurquer What about one child... and a puppy? ------ dangoor I think the point of contact tracing is not that it's a silver bullet used alone, but rather a piece used alongside more widespread testing to help lower the rate of transmission. It may be reasonable to argue that these tracing apps alone aren't valuable, but once you add in greater test availability, it seems like they can help. [https://ethics.harvard.edu/covid-roadmap](https://ethics.harvard.edu/covid- roadmap) ~~~ deeringc Right - this is just a way of helping to prioritizing who gets tested. Given that testing kits will always be a limited resource (you can't simply test everyone, everyday) it makes a lot of sense to find sub-populations who are more likely to be positive. That doesn't mean you don't test anyone else (eg. those with symptoms, those in sensitive jobs) - it just lets you use a certain percentage of your testing capacity one those people who have been in proximity with confirmed cases. As you say, it's not a silver bullet but in combination with a slew of other approaches can help reduce the rate of transmission rate. ------ jandrewrogers Schneier is correct in that the proposed method is almost worthless for _effective_ contact tracing. However, he does not offer a viable alternative. There have been large-scale ground-truthing experiments run in cities like Manhattan for similar types of data models where population coverage was similar to the most optimistic projections for the proposed contact tracing method. We have a lot more data on the effectiveness of this type of tracing than most proponents and bystanders know, and it provides plenty of reason to believe the bluetooth proposal is an exercise in futility. Methods that would likely produce an effective data model exist but they are much more difficult to navigate as there is no legal framework for it, though technically possible. Discussion of contact tracing has been taken over by armchair experts who have a naive understanding of the complexities of the problem, particularly when a disease is already endemic. Technical implementations that would have broad efficacy in a country like the US are _at least_ a year away, and several governments are aware of this. Some governments are rolling out contact tracing programs they know have low efficacy for the sake of appearances. ------ samwillis Thinking "its not accurate enough" should not EVER be a reason to decide not to try something that could potentually help in this unprecedented situation. It may well not work well enough but we won't know unless we try! Each individual incremental activity, process, treatment, protection or APP that takes us a little closer to successfully fighting this thing should be done and done in conjunction with the others. ~~~ finnthehuman >Thinking "its not accurate enough" should not EVER be a reason to decide not to try something that could potentually help in this unprecedented situation. It may well not work well enough but we won't know unless we try! You do know you're using this line reasoning against the guy who literally invented the phrase "security theater," right? ~~~ sanderjd The analogy is definitely apt, but the difference is that we know a lot less about what is going to help with this problem than we did about the terrorism problem. Furthermore, it seems like contact tracing has helped in some countries who are already doing it, so there is some evidence it is not just theater. ------ mirrorlake Two big things he seems to miss. Correctly identifying (and quarantining) just a few newly infected people in the early stages of an epidemic is a huge win. It's the same as compound interest. Early investment pays handsomely. Secondly, this article is written as if better testing won't be available in the future. Better tests will eventually exist, so that can hardly be a reason why we shouldn't lay groundwork now. Bonus point: we aren't just trying to help the current pandemic. Perhaps this infrastructure could help prevent the next pandemic of a far deadlier disease where every extra quarantined person saves multiple lives. ------ newacct583 This is very wrong, to the point of being deliberately misleading: > Assume you take the app out grocery shopping with you and it subsequently > alerts you of a contact. What should you do? It's not accurate enough for > you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And without ubiquitous, cheap, > fast, and accurate testing, you can't confirm the app's diagnosis. So the > alert is useless. YES, of course we need pervasive testing. Everyone knows we need pervasive testing. That's why it's called a "test and trace" regime! We don't have it, and that's a major problem. But we know we have to get there. And once we do, the alert isn't useless anymore. Tracing is _one_ requirement of a successful mitigation strategy. Testing is the other. We need both. Having one side refuse to cooperate because they don't think the other will is just a recipe for disaster. I mean, imagine if the medical community started refusing to do tests because they thought the privacy folks would block attempts at tracing. That's what this logic amounts to. ------ zvrba For me it's both about the privacy and vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth stack such as [https://www.armis.com/blueborne/](https://www.armis.com/blueborne/) According to the article, you need Sep 9 2017 security patch level, but my 5 year old phone is on Sep 1 2017 level. No way I'm going to have Bluetooth turned on in untrusted areas. While I'm unlikely to get hacked on the street or in a store, it gets more likely in places like a bus or a train (while commuting). ------ rswail Unlike "Security Theatre" of the TSA et al, this is a little different. Contact tracing is proven to be effective in reducing the number of infections and locating and treating infected people earlier in their infection. These apps are _aids_ to that tracing, not a solution. They help both those that were in contact with someone who is diagnosed, by getting tested and treated earlier, they are more likely to stay healthier. But if they also quarantine themselves and are infected, they are less likely to spread the infection further. So it's a win-win. ------ tastroder > [...] and Bluetooth -- just aren't accurate enough to capture every contact. Did I miss his paper on the matter? There's dozens of groups working on this and even with a regular free space model the results seem "good enough" in <2m,15min scenarios for an additional data point. Most of this seems to leave out that digital contact tracing is not a cure all but a tool to help manual efforts. I somewhat hate the simplification people bring here, that every additional identified contact helps, but dismissing it as "plain dumb" seems rather shallow as well. Sure, false negatives will be a thing, the false negative rate of not doing digital contact tracing at all would be higher by definition. Most of what he outlined can occur in manual contact tracing as well and we still do that, simply because it's necessary. I haven't seen anything so far that would suggest that digital contact tracing in the poster child Singapore had any of the negative impact he brings to the table here and studies like Ferretti et al. [0] seem to make a pretty good case why it would at least not hurt the overall epidemiological goal. > It's not accurate enough for you to quarantine yourself for two weeks. And > without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing, you can't confirm the > app's diagnosis. So the alert is useless. The time frame and assumptions on testing capability is US centric I assume? If you can get a quick test it would not be two weeks, it's likely quick tests will become more prevalent if this sticks around long enough and testing capability will be raised to sufficient levels. Otherwise yes, false positives would quickly diminish usage. Of course some of his points are valid and need to be addressed by OS vendors, apps and policy makers, and evaluation of efficacy will be just as critical as teaching the public that having an app does not mean things can go back to normal. There's also plenty of opportunity for abuse even with the commonly decentralized architecture that is at the moment widely agreed upon but none of that supports the allegations of this particular article imho. The comments similarly bring up things like "surface transmission" as if that mattered at all. If you treat a contact tracing app as an additional data point it becomes much more sensible. [0] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936) ~~~ nocturnial What percentage of the population should install and use this before it becomes useful? The latest survey in my country said less than 50% were willing to adopt it and the number in the article mentions only 20% in Singapore. ~~~ tastroder That completely depends on your definition of useful, how people react to a "hit" in the application, and a bunch of other factors honestly. Figure 3 from the paper I linked contains a heatmap [0] that shows the simulated impact on r in different isolation scenarios vs. completely manual contact tracing. That's where those widely cited 60% adoption come from. In my, non-epidemiologist, view what matters more is that a) the gradient in this is better than completely manual contact tracing and b) I have yet to see anything that suggests it did not help in Singapore. While their product lead [1] is a biased source, he correctly points out that working in tandem with health authorities is critical for these efforts. If these apps aren't made only for technologies sake I do not really see how they would hurt. They have 20% there, quite some experience with outbreaks, and didn't replace it yet so I'd figure 20% would be a good enough data point for other countries to evaluate the approach on the scale of a population. And afterwards they would have to be re-evaluated constantly, just like any other measure politicians and epidemiologists currently propose to address the pandemic. We imho don't have enough data yet to even remotely answer "this amount helps", "this is how good they are" but I don't really see how that justifies these "this isn't perfect so it is dumb" reactions in the other direction. [0] [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/04/09/...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936/F3.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1) [1] [https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is- not-a...](https://blog.gds-gov.tech/automated-contact-tracing-is-not-a- coronavirus-panacea-57fb3ce61d98) ~~~ nocturnial Thanks for taking the time to type out this response. I had scanned the paper you posted and failed to make the link between success to isolate and adoption of the app. It's messy and a bunch of factors come into play, I now understand this better. I don't oppose a tracking app (it could be an api baked into the os but let's call it an app to simplify things). Maybe I'm wrong but that paper only addressed the (bio)tech side of things instead of also considering the sociological implications. If governments rely on this app to do the work of human tracers, I think the initial adoption rate will be high but then fall dramatically. This is the sociological effect I'm talking about. What happens if the app flags them as possibly infected? Can they call a hotline to give them information or is it just some automated crap they hear? How many times do you think someone would get a false positive before they uninstall it? It works using bluetooth. How much power drain on their batteries are they willing to accept? I see this app as an aid to human contact tracing not as a replacement. Maybe this is a naive interpretation, but I see it more useful in this situation: vector: "On date X I met with Zoe, Alec and Ronnie" tracer: "There's a fourth with the same timestamp here" vector: "A fourth?? I don't remember a.. Oh... right... uncle dave was also there" The problem is companies and some governments have abused privacy information and now the consequence is that people are more reluctant to give this useful info. That's why you need to study this also from a sociological point of view. ~~~ tastroder Yeah that's fair, especially your last point. In a perfect pandemic-fighting world we could just have an app that did that, the decentralized model adopted won't be that specific. It would be more something along the lines of uncle dave getting a notification. I share your concern on initial adoption, especially since I could not find hard data on places that already implemented apps. I would expect an initial rush and then a plateau instead of WhatsApp like growth as some people expect. As for your specific questions I can only offer a few points on two of them given what we know about the current plan here in Germany, that highly depends on the country and I honestly have not looked at how health authorities work in the US very much. > What happens if the app flags them as possibly infected? Can they call a > hotline to give them information or is it just some automated crap they > hear? The new vendors here in Germany were especially chosen with the argument that they are able to operate 24/7 human phone support. With the decentralized approach they'll get a lot of people flagged and at the moment it seems like the app would suggest to them to call up that number (or likely offer that as an alternative to the other established contact points). Those phone contacts could then talk them through the next steps or, should testing become too limited at any point, through an assessment if testing makes sense for them / voluntary self quarantining can be done / ... > It works using bluetooth. How much power drain on their batteries are they > willing to accept? In centralized models as proposed by PEPP-PT/ROBERT(France) or NHSX(UK) there's a few ways explored to minimize battery usage on Android, the APIs on the iphone require the screen to be turned on for this use case and must subsequently be horrible for battery usage. The decentralized model that was adopted adopted by many countries is supported by Google/Apple as OS vendors with battery usage and interoperability with other Bluetooth usage in mind, I doubt there will be much of an impact (at least not any that would drive significant user numbers away from voluntary use). ------ sigmar >without ubiquitous, cheap, fast, and accurate testing No one is arguing to do more contact tracing and stop building testing capacity. You need both. False positives are a big issue and should be reduced. but I don't see how having a better idea of which asymptomatic people to test would be a net negative on the whole? ------ gregwebs This is a false dichotomy. Professional contact tracers must be in charge. Contact tracing apps help them do their job more effectively. His arguments also seem to assume that testing will remain scarce. But testing capacity keeps increasing and as lockdowns continue demand goes down. Schneir seems so out of his element here to the point that his arguments devolve into name calling. Unfortunately this is going to taint his future credibility on contract tracing. It would have been nice to have his input on the security and privacy concerns of this issue. ------ syrrim An important part of the criticism is that the apps being proposed won't tell you who or where you had a contact, just that it occured anywhere. This leaves you with no capacity to judge the actual danger of being infected. An app being used to augment practical contact tracing, for example by reminding you who you'd been in contact with, would be potentially useful, but that isn't what's proposed. Another way that such apps become useless is their voluntary nature. Ie that use of the app, and self-quarantine in response to an alert, are an individual's choice. Obviously, if you passed by a sick person in the grocery store, you do have a chance of being sick, and therefore quarantining is still useful. But most people will feel silly about quarantining themselves in response to such a low probability event. Having even a small fraction of people act on these alerts would therefore require enforced compliance of some sort. Note that I'm not per se advocating either that the app be less privacy aware, nor that compliance be enforced, just expanding on the source of the impotency schneier talks about. ~~~ chasd00 also, even if compliance was enforced, at best, the apps can only track phones. For example, I leave my phone at home by mistake all the time... ------ bfung The crux of it is: “... it's just techies doing techie things because they don't know what else to do.” All the comments here, esp HN, should think about if this is even a useful app, before debating other stats. Will ordinary people install and use this app? Example scenario: will SIP protestors use this app? Force install with opt-out? ------ bybjorn Add ubiquitous & fast testing into the mix - is contact tracing valuable then? Because testing on demand is what a lot of governments are looking at. I’m thinking the app giving me a notice of close contact with a confirmed covid case will also increase my chances of getting a test even before we reach that scenario. ------ m3kw9 If contact tracing can be better than 50-50 it will be better than knowing nothing like we are now when ever we go out. If it is les than 50/50 it could have fatal consequences where people lower their guards because of too much trust into the data that is probably wrong ------ Gravityloss The points are worth discussing and putting some numbers on. What false negative and false positive rates, installation percentage among population and other things are acceptable for still useful contact tracing? And how does it tie to testing availability etc. ~~~ tastroder [https://twitter.com/eredmil1/status/1255934130753204224](https://twitter.com/eredmil1/status/1255934130753204224) this had preliminary results on questionnaires w.r.t. user acceptance . This [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/science.abb6936) paper looks at how effective it is given N% of the population using it and I've not seen any info that it hurt the situation in Singapore. ~~~ Gravityloss [https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do- testing...](https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-how-to-do-testing-and- contact-tracing-bde85b64072e) This article argue why it's not very likely to be good, compared to manual contact tracing. I don't agree with all the points, but it is a valuable read. There is a lot of other good things there as well. ~~~ tastroder When discussing the paper I linked this article says "That sounds hard. The good news is that, done well, this measure alone could stop the epidemic. But even if you don’t do it well, it contributes." and correctly calls for combination with other measures. That's my main point, even if it's not as good as manual contact tracing the allegation that this is "tracing app" vs. anything else is just a pointless debate that Schneiers post seems to further. Like the article you posted seems to say, we should improve manual tracing and testing as well but I haven't seen anything in there that would support the Schneier viewpoint on first glance. Looks like an interesting read for later though, thanks for sharing! ------ dchyrdvh With 95% infected not showing any symptoms, contact tracing is pointless, as it will be about tracing contacts of those few severely ill. With this in mind, contact tracing is really just a way to sell survelliance to people and then seal it in laws. ~~~ xorfish But it is more 5-40% of infected that don't show any symptoms. It is also not clear how infectious people that don't show symptoms are. ~~~ dchyrdvh They are doing well. The symptoms are the same as mild flu or allergy, and the effects are nearly non existent except in already old and sick. If half of infected got severe complications, it would be a blood bath with military on the streets already. ~~~ xorfish Average life expectancy based on age and comorbidities of the people who die is around 10-13 years. That is not an insignificant lifetime reduction. 0.5%-2% of the people who get it, die. That is much worse than the flu that kills 0.04-0.1% of the infected. The flu itself is already pretty deadly and this is much deadlier. ~~~ dchyrdvh But it's not deadly enough to reverse the climate change. Humans are smart animals: they will adopt to the virus real quick, restart the dirty economy machine, get their previous life expectancy back and suffocate in dirty air, water and unbearable weather. But they will die on their terms, with pride and dignity. ------ coucou I think there is more to the ContactTracing app then what Schneier mentioned. Understand how to define a close-contact of infected. It requires a constant 30 minutes Bluetooth-strong-signal (geographically near) to the infected person, not just because your "ID" being captured on the infected person. The app helps find these close-contacts around you and eventually notifying them to isolate themselves and test. Imagine this process chained. Of course, this will need a scale of people downloading the app. But better- having this auto-logged than human-effort asking infected 1 by 1 (10,000+++ infected VS 100 contact-tracer)! ------ finnthehuman >That loss of trust is even worse than having no app at all. Suddenly, for the first time, I'm sold on contract tracking apps. Lets build them and push them far and wide. If the hype cycle and subsequent arguments regarding contract tracking have shown us anything, it's that everyone needs to stop trusting claims of "it's for your own good." ------ kolbe I have a rather cynical prediction for these apps: they will be mandatory for us to have to use various public services, and they will cost absurd amounts of money. This will be regardless of the efficacy because the goal isn’t safety or surveillance, but extracting rents for the politically-connected people who will be “approved vendors.” ~~~ generalpass I suspect there will be multiple flavors of bootleggers and multiple flavors of baptists. ------ brenden2 Another take: all these things (shutdowns, contact tracing, social distancing) are measures to give people a sense of security, and make them feel as if the PIC are doing something useful. At the end of the day, the virus will do what the virus does, with or without apps. Until there's herd immunity or a vaccine, this will remain a politically charged issue and there will be constant jockeying for political clout (and I'm using the term 'political' in a sense that includes private entities trying to win favours in the eyes of the public). I agree with Bruce, the contact tracing apps are goofy and I don't see how they will make the virus stop spreading without other changes such as widely available cheap home test kits. ~~~ dchyrdvh TBH, the real solution will be reopening the economy with masks on and social distancing. Vaccine is a pipe dream and by the time it might be created, everyone will have been infected a few times. My conspiracy theory is that the government understands that very soon everyone will wear masks and sunglasses and all the face-recognition tracking will become useless, so to compensate for that, they are pushing hard for alternatives. Once masks get normalized and the infection rate drops to manageable levels, the opportunity to push this app surveillance will be lost. ~~~ brenden2 I'd agree that qualifies as a conspiracy theory. ------ dustingetz If software is the new bureaucracy and this app can put you in a detention center, oof. How do you get out when the software is wrong? ------ chasd00 what these apps would be most useful for is keeping OCD types and concern trolls busy while the rest of us get on with our lives. EDIT: and think about this, users of this app will open and engage with it every time they're shopping or any venue. It will be the most effective add delivery platform ever made. I think that's the real motivation. ------ senectus1 Schneier is too close to the binary nature of security. This is an organic problem, not his specialty and will take a multilayered response. ------ kohtatsu I really think the equivalent of paper journals is the way to go. As well as some way to report to grocery stores etc you've visited after testing positive. Heck an answering machine at the grocery store that reports known cases, which everyone calls each Sunday would be enough. ------ ck2 Half the population won't even voluntarily wear a mask or isolate. Some even go anywhere they want coughing constantly. So how exactly is voluntary contract tracing anything but an utter fantasy and hand waving that it "exists" so magically protects us? ------ buboard It doesn't matter; politicians already love it because they appear to be “Doing Something(TM)”, and the ~~commecial arm of NSA~~, er, big tech are excited to provide yet one more surveillance tool. What could go wrong? This year it will be for covid, next year for influenza, then u re just going to have to learn to live with it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
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Memory Safety in Rust: A Case Study with C - wcrichton http://willcrichton.net/notes/rust-memory-safety/ ====== shabbyrobe A lot of point-missing here about the example C program. Maybe everyone else in the world is a perfect C coder who never makes a mistake, but I've found every single one of those mistakes in my own code at one point or another (though of course, not at quite the same density). The point is that they're easy to make, and though there is tooling, it's extremely cumbersome and imperfect. Worse, over time as a codebase gets more complicated and older - and only if you're one of the few lucky enough to start with C code that isn't an unholy, inconsistent no-warnings disaster-mess slop bucket of horror - some of those warnings have a nasty habit of getting disabled so some middle manager can expedite some unreasonable commitment out a door to tick a box. Call me a masochist but I enjoy writing C, particularly with valgrind, san, afl, et al at my back. But I felt the point was well made by the author and I find it hard not to feel like a world where these problems simply didn't exist at all might be a bit nicer ~~~ 2trill2spill > The point is that they're easy to make, and though there is tooling, it's > extremely cumbersome and imperfect. What's hard about adding -fsanitize=address or -Weverything to your Makefile? Or running a program under Valgrind, or using the clang static analyzer or coverity? Using AFL can be a little cumbersome but still not that hard. ~~~ seba_dos1 Depending on what you're doing, AddressSanitizer might not be available for you to use, as there are plenty of ASAN-incompatible constructs that may be used by libraries your application depends on. (it's worth looking at other sanitizers anyway, it seems not everyone is aware of their existence after all; if you can't put C away they're really great tools for retaining your sanity :)) ------ reza_n Not exactly the best example. If I take this code (test.c) and try to compile it: > gcc test.c I get an error: test.c:21:3: warning: function returns address of local variable [-Wreturn-local-addr] return &vec; After I fix that error, the program segfaults when running. Compile with asan: > gcc test.c -Fsanitize=address -lasan -g Then we can start debugging these problems: ==3261== ERROR: AddressSanitizer: attempting double-free on 0x60040000dfd0: ... #2 0x4008b5 in vec_free ./test.c:46 Not trying to say that this is the best workflow for debugging C, but the tooling does exist for these kinds of programming errors. ~~~ amluto None of which will help detect the integer overflow unless you're quite serious about your testing. ~~~ reza_n Very valid point. The code for that: int new_capacity = vec->capacity 2; assert(new_capacity > vec->capacity); ~~~ nbsd4lyfe asserts are for diagnostic-enabled code, don't use them for security checks. ~~~ steveklabnik This is one area where Rust also differs from C; assert!s are left on in release mode; you use debug_assert! if you want something only in development. ~~~ nbsd4lyfe I agree, it's a hella questionable language choice, and not limited to C. I found out about it through [https://github.com/rohe/pysaml2/issues/451](https://github.com/rohe/pysaml2/issues/451) ------ sidlls This is more like "a comparison of terrible C to middling Rust." Rust is generally a superior language, but this sort of comparing the worst kind of C to middling (or, worse, well-written) Rust doesn't seem useful to me. I suppose it could be worse: these sorts of examples could always use obfuscated C as their source for comparison. ~~~ klodolph Yeah, sure. Personally, as much as I dislike the way the Rust community evangelizes the way Rust works (like the Haskell community writing another monad tutorial), there are some pretty common categories of errors demonstrated in the C code: \- Return pointer to stack object (more common than you might think!) \- Incorrect size passed to malloc() \- Pointer to array outliving invalidation of array Some of the remaining C code appears to be garbage intended to distract you from the errors people actually make, but there is some good stuff in there and I pull out similar examples when I'm trying to convince people not to learn C or C++ just to improve the quality of their greenfield projects. ~~~ kbwt > Return pointer to stack object (more common than you might think!) Maybe when you're still learning how to program. A combination of valgrind/sanitizers will catch all of these mistakes. The same class of mistakes can also be made in "memory-safe" languages, just replace pointer with index and memory with array. ~~~ danieldk Valgrind will only catch such indexing errors when you read/write out of bounds when running Valgrind. There is a huge difference between out-of-bounds indexing leading to undefined behavior or an exception/panic. ~~~ klodolph Valgrind won't catch certain indexing errors even if you exercise them. Valgrind only checks that the address is valid, not that the address was derived from a pointer to the object you are accessing. int main() { int x[16]; int y[16]; int z[16]; x[0] = 0; y[0] = 0; z[0] = 0; y[18] = 3; // Valgrind thinks this is OK. return 0; } ~~~ jcelerier [https://i.imgur.com/fgufyE1.png](https://i.imgur.com/fgufyE1.png) ~~~ klodolph I think you may have missed the part of the conversation where we were talking about Valgrind, specifically, and not talking about the address sanitizer. ------ 2trill2spill That C code is bad and doesn't compile on macOS using clang without adding #include <assert.h> . Just looking at it you can see the bugs. But the main problem I'm having with this article is comparing a contrived C program with no tooling to Rust. As the author notes returning a stack address is caught by clang. Also simply compiling with address sanitizer or running under Valgrind would have caught the rest of the bugs. I'm not saying Rust isn't safer than C or not a sweet and useful language it is those things. What I am saying is comparing Rust to C without all the tooling that Modern C developers use is kind of disingenuous. ~~~ jstimpfle I don't even use any tooling except occasionally a debugger (gdb on Linux / Visual studio on Windows). I have spent more than 500 hours of the last 8 months in C (no complicated data structures), and I'm pretty sure I've spent less than 2 hours total tracing memory bugs. (not saying there aren't more hidden). ~~~ 2trill2spill Use as many tools as your platform supports. I've had "stable" C code run just fine for two years but come crashing to a halt immediately under address sanitizer. So if code is working just fine now it could still be buggy and not work on other platforms or when built by other compilers. ~~~ jstimpfle Yep - might do. Unfortunately, to be honest, the OpenGL implementation I use printed quite a bit of a mess when run under valgrind, so I haven't tried again. (Could improve the architecture to bench separately). Update: tried and valgrind doesn't report problems in my own code under normal operation, except for me being sloppy at shutdown :-) ~~~ 2trill2spill Check out the docs for suppressing errors in valgrind[1]. Also try the various compiler sanitizers, as well as the clang static analyzer and if your project is open source, coverity. [1]: [http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/manual-core.html#manual- core...](http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/manual-core.html#manual- core.suppress) ------ viperscape Having learned Rust and used it for nearly 2 years, I am now happy using C. I think most issues in C are easily catchable. Here me out: 1\. If using Int for indexing or any sort of len or count, make sure it's positive when needed, and within bounds of what's allocated. As in if you plan on allocating huge data, plan it out and use the right data type. 2\. If you alloc, then free when done. If you free, set to Null; and before you free, check for Null. 3\. If you realloc, in particular, check that it actually worked and prepare for basic error handling. Rust requires all of these steps by default. Finally, just test some of your code. Rust makes this easy, and encourages it. I still really like C. ~~~ wott > _before you free, check for Null._ You can free(NULL), no problem. It will not do anything. ~~~ syockit It's usually a problem with pointers to structs that have pointer members. In a typical destruction sequence, you usually free the members before the struct itself. ------ fao_ Would anyone realistically write this C code though? The second point (the initial total amount being 0) is something that anyone paying even a cursory glance at the source code could pick up on, as were many of the others (who the hell gets the address of stack memory and returns it? This is C 101). If this was found-in-the-wild C then I wouldn't be bothered with it, but this is completely contrived. ~~~ danieldk No experienced C programmer will write this code, but years of buffer overflow/double free CVEs show that even experienced programmers make such errors occasionally. And one error can be enough for a system compromise. Of course, this is not only an argument in favor of in Rust, but any memory- safe language. Rust just happens to address some of the same problem domains that C and C++ have traditionally been dominant in. ~~~ viperscape Why is double free so commonly an issue? Isn't setting to Null after free and checking for Null before hand a common practice? ~~~ tene It's usually not calling free() on the same variable within a single function, although that can sometimes happen. The most common case, I expect, is when two separate data structures both have pointers to the same object and believe they own it, then later end up calling free on the same address at different times. ------ amluto There's an extra bug in both the C and the rust code. The code assumes that, if length == capacity and capacity >= 1, then length < capacity *2. This is false for finite-precision integers. In C, this will manifest as an out of bound write when the array gets too big. In Rust, it'll panic when array bounds checking or integer overflow checking catches it. ~~~ tjalfi A related issue is that overflow on signed integers in C is undefined. Vec.length, Vec.capacity, and new_capacity should all be changed to size_t to avoid a compiler optimizing out an overflow check. Edited to be explicit about programming language. ~~~ steveklabnik (Note that they are both well-defined in Rust) ------ MrBingley Another problem with the C code, which is perhaps even more subtle, is the usage of `int` for the length, capacity, and loop index. On 64-bit platforms these variables will overflow for very large arrays, which will likely break the entire implementation. The call to `malloc()` should give a signed-to- unsigned conversion warning which will hint about this, but unfortunately many people ignore integer warnings. Incidentally, this could also be caught by compiling with `-ftrapv` or `-fsanitize=undefined`, but this problem is only triggered in a rather extreme corner case that is unlikely to be exposed during testing. The correct integer type to use is `size_t`, which is guaranteed to be large enough to hold the size of any object in memory. ~~~ jstimpfle Personally I'm going the other direction. I use int for anything unless there's a serious need to make an exception. The amount of complexity introduced by using a zoo of integer sizes and signedness is unmanageable to me. There is no point in measuring array sizes in size_t. I don't make bigger allocations >2G. (At some point this assumption will probably break and I will have to re-think my approach. Shouldn't we all move to 64-bit integers by default already?) ~~~ burntsushi > There is no point to measure array sizes in size_t. I don't make bigger > allocations >2G. I think almost every Rust program I've ever published regularly encounters files greater than 2GB (even 4GB), and if I had used C and its `int` type everywhere, I'd be in for a very very bad time. This of course doesn't mean I am allocating >2G on the heap, but I might memory map the file. Or there might be some other counter (line counter? byte counter?) where using `int` would just fail. There are even some alternatives to my tools written in C, and either they or their dependencies use `int` instead of `size_t`, and that leads to actual bugs their end users hit in exactly the cases where files are greater than 2GB. Getting integer sizes right is important, and it's not just in cases where you're putting >2G on the heap. ~~~ jstimpfle > Getting integer sizes right is important, and it's not just in cases where > you're putting >2G on the heap. I prioritize on getting their _values_ right :-). So far I have not encountered bugs due to my pretty uniform usage of int. But if they had to deal with allocations >2G, my programs would just die. Yup, I make some exceptions as well, for example to measure time in microseconds, or to measure the size of very large streams. And of course I try to assert that all downcasts to int are valid, and that my integer operations don't overflow, etc. (why do CPUs still not support overflow exceptions?) I'm pretty sure we could get rid of quite some historical baggage in terms of integer types. For example, I'm currently working on a network module, and there is a type socklen_t which is to indicate the size of a socket structure. I might be missing something, but to me there is no good reason not to use simply int. ------ alkonaut Lots of comments seem to say “these aren’t mistakes any experienced C programmer would make”. Does that really make the protection against those mistakes less important? ~~~ 2trill2spill > Does that really make the protection against those mistakes less important? No it doesn't. But from a C programmers point of view it's kinda like can you show examples of bugs in C that wouldn't immediately be found in code review or by tools like ASAN, Valgrind, Coverity or even just the C compiler, that Rust can solve. Those are the examples that would interest the C community. ~~~ pornel Bugs that sneak through code review are, almost by definition, the hardest to demonstrate. If a qualified person familiar with the code couldn't see it, it will take a lot to explain it to an average reader. Hidden bugs are generally in large and complex codebases, but such codebases are also the worst for example code in a blog post. So that's why the next best thing is to show it in obvious case, and leave it for you to extrapolate it to your complex cases. Also the more complex the problem, the more likely it is incomparable between C and Rust. The prime example is a controversy whether Heartbleed would have happened in Rust. On one hand a direct C-to-Rust translation of the whole system with a custom memory-reusing allocator wouldn't have prevented the bug. OTOH such approach from Rust perspective is very contrived and unusable in practice, so one can argue nobody would have structured the code like that in the first place. ------ youdontknowtho So rust isn't memory safe? You can still access invalid pointers? I'm just trying to clarify...it's lifetime safe, but not access safe, or leak safe? ~~~ steveklabnik Unsafe code allows programmers to write code the compiler can’t check. Unsafe code is expected to uphold the safety invariants, but humans can make mistakes. Most people mean “safe Rust” when they say “Rust.” Leaks are memory safe though. They’re hard, but not impossible, to get. ~~~ sidlls > Most people mean “safe Rust” when they say “Rust.” I disagree. I think they mean Rust code they see in use that has no explicit "unsafe" blocks. For example, most people are going to say "let mut v = Vec::<i32>::new(); v.push(0)" is "safe Rust." It is, in the sense that all the rules of Rust safety apply to the specific code quoted as-is. It also isn't, because 'Vec' is littered with unsafe. ~~~ steveklabnik That’s what I mean by “safe Rust”, so we agree. ~~~ sidlls We don't, though. The quoted code isn't safe. It has implicit unsafe blocks in it. You can't claim there are two dialects of Rust if you inlcude the "unsafe" dialect in your definition of "safe" as long as there isn't an explicit "unsafe" block present. It's misleading ~~~ steveklabnik That's not a useful definition, though, as that means that all code everywhere is unsafe, since the hardware is. ------ wott The 382th episode in which a rustacean blames C while he has only practised C++. 1\. The (int PTR) cast of malloc() gives you away immediately. No cast in C. 2\. > _missing free on resize. When the resize occurs, we reassign vec- >data without freeing the old data pointer, resulting in a memory leak._ Er... C has realloc() for that. Once again, you do delete() + new() only in C++, not in C. BTW, you forgot other errors in your "C" program. ~~~ dang Please don't post snarky dismissals here. Not cool, and you can make your substantive points without casting them that way. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Thousands Violate SF Housing Laws Using Airbnb, Few Face Penalties - kspaans http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Bay-Legal-Thousands-violate-SF-housing-laws-few-face-penalties-380218621.html ====== sna1l > Since February of last year, 1,281 other hosts have also registered with the > city. However, that number is a far reach from the 7,046 hosts that Airbnb > acknowledges are listing more than 9,000 properties in San Francisco. That > means at least 82 percent of hosts are breaking the law. I agree that Airbnb hosts not following regulations are probably contributing to the supply crisis. But 9000 properties? Isn't SF in need of 10s of thousands of units if not even more than that to match demand? I think SF's ineptitude around permits, zoning, and the "not in my backyard" mentality is a way bigger issue. ------ fasteddie I'm conflicted on the SF AirBnB issues because on one end I'm part of the "any more housing is good housing" crowd but at the same time I'd like AirBnB to succeed (as a user when I travel from SF) and I'm afraid of downstream consequences of heavy regulations in its host city. I've more or less accepted I'm a hypocrite on the issue, or at least selfish on it. ~~~ ncr100 What percent do you estimate of AirBnB landlords would withdraw from AirBnB if they were further encouraged by AirBnB to abide by the law? ------ brbsix If SF is going to be a NIMBY city, actively discouraging new development, violating property rights, and banning short-term rentals in a manner akin to some sort of socialist state, I guess that's just the shit we're used to here. But to restrict supply, implement all sorts of price controls, and then engage in this sort of selective (or nonexistent) enforcement feels so utterly corrupt. Though I suppose expecting any sort of consistency on the matter is asking too much. ------ camel_gopher I registered with the office of short term rental close to six months ago. Still haven't heard back from them. Ditto for a few other people I know.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Volkswagen Says 11M Cars Worldwide Are Affected in Diesel Deception - 001sky http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/international/volkswagen-diesel-car-scandal.html?_r=0 ====== jbob2000 I wonder where that $7.8 billion is coming from. If they pulled it from R&D, will we see sub-standard VW models for the next couple of years? I imagine we're going to get a decade of "VW is environmentally friendly!" ads too, while they try to shake this bad PR. ~~~ pcurve they have healthy balance sheet pay this off. But most likely, they will take on long term debt to finance this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gamasutra: 15 iPhone Game Observations, Before and After - BPO_Quickdraw http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JeffHangartner/20110628/7878/15_iPhone_Game_Observations_Before_and_After.php ====== Revisor Some interesting notes: \- Ipad is less powerful than Iphone (at least from a game developer's POV, regarding the screen is larger) \- Usability of the app catalog sucks for browsing But what's the most important (meta) insight for me: Games (on iOS) are fully commoditized. There are twelve a dozen games for every genre and every theme and yet more developers are looking for gold there. ------ smashing What is up with the seemingly random bold of the text? Also, the article lacks punctuation at parts near the end of the partially-bolded paragraphs. It was kind of difficult to read.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook threatens to 'Zuck up' the human race - olivercameron http://cnn.com/2012/05/30/tech/keen-technology-facebook-privacy/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 ====== friggeri Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there's a "shift" from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence. The way I understand this quote, it's opposed to centuries of sociology/psychology, cf. Aristotle's zoon politikon and Lev Vygotsky's “Through others, we become ourselves.” My point is, the nature of the influence of others on ourselves has not changed, only the medium this influence goes through is different. And needless to say that this new medium is nothing more than a complement to all others through which we already achieve social presence. ~~~ laglad I don't buy that identities were previously generated from within. I think that pre-internet, the average person assumed a stronger piece of their identity from family, job, nationality, gang etc. than from their inner convictions. The internet boosts the number of identity groups you can join to a size so great that you need a different outlook to grapple with the madness. Maybe it's a good thing because it's kicked us out of a local maximum where we could arbitrarily settle on who we are. Now, the clouds have cleared and there are vast mountains everywhere.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Stock Scales $1,000 a Share - prateekj http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/technology/google-stock-scales-1000-a-share.html ====== aroch There's no way you missed the post at the top of the front page (which has been there for hours)...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Using Technical Recruiters to Hire Engineers - lgsilver We're a profitable early-stage startup in SOMA, scrambling (like everyone else) to find talented Python devs who can help us build V2 of our web-based social marketing platform.<p>We've been rolling around the meetup circuit, posting online, and pushing the roles out through our networks, but still haven't met the caliber of innovators we're looking for. Since we have some cash for this, we're now thinking about working with a recruiter(s).<p>Are technical recruiters worth it? Should we try to bring someone on in-house, or outsource? Is contingency okay? Any thoughts on this would be hugely appreciated. ====== Peroni Former Tech Recruiter with an agency, currently inhouse Tech Recruitment Manager for a large dev company. If you know of someone with proven experience in the area you are hiring for and you know of organisations that have used them successfully then go for it. Otherwise, don't waste your money. Recruiting is an incredibly difficult challenge that requires patience and persistence. If you are struggling to find people I can guarantee it's for one of the following reasons: 1\. You aren't paying enough 2\. The job description isn't appropriate to attract the right folk 3\. You are looking in all the wrong places (highly doubt this is the reason) 4\. There are no suitable candidates on the market. I would be amazed if points 3 or 4 were the crux of the issue. If you want you can send me the job description along with the details of the package and I'll happily give you my opinion. In the mean time, some reading material: 1\. Why you should avoid recruiters at all costs - [http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/6/15/all-that-is-wrong- wit...](http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/6/15/all-that-is-wrong-with-the- recruitment-industry) 2\. Recruiting advice for start-ups - [http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/11/5/why-should-i-join- you...](http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/11/5/why-should-i-join-your-start- up) ------ mchannon If I was in your shoes, I'd become your own technical recruiter, pick a far- flung college town or city with a good CS program, and try to relo a crackerjack Python dev out of a batch of a dozen you contact. Fly yourself out to Podunk City to seal the deal. Only so many devs come out of bay area schools, and only so many devs relocate out to SF before they have guaranteed employment. There's a lot of pent-up supply of $100k-grade talent pulling in $40k in flyover country. You're going to find and keep those people far easier (and cheaper!) than barking up the same trees (recruiters and H1B) that your contemporaries are. ~~~ noahc Just wanted to point out that in fly over country a first time developer can get close to $70k from recent experience, so I wouldn't expect the $40k number to stick. Although, I will say that it is easier to under price your self in fly over country because your cost of living is much lower. ~~~ mchannon Exactly. "Can get" and "are getting" are two completely separate things. Even still, $100k at your SOMA startup seems like it would sound a lot better to someone earning $70k in the middle of nowhere than someone earning $100k at an existing job down the street. ~~~ noahc I dont want to give away too much but moderately sized metro areas are paying 70k for first time developers. ------ mingpan Not that there aren't good third-party recruiters out there, but the majority I've encountered while personally looking for work were disappointing. They seem to scrape resumes from the Internet, perform rudimentary keyword- matching, and cold-call for candidate volume rather than candidate quality. Part of the issue is that it's in their best interests not to find a best fit for either party, but rather to maximize their own overall throughput. If you decide to use a third-party recruiter, then please, for your own sake and those of your potential hires, vet them thoroughly. ~~~ lgsilver Yeah, that's the feeling I've gotten. There seem to be a group of recruiters, and a group of serial contractors, that cycle around SV. In this market, it's almost just a matter of manpower and positive outreach. I guess that's what dev advocates are... ------ xoail Sometimes hire fast, fire fast really works. If you find someone even matching 50-70% of caliber you are looking for, it might be worth taking a risk. If you are concern is his/her code quality, then ask for code references and if your concern is culture fit related, then you'd know in 2-4 weeks. Keep the conversation transparent though. As an early-stage company, i'd avoid going through a recruiter. ------ calbear98 Read this before deciding <http://www.ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recruiter- honeypot/> ~~~ lgsilver Calbear, Thanks. This article was awesome! Elaine had great ideas about hiring at the start, and her (or her fictitious dev's) experiences are exactly in line with my own. Just hoped that maybe there was something else besides LinkedIn out there... ------ calbear98 A good recruiter might be even harder to find than a good developer. You probably need a recruiter if you really need to scale or are in a desperate time crunch. ------ jpd750 Recruiters are pretty worthless. ------ truebecomefalse The bulk of my experience with recruiters has been quite negative.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to ship your site inside an Android app - leonvonblut http://simoneloru.com/how-to-ship-your-site-inside-an-android-app/ ====== tadfisher That's a good explanation of "how", but unfortunately it leaves out the "why", as in "Why should my users go through the effort of installing a dummy application when they can simply open a URL in their web browser?" ~~~ leonvonblut because users prefer to open an app than open a browser. it's like an easy bookmark to your site ~~~ inportb but an even easier bookmark could be had from the browser menus. the embedded site could access Android api's, though. ~~~ webmaven Easier to make the bookmark vs installing an app, but not easier to use. Compare # of clicks from the home screen for an app icon vs a bookmark. ~~~ inportb 1, in both cases?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Powerful Radio Signal from Deep Space - enigami https://www.sciencealert.com/periodicity-has-been-detected-in-a-repeating-fast-radio-burst ====== agoodthrowaway One thing that I wonder is whether we could ever identify an alien communication signal as an alien signal is likely to be much more advanced. In that scenario, the alien civilization is likely to be able to send their signal at the Shannon limit. Additionally an advanced civilization is likely to be sending signals optically instead of over radio waves. But even if we assume radio waves, Shannon says that the you can send the most information when using a random code. As you approach the Shannon limit the signal becomes more noise-like as the encoding tends towards random. So it’s entirely possible an alien signal is likely to look like pure noise to us and hence we may miss a true alien signal. ~~~ dvh It's too short for communication. I think it's burst of particles that are released when spaceship goes out of warp. [https://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come- wit...](https://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-with-a- killer-downside/) 16 day regular cycle is because it's regular transfer between two planets. Other FRBs are random because they are just random ships on random research routes. ~~~ syshum Or they are heading straight for us but can only stay in warp for 16 days at a time. ------ lovelearning More like "powerful radio emissions from deep space". The paper doesn't use the term "signal" at all, and a website dedicated to science probably shouldn't have either (although it did help bait my click). ~~~ thdrdt I think the click-bait title is the reason why most comments here are about aliens. Also because it has a set interval. People like to assume there is some intelligent life form that trigger the events. But on our own planet we have geysers that erupt at set intervals. All without the help of an intelligent life form. So I think it's more likely that it's a natural phenomena. ------ pledess Alternate explanation: there really aren't 12 silent days. They have (in effect) a directional antenna that happens to be aimed at us on the 4 other days. When it's not aimed at us, the signal is way below what [https://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/en/effelsberg](https://www.mpifr- bonn.mpg.de/en/effelsberg) can detect. ------ dmitripopov Just imagine one day a true alien signal comes ringing, and what the public reaction would be? "Yeah, right. Again." ~~~ jonny383 I guess it would depend how compelling the signal was. If it's just rogue radio waves with seemingly intelligent structure that the average person cannot understand, then the reaction would likely be "Yeah, right. Again". If it's some kind of encoded message containing information that can be decoded and verified by scientific communicators, perhaps not. ~~~ swsieber If I were in charge of broadcasting a communication signal into space, I'd make it a very obviously square wave, or something else that doesn't usually occur on its own. So it really depends on if the signal was meant to be seen as a discovery mechanism. ------ sixdimensional Sci fi daydream here. What would it take for us to actually try to make such a signal ourselves in space? Really huge explosions? I suppose one weird way to see if they could be alien signals is see if we can imitate them. Of course, that would be no guarantee that we aren’t just making bird calls imitating the sounds of car alarms (or other birds for that matter). But, I mean, if we can detect these signals, if we could generate one, maybe some other civilization would too. And if we proved that any civilization of a certain state could use the same technique, it would at least lend more probability to the possibility that these are something not natural phenomena. And who knows, when the alien armada invasion force shows up, you’d know for sure it worked! Ah, such reckless abandon. ~~~ _1100 The Three Body Problem is a first-contact trilogy of books that starts just like this: Someone ponders what the most powerful thing in our area is (the sun) and then finds a way to influence it just enough so that it can send repeating signals. From there the alien armada heads our way and sets up the plot of the rest of the trilogy! ~~~ runawaybottle Would it really take an Armada? Coronavirus infected 40k people, we have some of these viruses in labs. I’d send one agile team and drop a nice virus on Earth (minimal viable product). ~~~ _1100 In the book, they start by sending as little as 3 protons, and it completely debilitates humanity. ~~~ DataGata The protons as you call them are a fun quirk of the science fiction genre, "How do we explain the Great Stagnation"? Fine Structure by Sam Hughes is the first book I've ever seen do it. ------ runawaybottle What could create a natural radio signal in space? Edit: I should have done some basic googling, turns out a few things: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_radio_source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_radio_source) ~~~ sizzzzlerz The real question you should be asking is what doesn't. Radio signals are generated in many ways at frequencies up and down the spectrum. ------ Angostura > an alien signal is likely to be much more advanced. ... and therefore they will probably think to themselves 'maybe we shouldn't talk too fast and say things as simply as possible... if we want to increase the likelihood of being understood'. ------ magduf Didn't we see a movie about this? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_$1997_American_film$) ------ HoustonRefugee Intergalactic numbers station! ------ mothsonasloth Just think, whether this is an alien device or a quasar / celestial body outputting this energy. It is a truly terrifying level of radiation. I wouldn't like to be a planet in a solar system near the origin of those bursts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Banned by Tesla - gcoguiec https://medium.com/@salsop/banned-by-tesla-8d1f3249b9fb#.f5lddvddz ====== Someone1234 The article or the proceeding one has an error: > Starting a 7:00pm event at 8:50pm is simply unacceptable . > (even though the invitation insisted that everybody be at the venue by > 7:30pm sharp). So did it start at 7:00 pm or 7:30 pm? That error notwithstanding, if this turns out to be true it seems pretty petty to cancel his preorder out of spite. In general I take a negative view of companies that "punish" their customers for writing negative reviews or comments. Makes me wonder if Tesla will let journalists review their vehicles fairly in the future. Instead of this turning into a negative PR event, they could have turned this into a positive. Just call the guy, apologise for the late start, and invite him in to view the vehicle in a private showing. No doubt he would write an article either on the apology OR on the vehicle, and it is a net gain to Tesla's PR (or worst case he writes no article, and you still don't wind up with the negative PR we see here). Instead now we have a company which may punish journalists and critics. ------ scrumper I actually think that's rather magnificent. Mr Whiny can't have his toy anymore. Yeah it's bad PR, probably, but I can't be the only one who thinks these rude blog posts directed at well-known strangers saying variations of 'dear so-and-so you should be ashamed of yourself' are a bit tasteless, crass, and low class. I mean, the VC wrote his original post as a direct personal attack and then distributed it in public on a widely-read platform. That's pretty nuclear. In ascending order of severity he could have: \- Contacted Tesla directly \- Written to Elon Musk directly, privately \- Written a blog post about his crappy experience at the event \- Tweeted Elon with a link to his blog post All of which might have made him feel better about wasting his evening and maybe got him some compensation (jumping a few places in the waitlist, or something) while not being actually offensive. ~~~ beau26 The best part is that he wasn't even "banned by Tesla," he cancelled his order out of spite and so he could thrust himself into the spotlight again. Honest to god, some people are insufferable blowhards. Sure, the event started late, sure Elon might have acknowledged that, but if he thinks that (a) any of this matters enough to write TWO articles about and (b) that anyone really cares what he thinks, he's deluding himself. Moreover, he just looks like a complete fool for posting this kind of garbage and expecting a positive response. ~~~ scrumper Wait, what? He as in the VC author cancelled his own order? Oh man. I read it as Elon instructed Tesla to cancel his order. Edit: I think I was right. Here's the direct quote from first paragraph: _I also hear that you are not comfortable having me own a Tesla car and have cancelled my order for a Tesla Model X._ Maybe you read a phantom "I" between 'and' and 'have'? ~~~ beau26 Good catch, I think you are correct! ------ minimaxir This is an article I thought was legitimately satire (why would _Elon Musk_ call a random person?) until I saw that said person is a VC. The network of Silicon Valley's elite is _weird_. ~~~ simonebrunozzi I guess this "VC" guy lives in LA. ------ sharemywin I thought SV was all about customer feedback and refining your product. In this case your marketing event for your product but still. ------ scotty79 > I also hear that you are not comfortable having me own a Tesla car and have > cancelled my order for a Tesla Model X. Is that even legal? ~~~ dragonwriter > Is that even legal? In general, cancelling and refunding orders is legal; there are cases where it is not legal (e.g., where it is done to implement a policy of discrimination on a legally-protected basis in something which is legally considered a public accommodation), but in general its perfectly legal. ------ _pmf_ Can I please have the last 3 minutes of my life back? ------ Kurimo I wouldn't want him as a customer (or anything) either. I regret even reading his posts. ~~~ Someone1234 It would be helpful if you explained why? Isn't obvious to me from reading his posts. The event did start 45-60 minutes late and he still never got to view the vehicle. ~~~ skorecky The guy left at 9:00, 15 minutes after they started the event. Doesn't sound like he even tried to see it. ~~~ Someone1234 He arrived 30 minutes before it was due to start and stayed an hour and a half. Not unreasonable. I love how you twist facts to make it sound like the event didn't start an hour and a half late. ~~~ skorecky I'm not twisting facts, just stated he didn't even stay after the announcement to checkout the car, that's on him. Also this was a reply to the parent comment talking about seeing the car. I'm also not saying it was right for Tesla to ban him, that was shitty, but getting so angry over a late start and ranting about it in a blog post directed at Elon also wasn't a great choice. ------ rocky1138 First world problems.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
still true today, is identity the final frontier? - floozyspeak http://www.flickr.com/photos/drock/7802290/in/set-196973/ ====== Alex3917 Don't do an identity startup. Even if you know the solution to the problem. In fact, especially if you know the solution to the problem. The fact is, 99% of Internet users don't know they have an identity problem. And no matter how much they do, nothing you can do will convince them of this. Better to wait another five years and then tackle the problem. No one else will have solved it by then, trust me. ~~~ floozyspeak I think its forming. I don't have a startup in my pocket to address it, but I think consumers are being exposed to more identity issues today than they've ever been before. I think consumers are connected to the pain of identity as the net evolves. They see this in news regarding id theft and they feel the pinch on the browser trying to remember multiple logins or how strange it is that everyone seems to want their email address from the milk vendor to the place they buy shoes. The pinch is on, the pain is there, the solution? No idea, but its definately not going away.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The hum that helps to fight crime - neic http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20629671 ====== antihero So if one were to set up a continuous recording of mains electricity, and then provide a UI that lets you grab a slice of the hum (a time range), and sell that, you could make some rather evil money. Or, if you were the police, have your "real" recordings verified very easily. ~~~ jff But you'd have to get rid of the _existing_ hum, which is, as the article states, a challenge even for recording professionals. ~~~ dkokelley Just thinking about it, couldn't you get an isolated recording of the hum, and then mix the inverse of it over the appropriate audio sections? That should leave you with a humless track. \- step 1: Set up a recorder in a relatively isolated environment, ensuring that the hum is being recorded. \- step 2: Record a 30 minute conversation with the target, ensuring that you have enough to splice together something incriminating. \- step 3: invert the hum recorded from step 1 and mix it into the track from step 2. This produces 30 minutes of humless audio with the target. \- step 4: edit the 30 minute recording to produce incriminating audio clip of about 30 seconds. \- step 5: overlay legitimate audio from 30 seconds of real hum onto faked recording. It seems like it could work. \- step 6: Get caught for something much simpler that you overlooked, and ruin your life. Please don't actually use this maliciously. I suppose it could be a decent defense in court if you could prove that it is possible to fake the hum. ~~~ laumars If you're doing that, then you're better off recording your audio with balanced XLR or such like and not have any hum to begin with. ~~~ dkokelley I'm not sure that an XLR feed will eliminate the hum. Ideally you could record the victim somewhere isolated from the hum. ~~~ laumars It wouldn't entirely eliminate the hum, but a balanced feed (note that XLR can be unbalanced as well) will reduce the EM interference and cross talk that adds to the background hum. Another contributing factor is when power supplies to the equipment are different or "dirty". Often this can be resolved with something as simple as a multi-adapter with the earth pin disconnected (note, this shouldn't be attempted unless your hardware is already insulated. but then if you're trying to commit a crime, then an electric shock is likely preferable to life sentences in jail). ------ dabent "This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings." It hit me a while back when I was writing the software for a test stand for a hearing aid as a summer intern. Mysterious 60/120/180 Hz frequencies appeared on our analysis, soon to be discovered as the motors for the building's ventilation unit. It was barely noticeable to anyone, but it was quite obvious to our test equipment, even in an insulated box. ~~~ PeterisP It may be that the reason was not the sound of the motors, but the effect of the motors on your electricity supply for the audio gear. Isolating the electricity (running stuff from batteries) might give more benefit than the audio insulation of that box. ------ dkokelley OT, but I've seen this come up before and I wonder if HN could explain/justify this grammatical curiosity: > _"A gang were accused of selling weapons..."_ "A gang" implies a singular entity (gang), but "were" is a pluralized use of was, as if "gang" was plural (as in, 'several gang _s_ '). (I lack the vocabulary to properly articulate myself, since grammar is not my strong suit. I am probably not describing terms completely accurately). I've noticed this more and more in regard to singular forms of entities (typically compromised of many singular parts, such as corporations). For example: "Apple were..." or "Google have..." or "Microsoft are..." I notice that this seems to be more of a British English phenomenon. My question is this: Why are people using what I will call pluralized modifiers on what I would consider singular nouns? What I would consider the "more correct" forms of the above examples are: "The designers at Apple were..." or "Google's board of directors have..." or "Employees of Microsoft are..." Is this just a cultural clash between American and British grammatical conventions, or is there an elusive (to me) practical reason why one version is "better" than the other? I apologize for thread jacking. Hopefully the more relevant comments will rise above this one. ~~~ pdw It's a quirk of British English. Collective nouns are often treated as if they were plural. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_Brit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English#Formal_and_notional_agreement) ~~~ glaugh As an American English speaker I find it delightful to read or hear occasionally. For me it's a nice, occasional reminder that groups are made up of individuals. ~~~ alexkus As a Brit who has lived in the US for a couple of years on and off it gets very confusing. I can never remember which spelling is correct for the current situation for some terms: centre/center, tire/tyre, singular or plural collective nouns, etc. I know there are two variants, I just can't remember which one is the US one and which is the UK one; stuff like colour/color is easy, as is when to use sneakers/trainers (only made that mistake once) but some words play tricks on me. ~~~ delinka Meh. Just be British and don't worry about it! ;-) ------ nitrogen Last time this was posted on HN, this question went unanswered: wouldn't variations in the AC line frequency be dominated by variations in recording speed? Even digital recordings have to be perfectly clock synced or they drift out of sync, and not necessarily monotonically. I've made digital recordings just minutes long that sounded fine to the ear alone, yet even after lining up the beginning and end, the middle was noticably mismatched. ~~~ mseebach It seems to me (and I don't have any formal qualifications to answer this questions) that computer clock drift is on the order of mega- or gigahertz, while this is on the order of 50hz - 5-10 orders of magnitude slower. ~~~ nitrogen The speed of the clock that is drifting is unrelated to the rate or the amount of the drift. An audio sample rate of 48kHz may be driven by a 12MHz clock, and that 12MHz clock may exhibit thermally induced drift between, let's say, 11.99MHz and 12.01MHz. That will result in a sample rate drift between 47960Hz and 48040Hz. A perfect 50Hz tone recorded in those conditions will vary between 49.9583Hz and 50.0417Hz. In the case I gave before, I was trying to synchronize a 48kHz USB audio interface recording with a 48kHz/30fps DV tape recording. If I lined up the beginning of the recordings, the ends were off by ~500ms (IIRC), which for a 2min clip means a 0.4% deviation. However, if I adjusted the speed of one of the clips to align the ends, the _middle_ would be off by 500ms, suggesting a fluctuating deviation as high as 0.8% (if my middle-of-the-night mental estimation is correct). According to [0], the UK grid is allowed to vary between 49.5Hz and 50.5Hz, or ±1%. Watching the meters at [1], [2], and [3], it looks like deviations of 0.2% are common. Depending on the frequency of the mains and recording rate deviations, it seems mains deviation could be swamped by the 0.4% variation I observed in real-world recording scenarios. Thus, I am skeptical of the forensic utility of mains frequency analysis, and would need to see evidence that forensic analysts are compensating for recording rate deviation, or arguments why it's irrelevant, before I would change my mind. [0] [http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Balancing/service...](http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Balancing/services/frequencyresponse/) [1] [http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Fre...](http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Frequency/Freq60.htm) [2] <http://www.dynamicdemand.co.uk/grid.htm> [3] <http://www.mainsfrequency.com/> ~~~ mjb I think you are missing how much the spectrum of the drift matters. Just knowing the range over which the clock varies (say 5%) isn't enough. If the drift is slow - which thermally induced drift usually is, because it's driven by daily heating/cooling cycles - then it's possible to correct for it in the recording. Analysis techniques which are based on frequency-domain variations would tend to reject this type of slow drift automatically, but the details depend on the technique used. If, on the other hand, the noise on the clock is fast jitter rather than slow drift, things become much more difficult. On typical consumer recording devices, the noise floor due to jitter is way below the noise floor due to the limited SNR of the microphones and amplifiers used. The jitter noise is non-linear, which makes things harder, but doesn't tend to be a limiting factor. It's been most of a decade since I worked on this stuff (in the context of radar and sonar), so that knowledge may be out of date. Still, I'd be surprised if clock (LO) jitter is the limiting factor in this type of analysis. ------ wch It sounds cool, but I wonder how reliable this method is. What's the false positive and false negative rate? Errors here would have real consequences -- for example, according to the article, it was used as a crucial piece of evidence in putting several men behind bars for decades. ------ kordless Great. It's a modern day equivalent of the lie detector for recordings. ~~~ derleth > Great. It's a modern day equivalent of the lie detector for recordings. Unless it's a lot more reliable than the polygraph, it shouldn't be admissible in court, either. (The polygraph, sometimes called a 'lie detector', does not create evidence admissible in court. It has too many false positives and false negatives.) <http://antipolygraph.org/> [http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington- whispers/2012/09...](http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington- whispers/2012/09/25/nsa-whistleblower-reveals-how-to-beat-a-polygraph-test) <http://www.skepdic.com/polygrap.html> ~~~ kordless I agree with you. ------ telent So why is an article about the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London (UK) illustrated with a stock photo of what appears to be a US power socket? (It might be a Euro socket, but it's certainly not a UK one.) Do they not have electricity sockets anywhere at the BBC that they could have taken a picture of? ~~~ jcurbo Those are identical to the outlets I saw in Germany, so I guess they're European. Definitely not American though. ~~~ Udo Yep, they're German. ------ praptak The mains frequency is an interesting topic. While it is true that it floats still its daily average is purposefully kept at quartz-like stability so that clocks can use it for synchronization. It also needs precise phase synchronization across the whole network (otherwise generators would blow up.) ~~~ PeterisP I'm not so sure if the daily average is kept so stable actually (or maybe it depends on the country). I worked at a power grid a long time ago, and I recall that in days where the grid had undersupply issues due to climate and high demand, the frequency was kept stable at 49.5-49.6 Hz for weeks or so. The clock-sync is a nice wishlist feature; but the frequency affects power consumption which often may be more important or financially valuable. ~~~ wglb In some of the power grids in the US, the clock-sync thing was something that the operations were required to maintain over a 24 hour period. One technique used to monitor this was a simple electric clock. Electric clocks have synchronous motors, meaning that changes in frequency of the supply would change the time. The target was to be sure that at, say, 6pm, that the clock would show exactly 6pm, even though it would vary a bit during the day. ------ tobyjsullivan Curious, is this "mains frequency" the same ringing I often hear when in alleged silence? And, no, I'm not talking about my hearing because I've had conversations with others who witnessed it :P - more like the ring old tube TV's used to make. ~~~ sneak No, the frequencies emitted by CRTs are sonic (this is EM) and are much higher in frequency. You can't hear mains hum without a speaker (or transformer acting as a speaker). ~~~ PeterisP I believe that you should be able to hear overtones (2* or 4* mains freq) coming from lightbulbs and power supplies (computers, chargers, etc) in an average room - it could be tested by running a decent mic + solidstate recorder on batteries and checking how loud it is. ------ VMG Application idea: locating criminals, hostages using video / audio recordings ~~~ pygy_ It can be defeated by jamming the relevant frequency bands, i.e. by overlaying other mains recordings with random fluctuations. No deed to remove the original. I'm not sure a notch filter would be enough because, even though the mains is supposed to be a perfect sine wave, some harmonics occur (sometimes with a much higher frequency). Perhaps by filtering all harmonics as well? Sound quality isn't exactly a must in these situations. It requires a technically astute criminal, though, and most aren't. ~~~ VMG _It requires a technically astute criminal, though, and most aren't._ Exactly. Many don't even use gloves. I was wondering on how precisely you could locate the hum and if you could deliberately create a hum signature for a region. ------ cjensen I'm a little disturbed that they are using this as evidence, yet one of the "forensic scientists" is quoted as saying Normally this frequency, known as the mains frequency, is about 50Hz," explains Dr Alan Cooper That is incorrect. Normally it is _exactly_ 50Hz. That's why the time displayed on battery-powered clocks drift over time, but clocks plugged into the wall stay correct. ~~~ tlb It is not very exact. The total phase error can be hundreds of cycles. _In the synchronous grid of Continental Europe, the deviation between network phase time and UTC (based on International Atomic Time) is calculated at 08:00 each day in a control center in Switzerland. The target frequency is then adjusted by up to ±0.01 Hz (±0.02%) from 50 Hz as needed, to ensure a long- term frequency average of exactly 50 Hz × 60 sec × 60 min × 24 hours = 4,320,000 cycles per day.[21] In North America, whenever the error exceeds 10 seconds for the east, 3 seconds for Texas, or 2 seconds for the west, a correction of ±0.02 Hz (0.033%) is applied. Time error corrections start and end either on the hour or on the half hour._ \-- <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency> ------ levlandau Any thoughts on how "unhackable" this system is? ~~~ glimcat The general premise is that there is an arbitrary, recoverable signal which has been convolved with the data signal. The generating function for this signal is a matter of record if you have access to the utility logs, but difficult to obtain otherwise without being physically at the time and place where the effect occurred. I strongly suspect that it can be compromised under both of the following conditions: 1\. You take recording A, then you take recording B at a time and place which you want to assert that recording A took place at. You recover the thumbprint from recording B, suppress the thumbprint in recording A, then apply the thumbprint from B to A. This is not a trivial process, but you only really need a plausibly consistent result. A reasonably basic understanding of signal processing theory, a copy of MATLAB, and many pots of coffee should do the job. Then, you could automate most of it for the next guy. 2\. You take many recordings at a series of locations of interest, while taking data about the power grid from nearby locations and from distribution nodes. You then attempt to predict the signal at a location from the characteristics of the surrounding area. This is almost certainly possible, as generalization from distribution logs to the local effect is what makes their fingerprinting technique possible in the first place. It is not a trivial undertaking, and it's questionable how well it would be generalizable. But at the same time, it's largely a question of if you want the data badly enough to do the legwork, and whether you have a reasonably functional understanding of machine learning. ~~~ hatcravat Regarding point 2, the article gave me the impression that they used historical measurements of the the mains frequency as part of the analysis. Since Britain is on a single grid, the local conditions shouldn't affect the recorded signal. I'm sure it is possible to find patterns (frequency drops slightly in the morning as the public utility tries to keep up with increasing demand), but you wouldn't know, for example that the utility overestimated demand on the particular morning that the audio was alleged to have been recorded (and thus that the frequency was actually higher). As for point 1, there are a number of plausible angles to approach this, but I think that the forensic adversary has a huge advantage: Synchronous detection. The approximate time of the recording is known, as is the historical record of mains frequency. That allows for the possibility of huge processing gain, which might allow for recovery even after the amplitude of the mains hum is filtered to below the quanta of the audio system. I almost think you might have to Fourier Transform the whole audio record and zero out any component at f_mains +/- delta (and harmonics). That, of course, would look pretty suspicious to a forensic analyst. Even that might not be enough if mains hum has a determinable effect on the data compression algorithm used to store the audio data. Edit: The point I was trying to make in the first paragraph is that if you wanted to forge a recording, you'd need to have the grid frequency data. Having it for anywhere would be good enough and not having it for anywhere simply wouldn't. ------ gwern > If millions of people suddenly switch on their kettle after watching their > favourite soap, the demand for electricity may outstrip the supply, and the > generators will pump out more electricity, and the frequency will go up. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup> ------ yaddayadda Obviously, if a building is off the grid then there wouldn't be the same background hum, but what if the building has its own energy generation system (e.g., solar) and feeds back to the grid? ------ cromwellian I wonder if the same technique could work for the microwave range and the cosmic microwave background. That is, is there a discernible "hum" in microwave signals from the CMB?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tcl/tk vs. the web - SFjulie1 http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.com/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html ====== Pxtl Yeah, I remember in 2000ish doing our first "real-life software application" in my undergrad. Just a simple desktop UI for Amazon. Everybody else used Java because that's all they knew, and it killed them. 3 man teams and they couldn't make it work. I used Python with TkInter and it was a breeze. Not quite as easy as VB6 (Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for stealing Delphi's good ideas), but they'd specifically said I couldn't use that. I had only 1 teammate and he spent his whole time working on Amazon interface code - sending/receiving XML and getting them into useful python objects. Later on in my carreer I learned Web stacks and my brain hurt... but that might be because I started with the horrible abomination of ASP.Net webforms. HTML+CSS+Javascript only manages to be a functional application framework thanks to the weight of the _entire computing industry_. The _trillions(?)_ spent on this bullcrap is just silly. The wrong platform won because it was the lowest common denominator - everybody already had a browser. ------ js8 Web UI programming is complex compared to _anything_ , I mean any GUI toolkit from the late 90s (my favorite is Qt). The problem is that the people who design JS frameworks insist that you have to be able to use JS, HTML, CSS. This leads to bad API, you reuse something that was designed for documents for applications, and no one really knows how to map these different things properly. GWT could have been a viable route, but it sadly didn't catch on that much. ~~~ Pxtl > The problem is that the people who design JS frameworks insist that you have > to be able to use JS, HTML, CSS. This leads to bad API, you reuse something > that was designed for documents for applications, and no one really knows > how to map these different things properly. ExtJS. An old, mature JS framework designed for desktop-style apps on the browser. ExtJS code doesn't look like web code at all - no mentions of DOM and styling and stuff like that. All about widgets and data-binding, like making a desktop app. It's not perfect - being almost as old as JQuery, it has some flaws that would have been avoided in newer frameworks. But it's there and I use it professionally. The problem, of course, is "why does our webapp look like a desktop application but with non-native widgets?" Now everybody _expects_ the web to be all designer-y. Even for a line-of- business app. It's on the web, it should look webby. ~~~ douche ExtJS is wicked heavy, though. We used it for a while (they have a really slick table component) but it was such a world unto itself, plus being like 10MB with all the required themeing and images, that we bailed and went to a jQuery-based component instead. ~~~ qohen _ExtJS is wicked heavy, though._ And it's expensive: [https://www.sencha.com/store/](https://www.sencha.com/store/) ~~~ douche Wow, I do not believe it was that pricey when we were using it. ~~~ Pxtl I'm guessing most people are just using the GPL license since AFAIK the GPL doesn't matter when you're hosting it yourself. ------ jrapdx3 Highly unusual seeing the _3rd_ article on HN about Tcl/Tk in the last few days. Ordinarily it's been pretty much a neglected language which is kind of a shame because it can be highly capable and adaptable. Like the author, I learned Tcl/Tk back in the '90s. I needed to have certain tools for running my business and there weren't affordable off-the-shelf apps available. Especially so for Linux which we were starting to use. There were adequate C GUI libs at the time, but writing, for example, a networked scheduling app in C was a complex, daunting task. Then I discovered Tcl/Tk, I was amazed how relatively simple it was to create the UI, connect the logic and maintain the "separation of concerns" between them. Also the Tcl event loop model made writing network backend database, server and client interaction fairly straightforward. Client/server connections were made persistent, sort of reminiscent of the websocket protocol. I guess these experiences echo the article's idea, that Tcl/Tk anticipated some of the facilities the "web stack" is trying to provide near 20 years later. We know Tcl doesn't have the appeal of other languages, perhaps many consider Tcl to be "weird", and it may well be. However, a case could be made that the thousands of extant web frameworks and other current-day "tooling" are no less peculiar, and certainly don't offer the versatility and staying power that Tcl/Tk has shown. Of course we can't undo history, but I've often wondered how the web would look today if way back when Tcl had been chosen as the browser language. Maybe what the author of the article was trying to do was ask that sort of question. ------ SwellJoe I've got nothing against Tcl/Tk. I built my current company's first website with OpenACS and AOLServer, and everything was built in Tcl. I have no major complaints about the language or about Tk (I've also built some trinkets with Python+Tk and Perl+Tk over the years). But...that ship has sailed, about 15 years ago. And, I can't argue with the "JavaScript burnout" problem. I'm currently trying to sort out the front end for our UI rewrite, considering things like React. There's an incredible wordsoup of jargon and new tools to learn, no established best practices (we're in the wild west phase of web UI development, with a thousand competing and occasionally interacting technologies), and no unified way to build a user interface in HTML+JavaScript. I mean, I can understand someone looking at how bloody simple it is to put a window with a widget on the screen with Tcl/Tk (or almost any other reasonable UI toolkit, for that matter), vs. the huge pile of crud one has to install and poke at to do the same for a browser in a modern way (i.e. without reloading the page every time something changes state, for example), and throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Fuck this! I'm going back to...whatever I was using before." Things have gotten so baroque in the web development space, it can seem impossible to look at a new project and have any clue what's going on (because you have to know all of the frameworks and libraries and transpilers it uses, the tooling it uses like Webpack, SASS/LESS, etc., plus the basics of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript). And, obviously, I can't tell anyone not to give up on the web and build traditional desktop applications. But, if you want your software to be _used_ by real people, it's almost always going to need to be on the web. And, that will become more true over time, rather than less true. I find desktop apps charming, but even my stubbornness has run its course. I haven't started seriously using a new desktop application in maybe five years (Mixxx DJ software is the most recent thing I can think of). Even for things that a desktop app ought to do better...like email, there are now better web applications for the task, and I find myself using the web more than the desktop programs for almost everything. ~~~ amelius The problem is that W3C insists to make the web simple for everybody, instead of useful for experienced developers. This is the wrong approach, imho, because when you target developers first, basic economics tells us that they will do the work for you to make the web simple for everybody else. ~~~ kevin_thibedeau And so they went with a language without so much as a standard string API. ------ networked Tcl is a functional programming language in the sense that every value in Tcl is an immutable string (the legacy arrays excluded) and as a result you are able and encouraged to build Tcl applications mostly out of pure functions. Where mutability comes into the picture is through the state maintained by Tcl extensions written in C, such as SQLite, TclCurl, TclOO (the standard object system) and Tk (the GUI toolkit). You might use the same immutable strings as handles for the objects maintained by these extensions but the internal state of the objects is mutated. Besides that mutability there is (immutable string- based) state in the form of global/namespace-local variables that you can reassign. ~~~ SFjulie1 Ok, I was a tad lacking of precision. _Tk_ not tcl because it is event driven relies heavily on a mutable called time/clock. And there also always states every time you do asynchronuous to handle the status of things (connection, ....). And since you can manipulate them, you have to deal with states. And you cannot "snapshot them". Basically modern web is just using browsers like an asynchronous GUI it was my thesis. And indeed, in other contexts tcl can map to functional paradigm. I really don't care in fact of FP. At one point it is like monads, string theory & a lot of very interesting theories that are very enjoyable to learn but for which the cognitive burden to respect the purity of the theory outweigh for my pooor brain in real life application. It reminds me of my teachers being pissed when I could solve their problem faster with an easier personal ways when I could use my tools. And even more pissed when I was framed to use their tools and failing. They thought I was doing it on purpose like other kids ... to shame them publicly. No I must be kuku. What protects the international conventions on Intellectual Property anyway? The originality of the way of solving a problem. So I always thought that making myself my own tools and thinking was a necessary risk in order to be truly innovative one day. That is also why I dropped the consulting bullshit to test my theories in the grunt job. I also do a lot of other stuff like testing my greatfathers ratio of KNOP in fertilizer, music, knitting, cycling 50km/h in the city, cider, bread, emulsions (béarnaise, béchamel, vinaigrette...) to challenge my knowledge. Stuff that must work. And I pride myself in some successes. (at the price of a lot of failures). ------ nickpsecurity I counter with the example of Juice Oberon project. Oberon is type-safe, memory-safe, compiles insanely fast, and executes fast. Juice turned it into a Java and JS substitute. Sent compressed AST's to reduce bandwith, too. Adding macro's and 4GL-like commands for browser-specific stuff would have way better results than Tcl. Another better road not traveled... ~~~ cylinder714 The ECMAScript 2015 spec[http://www.ecma- international.org/ecma-262/6.0/index.html](http://www.ecma- international.org/ecma-262/6.0/index.html)) runs 566 pages, whereas the Oberon-07 spec ([http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/index.html](http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Oberon/index.html)) is _16-1 /2 pages_. Yes, I'm interested. ~~~ nickpsecurity Here's the archived version of the project: [https://web.archive.org/web/19990224200116/http://caesar.ics...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990224200116/http://caesar.ics.uci.edu/juice/intro.html) Found this accidentally in the progress: [https://github.com/berkus/Juice](https://github.com/berkus/Juice) Feel free to dig in to see if it's the actual source or whatever. However, it was an academic prototype thrown together. I won't expect much. I'm envisioning pro's from Mozilla etc putting a tenth of effort into it they put into Javascript. The results would've been native speed while quite safe. :) ------ sloreti "Porn industry in the 1990s invented : chatrooms, e-commerce with visa card, dynamic contents...." Can someone knowledgable of the history of the web confirm this? I assumed the industry played a major role in the development of some web technologies, but can the rise of e-commerce, for example, be mainly attributed to porn? ~~~ mixmastamyk They were an early pioneer, yes, inventor is probably too strong a word. Chatrooms were around much earlier. Perhaps he means on a website? ~~~ SFjulie1 on a web site indeed. I saw the first "private chatrooms" in 1998 based on ugly PHP/js hacks. And it was the pornmaster who showed to me how to do them. ------ phantom_oracle I just looked at the TkDocs, and wow! it is reasonably sane and one should be able to immediately understand the code in their language of choice: [http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/firstexample.html](http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/firstexample.html) Desktop apps, especially the Linux-kind, feel very retro. You know you're appealing/building apps for a very niche subset of humanity, but that someone on the internet, somewhere, will say: Wow! I can't believe there is a Linux desktop app for this! I just installed Linux and cannot believe how simple it is or how many options I have Desktop apps are dead, long live the desktop app! ~~~ wallacoloo I just can't figure this one out. > I just looked at the TkDocs, and wow! it is reasonably sane and one should > be able to immediately understand the code in their language of choice. This statement seems serious, and reasonable enough. On the one hand, the pencil-drawn UI schematics are completely out of place and not very helpful. On the other hand, the Tk examples _are_ given in 4 languages, and do seem pretty reasonable. But everything else in your post seems sarcastic. And then finally, > Desktop apps are dead, long live the desktop app! I'm hopelessly lost. I feel like I'm back in English class doing one of those convoluted assignments wherein I'm told to analyse the author's intent, symbolism, and the meaning behind their motifs, etc. Those assignments always kicked my ass. ------ brianpgordon > By default, strings have no bytes ordering problems. They are portable. Hmm. See [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html) ~~~ ori_b That doesn't contradict anything stated. ------ bsder Tcl also went through a gigantically wrenching transition (from Tcl 7 to Tcl 8) right at the time when the web was undergoing its exponential growth. In addition, the explosion of memory and CPU made the design choices of Tcl look suboptimal. It is no coincidence that the languages which most people are using now (Javascript, Python, Ruby, etc.) made very different design tradeoffs than the ones that preceded this era. ~~~ vram22 What was that transition about? ~~~ kevin_thibedeau Changing the core to a byte code interpreter that uses objects rather than strings everywhere as well as adding Unicode support plus porting some of the extensions used for Tk into the mainline Tcl interpreter. ------ AstroJetson Back in the late 90's we built a pretty comprehensive financial site based on a TCL server. All the pages were backed by TCL code that we could pull out of a database on the fly. It was based on the work done around AOL server at the time. It was pretty cool to read "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", he had done lots of the same things we had. ~~~ philippeback ArsDigita Systems Journal was pretty interesting at the time. ~~~ AstroJetson Sadly all the links to copies of it are dead. ------ zwetan well .. all this come as pretty smug with a tad of superiority complex. Not surprised here, I'm French and saw that quite a lot from a crowd who think because they learned programming "the scientific way", anyone else is a hack or an amateur at best. Man got so much disdain ... "I had to deal with poorly coded rewrite of ..." "Because of hype and stupid sysadmins ..." "because in the 2000 good coders were hard to find" "You cannot self teach it yourself." "one man armies self taught and not software engineers" "less expensive to hire self taught programmers than students that had loans to pay" Do I understand all that right ? best innovation on the web come from the porn industry ? self taught programming is bad, java engineers are bad, sysadmins are stupids and everyone should move to TCL/TK ? some people really do have an enormous ego :) ~~~ SFjulie1 Indeed. :P But it is not my ego that is big, it is my life. Being bankrupted, scamed into weired business practices, fired for using CSS in a web app because CSS stands for Cross Site Scripting while I just shown that letting the user store non stripped HTML in a web page for a "highly sensitive" application was weired forges the ego. Btw, I am self taught mostly. I come from a physic university. But, I did have important lessons (heap, stacks, linked lists, FIFO, LIFO, ana num, matrices and LU...), and more importantly I have been mentored and have learn by apprenticeship mostly and not in the real "academic" process. Not every thing can be taught by yourself. And the school might not be best place to learn computer programming. But we sure do need the others to improve. My ego leaves a lot of room for the others because I need the others too. Simple no? By the way, what you did is called an adhominem arguments according to Schopenhauer. I guess it is on Gutenberg project. A must read. [http://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Schopenhauer-L-art-d- avoir...](http://inventin.lautre.net/livres/Schopenhauer-L-art-d-avoir- toujours-raison.pdf) ------ awthistory > Java awt is a descendant of Tk (oak). That's not accurate. Tk did predate Java by a few years and Tk was fairly well known in the X-Windows/Suns/Unix workstation circles so it may have had a slight influence but AWT never shared any code with Tk. ~~~ kevin_thibedeau He meant the dynamic layout model which was pioneered by Tk and adopted by AWT, GTK+, Qt, and others. ~~~ SFjulie1 Dont try to save me, he got me. He as a point. In fact thank you for saying exactly what I meant I feel relieved : you also have a point. How is it possible you are both right? I made a shortcut that was incorrect. That is the reason why I often include myself in the idiots I am denouncing. Because I make mistakes too. ------ mike_hearn TCL/TK wasn't an especially pleasant toolkit for users or developers, although compared to the HTML5 stack building a house out of matchsticks will seem convenient and pleasant. There were much better toolkits even back then: Delphi's component library was my favourite. IMHO the web is one of the biggest downgrades to app development that has ever happened, in so many ways. And what's really sad is that so many developers joined the industry since around 2000 that it feels like the majority of programmers have never written anything _but_ web apps, they literally have never used a professional, well designed UI toolkit! The closest many people have got to that is doing mobile development. One project I occasionally daydream about doing (if/when I get spare time again), is trying again to make Java applets work, with the following fairly major changes: 1) No browser dependencies beyond a URL handler. The 'app browser' would register some sort of app:// URL handler and that's the only way to invoke apps from the browser. 2) Core app browser uses the same auto-update tech as Chrome. Silent, invisible, in the background, continuous. 3) Old cruft like AWT that exposes huge amounts of native code (i.e. exploitable code) would be removed. Sooooo many Java exploits boiled down to exploiting native libraries shipped along side the JVM, but these days you can do most stuff without needing support from C/C++ libraries. 4) App code is compressed, reordered to be streamable and then app servers stream everything via HTTP/2 with server push. The average web page is now 2mb in size so with some careful design you could make apps written in this way start faster than actual web apps can, especially as you'd remove a lot of overhead that's useful for documents but not so much for apps. 5) Apps would also update themselves in the same way as Chrome does. You could mark apps as "check for update on every launch" but if you don't, apps will start even when offline. 6) There'd be a universal, reference app server that accepts sandboxed app uploads and provides access to a few useful services like a Postgres. By default it'd let anyone upload any app to any server. Again, the server would update in exactly the same way as Chrome (no apt-get required). 7) Things like CSS would be replaced by type safe DSLs that compile down to bytecode. There are a bunch of other improvements I'd like to put into my ideal app platform, but I can't list them all here. The above might sound completely crazy given Java's track record of exploits, but you have to consider a few things. One is that HotSpot got a LOT more secure in recent years due to heavy investment in security. When the last zero day was discovered (a bug in a Microsoft DLL shipped for AWT), over two and a half years had passed between that and the previous zero day. Java has reached the same point that browsers have: the security bugs are almost all being discovered by whitehats. Unfortunately browser makers had decided to kill off applets entirely by this point and users had learned to hate them, partly because of the obnoxious update process on Windows (Ask Toolbars and such). But the underlying core tech isn't actually that bad anymore. Compare the list of CVEs between HotSpot and Firefox and it doesn't look so different. Another reason for Java's poor reputation is that it historically exposed far more functionality to applets than HTML did to web pages. But the HTML5 effort has been changing this and by now, the modern web platform exposes a vast and rapidly increasing surface area to web pages. Massive new chunks of functionality like video chat or OpenGL can appear almost overnight, it seems. But all of this stuff is implemented in C++ and suffers the usual litany of bugs associated with that language. Whereas the trend in the Java world has been the opposite: new functionality is often mostly or entirely implemented in Java itself, and so cannot be buffer-overflowed or double-freed. Finally, the Java team are still making major architectural improvements that should reduce security holes even further, in particular, the Jigsaw effort supposedly would have avoided about a third of all the security bugs in Java in recent years. Given that any large app platform that supports mobile code will have security bugs, I feel it's really more about how you manage them than a simple "web rocks, java sucks" world view. And the advantage of using a platform actually designed for apps instead of documents should be obvious. ~~~ Roboprog Maybe a library that works like "AWT for Javascript"??? It probably already exists, but I don't know what it is. Something that completely hides all the CSS ugliness ------ lifeisstillgood tl;dr why aren't we running tk instead of browsers and viewing web pages on top of a sane display canvas? I think there is a point but mostly, I cannot imagine how we could have got here differently. Maybe pmarca could have written a quick tcl script and solved everything but ... Nah. They tried a long time to not give a real canvas on top of a web browser, for perfectly good reasons. By the time html5 demanded a real canvas, well JS had won and everyone else was also ran. ------ skeeterbug >But why are we using web in the first place? >Because of hype and stupid sysadmins that blocked everything but HTTP protocol (Deep Packet Inspection might block TCP:80 because people are scared it could be an SSH server with tunneling enabled on the other side). So we are required to install an app locally for everything and give access to our entire system? No thanks. ~~~ js8 > So we are required to install an app locally for everything and give access > to our entire system? And why not? [https://xkcd.com/1200/](https://xkcd.com/1200/) The truth is, for systems with just one typical user, it doesn't matter that much whether applications have root access or not. Look at Android or iOS applications - they install locally yet can access the internet without much hassle. There is no excuse this cannot be done on the desktop, too. The only real obstacle to that is insistence of various companies to own the platform. ~~~ petra >> is insistence of various companies to own the platform. Well , not everything in tech is 100% determined by powerful companies. For example python don't owe it's success to powerful friends. It was mostly bottoms-up. So maybe there's a strategy that could succseed in creating a better app platform , just using developer support ? ------ eggy I specifically started playing with Elm for this reason. It eventually becomes HTML, JavaScript and CSS. I have not made anything big with it, but it does allow you to hook into the usual JS suspects. The 'Time-traveling' debugger and FRP capabilities make it a lot of fun, and keep you insulated from the HTML-JS-CSS soup. ------ robertcope Vignette StoryServer Forever! Had some fun times writing Tcl in that system. ~~~ AstroJetson Yikes I had forgotten all about StoryServer. What a mess that was. The system level API's were written by someone that was a C programmer, trying to get TCL to cleanly talk was a real bear. Glad RobertCope you have better memories than I do :-) ------ marcoperaza The web is controlled by players who have shifting agendas. There's always at least one player that wants to advance the web, because they are doing poorly in the native OS market (or some portion of it). There's always at least one other that wants to keep web technology stagnant, because they are doing well in the native OS market. These players switch roles as the market evolves. The power in the web is that once you have a critical mass of content that requires a certain feature, browser makers have very strong incentives to support that feature, and very strong disincentives to not support it (such as undermining their market share, and thus control over future web evolution). Which means that progress is pretty much monotonic, but also very path- dependent. Hence why the technology is often such an awkward fit for its current uses. It also means that the web api will always lag behind the richest native apis, but that's how all technology works, and must work if there is to be progress; the cutting-edge is always non-standard experimentation. In terms of controlling presentation, WebAssembly, HTML canvas, and WebGL are conspiring to bust the monopoly of the Javascript/HTML/DOM model. Look at this: [http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/emscripten- qt...](http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/emscripten-qt- examples/kate/kate.html) (takes a while to load, worked on Chrome for me despite warning). It's a full blown Qt app running in the web browser. There's obviously a lot of kinks to sort out, like the massive loading times, but it's not that far from being viable. WebAssembly and the ecosystem that will grow around it (to some extent, this already happened with asm.js and Emscripten) are game-changers for the web because they shift the burden, i.e. developing for an inferior platform designed by a committee full of bad-faith actors, from every single app developer to the compiler and core-library developers. Of course, this will lead to inefficiencies like drawing with Qt inside a VM inside a web browser that's itself drawn using Qt. And so smart browser vendors will figure out how to optimize, thus some web apps will work much better on their browsers. This will force the less-eager browser vendors to improve the performance too. And so the cycle continues... This is actually exactly how WebAssembly came about in the first place. Asm.js provided a solution that worked on all browsers by brutally and inefficiently repurposing existing technology, but that could be heavily optimized by enlightened browsers. One browser vendor gained a temporary advantage by doing this, and thus forced everyone else's hands. A binary format was just the next step. I suspect that this dynamic is a general phenomenon that causes technology to naturally trend toward standardization and therefore openness. ------ coulix Granted the current state of JS is a bit of a joke. That said spend a week or two on understanding web components, virtual dom, immutable.js, webpack, babel and its plugins and you are good to go. ------ supercoder Thing is, HTML is a really fantastic and powerful way of describing documents. But it's absolutely terrible at describing UIs. I know it'll never happen, but if we had a layer created specifically to deal with UI then the web could have a chance at becoming a great software platform. ~~~ tosseraccount No one has solved the lean,powerful, portable GUI API problem. It'd be nice to write a program that can distributed as a single file for the target OS: iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, OSX, DOM. Though not very powerful and very slow, javascript is pretty easy. ~~~ icedchai Too bad Sun screwed up with Java on the client. We could've had this 20 years ago. ~~~ vezzy-fnord Or, speaking of Sun, something akin to NeWS: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS) ~~~ icedchai NeWS looks interesting, though unfortunately a little before my time. My first experience with SunOS was SunOS 4.x on a Sun-3 (3/60, I think?) in the early 90's, and by that time everything was X-based, I believe.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
GLFW 3.3 Is Released - dmitshur https://www.glfw.org/Version-3.3-released.html ====== klodolph For those who wonder what GLFW is... if you want to play with OpenGL or Vulkan, make a graphics demo, or make a game, GLFW is a library that frees you from having to deal with the nuances of Win32/X11/etc, wrangles keyboard inputs and other things across platforms. It is similar to LibSDL, but is more lightweight and GPU-centric. GLFW is designed more with greenfield projects in mind, whereas LibSDL was designed from the beginning to help with porting existing code. (They are both excellent libraries.) ~~~ kbenson So, it's sort of like GLUT was? (is?) I only messed around with 3D rendering a little back in the very early 2000's, but from what I remember, GLUT made everything much easier. ~~~ skocznymroczny Yes, it's kind of like GLUT, although it covers fewer functionalities. It focuses only on abstracting the OS specific parts like keyboard/mouse input and window/graphics context creation. GLUT also offered things like rendering fonts, teapots and additional functionalities. ------ bryanphe Very excited for this release! GLFW is part of the foundation for a UI framework we're building called Revery [1] and there are several features in 3.3 that will be useful for us - transparent framebuffers, headless backend via OSMesa (important for CI / automation), and high-DPI improvements. GLFW takes a lot of the pain out of cross-platform GPU development, and I've found the API simple and intuitive to work with. For those looking to play with it - the LearnOpenGL tutorial series [2] is excellent, and uses GLFW for managing a window and getting an OpenGL context. Thank you maintainers for your work on it! \- [1] Revery: [https://github.com/revery- ui/revery](https://github.com/revery-ui/revery) \- [2] LearnOpenGL: [https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Creating-a- window](https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Creating-a-window) ~~~ genpfault Sadly Mesa's software renderers seem to have topped out at OpenGL 3.3[1] :( [1]: [https://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL3.3-GLSL3.30](https://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL3.3-GLSL3.30) ~~~ bryanphe Ah, that's too bad! I've been hunting for ways to get better integration tests on CI for Revery. Would like to have image-based verification for certain classes of tests, and we use Azure CI pipelines - seems their VMs don't have hardware support at all for OpenGL (on any platform). ~~~ genpfault Eh, 3.3 Core is still pretty darn capable. 4.0+ mostly just added tessellation/compute shaders & quality-of-life and/or AZDO[1]-style features. [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_computer_graphics#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_computer_graphics#azdo) ------ minxomat Nice to see this is still in development. I wrote GLWF bindings for two languages and it was pretty easy to grok. It's also absolutely essential if you want to have an UI in a language without support for GUIs (like golang). Just use the OpenGL backend for the immediate mode UI lib of your choice (dear-imgui, nuklear, ...) and GLFW for the window setup and you're golden. ------ planteen Excellent! I've been using GLFW_TRANSPARENT_FRAMEBUFFER for over a year, but kept having to do builds out of Git to get support. It will be nice when this new library trickles into Linux distros over the next year. ------ eikenberry "GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan development on the desktop. It provides a simple API for creating windows, contexts and surfaces, receiving input and events." ------ binarycrusader As a nice complement to GLFW, there's also bgfx which can be configured to use GLFW: [https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx](https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) ------ enriquto Can somebody explain what are the advantages of glfw over freeglut? (other than the non-issue of "being" old) I am using freeglut for casual opengl code, and I see no problem with it. Is there anything that I am missing? ~~~ eropple Back when I was doing a lot with this stuff, GLUT was effectively dead. Stuff like MacOS HiDPI surfaces wasn't doable without going well outside of what GLUT wanted to help you with. GLFW has been under active development over that time period, unifying baseline OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan stuff to build upon. ~~~ enriquto Indeed, GLUT is not in active development (I would not say that it is "effectively dead" but rather that it "crystallized into a perfect form", but I digress). However, I was asking about "freeglut", which is a different thing, which is actively developed: last commit on 2019-03-26 dropped some unnecessary dependencies, for example. ~~~ jandrese I remember GLUT having some pretty significant deficiencies last time I looked at it. I guess FreeGLUT has added support for stuff like Unicode, high-DPI displays, etc... in the intervening years? ~~~ enriquto I just use freeglut to open a window and throw opengl into it, in a more or less portable way. The "gui" and "font" parts of freeglut are not really very useful (and they are missing in glfw anyway). Thus, unicode and high-dpi issues should be of no concern: as long as you can draw to your window and receive user input, what else do you need? What do you mean exactly by high- dpi "support"? ~~~ eropple You have to explicitly opt into a Retina display context on MacOS in order to get a window into which you can render at high DPI (2x the physical dimensions). You cannot mimic this with transform matrices; the render target will be rasterized at low-DPI and interpolated. So, yes, high-DPI issues very much exist, and GLFW does the right thing. ------ floatboth Dynamic loading of backends, i.e. supporting X11 and Wayland with the same build (PR #1338) didn't make it :( ------ jokoon Finally, I was waiting for this release, they fixed an annoying click event bug on Linux. Hard to know why this bug had to wait so long for a fix. Where are the delays coming from?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Should Programming Work be Billed in Hours? - nsoonhui http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2009/08/should-programming-work-be-billed-in.html ====== abalashov I think hourly billing is bad for two reasons, even though I do it all the time: * It just limits the amount of money you can make. People have a strange psychological approach to hourly figures; once you hit a certain rate that they consider alarmingly "high," which is a metric that varies immensely, their eyes just sort of glaze over and they go, "ooof!" But if you give them a fixed bid that assumes x hours and comes out to an equivalent hourly rate that is ${quite high}, they seem to be just fine with that - in my experience, this is often true _even if you itemise it and declare the expected hours_. Some sort of fixed bid leaves a lot more room for padding in case things don't go as expected, and, if you're lucky, more profitability. * Programming workflow just isn't linear like that. We've all read Joel Spolsky's "Human Task Switches Considered Harmful." In addition to that, programming problems are often solved in strangely noncontiguous, out-of-band ways, like coming up with solutions to a vexing encumbrance in the shower. The point is that billing should attempt to reflect the actual workflow as closely as possible, and the workflow of a programmer just doesn't go like an auto shop's. If you have a 20 hour project, doing 5 hours here, going off to do something else, and coming back to it and doing another 5 hours _doesn't mean the project is 50% done_ \- at least, from a practical perspective. Being a very small business myself with no credit facility and no savings or cash buffer whatsoever coupled with relatively high living expenses inherited from my employed days, I face the additional issue of severe cash flow constraints when I attempt to float long projects that pay hourly. I describe this more extensively in this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746517> For me - as for many freelance programmers and contractors - I think the right choice is some sort of flat weekly billing, and splitting up any project of nontrivial size into smaller, manageable and well-defined milestones. If you can get away with it. I think it's pretty fair to say that you often can't do a linear, 1:1 relationship between time spent toward project and money paid. One caveat is the one I pointed out above. The other, more generally, has to do with the fact that at 100% completion code acquires orders of magnitude more economic utility than when it's 90% complete. At 90%, it's just a useless blob of code as far as most customers are concerned. At 100% it's a finished deliverable that does what they want - or thought they wanted, whatever. So, usually there's a bigger balloon payment at the tail. It's not realistic to expect that when you have 7/8ths of the project done, you'll have 7/8ths of the money in hand. There are other reasons for this as well; see the link to my other comment above. But I think one should strive to get as close to that possible, insofar as it's possible to measure % completion to any degree whatsoever. ------ pj I think tools are an important part of the equation. Say you are paying someone to demolish your concrete driveway. Would you pay someone with a jack hammer who can get the job done in an hour the same rate you'd pay someone with a sledgehammer, which will take 8 hours? The task is the same. The value of the completed project is the same. But if the jack hammer owner charges a fix bid billed for half the hourly rate of the sledge hammer owner, he spends an hour and gets paid for four. In a fixed bid contract, the jack hammer could charge 50% more than he would estimate the demolition (originally billed at half the hourly rate of the sledge of 4 hours) at 6 hours and still make more money and spend less time: 6x as much money and spend 1/8th as much time completing the job. If his estimate was _way_ under actuals and it ends up taking him _twice_ as long (2 hours) as he originally thought it would take, which was 1 hour, he still makes triple the hourly rate for two hours of work (6 hour billed estimate, 2 hours of work) than the guy with the sledge hammer! The use of tools that accelerate task completion, in this case an 8x improvement (jack over sledge) enables the jackhammer operator to underestimate the labor times and still make more money at lower times to completion. Plus, the driveway owner gets his demolished driveway in 25% of the time that it would have taken with a sledgehammer and that is _still_ at a project overrun of 100%! But the world doesn't understand equations like this or really accept the value of advanced technologies. I use technology to build custom software products that are way more advanced than what typical developers use, so I can build them 10x faster and charge half the rate and still make more money! I know a local case where a company is paying a guy to use Perl to build a data driven website using files -- instead of an SQL Database. he's been working on the website for over 5 months and it still isn't finished and it has already reached the maximum of its flexibility. It's already going to have to be re-architected to enable the features the client wants now. If the local company had gone with _our_ company, which uses a flexible sql based infrastructure, then the project would have been completed in about 2 weeks and still have lots of flexibility to go! New features would be easy to add. Now, the programmer is coming to us asking to use our technology to help him complete his project! So, I love the current state of the software world. Frustrated customers paying too much for projects that typically fail are a great market segment. ~~~ pmichaud What tool do you use? ~~~ pj Qrimp ~~~ pmichaud Interesting -- I'd like to talk to you about it in more detail, if you have a moment. I'd shoot you an e-mail, but none is listed! ------ BigZaphod For my latest contract gig, I decided to try a slightly different approach than tallying and billing hourly or guessing at a fixed-cost. We're going with a "retainer" model which more or less makes me into an unofficial employee, but the idea is that they get X number of hours per week of my time. Deadlines and such are attempted to be met within those constraints. The upshot of this is that they have a clear and known rate of expense. If the project doesn't appear to be progressing fast enough, they could increase the hours per week they pay for, hire more help, hire someone else, or wait longer. :) The tricky part is getting into a deal like this without them trying to attach things like, "ok, you work 20 hours a week on our project - but if it's not done by the 3rd, we don't pay you." or whatever. But if you can avoid that and get them to think of you as an employee and not just a code factory, it works out. ------ cgs Bill by the project. You can use your hourly rate to estimate the fixed cost. The more projects you do, the more accurate your estimate will become. Over time you develop your own time-saving methods, such as pulling code out into reusable libraries you can use on your next project. Say you do a project that takes you 50 hours and you charge $5,000. If you get another similar project but this time you know it will only take 25 hours, are you going to charge $2,500 for it? Hell no! Charge as much as the market will bear, but set some kind of a minimum threshold for yourself. Here's an old article relating to technical writing, but I think it still applies to software development: <http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jan98/kent.htm> ~~~ jamesbritt "You can use your hourly rate to estimate the fixed cost" Only if you know how long it will take. Which assumes you know what you are going to build, which assumes the client _really_ knows what they want. If you are doing a more agile project, you expect new requirements to come up, current requirements to drop out, things to change along the way. But you almost certainly have no solid idea how long it might take. A mixed approach might be to make a big project into a series of smaller projects (e.g., well-defined and doable in 1-2 weeks), and bill each at a fixed price. ------ patio11 I have never quite gotten billing in hours. The value of a project is utterly uncorrelated with them. The number of hours to accomplish X goes down as the skill of the individual goes up. What sane model is it that says hiring average people to do unimportant work should cost more than hiring experts to do things that really matter for the business? ~~~ BigZaphod That's why as skill increases, the hourly rate should, too. If a company is looking to get something done faster and are willing to pay for it, they can hire the more skilled/faster professional. If that's less important to them, they hire the slower and/or sloppier but cheaper alternatives. You have to be willing to increase your rates if you're getting better/faster. If you're an employee, that's why you should be able to expect raises and bonuses and the like. The assumption is that you're getting better and better at what you do and therefore becoming more implicitly valuable. If you feel yourself getting more and more skilled but the company refuses to reward you, you should leave for someone else who values that skill - which is basically the same thing as raising your hourly rates if you're independent. ------ jokull Day rate is the way to go. No time tracking, include an hour break for chatting and eating. ------ bmelton Billing by the hour is the only effective way I have found to eliminate scope creep. Being able to say "Well, sure, I CAN do that, but it's going to cost an additional 4-6 hours" is simply the easiest (and most well received) method of indicating that they are asking for something not initially agreed to. Obviously, it helps to have a contract/requirements documentation/specification/etc., to point to, but it's rare that you run into a document detailed enough to cover nuances like whether or not this element should be blue or light blue after clicked upon. ~~~ pj If you billed fixed rate and the client changes the requirements, then you change the fixed rate. Say you estimate the cost at $10,000 and they want you to make a change, you say, "Okay, but this change wasn't included in the $10,000 so we will have to estimate how much the change will cost and add it to the bill. If you want us to do that, let us know." This is why you have to outline the requirements before you do a fixed bid. Instead of saying it's going to take 4-6 more hours, you say it's going to cost $400-600 more dollars, assuming you estimate at $100/hr. If it really takes you 1 hour, then you still make $400-600, but it only takes an hour so your hourly rate just went from $100 an hour to at least $400 an hour. If you're a highly productive programmer and use the right tools, then a fixed bid can come out in your favor if you estimate projects using the hourly rates and estimates that not so productive programmers use. ~~~ jamesbritt 'Say you estimate the cost at $10,000 and they want you to make a change, you say, "Okay, but this change wasn't included in the $10,000 so we will have to estimate how much the change will cost and add it to the bill. If you want us to do that, let us know."' Sometimes it's really that simple. Other times, you end up debating whether something is a 'change', or 'clarification', or some replacement, or whatever. The upside of fixed bid is that you can do quite well when the process is well-defined and everyone is reasonable. The upside of hourly is that you get to offload assorted issues (i.e. prolonged requirements gathering, change requests, and ad-hoc requirements finessing) and focus on the work. For every person I hear advocate fixed-bid, I hear another advocation hourly, and each swears experience is on their side. ------ TrevorJ Where I work we bill fixed bid and then go hourly if there is a scope change above and beyond that. It's the best of both worlds. ------ access_denied No, to answer the original question. But I've heard it ties well to agile dev methods.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Online invoice Free forever - agevenkat http://freeinvoice.in ====== shanecleveland No space for postal/zip code. May want to take out the discount column or allow it to be removed; If I'm not giving a discount, I may not want the customer to see that. I like that you can either add a new row below an existing row or at the bottom.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Microsoft Edge: Building a safer browser - cpeterso http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/05/11/microsoft-edge-building-a-safer-browser/ ====== jedberg Having met the engineers who actually built Edge, I can say with some confidence that I think this will the Microsoft browser people actually like. They built it from the ground up with security in mind, and with standards compatibility at the expense of backwards compatibility. In other words, they have finally decided that it is ok to tell their lagging enterprise customers to get with the times. ~~~ JustSomeNobody I thought they started with IE and cut out parts. That's not ground up. ~~~ Osiris > But Microsoft Edge has done more than just re-write the rendering engine... > Microsoft Edge hosts a new rendering engine, Microsoft EdgeHTML > The largest change in Microsoft Edge security is that the new browser is a > Universal Windows app. Everything they'd said in their press releases, including this one, says that the browser is a completely rewrite from scratch, though leveraging lessons learned on security. edit: I stand corrected. Is there evidence that the application (Edge) itself is based on IE or just the rendering engine? ~~~ azakai Actually, the information said that they _forked_ their existing rendering engine, and started to remove all the cruft they didn't care about any more. That led to a lot of new code and faster development - but it isn't entirely from scratch. edit: See for example [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML) that mentions it beginning as a fork of Trident. ~~~ lazaroclapp True enough as far as it goes, but isn't that like saying that people running a current version of Firefox are still using code from the Netscape 4? A fork of Trident that is not afraid of deprecating unsafe features and breaking backwards-compatibility for the sake of standards-compatibility isn't necessarily a worse thing than a from-scratch-new rendering engine. ------ rmtew > The largest change in Microsoft Edge security is that the new browser is a > Universal Windows app. .... This provides the user and the platform with the > confidence provided by other Windows store apps I see it's going to be a Windows Store app. I wonder how this will affect the usability for people like myself, who never see the metro side of windows unless I accidentally move the mouse near the wrong side of the screen, or accidentally hit the Windows key. Any time I see a metro app like the horrendous metro version of Windows Update, I moan that it's there like a false positive, close it and find the normal version that isn't awkward to use. ~~~ cobalt Widnows 10 does not have fullscreen apps like windows 8 did ~~~ AdeptusAquinas Or rather fullscreen view is now optional. ------ lawnchair_larry _" A broad variety of memory corruption mitigations have been devised since the mid-1990s, and in the 2000s Microsoft has lead the way with advances including ASLR, DEP, and SeHOP."_ No, they didn't lead the way. PaX beat them by at least 5 years, yet they still take credit for this. They didn't even create the Windows version of ASLR in house. _" including industry leading sandboxing"_ They're really going to claim that the Edge sandbox is better than Chrome, with no basis? ~~~ wyldfire > They're really going to claim that the Edge sandbox is better than Chrome, > with no basis? Edge has yet to be exploited at Pwn2Own and Chrome gets exploited every year. Clearly that's a better record. ;) ~~~ yeukhon I will take it being sarcastic...otherwise, Edge has only been made available for less than two months. ------ kid0m4n I believe that Microsoft not releasing versions for Linux / Mac OS X is going to not allow Edge to get maximum adoption. How am I supposed to test that my website works on Edge properly? The only option thus far is to setup a VM with Windows 10 on it so that I can run a browser to test my website. I dont even bother testing stuff on IE x for that reason. ~~~ mikhailt The same way as before, Microsoft will release an Edge-dev optimized VM builds on their site here: [http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/](http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/) They have other tools there to help as well. Microsoft is pretty good about helping devs here. It's not like testing sites in Safari is better, Apple isn't even bothering to update Safari on Windows as it has been dead for nearly more than 2 years. At least Microsoft is updating more often than Apple. They already have IE11 on Win10 dev VM there. ~~~ integraton That is enormously disingenuous to try to equivocate IE/Spartan/Edge's single- OS existence with Safari/WebKit. WebKit works on every major operating system, including Windows and Linux. IE/Spartan/Edge does not work outside of Windows. There are some minor feature differences between WebKit, OS X Safari, and iOS Safari, but the reality remains that WebKit exists on Windows, can be built on Windows, and can be used on Windows, while IE/Spartan/Edge works on nothing but Windows. Edit: I'd love to hear from the ethically bankrupt downvoters about which fact in this comment they are trying to hide from. ~~~ bunderbunder There are WebKit browsers other than Safari. But judging by how often I come across sites that render differently in Chrome and Safari, I don't know that we should draw too strong an equivalence between them either. (And while I can't speak for the downvoters because I'm not one of them, I suspect that it's not the facts presented in the post that are attracting the downvotes so much as that it's written in the form of a flame.) ~~~ integraton Chrome doesn't use WebKit, it uses Blink, a fork of WebKit. I'm only referring to WebKit, the Apple open source browser project that builds and works on every major operating system including Windows. If you also want to talk about Blink, Google's browser project that, unlike IE/Spartan/Edge, also works on every major operating system, then that's fine, too. While we are at it, let's talk about Mozilla's browser and rendering engine that also works on every major operating system. ~~~ eropple _> Chrome doesn't use WebKit, it uses Blink, a fork of WebKit._ Chrome didn't render the same as Safari when Chrome used WebKit, either. You're caping up for this, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. ~~~ comex To be fair, Chrome certainly behaved (behaves) more similar to Safari than to browsers with completely unrelated engines. ~~~ eropple Only to a point. Font rendering, in particular, was significantly different between the two, even Windows/Windows and Mac/Mac. It was enough to make life difficult. ------ craigds > Microsoft Edge provides no support for VML, VB Script, Toolbars, BHOs, or > ActiveX. Years too late of course, but good to see this finally happening. ~~~ ethana There are people that swear by VB script. But new extension engine would be nice. ~~~ JoshTriplett > There are people that swear by VB script. And many more who swear _at_ VBScript... ------ ethana I was hoping they would open source Edge at Build, but that was a bit optimistic of a time frame. There are still core components yet to be finished. Hope it will get done soon and have a solid code base to be released as open source. ~~~ bobajeff They don't seem to want to open source it. When I asked, they told me that they had no plans to and now they are hand-selecting companies to contribute code to their engine. ------ johnwfinigan "Microsoft Edge is also 64-bit, not just by default, but at all times when running on a 64-bit processor." After 32-bit Windows Server went away as of 2008 R2, I didn't expect MS to keep shipping 32-bit client for this long. Anybody have a convincing argument as to why? 16-bit legacy apps in large businesses? Obviously it's not free to do this, especially since they'll be producing every patch for two PC platforms for probably another decade. ~~~ wtallis Drivers would be the only justification. If they really cared about 16-bit apps they would have supported them on 64-bit Windows: it's only real mode and virtual 8086 mode that are hard to support on a 64-bit OS; 64-bit compatibility mode can handle 16-bit protected mode software just as easily as 32-bit software. Additionally, virtualization works fine for application-level code, but not drivers. ------ stokedmartin Features built or under consideration [0] [0] [http://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/](http://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/) ------ comex > MemGC (Memory Garbage Collector) is a memory garbage collection system that > seeks to defend the browser from UAF (Use-after-free) vulnerabilities by > taking responsibility for freeing memory away from the programmer and > instead automating it, only freeing memory when the automation has detected > that there are no more references left pointing to a given block of memory. Interesting; I don't think this has been announced before. It sounds similar in concept to Chrome's Oilpan (still not shipped AFAIK). ~~~ Animats What is Edge written in? I would have assumed Microsoft would use C#, which is garbage collected. ~~~ nbevans Highly unlikely. It would be written as a native C++ app. Whilst the .NET CLR is very powerful and highly performant these days, there just wouldn't be enough justification I don't think to design their web browser on it. Remember this thing will be targeting mobile devices too. So every little performance optimisation can save minutes of battery life which all adds up. That said, I've always wondered what a JavaScript implementation built on top of the CLR might behave like. ------ kijin A bit off topic, but I really hope that Microsoft and Samsung have reached some sort of understanding regarding the name "Edge". A trademark dispute involving their new browser is the last thing Microsoft needs at this time. It was confusing enough when they had to change SkyDrive to OneDrive. ~~~ vinceyuan I don't think it is a problem. The new browser's name is not Edge. It's 'Microsoft Edge'. The samsung phone's name is 'Galaxy Edge'. Now tech companies like to use the compound name, e.g. Apple Watch, to avoid the trademark issue. ~~~ kijin SkyDrive was Microsoft SkyDrive too, but the British court ruled that it infringed BSkyB's trademark. ------ chasing Microsoft has one helluva hole to dig themselves out of, here. ~~~ nivla For us techies, sure, but I wonder how many average joes have written off IE? For them the 'e' logo is and always have been the door to the internet. Now since Microsoft is planning on bundling both the new and the old browser in Win10, I am curious to see how many of these people will still stick with the old one over the new. ~~~ Turing_Machine "I wonder how many average joes have written off IE?" Lots of them. Many surveys show it down in the Safari region, for instance: [http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-browser-ww- monthly-201504-201...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-browser-ww- monthly-201504-201504-bar) ~~~ adventured More likely closer to 25% to 30% Every other major source than that one reports IE well above 12% [http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-u-s-popular-web- browse...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-most-u-s-popular-web-browsers/) [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0) ~~~ Turing_Machine The first one is limited to .gov websites, and lots of government agencies still use IE for internal use. The second one excludes mobile, for no good reason that I can see. Mobile is huge. ~~~ mynameisvlad Because the browser landscape is _completely_ different in mobile? There isn't really any reason not to separate them. They're completely different markets. ~~~ Turing_Machine No, they aren't different "markets" They're not even different code. Safari on iOS comes from the same code base as Safari on desktop, and I'm pretty sure the same is true for Chrome on Android (Chrome on iOS, like other iOS browsers, is just a wrapper around the Safari engine). The old Android browser was different code, but that's been on its deathbed for a while now. Mobile users use the same sites as desktop users, to a very large degree. They use the same browser code (again, to a very large degree). The only reason to separate them that I can see is to artificially inflate the number of IE users. ------ akandiah > building a sun porch onto your house without locking the door to the > sunporch Love the tongue-in-cheek swipe at Java applets. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this line.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Explaining JavaScript VMs in JavaScript - fceccon http://blog.mrale.ph/post/24351748336/explaining-js-vm-in-js ====== elliotlai yo dawg i heard you like js so we implement a js vm in js so you can run js while u run js <http://i.imgur.com/ZRM6J.jpg>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Create Your Own Expression Parser - treyhuffine https://levelup.gitconnected.com/create-your-own-expression-parser-d1f622077796?source=friends_link&sk=8d4244e0c450f1e346be8693a00c286d ====== dastx I've been looking to write a basic system that can parse documents of HTML protocol in go but it seems no such project exists. So I set out to write my own, and I come across a whole lot of projects that help you write your own parser. However, they're usually allowing to write an already popular method (ebnf, bison, yacc) but for whatever reason, I'm struggling to find any documentation on writing these things. Like, where is the a documentation for writing yacc (go) files? Or EBNF? Or whatever else. ~~~ notduncansmith Not sure if this meets your needs but there’s a library for parsing HTML in Go: [https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/net/html](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/net/html) ~~~ dastx My bad. I meant to say HTTP protocol. Not sure where my mind was at the time. ~~~ notduncansmith No worries! Incidentally, Go has something for that too (which I used semi- recently): [https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#ReadRequest](https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#ReadRequest) ~~~ dastx For whatever reason I never seen this before. Thanks for this!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
National Debt as a Roadtrip - durin42 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5fL469k9qc ====== russell It's a very cute video that shows the growth in the national in miles per hour along a map across the US. I still think Bush and Reagan were nut cases and Obama is cool.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Weekend project - Getting ignored by my own robot - rburhum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVYsWtR_gR4&feature=g-upl ====== rburhum Basically, I learned how to build a small robot this weekend. I did not even know how to operate a tiny little Servo on Saturday morning and by Sunday night I was hooking it up to the Android Speech SDK. Let me know if you got questions. Hope you like it!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Reddit user is donating 5057 BTC ( 86M USD ) to charities - _Marak_ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7jj0oa/im_donating_5057_btc_to_charitable_causes/ ====== _Marak_ In case someone wants to flag the post, the link to the actual fund is: [https://pineapplefund.org/](https://pineapplefund.org/) They have a signed messaged with the funds and verified transactions already sent including $1,000,000 going to the EFF. ------ focal Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game - Anon84 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02156-9 ====== thomasfl One of the researchers, Tuomas Sundholm, has a real badass CV. Former pilot in the Finnish airforce. Finnish windsurfer champion. Snowboarder. Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Speaks four european languages, including swedish. And now at the age of 51, he has created the best AI powered poker bot. [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf) ~~~ jacquesm Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK. ~~~ loup-vaillant > _speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe_ _Northern_ Europe, maybe. French people for instance tend to suck at foreign languages. We rarely go beyond 3 languages (French, English, then German or Spanish. The last two are often forgotten after school.) I suspect Spain and Italy are similar. ~~~ jfengel As an American, I am now going to bang my head into a wall. ~~~ stronglikedan Nothing to do with being American, since you're afforded the luxury to learn other languages _for free_ through public schooling. If anything, bang your head because you _chose_ not to. ~~~ jfengel The offer is made, but the reason for doing so isn't made clear. I didn't understand it at the time; I availed myself of it in a minimal way. Most don't do that. Some of that is the accident of geography: it simply wasn't necessary. Today, we are more connected to our Spanish-speaking neighbors, and the value of learning that language is becoming increasingly obvious. I don't know whether the schools are doing a better job of stressing that than they did when I was in school. I have indeed chosen to learn other languages, several of them. I wish I'd done it in school, at a time when my brain was more open to it. Unfortunately, that was also a time when I didn't know very much and put my priority on other things that ended up making less of a difference in my life. ~~~ Kaiyou It's a myth that you learn languages easier earlier in life. Mastering a language takes about 10 years, it's just that when you start at age 6, you could be done by age 16. ------ pesenti Blog post: [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to-beat- pros-...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to-beat-pros- in-6-player-poker/) Science article: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/science.aay2400) ~~~ YeGoblynQueenne >> Pluribus is also unusual because it costs far less to train and run than other recent AI systems for benchmark games. Some experts in the field have worried that future AI research will be dominated by large teams with access to millions of dollars in computing resources. We believe Pluribus is powerful evidence that novel approaches that require only modest resources can drive cutting-edge AI research. That's the best part in all of this. I'm not convinced by the claim the authors repeatedly make, that this technique will translate well to real-world problems. But I'm hoping that there is going to be more of this kind of result, singalling a shift away from Big Data and huge compute and towards well-designed and efficient algorithms. In fact, I kind of expect it. The harder it gets to do the kind of machine learning that only large groups like DeepMind and OpenAI can do, the more smaller teams will push the other way and find ways to keep making progress cheaply and efficiently. ~~~ kqr Yes! I work for a company that does just this: pull big gears on limited data and try to generalise across groups of things to get intelligent results even on small data. In many ways, it absolutely feels like the future. ~~~ mooneater Interesting, are you using bayesian methods? ~~~ kqr Does "Bayesian methods" mean anything specific? Parts of the core algorithms were written before I joined, and they are very improvised in the dog-in-a- lab-coat way. I haven't analysed them to see how closely they follow Bayes theorem and how strictly they define conjugate probabilities etc. (we are also heavily using simple empirical distributions), but the general idea of updating priors with new evidence is what it builds on, yes. I have a hard time imagining doing things any other way and still getting quality results, but that is probably a reflection on my shortcomings rather than a technical fact. ------ gexla It's easy to "take away" too much information from this. The focus is that an AI poker bot "did this" and not get too much into other adjacent subjects. But what's the fun in that? 10,000 hands in an interesting number. If you search the poker forums, you'll see this is the number you'll see people throw out there for how many hands you need to see before you can analyze your play. You then make adjustments and see another 10,000 hands before you can assess those changes. In 2019, it's impractical to adapt as a competitive player in live poker. A grinder can see 10,000 hands within a day. The live poker room took 12 days. Another characteristic of online poker is that players can also use data to their advantage. So, I wouldn't consider 10K hands as long term, even if this was a period of 12 days. Once players get a chance to adapt, then they'll increase their rate of wins against a bot. Once you have a history of hand histories being shared, then it's all over. And again, give these players their own software tools. Remember that one of the most exciting events in online poker was the run of isildur1. That run was put to rest when he went bust against players who had studied thousands of his hand histories. This doesn't take away from the development of the bot. If we learn something from it, then all good. ~~~ csa You clearly didn’t read the additional links they posted. They mentioned why they chose 10k (AIVAT), and it goes far beyond any of the variables you mentioned. For any number of hands, my money is on the bot. ~~~ Traster That really doesn't address the point that was raised. It's not that the bot wins through luck and that 10k is too small a sample, it's that a good professional poker player isn't good over 10k hands, they're good over 5 years. Any good player will have their play analyzed and responded to, so there's a feedback loop there - any good player will have their play analyzed, exploited and will have to re-adjust their strategy to respond to exploitative play. The question is: How does the AI strategy adapt over time to players who know the hand history of the AI strategy. That's an extremely important part of being a top level player. To give you an example - if you watch Daniel Negreanu's vlog about his time at the WSOP he actively talks about changing his strategy in response to his analysis of different players' profiles. This is especially important in Sit & Go where at high stakes you'll have regular grinders who build up reputations - less so in tournaments where you're less likely to meet any given player. ~~~ hdkrgr This will be interesting to see. Brown and Sandholm's algorithm aims to play a Nash Equilibrium which by deifnition _cannot_ be exploited by a single opponent player as long as all players are playing the equilibrium strategy. As they note in the paper this gives you a strong optimality guarantee in the 2-player setting. It was unclear whether this would transfer to real-world winnings in the multi-player case, and while it looks like it does for now (for current strategy-profiles of human players) humans might be able to adapt to the strategy played by the bot. Given the fact that the bot wins against current human strategy-profiles in the n-player setting, it's likely (but not a sure thing) that human players will have to team-up against the bot to exploit it. That seems rather unlikely to me. ------ noambrown I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA ~~~ throwamay1241 Who _were_ the pros? Are they credible endbosses? Seth Davies works at RIO which deserves respect but I've never heard of the others except Chris Ferguson who I doubt is a very good player by todays standards (or human being, for that matter), but I've never heard of the others when I do know the likes of LLinusLove (iirc, the king of 6max), Polk and Phil Ganford. Is 10,000 hands really considered a good enough sample? Most people consider 100k hands w/ a 4bb winrate to be an acceptable other math aside. However, as your opponent and yourself play with equal skill, variance increases to the point where regs refuse to sit each other. ~~~ noambrown LLinusLove was one of the players. Chris Ferguson was in one of the 5 AI's + 1 Human experiment but not the 5 Humans + 1 AI experiment. We used AIVAT to reduce variance, which reduces the number of samples we need by roughly a factor of 10: [https://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/aaai18-burch- aivat...](https://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/aaai18-burch-aivat.pdf) ------ auggierose This is fascinating stuff. So do I understand this right, Liberatus worked using computing the Nash equilibrium, while the new multiplayer version works using self-play like AlphaGo Zero? Did you run the multiplayer version against the two-player version? If yes, how did it go? Could you recommend a series of books / papers that can take me from zero to being able to reprogram this (I know programming and mathematics, but not much statistics)? And how much computing resources / time did it take to train your bot? ~~~ noambrown Training was super cheap. It would cost under $150 on cloud computing services. The training aspect has some improvements but is at its core similar to Libratus. The search algorithm is the biggest difference. There aren't that many great resources out there for helping new people get caught up to speed on this area. That's something we hope to fix in the future. Maybe this would be a good place to start? [http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdf](http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdf) ~~~ dharma1 Is Oskari Tammelin still working on this stuff? I remember he wrote some very fast CFR optimisations a few years ago ------ JaRail So let me see if I understand this. I don't believe it's hard to write a probabilistic program to play poker. That's enough to win against humans in 2-player. With one AI and multiple professional human players sitting at a physical table, the humans outperform the probabilistic model because they take advantage of each other's mistakes/styles. Some players crash out faster but the winner gets ahead of the safe probabilistic style of play. So this bot is better at the current professional player meta than the current players. In a 1v1 against a probabilistic model, it would probably also lose? Am I understanding this properly? Or is playing the probabilistic model directly enough of a tell that it's also losing strategy? Meaning you need some variation of strategies, strategy detection, or knowledge of the meta to win? ~~~ rightbyte Interesting article. Too bad a don't have a subscription to read the paper. The bot played like 10 000 hands. There is no way that is enough to prove it's better or worse than the opponents. More so in no-limit where some key all-ins can turn the game up side down. The variance is higher than limit or fixed, right? I did a heads up Texas holdem fixed bot with "counter factual regret minimization" like 8 years ago from a paper I read. It had to play like 100 000 hands vs a crappy reference bot to prove it was better. Strategy detection in so short games is probably worthless. The edge is probably in seeing who are tired or drunk in paper poker. ~~~ junar They mention that they use AIVAT to reduce variance. > Although poker is a game of skill, there is an extremely large luck > component as well. It is common for top professionals to lose money even > over the course of 10,000 hands of poker simply because of bad luck. To > reduce the role of luck, we used a version of the AIVAT[1] variance > reduction algorithm, which applies a baseline estimate of the value of each > situation to reduce variance while still keeping the samples unbiased. For > example, if the bot is dealt a really strong hand, AIVAT will subtract a > baseline value from its winnings to counter the good luck. This adjustment > allowed us to achieve statistically significant results with roughly 10x > fewer hands than would normally be needed. [1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06915](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06915) ------ GCA10 Hi Noam: I'm intrigued that you trained/tested the bot against strategies that were skewed to raise a lot, fold a lot and check a lot, as well as something resembling GTO. Were there any kinds of table situations where the bot had a harder time making money? Or where the AI crushed it? I'm thinking in particular of unbalanced tables with an ever-changing mixture of TAG and LAG play. I've changed my mind three times about whether that's humans' best refuge -- or a situation that's a bot's dream. You've done the work. Insights welcome. ------ cyberferret With the advent of AI bots in Poker, Chess etc., what happens to the old adage of "Play the player, not the game". How do modern human players manage when you don't have the psychological aspects of the game to work with? I see on chess channels that grand masters have to rethink their whole game preparation methodology to cope with the "Alpha Zero" oddities that have now been introduced into this ancient game. They literally have to "throw out the book" of standard openings and middle games and start afresh. ~~~ pk2200 The chess channels you're visiting are grossly overstating Alpha Zero's impact. AFAICT, it hasn't made any impact on opening theory at all. AZ's strength is in the middlegame, where it appears to be slightly better than traditional engines (like Stockfish) at finding material sacrifices for long term piece activity and/or mating attacks. ------ neural_thing How long until a slightly worse version of this model is reverse engineered and appears at every table in online poker? ~~~ DevX101 Slightly worse versions are already out in the wild. Bot using the published technique will be live in a couple of months tops. ~~~ rightbyte Colluding bots are the main worry if you play online though. ------ merlincorey Pretty incredible that this has scaled down from 100 CPUs (and a couple terabytes of RAM) for their two player limit hold'em bot to just two CPUs for the no limit bot. ------ donk2019 Congrats Noam for the great breakthrough work! I have a question about the conspiracy. For the 5 Human + 1 AI setting, since the human pros know which player is AI (read from your previous response), is it possible for human players to conspire to beat the AI? And in theory, for multi-player game, even the AI plays at the best strategy, is it still possible to be beat by conspiracy of other players? Thanks. ------ asdfman123 So, is this the end of online poker? Will it just become increasingly sophisticated bots playing each other online? ~~~ trishume I'm really confused about why stock for the company that makes PokerStars hasn't moved at all today: [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=TSE:+TSGI#scso=_wqsn...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=TSE:+TSGI#scso=_wqsnXbuWBu2N_QbshojgBw2:0) The fact that there's a published recipe for a superhuman bot that can be trained for $150 and run on any desktop computer sounds like an existential threat to their business. The main mitigating factor I can think of is that you'd need to also adversarially train it so it isn't distinguishable from a skilled human. But that doesn't seem like it would be too difficult. ~~~ asdfman123 You know, now that we're talking about it I'm wondering if someone hasn't already come up with a better bot and has just been silently using it to win money online. I'm sure the sites have been crawling with bots as long as they've been around, some better than others. As long as it doesn't drive away too many customers I doubt the sites care. They still take a rake on bot games. However better AI could change that as the "dumb money" slowly dries up. ~~~ bcassedy Dumb money has been drying up for years. There have been bots taking millions of dollars out of games for more than a decade. Even bots from 10 years ago were sophisticated enough to win money at mid-stakes poker (up to $2000 buy in 6max no limit games) ~~~ dbancajas proof? I dont' believe this. 2K buy-in has a lot of regs that are pretty good overall in cash games. Plus Pokerstars/FT has a pretty good anti-bot policy. if you get caught bye bye to the $. ~~~ bcassedy [https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/153/high-stakes-pl- omaha/...](https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/153/high-stakes-pl- omaha/massive-bot-ring-pokerstars-party-how-spot-them-1537778/) There are a bunch of such threads over the years where through statistical analysis, users have identified groups of dozens of bots. While years ago many of the pros could theoretically beat these bots, it may not have been by enough of a factor to overcome the rake. Of course if the bots are practicing any game selection they can take money out of the economy even if they can't beat pros. Anti-bot measures is an arms race and the sites aren't always ahead of the game. ------ solidasparagus So Dota 2 doesn't count as a multiplayer game? OpenAI Five beat the world champions in back-to-back games... ~~~ taejavu Yes, Dota 2 is not a multiplayer poker game. I agree that the title is ambiguous, but it's not a stretch to imagine that "poker" is implied here. ~~~ solidasparagus I don't think it's implied considering the articles compares the poker bot to go and chess bots (which are the non-multiplayer games the title is referring to). ------ r00fus I was really hoping the article would go into more detail on how the AI engaged with the human players. Was it online? the picture on the article seems to imply IRL. If IRL, what inputs did it have, simply cards shown or could it read tells? Did those players know they were playing an AI? ~~~ noambrown It was online. The players were playing from home on their own schedules. The bot did not look at any tells (timing tells or otherwise). The players knew they were playing a bot and knew which player the bot was. ------ grandtour001 Were the games played with real money? Nobody is going to take fake money games seriously. ~~~ slashcom From the paper: "$50,000 was divided among the human participants based on their performance to incentivize them to play their best. Each player was guaranteed a minimum of $0.40 per hand for participating, but this could increase to as much as $1.60 per hand based on performance." So the humans weren't betting their own money, but they still made more money if they won. ------ rofo1 I'd love to see high-stakes heads-up bot vs Tom Dwan or Negreanu. Maybe a bot technically qualifies as an opponent in durrr's challenge [0]? :) How would bluffing influence the outcome? Both these players who are considered very strong, are known to play all kinds of hands. [0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dwan#Full_Tilt_Poker_Durrr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Dwan#Full_Tilt_Poker_Durrrr_Million_Dollar_Challenge) ------ nishantvyas I don't get this... Poker isn't pure mathematical... it has emotions involved (greed, fear, belief, reading others, manipulations (to fool the opponent)... and may be more... and all of these emotions arises differently for different people based on their time, place, their world view, their background and history...) Are we now saying that a computer can do this all in simulation? if so, it's a great break through in human history. ~~~ throwamay1241 At the nosebleeds, poker hasn't been around those things in a long time. Poker is about exploitative play against people who base their play off emotions, and unperfect game theory optimal against players who don't base their play off emotions. The more perfect the GTO play is, the higher the winrate against the latter group, but higher stakes games are built around one or more bad players - pros will literally stop playing as soon as the fish busts. ------ luckyalog isnt it just possible that the bot got lucky. It plays good. Maybe really good but does it play as good as a pro??? Would it win 9 wp bracelets. Would It make it to day 3 of the world series of poker. Chris Moneymaker got some damn good hands. Its part of the game. Its why this feat is unremarkable and why poker is a crap game for AI. The outcomes are very loose, especially when the reason these guys are pros is partially because of their ability to read. You are taking away a tool that made their proker players great and then expect them to be a metric to test the AI. A better test would be to have pro players play a set of 1, 2, 4, 7 basic rule bots and the AI does the same. Then you compare differences in play. With enough data points you can compare situations that are similar but the AI did better or worse. This is a fair comparison of skill. Also if there are professional players at a multiplayer game the AI is getting help from other players. Just like Civ V I get help from the AI attacking itself. Im sure this AI got help from the players attacking eachother (especially if they were doing so and making the pot bigger for the AI to grab up, think of a player reraising another player after the bot does a check all in). ~~~ awal2 Despite the luck/noise in Poker, there are reasonable measures of performance, and while I'm not an expert in this area, the bot seems to be doing very well (see paper for details). Poker is not a "crap game for AI" it's actually quite a good game. It's a very simple example of a game with a lot of randomness (a feature not a bug) and hidden information that still admits a wide variety of skill levels (expert play is much better than intermediate play is much better than novice play). This is a great accomplishment. More links for reference: [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to- beat-pros-...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to-beat-pros- in-6-player-poker/) [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/science.aay2400) ------ w_s_l I would love to get a hands on the source. Hook it up to an API like [https://pokr.live](https://pokr.live) and then basically build a computer vision poker bot. The trick is how to create natural mouse click movements or keyboard inputs. This is the part that I'm most shaky on but the pokr.live API works by sending screenshots which it will translate into player actions at the table disclaimer: pokr.live API is a WIP ~~~ auggierose You do that by letting a human play, informed by the bot. ------ DeathArrow I was thinking a year ago about using Deep Reinforcement Learning in a poker bot what stopped me was the impossible amount of data and computation due to imperfect information nature of poker games. If I'll have the time I'll try to implement thing akin to the search technique described in the paper. It might pay better than a full time job. ------ axilmar "At each decision point, it compares the state of the game with its blueprint and searches a few moves ahead to see how the action played out. It then decides whether it can improve on it." That's exactly how the brain operates. ------ gringoDan Curious if we'll see human poker pros get much better in the coming years as they incorporate training regimens that involve bots (analogous to chess today vs. 50 years ago). Seems like this will be the trend in almost every game. ~~~ TylerE As someone who plays both games....I doubt it. Poker is an incomplete information game with crushingly high variance. The bots strategy is likely not quantifiable. ~~~ gringoDan Can you expand on this? I'm a novice at both games, but the Facebook blog post mentioned that the bot exhibited some unconventional strategies: > Pluribus disagrees with the folk wisdom that donk betting (starting a round > by betting when one ended the previous betting round with a call) is a > mistake; Pluribus does this far more often than professional humans do. Is it overly simplistic to think that humans could improve their game by incorporating some strategies like this more/less often than they were previously? ------ DeathArrow I wonder what would be the impact of using Counterfactual Regret Minimization instead of training a neural network based on hands played by real players? Whys is using CFR better than training based on real data? ~~~ Tenoke It's not necesserily better but with CFR you can learn beyond what humans have learned, but on the other hand you dont learn their usual mistakes to more easily exploit them. Also in this approach you need CRM since at every point you are checking what would've happened if you picked something else, which is just impossible with a fixed dataset. ------ auggierose Would you say it would be hard to expand this to tables with 9 players? ~~~ noambrown No, it wouldn't be hard. We chose six players because it's the most common/popular form of poker. Also, as you add more players it becomes harder and harder to evaluate because the bot's involved in fewer hands, we need to have more pros at the table, and we need to coordinate more schedules. Six was logistically pretty tough already. ------ User23 The most interesting thing about this to me is the lesson it teaches human players about bluffing. ------ indigodaddy Was this cash or tourney format? How many blinds deep was the bot and the rest of the players at the start? ~~~ GCA10 From the sample hands, it looks as if it's a cash game with stacks equal to 200BB. Plenty of room to play real poker. ------ ayemeng Curious, why was 100BB used for six max? If I recall right, the head ups experiment was 200BB? ~~~ noambrown We considered both options but decided to go with 100BB because that is the standard in the poker world. It doesn't make a big difference for these techniques though. ~~~ srkigo Could you try to run a training with ante included in the pot? I wonder if open-limping would be a viable strategy with some hands. No one knows that and it would be really interesting to find out. Ante should be equal to BB, like it was in WSOP Main Event. ------ cklaus Is the source code and data available for allowing others to play against this not? ------ anbop Would love to wire this into some kind of device I could play with at a casino. ------ zzo38computer I have seen fixed limit AI, and here is now no limit AI. Is there a pot limit AI? ------ IloveHN84 Basically, all the online Poker rooms are now rigged and leading to frauds ------ donk2019 Congrats Noam for the great breakthrough work! I have a question about the conspiracy. For the 5 Human + 1 AI setting, since the human pros know which player is AI (read from your previous response), is it possible for human players to conspire to beat the AI? ------ david-gpu Time to cross poker off the list? [0] [https://xkcd.com/1002/](https://xkcd.com/1002/) ------ alexashka The title is misleading - bots have been beating no limit pros in 1v1 matches for quite some time. This is for 6-man games. The article mentions 10,000 hands - this is a very small sample size to draw any real conclusions, as anyone who has dabbled in online poker for more than a few thousand dollars can attest to. Regardless - it's trivial to write a bot that'll beat 90% of the players, as site runners can all attest to (bots are a serious problem that is not new). What does it matter that a bot can beat 'the best' or 'professionals'? It's enough that it can do better than the vast majority, outside of dystopian woes about robots taking over or being 'superior' to human beings. Glossing over all that - I am curious if this can be used for something other than ruining online poker, which has largely already been ruined by allowing multi-tabling professionals with custom software that gathers statistics on players (data mining), existing bots, US government and irresponsible (criminal) site runners (looking at you ultimate bet)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
YouTube soon to start live sports streaming - Garbage http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/23/sports.youtube.mashable/index.html?hpt=Sbin ====== samuel1604 Seems to be a hoax : (Mashable) -- UPDATE We've just heard from the NHL, who tell us: "The NHL is not in discussions with YouTube to stream live games. The NHL has not had conversations with the Google spokespeople mentioned in the Bloomberg report."	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model - mzl https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html ====== afarrell An important aspect of being a professional software engineer is having the backbone to sometimes say things like: \- “I don’t know yet enough about the problem to give you even a rough estimate. If you’d like, I can take a day to dig into it and then report back.” \- “This first part should take 2-3 days. 5 on the outside. But the second part relies heavily on an API whose documentation and error messages are in Chinese and Google Translate isn’t good enough. I’d need to insist on professional translation in order to even estimate the second part.” \- “The problem is tracking down a bug rather than building something, so I don’t have a good way of estimating this. However, I can timebox my investigation and if I’ve not found the cause at the end of the timebox, can work on a plan to work around the bug.” You need to be willing to endure the discomfort of looking someone in the face, saying “I don’t know”, and then standing your ground when they pruessure you to lie to them. They probably don’t want you to lie, but there is a small chance that they pruessure you to. If you don’t resist this pruessure, you can end up continually giving estimates that are 10x off-target, blowing past them as you lose credibility, and your running your brain ragged with sleep- deprivation against a problem you haven’t given it the time to break down and understand. But when you advocate clearly for your needs as a professional, people are generally reasonable. ~~~ Aeolun > But when you advocate clearly for your needs as a professional, people are > generally reasonable. This has not been my experience. People want ‘estimates’ at all costs, tell you to not worry about any accuracy, and then a week later tell your manager you committed to x date. ~~~ nahname As long as software is a cost center to your company, it will be treated this way. Trying getting a job at a company where software is a core concern. Ideally with a CEO that is not from a marketing/business background. ~~~ afarrell For more on this sort if thing, Patrick McKenzie’s writing is good: \- [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a- pr...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/) \- [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can- tea...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the- oss-community-about-marketing/) ~~~ eikenberry > In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and > after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one > for your entire career. Spoken as someone who has never taken the time to fully master a programming language and, from the sound of it, has never worked with someone who has either. The difference between someone who has spent 6-12 months with a language compared someone who has spent 6-12 years is night and day. From the general tone of the article, he obviously focuses more on the business value than on the technical side and that is a pretty good approach for making money. But I'll take Peter Norvig's advice ([http://norvig.com/21-days.html](http://norvig.com/21-days.html)) over this guys when it comes to mastering a language. To be fair most of the content of those articles is pretty decent though and it is just a pet peeve of mine when people claim that mastery of your medium doesn't matter. ~~~ Aeolun In my experience, having mastery over one language translates more or less directly into being at least journeyman in all others. If you are working with an apprentice, whatever you do, it will seem like you are really experienced. ------ bunderbunder I've been one place that I thought was _really_ good at software estimation. Their system was: Everything gets a T-shirt size. Roughly, "small" is no more than a couple person-days, "medium" is no more than a couple person-weeks, "large" is no more than a couple person-months. Anything beyond that, assume the schedule could be unbounded. Figure out how to carve those into a series of no-larger-than-large projects that have independent value. If they form a series of iterations, don't make any assumptions about whether you'll ever even get around to anything but the first one or two. That just compromises your ability to treat them as independent projects, and _that_ creates risk that you find yourself having to worry about sunk costs and writing down effort already expended when it eventually (and inevitably) turns out that you need to be shifting your attention in order to address some unforeseen business development. At the start of every quarter, the team would commit to what it would get done during that quarter. There were some guidelines on how many small, medium or large projects they can take on, but the overriding principle was that you should under-promise and over-deliver. _Lots_ of slack (1/3 - 1/2) was left in everyone's schedule, in order to ensure ample time for all the small urgent things that inevitably pop up. There was also a log of technical debt items. If the team finished all their commitments before the end of the quarter, their reward was time to knock things off that list. Best reward ever, IMO. ~~~ SketchySeaBeast > Everything gets a T-shirt size. Roughly, "small" is no more than a couple > person-days, "medium" is no more than a couple person-weeks, "large" is no > more than a couple person-months. That's pretty much exactly what I've ended up using on past projects - a little more fine grained (start at a half day, went up to months), but that was my approach as well, and if I didn't know everything it went up a size. ~~~ karthikb Did you find much differentiation between half day and couple of days? Especially because some things that might take a couple days end up taking 30 mins (some efficient package already exists), and some half day things end up taking a couple days, so it comes out in a wash? ~~~ bunderbunder The answer to that question depends heavily on the duration and nature of your planning iterations. If you're doing quarterly planning, the difference between half a day and a couple a days is meaningless, and there's not really any point in distinguishing among them. If you're doing 1-week sprints, the difference between half a day and a couple days is enormous, and the product planner might get some value out of distinguishing among them. If you're following a more kanban-y approach, the difference is perhaps meaningful, but not particularly actionable, so I think I (personally) still wouldn't bother to capture the distinction for planning purposes. ------ teddyh According to Joel Spolsky¹, programmers are generally bad at estimating, but they are _consistently_ bad, with the exact factor depending on the individual. So by measuring each person’s estimate and comparing it to the actual time takes after the fact, you can determine each person’s estimation factor, and then when they estimate again, you can get a pretty reliable figure. 1\. [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based- sch...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-scheduling/) ~~~ tonyedgecombe You know that article was written to sell a feature in their bug tracker. I like Joel's writing but I'd take that piece with a pinch of salt. ~~~ teddyh If we try to be a bit charitable, we could assume that they implemented the feature in the bug tracker _because_ of this observed property of estimates. ------ acd US navy has developed something similar with beta statistical distribution. You estimate "Optimistic", "Most likely" and "Pessimistic" time estimates for each task in the project and then use beta distribution on it. Some tasks take way longer than estimated. Here is the link to the time estimation described above with Beta distribution. [https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/project- management/bet...](https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/project- management/better-project-management-through-beta-distribution/) ~~~ maltalex I find this approach very interesting, but it hinges on the assumption that project completion times follow a beta distribution. What's the basis for that? ~~~ kqr It may reflect the observations in OP kind of well -- with one difference: it assumes we're good at estimating the mode, not the median. But other than that, within the range we're talking about (1 < alpha < beta) it has somewhat similar shape to the lognormal distribution. The three things that still bother me about that idea are: 1\. I haven't tried fitting it to the dataset in OP; 2\. It's bounded to the right, which seems unrealistic; 3\. I haven't come up with intuitive interpretations for the alpha and beta parameters in this context. If the beta distribution means something, then its parameters must have natural interpretations as well. ------ mbesto As always, my favorite article on this subject: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CPm5LTwHrvBJCa9h5/planning-f...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CPm5LTwHrvBJCa9h5/planning- fallacy) > _A clue to the underlying problem with the planning algorithm was uncovered > by Newby-Clark et al., who found that Asking subjects for their predictions based on realistic “best guess” scenarios; and Asking subjects for their hoped-for “best case” scenarios . . . . . . produced indistinguishable results._ > _So there is a fairly reliable way to fix the planning fallacy, if you’re > doing something broadly similar to a reference class of previous projects. > Just ask how long similar projects have taken in the past, without > considering any of the special properties of this project. Better yet, ask > an experienced outsider how long similar projects have taken._ ~~~ jfehr Daniel Kahnemann calls this the "inside view" and "outside view", from his book Thinking Fast and Slow. The relevant excerpt (mostly an anecdote that serves as an introduction to a whole _chapter_ about it) can be found here: [https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and- cor...](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate- finance/our-insights/daniel-kahneman-beware-the-inside-view) ------ basetop The mythical man month ( required reading for most CS programs ) goes into a historical and production aspect of why software projects take longer than what you think and what you expected. Also, there is a law named after author called the Brooks's law : "adding human resources to a late software project makes it later" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law) In most industries, if you are running behind schedule, you throw more workers at the problem to catch up. For example, laying railroad tracks, digging ditches, deliverying packages, harvesting crops, etc. By adding more workers, you shorten the time it takes to complete the project. But which software engineering, the reverse tends to happen. If you are falling behind, just throwing more developers at the problem worsens the problem. Most likely because you need the new developers to get "caught up" with the code/project/tools but if you rush that process, then they won't have a full understanding of the project/code/tools and introduce bugs/problems themselves which exacerbates the problem. It's a fun read if you have the time. ~~~ rainhacker Given most software project estimations are off, wonder if a corollary of Brook's law can be - don't add resources in later stages of 'any' software project. ~~~ bostonvaulter2 Ah, but how do you know what stage of the software project you're in? Are you 3 months into a 4 month project or are you 3 months into a 5 year project? ~~~ rainhacker Maybe, instead of asking - if I'm x months into a y months project (assuming y months is the initial estimate) - ask if the project is x% feature complete. Based on the remaining features identify how far the project has progressed. Though, this approach has the problem of scope creep. As the requirements are fluid, especially in a long-running project. ------ hnzix My rule of thumb: take your estimate, double it, then add 20%. I'm not joking. ~~~ thatoneuser Eh. I've been successful adding 20% in. I feel like if you have to double first (meaning your end result is 220% of what you originally estimated) then you aren't learning from previous mistakes. Maybe 220 is appropriate for the first time you do work or work with a certain team tho. ~~~ crazygringo > _then you aren 't learning from previous mistakes_ ??? The doubling-it is for when you build the whole component on top of a library, then discover that the library has a fatal bug you can't work around, and you have to rebuild the whole component on top of a different library, then discover that other library has _another_ fatal bug, so now you need to include _both_ libraries with logic around when to use which one, and then that seems to work but you add plenty of tests and documentation to make sure it works that way in prod too and not just on your dev machine. I don't see what that has to do with learning from previous mistakes. Pretty much all but the most basic programming turns out to be like that -- dealing with unforeseeable and undocumented problems. (The 20% is because you weren't planning for sick days, an unforeseen emergency bugfix on another project, nobody remembered about the afternoon retreat next week, etc.) ~~~ lostctown Going through this now and boy is this true. Nothing like rewriting a 1k+ lib the day before a feature is supposed to be ready and then praying you didn't blow up some other lesser documented part of the code. ------ onion2k This is why I like 3 point estimation[1] - if you have optimistic, expected and pessimistic estimates for each task you can pull out which points are high risk. Using a single estimate can't give you that insight. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- point_estimation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_estimation) ~~~ vbuwivbiu manager: "thanks for the optimistic estimate!" ~~~ onion2k Sure, in the same way a bad manager will say "No, that's too high, I'm going to reduce your estimate" if you use a single number. Bad managers are a thing. Make sure you get a good one. ~~~ nicoburns Yep. I still remember my first manager, who doubled every estimate I gave him. He was great. ~~~ onion2k Definitely a good manager, but Hofstadter's Law says that's still too low. :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law) ------ adrianmonk One strategy for dealing with risk is to order your tasks so the highly variable ones come first. That way, as you progress through the project, you eliminate a lot of unpredictability, and it's smoother sailing toward the end. However, as the tables in this article show so clearly, one task can dominate others. This serves as a great illustration of a perception problem the above strategy can create. Outside observers watch your progress and will probably evaluate it in terms of number of tasks completed. You have (say) 10 tasks to complete, and from their point of view, all they know is a really long time has passed and you haven't even completed 1 of them! Since they are further removed from the situation than you are, they are almost guaranteed to not appreciate why the variable task is that way. They're likely to just think your team is performing badly. So, maybe it's better to order tasks so that risky stuff is spread more evenly across the timeline of the project. It could create less confusion. Putting risk at the beginning is a strategy that requires a whole lot of trust and buy-in. ------ mikekchar The interesting thing is that by the central limit theorem, the mean of a mean is normally distributed. This is extremely helpful. Here's what I suggest you do: Same size your stories to small values. Do 30 stories in a sprint and take the mean. Do 30 sprints and take the mean of the sprint. What you get is the mean amount of time to do a sprint of 30 stories. What's amazing is that this estimate will be normally distributed. You can measure the variance to get error bars. Of course 900 stories to get good estimates ;-) However, imagine that your stories averaged 2 days each. Imagine as well that you have a team of 10 people. That means that you will finish a "sprint" of 30 stories in 6 days (on average). 30 sprints is 180 days -- the better part of a year, but you probably don't need a 95% confidence interval. You will find that after a few sprints, you'll be able to predict the sprint length pretty well (or if you set your sprints to be a certain size, then you will predict the number of stories that will fit in it, with error bars). The other cool thing is that by doing this, you will be able to see when stories are outliers. This is a highly undervalued ability IMHO. Once a story passes the mean plus the variance, you know you've got a problem. Probably time to replan. If you have a group of stories that are exceeding that time, then you may have a systemic estimation problem (often occurs when personnel change or some kind of pressure is being applied to the team). This kind of early warning system allows you to start trying to find potential problems. This is really the secret behind "velocity" or "load factor" in XP. Now, does it work on a normal team? In my experience, it doesn't because groups of people are crap at calmly using statistics to help them. I've had teams where they were awesome at doing it, but that was the minority, unfortunately. ~~~ piccolbo The central limit theorem is in the limit for the number of variables in the sum approaching infinity. In the finite world, the article explains how it's done. The article is saying, the sum of lognormals is not normal. You are saying: take enough of them and it is normal. The article is still more accurate than your reasoning for 30 stories. From the wikipedia entry for Central limit theorem " As an approximation for a finite number of observations, it provides a reasonable approximation only when close to the peak of the normal distribution; it requires a very large number of observations to stretch into the tails". To prduce a 95% confidence intervals, you have to upper-bound the tails. All methodologies that are based on sum of subtasks estimates are not evidence based. But we knew already sw methodologies are not evidence-based, did we? ~~~ ska You are saying: take enough of them and it is normal. This doesn't completely undermine your point, but that isn't what they are saying, I think. I read it as saying by CLT that the estimates of the mean of those distributions is normal and centered on [the mean you are actually interested in]. Tails are perhaps somewhat a red herring here, because you don't really care about them unless you are specifically trying to evaluate worst-case-but-really-unlikely. ~~~ mikekchar Yes, that is correct. It's been a very long time since I studied statistics, so I'm not sure if the variance of a mean has the same confidence interval as the mean. I suspect not. So you would indeed need to have a very large number of samples to get good error bars. It's a good point which I hadn't really considered. However it will never really get that far anyway because hopefully you'll intervene before the long tail hits you. I think those really long tails are more of a problem when you are working with "features" that are much longer. If you have 1 day stories and you've been working on the story for a whole week, you know you have a massive problem. It's time to back up and see if there is a way to break it up, or to do it differently. If you have a feature that is a month, by the time you get to 5 months, you have so much capital invested in the original plan that it's very hard (politically) to say, "Nope... this isn't working out. Let's try something else". Of course, it is very hard to get your organisation to plan to a 1 day level of granularity. ------ yawz Even the language is not correct: We all call it "estimate", but stakeholders behave like it's a "commitment". Passage from uncertainty to certainty happens in the language, and all the responsibility is on the engineering team's shoulders. ~~~ adrianmonk Even if you choose the right words, people don't necessarily pay close attention. And if they want a commitment, they may assume that the numbers you give them are a commitment regardless of how you phrase it. But even if they did listen closely to what you said, "estimate" is not even a great word. If your car is in a wreck, a body shop gives you an estimate to fix it, and they may treat that estimate as a commitment. It's pretty common practice that people are held to an estimate, or to not going over by a certain small percentage. Maybe we need a word like "forecast" or "prediction". ~~~ Bjartr > Maybe we need a word like "forecast" or "prediction". Scrum (The org behind that flavor of agile) actually changed the language used in their guide back in 2011 from developers making a "spring commitment" to making a "spring forecast" for exactly these reasons. [https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs- forecast](https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast) ------ wellpast > Instead, figure out which tasks have the highest uncertainty – those tasks > are basically going to dominate the mean time to completion. From the _technical_ side of things, uncertainty can mean a few things here: (A) I've never done this kind of task (or I don't remember or didn't write down how long this task took in the past) (B) I don't know how to leverage my historic experience (e.g., implementing an XYZWidget in React and implementing the same widget in Vue or Elm for some reason take different amounts of time) Considering (A)... _Rarely_ does a seasoned developer in the typical business situation encounter technical tasks that are fundamentally different than what has been encountered before. Even your bleeding-edge business idea using modern JS' \+ GraphQL' is still going to be built from the same _fundamental_ pieces as your 1999 CRUD app using SOAP and the estimates are going to be the same. If you disagree with this you are in the (B) camp or you haven't done the work to track your estimates over time and see how ridiculously accurate estimates can be for an experienced practitioner. Even "soft tasks" like "design the widget" are estimable/repeatable. This whole you-can't-estimate-software accuracy position is entirely a position of inexperience. And of course all bets are off there. You are talking about estimating _learning_ in this case, not _doing_. And the bets are especially off if you aren't modeling that these are two different activities: learning and doing. ~~~ afarrell > is entirely a position of inexperience There are a lot of inexperienced software engineers and very little good guidance written for them. What is a new CS grad to do when asked for an estimate? How can a new grad learn to produce accurate estimates within 3 months? ~~~ wellpast A problem with our industry in this regard is that we don't understand the difference between _learning_ and _doing_. A new grad entering industry is going to be doing _a lot_ more learning than doing -- or rather learning _while_ doing. I know from experience that explicit _doing_ is highly predictable/estimate- able for the experienced software practitioner. I have a suspicion that the _learning_ side would be predictable, too, if our industry could do a better job of articulating what the _practitioner_ skill set actually is -> then a pedagogy could develop and it could be said that learning X-Y-Z takes on average this long for a set of students. Etc. But we as an industry do not seem to be near this level of clarity -- in large part because we don't even have the vocabulary to frame it this way... in terms of _learning_ vs _doing_... Now what this means for the new CS grad is not the best story. You'll rather have to play the chaotic game a little bit, which includes a mess of things like doubling estimates and working weekends or what-have-you depending on the work culture you find yourself within. That ^^ in the short term. In the long term what you should do is practice on your own: 1) ALWAYS privately plan and estimate your tasks to the best of your ability-- on your own, you may not get benefit by exposing your "practice" to the higher-ups 1a) hint: your tasks should be as scoped/small as you can make them and they will look pretty simple, like this: "design widget X", "design API interface", "implement API interface", "test API interface", "implement widget Y", "learn how framework X lifecycle works" (yes! even learning tasks can be estimated!), and so on. The key is that you try to keep them under a day and ideally even smaller on the order of hours. 2) RECORD the time it takes and compare to your estimates. --> LEARN from this. 3) REPEAT If you do this conscientiously you will find that your estimates improve dramatically over time and you'll be able to out-estimate your peers to their own wild confusion. This skill set will pay off in your ability to deliver AND have weekends and hours with your family. Because you will be able to "see time" and protect yourself. You'll have protection and ammo even in the worst pressure-cooker environments because you will be able to say "No" with confidence. Or rather you will learn how to say "Yes" and what to say "Yes" to. (Ie. you will get really good at priority negotiation etc.) And you'll cultivate delivery trust with superiors and everyone will be happy. The main reason you get these claims that "business just doesn't understand software" and "they put too much pressure on us" is because "business" side doesn't trust us. Once you get good at estimates and _delivering_ on them, that trust is restored and everyone can be made happy. BUT -- and here's the rub -- it takes _time_ and conscientious _effort_ and variety of experience to reach this level of confidence. My advice: Ignore all the philistines who say it can't be done....because they'll just try to talk you out of the effort that they weren't or aren't willing to do themself. ------ oli5679 In the UK, bookmakers offer 'accumulator' bets, where a punter can select many outcomes, getting a big prize if 100% correct. This takes advantage punters' failure to accurately multiply probability - 10 events with 80% probability have joint probability <11%. Something similar happens with planning, where people fail to compound many possible delay sources accurately. Dani Khaneman covered this in Thinking Fast and Slow, also showing that people overestimate their ability, thinking they will outperform a reference class of similar projects because they are more competent. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy) ~~~ Sahhaese It doesn't take advantage in the way you say because you get paid along the same lines. If you bet an accumulator with 2 selections at evens, you get paid at 3/1\. (4.0 decimal odds) so that is "fair". It's profitable for bookies because they have a house edge, and that edge is increased the more subsequent bets you make. The house has more edge with an accumulator than a single bet. People like to do accumulators because it's more meaningful to win large amounts occassionally than more regularly win less meaningful amounts. So it's a "trick" to simply increase gambling. If you had to pick out 8 evens shots in sequence and intended to roll over your bet each time it would have the same effect / outcome, but starting with a pound by the last bet you're effectively placing a 128 quid bet on an evens money. It's not that the player thinks that they have a better chance of winning than 1/256 it's that it effectively forces them to gamble a lot larger amount in the situations where only 7 out of 8 of their picks come in. And that's before considering the edge. If we consider that these are probably events that happen more like only 45% of the time (at best) then instead of a 255/1 shot we're looking at 600/1 shot. ------ bloorp One big factor that I don't THINK the article touches on is how we are using 'space' metaphors (speed and distance) for our work that's very 'time' based (working productivity and duration). And I think when we estimate, we try to estimate distance/duration but we forget that we're really trying to estimate our speed/productivity. Where that gets painful is, say you estimate you can get something done in two days. In reality, you're twice as fast (there's that speed metaphor), so you actually get it done in one day. Yay, you saved a day! Now assume you're twice as slow as your two day estimate. Boo, you spent TWO days longer. So in terms of duration, getting it incorrect in the painful direction seems like a bigger mistake. I don't think this is the same phenomenon as the author's mean vs. median dilemma. I'll bet both the mean vs. median and the productivity vs. duration dilemmas are real factors though. ------ SilasX Pet theory: this is entirely explained by unknown systems not behaving as expected. As developers, and unlike e.g. carpenters, we are constantly using new tools with effects we haven't yet experienced. Then we have to yak-shave to get around their heretofore unknown kinks. Then the time blows up. If and when you're using known features of a known framework, and that's _all_ you're doing, the estimates are accurate and the work is completed quickly. ~~~ maltalex I disagree. Estimations tend to be just as wrong even when the tools are well known. There's always that one edge case you haven't considered, that one algorithm that doesn't work as well as you expected, that small change to the requirements the requires a completely different approach. ~~~ SilasX "Just as" wrong? I don't know what to point to to resolve disagreement here since it's just anecdotal, but if you're just using the same feature you've used hundreds of times before, there is nowhere near the potential for yak- shaving snags. ~~~ maltalex Okay, sure. Not "just as" wrong since a certain class of pitfalls are eliminated by deep knowledge of your tools. But I'd argue that that's not where the bulk of the uncertainty comes from. I think that in the software industry as a whole, most of the problems are solved by people with at least a decent understanding of their tools, and estimates still suck. The problems is that the tasks we deal with are always new, unsolved problems. That's the nature of software. Unsolved problems come with uncertainty. That's the nature of unsolved problems. Carpenters on the other hand deal mostly with solved problems. They just need to execute. ------ pjungwir Here is a story about the woes of interpreting statistical distributions: I have two habits when I estimate: First, I like to give a range or even better a triple estimate of "optimistic", "expected", "worst case". (And btw, you should expect things to weight toward the pessimistic side, because you always find new requirements/problems, but you rarely discover a supposed requirement is not really one.) Second: I like to break down a project into tasks of just a few hours and then add everything up. I usually don't share that spreadsheet with the customer, but it helps me a lot. Pretty much always it gives me a number higher than I'd like, but which is almost always very accurate. A couple times I've ignored the result and given a lower estimate because I really wanted some project, and it has always turned out the spreadsheet was right. Well, one time I combined these two approaches, so that my very finely-chopped estimates all had best/expected/worst values, _and_ I shared that with the customer. Of course they took one look at the worst-case total and said, "How can a little thing like this possibly take 2 years??" I didn't get the work. :-) EDIT: Btw it feels like there is a "coastline paradox" here, where the more finely you estimate, the higher the max possible, so that you can make your estimate grow without bound as long as you keep splitting items into greater detail. It'd be interesting to see the math for that. ~~~ pjungwir EDIT2: In spite of my personal experience I do think the author makes a strong case for this: "Adding up task estimates is a really misleading picture of how long something will take." Perhaps I've had better results because I try to give myself a little padding in every task, just considering that everything requires not just typing code but getting on some calls, having back-and-forth in emails and the project management tool, testing (automated or manual), fixing a thing or two, etc. So my individual estimates are probably a bit higher than median. When I work with other developers they consistently estimate lower than me. But my numbers are deliberately not "best case", because then you _know_ you'll go over on the total. ------ chiefalchemist The why is typically: 1) The person(s) doing the estimate aren't qualified to do so. 2) There is a disconnect between wishful thinking and reality. 3) There is some arbitrary future milestone (i.e., "We need to ship by ____ because ____ is happening the following week.") that is independent of software development. 4) Most importantly, when the deadline is missed the estimate / estimators are not questioned, the software team is. I've been at this a long time - too long? - and the narrative that IT is __always__ at fault is a myth that needs to be buried. ------ Chris2048 I'm sorry to contribute to the dogpile effect (long thread probably says same thing I'm about to say, but I didn't see it..), _but_.. devs estimate known risks. Ideal path + predictable delays. The further reaches of the long tail are the unknown risks. known risks are estimated based on knowledge (hence, a question for a dev), unknown risks are just an adjustment parameter on top of that estimate, possibly based on historical evidence (there is no reason a dev could estimate any better). It should be managements job to adjust a dev estimate. Let's be real here - I've never heard a real life example of management using stats for this kind of thing, or being enthusiastic about devs doing the same. Perhaps if management is taken seriously as a science, things will change, but I doubt it. <strong_opinion type="enterprise_software_methodology_cynicism"> Bizness is all about koolaid-methodology-guru management right now, very much the bad old ways - a cutting example of workable analytical management would be needed for things to change, but this is unlikely as all the stats people are getting high pay cool ML jobs, and aren't likely to want to rub shoulders with kool-aider middle managers for middle-management pay.. </strong_opinion> ------ jermaustin1 In my experience software takes longer to build than original estimates because no one will get out of the way of the development team and let them work. This is an extreme example, but one I now live in daily. My current full-time-ish gig is working on a pretty enterprisy system for law enforcement. To this date there hasn't been a single feature request, or bug fix that took more than 16 hours of development time. And so I know that I can typically finish something within a few hours to a day of receiving the task. UNLESS my manager wants to discuss ad nauseam what he means when he says "intersect an array". Or get stuck in 2 day long code reviews where my manager makes me sit behind him while he goes over every single line of code that changed, then gets side tracked and starts checking emails, chat messages, text messages, calling other developers in to check on their statuses, and even watching youtube... while I'm stuck in his office waiting on my code review to be done so I can go back to my 5th day of trying to complete a task that would have taken only a couple of uninterrupted hours. /rant And this is why I pay $120 a week for therapy. ~~~ pysxul Sorry but why would a manager even do a code review? ~~~ jermaustin1 He was originally hired as the sole developer 10 years ago, but the project grew too big, and instead of hiring a manager to oversee the project and hire more devs, they moved him into a management position, and put him in charge of hiring new developers. ------ scandox In the world of small medium projects often the major issue is that software engineers give estimates for writing the software but customers take that to mean time to actual delivery in production and a lot of the time have no idea how big a task deployment and integration are...or don't even have a plan for that. ~~~ maxxxxx in medical devices it usually takes five times as long to really finish the project vs. finishing development. ------ revskill To me, software projects take longer than i think because customers don't know what they actually need until there's a runnable version of what they want. ------ ACow_Adonis Honestly, after doing this whole data science thing for a while now, I'm going to be blunt: I can estimate quite a lot of tasks with quite a lot of accuracy. including software and IT tasks. What I can't do is make bad management hear what they don't want to hear. Nor can I stop people from accepting an estimate because its closer to what they want to be true, because they've already made a promise that conflicts with the actual estimate, or because a certain process requires or necessitates inaccurate estimates. I think the whole "software is hard to estimate" myth stems from 2 fundamental causes: \- not controlling for human biases or referencing actual real world data \- processes that don't punish/ reward people who provide inaccurate/accurate estimates respectively. ------ andybak I once had a really convoluted metaphor for estimation which involved opening boxes that sometimes contained other boxes which sometimes contained other boxes... I wonder how that models mathematically. ~~~ andy_ppp The problem with this analogy is that the boxes do not obey the laws of physics and fit inside eachother... ~~~ andybak Did I mention that they were magic boxes? ------ nocturnial Wouldn't it be more sensible to give a range instead of a fixed date? I know it's not going to happen, but I think it would be more informative and honest. That way you could communicate better of how certain you are. There's a difference between telling something will be completed in, for example, 6 month +- 2 weeks. Or something will be finished in 6 months +- 1.5 months. The estimated time is the same but communicates the level of certainty more clearly. Or just use between, for example, 4-6 months if you don't want to use +- notation. ~~~ DougWebb In my experience, developers understand and appreciate range-based estimates. But when those numbers start moving up the communication chain, some non- developer is going to either not like or not understand the point of the range, and will convert it to a single number: either the first one, the last one, or the average. They might even be honest about it, thinking "I need to know the earliest possible date, so I'll use the low end". But then the next person, who doesn't see the range, thinks that low end is THE committed date and will plan accordingly. Now your deadline is 99% likely to be missed. ------ mekane8 I used to work for a software company that did projects for clients and charged by the hour (a consultancy) and we frequently had to estimate projects with incomplete information in order to event get the contract in the first place, so they often turned into the actual final budget. Since I was the head of engineering I ended up doing a lot of sales and estimation for new projects. Besides just doing it a lot and gaining experience from many projects, there were a few other things that really helped me: 1) Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell (already mentioned by others). 2) His short video on "Targets vs. Estimates" was super helpful - we watched it with engineering, sales, and project management all together and had a good discussion afterwards. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY9X21HA02w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY9X21HA02w) 3) Keeping a running list of "Things to Remember". Every time a project went astray or we encountered something during a project that I had failed to estimate (but potentially could have) it went on the list. That was useful to share with other too, when they did estimates. I really like the discussion of standing up to those who ask for estimates. A clear understanding of what an estimate is and what it's for is important, as is a strong sense of professionalism. I would recommend "The Clean Coder" by Robert Martin for this. It's more about professional behavior than software practices. Especially his chapters on "Saying No" and "Saying Yes". I read it and discussed it with my team often. It helped us realize when we had to refuse to give an estimate because we lacked the necessary information to do so, rather than just guess or make something up. ------ settsu I’ve been coding professionally for 20 years and I’m largely no better at estimating completion than day 1, maybe worse since I’m more likely to feign confidence in a figure I’ve essentially pulled out of my ass. At some point, I came to the realization that my fundamentally poor concept of time was always going to be an insurmountable obstacle to my career advancement. ------ JabavuAdams My empirically-confirmed heuristic is that the time to deliver a feature set that someone would actually want to use is 2.5x-3x of the time I think of when asked for an off-the-cuff estimate. Basically, multiply initial estimate by a number between e and pi -- no joke! It's a bit of a problem given that PM's think they're being generous with a 20% pad. ~~~ rainhacker I can relate to your heuristic. The current project I've been working on is close to completion and somewhere between 2.5-3x of its initial estimate. ------ maltalex My theory on why software estimates suck is tied to Rosenberg’s Law: > Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The > corollary is, The only software that’s worth making is software that does > something new. It's hard to estimate the difficulty of something you've never done. And the nature of software development is to always do new things. ------ iraldir I believe this is the reason why scrum uses story points instead of time estimate. By putting uncertainty on the same level as effort, you give it more weight. And using a fibonacci sequence rather than a continuous amount with the rule you should round up if unsure tend to correct those defects. ~~~ jfoutz there is an uncharitable response to this thread, which is marked dead. I do think there is a kernel of truth in that response, which is nothing more than mocking. why fibonacci? I think it's reasonable to say time includes an exponential error. an estimated 1 hour task is very different than an estimated 1 week task. i see that 1 hour, 1 day and 1 week estimates are progressively, and likely exponentially, worse. Is it just the ease of doing the math? (totally reasonable answer, in my humble opinion). or is there something specific about fibonacci that's actually relevant? I think it's the former not the latter. but if you have any evidence to the contrary, i'd love to hear it. ~~~ js8 The kernel of truth of that response is that you won't get more certainty about an estimate by adding more uncertainty, no matter in how much pseudo- scientific cargo-culting mumbo-jumbo you cloak it. (Unfortunately, HN readers don't really like sarcastic commentary which requires reader to think it through. Time is precious, and we just want to be coddled, give me your opinion ELI8 straight, because there is no time to think!) ~~~ jfoutz I think you're half right. adding an error band to a far out estimate won't give you a better estimate, but it might help tell you how much you _don't know_ about what you're facing. Cumulative error is _hard_. see weather prediction. ------ robbick One take away is for sprint planning - if there is a reasonable amount of uncertainty on a task, take it out, either break it down or do some investigation, and bring it back next time. You don't want a σ=2 task messing up your sprint! ------ achenatx The assumption in the article is the amount of work is a constant. Instead what happens is that a manager has decided how much time it should take (always too little). If you accept that time, then you will go over. If you push for more time and get it, then the manager will eventually add more scope and you will go over. The vast majority of the time we see projects go over deadlines because scope was added under the guise of clarifying scope. Starting with a business value actually works pretty well to enable people to control scope. We also use actual velocity on tasks to re-forecast daily. That has been the most effective way to get a good date. Over a large number of tasks this works very well. ------ zcanann I always think of project tasks as flow charts, where every item either takes 1 day, or 1 week. There's no way of really knowing in advance. Complications happen. It makes it really hard to calculate the "expected value" of 5-10 tasks. ~~~ dTal The more tasks you have to do, the _more_ certain about duration you should be - some of the uncertainty will cancel out and you will get a gaussian distribution. For your example, I expect 10 tasks of between 1 day and 1 week each (with flat probability) to take about 6 weeks in total, with a 95% chance of completion within 7 weeks. ------ arendtio Well, I think this is a complex topic. Not because of the math, but because the key to an accurate estimate is to understand who has done the estimate and on what basis. As stated in the summary, the core driver for inaccurate estimates is _uncertainty_ : > Tasks with the most uncertainty (rather the biggest size) can often dominate > the mean time it takes to complete all tasks. There are different sources of certainty: \- Experience: If someone has done a task 20 times he probably knows how much time he will require. Someone who hasn't done the task yet, probably underestimate the time he requires (e.g. because of the median vs. mean conflict). But don't be fooled just because you have 20 years of work experience in the field but never actually done a specific task doesn't mean you can estimate it better than someone who just started the job but had done that specific task 10 times. However, most of the time, projects are doing something new. So you have to find out which tasks have been done before by a project member and which are completely new ground. If something is completely new, remember to plan time for getting familiar with a problem space plus a handful of complications (together this will be more than the actual task would take someone who is trained for that specific task). \- Detail: The smaller the tasks the larger the overall estimate... or so. Planning on a top-level is rarely going to be accurate. We do it a lot because it doesn't take much time. But _if_ you want an accurate estimate, you have to plan on small, specific tasks. \- Risk management: Every project has risks. Some don't really have an impact and others blow up the whole project. Know your risks and what you are going to do if something should go in the wrong direction. It is not like you wouldn't have time to figure out what to do when the problem occurs but to understand how it would impact your timing and to take preventive actions (e.g. include stakeholders). If you have people who have done the exact same task a few times, made a detailed plan of every step and know how to handle the most likely or impactful risks you are in a good position to deliver on time. Most of the time you won't have that luxury and have to compensate the resulting uncertainty with a prolonged time to project completion, but that should be just fine when being communicated in the beginning. With all that said, remember, that some projects don't require an accurate estimate. _Sometimes_ it is enough to deliver just as soon as possible. ~~~ helloindia On the experience part, this happened to me few times, when the project manager asked me for an estimation, i give it from my perspective and experience, and then he gives the work to someone else with no experience, and obviously takes more than estimated. Now, i always give two estimates: An estimation if the work is done by me, and an estimation if the work is done by someone else. ------ mlthoughts2018 I’d also add that _the reason why the mean will be larger than the median_ is usually hard to discern for any specific situation. This foments bikeshedding debates that are a mix of business pressure to favor uninformed estimates and disagreements about which possible sources of surprises or hitting a wall are most likely. As soon as you mix this with a formal estimation system like Agile (yes, even the platonic ideal ‘agile’ too), it creates a snowball effect of time wasting because overhead is so frequently required to resolve debates and placate business pressures for estimates. ------ danpalmer Something I’ve been trying is estimating for the time in which I’m 80% sure I can finish something. I end up racing ahead of estimates most of the time because they are too high, but then some times I’ll find something that is a bit more complicated than expected and it takes a little longer. Overall this seems to balance out, but also have a lot more predictability, it’s easier to predict at any given time what I might be working on. This has been pretty important on my team where I’ve been doing API work for some iOS developers to use. ------ edejong Yes, this is a thesis I've brought up quite some times in relation to sprint planning. The odd misjudgment having a strong influence on the total estimate biases upwards, not downwards. ------ dre85 I'm blown away on a regular basis by how long it takes to write software that in my opinion is super easy. Usually it just comes down to fuzzy/missing/changing requirements. A lot of times people know that they want something, but they don't know exactly what. Or they're absolutely sure they need feature x, but then later they realize they don't, but they missed out on developing other more fundamental features. ~~~ adrianmonk I have developed a belief about this: people don't know what they want until you show them what they said they want. Then it's immediately obvious to them what they wanted instead. This suggests that demos and mock-ups might be a valuable tool. The sooner you can get someone to try something, the sooner they can tell you what direction they really wanted you to go in instead, and the less time you waste. ~~~ scruple They want everything but they can't even define a starting point. It's insanity. I've been going back and forth with a customer about this (through my product and sales team) since August of last year. At first the priority was high and it seemed like the scope was reasonable. But no one was making moves or delivering on my requests / asks / concerns. I suggested a phased approach, so that we could _be_ agile and get _something_ in front of the customer for feedback. But before I even got there the requirements changed again and again and again and again and again... Thankfully all of this specific work is easy to segregate away from the rest of my team. It's proven to be very toxic and morale draining. If my entire team was involved, I've no doubt that we'd have lost people by now. And the real kicker: It turns out that right now we can't even deliver on the first pass that I had originally suggested, despite me being basically done with my teams piece, because some other team in the company was loose with their language and convinced a bunch of product and sales folks that, yes, of course they had what the customer was asking for. They didn't. They still don't. I'm convinced today that they never will. Bunch of fucking sycophants. I have no idea how these things happen but recently I've become convinced that this sort of confusion-on-all-fronts is just par for the course in this industry today. The only work that I've been able to do in the past couple of years that was well understood and easy to articulate, and as a result capable of being completed mostly on time and within scope, was born out of a select few individuals being able to identify a real problem and a real solution and grinding away at it in a controlled fashion. But that seems to be rare and not at all "how things are done." ------ bigred100 What I want to know is why the software developer is expected to give estimates. Estimating how long common tasks take seems like something I would expect a software manager to be able to do effectively and care about. If you’re just a monkey who is asking everyone to do the planning and estimation job for you, I’m frankly unsure why the company allows you to collect a paycheck. ------ boffinism I've always thought that typically overoptimistic estimates tend to be more based on the mode. I.e. 'this is the sort of task that normally takes 1 day, so I'll estimate 1 day'. The high point on the probability curve is the most noticeable, but it's also way further to the left than either the mean or the median. I have no data to back that up though. ------ Michielvv I think the most important issue why projects take longer is not because the time it takes to complete a task is uncertain, but because at the start it will always be unknown which tasks will prove critical. The further you get, the more tasks will reveal itself that were not part of the original scope, but critical nonetheless. ------ twothamendment They don't take longer than I think. The problem is nobody listens! True story - They handed me an RFP, asked for an estimate. I gave it and they cut it in half and got the job. I didn't take any pleasure in being right, but I was right. It was an expensive mistake. ------ diiq Vistimo.com, the tool I built and use when I run estimates for my clients, uses log-normals and monte-carlo simulation to conquer this exact problem. Really exciting to see other people beginning to recognize and use the same statistical tools -- they've served me really well. ------ jrochkind1 1\. Do the tasks with, as far as you can tell, the most uncertainty as soon as possible in the process. 2\. This is why "agile" tries to avoid estimating more than a few weeks. The more tasks you have in there, the more you estimate is likely to be really off. ------ temp269601 How about making the manager estimate the project, that way if the deadline is not met, the manager receives the blame? It's the manager's job to manage resources, and if the deadline is not hit, then they can hire/bring on more resources. If an engineer works as hard as they can for 40 hours a week, why is it the engineer's fault if the arbitrary deadline is not met? If the engineer estimate's time for a project, the engineer will always have to work more than 40 hours a week because some estimates will be too optimistic. ~~~ ben509 The manager does receive the blame, and then stuff rolls downhill. ------ SiempreViernes _Fits symmetric function to clearly asymmetric distribution_ Author: Decent fit, in my opinion! This bad fit makes me genuinely sad (；∩；) ~~~ ben509 He could probably tweak a skew normal distribution to make it fit nicely, but it's _pretty_ close to normal. ------ StreamBright There would be great to have predictions that use ML to estimate how long something will take. ~~~ ska If you are thinking this as opposed to statistical modelling, what is the benefit you imagine? ------ gilbetron It takes longer than we think because writing software is solving a math problem, and you can't know how long solving a math problem will take until after you solve it. [http://www.warhound.org/kcsest.pdf](http://www.warhound.org/kcsest.pdf) ------ unityByFreedom Eh don't worry, self driving cars are coming this year, Elon said so. ------ pikzel I've been in a company where all estimates were multipied by pi. ------ juskrey Because they can't take negative time. ------ usgroup TLDR anyone? ~~~ markwkw Thesis: Developers are good at estimating median time to finish tasks. But the tasks that take longer, in fact take much, much longer than estimated. E.g. Dev estimates that time to complete each of A, B, C tasks will be 2 days. In reality, A will take 1 day, B will take 2 days, but C will take 8 days. Dev was right about the median time to complete each task (2 days) but average was much higher. Article goes into how to statistically model the distribution of actual time to complete tasks. ~~~ afarrell That was a really concise but faithful summary. Welcome to HN.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Funding Math and Science Projects For Young Women - okeumeni http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/10/funding-math-and-science-projects-for-young-women.html ====== ashedryden It's interesting to me that there are so many programs dedicated specifically to girls. My issue growing up and being a huge science/math/history geek wasn't that I didn't have access to these things as a girl, but that the clubs and groups didn't seem that open to girls and the boys in them certainly weren't. I organize tech groups and barcamps in Milwaukee and, being the only female organizer, I'm frequently asked what I do to promote more activity and involvement from women. It's interesting to me because the community puts it on the minority to make the minority comfortable when it's the exact opposite that needs to happen. Women/girls aren't attending events or clubs because they aren't populated with other women, but because they feel they are singled out for being women instead of being science geeks like everyone else there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AutoValue: Immutable value-type code generation for Java 1.6+ - chillax https://docs.google.com/document/d/1THRUCIzIPRqFSHb67pHV8KMbo55HphSXqlQcIx9oUiI/edit ====== chillax Not released yet, but source available on Github: [https://github.com/google/auto](https://github.com/google/auto)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Handling responsive layouts in React Native apps - deadcoder0904 https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/handling-responsive-layouts-in-react-native-apps-1494b3f85984 ====== deadcoder0904 Hey HN, author here. Previously, I wrote a tutorial called Scaling React Native Apps for Tablets [0] more than a year ago & it got a lot of attention thanks to the user- friendly title which resulted in a lot of organic traffic from Google. In that tutorial, I used another library called [https://github.com/nirsky/react-native-size- matters](https://github.com/nirsky/react-native-size-matters) at that time. It works great. However, another library called [https://github.com/marudy/react-native- responsive-screen](https://github.com/marudy/react-native-responsive-screen) came on the horizon at some later time. It is also easy to use. I thought about writing a tutorial on it for a long time & it's finally here. When I submitted the earlier article, someone on Reddit said that a Tablet should fit in more content than a Phone which I completely did wrong in my previous tutorial because I never used a Tablet before. In this tutorial, I think I've rectified my mistake if you can see from the screenshot. If you've ever wondered how to do responsive design in React Native, then be sure to check it out. Let me know if you have any questions :) [0]: [https://medium.com/react-native-training/scaling-react- nativ...](https://medium.com/react-native-training/scaling-react-native-apps- for-tablets-211de8399cf1)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Patterns: Great self promotion - bdotdub http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1546-patterns-great-self-promotion ====== tptacek This is something every software security services firm has embraced since the 1990s; we're lucky, because we have a series of professional conventions and research venues to demonstrate our work in. It was one of _the most frustrating things_ , coming from a security research/startup background and going to work at a relatively large network security software company like Arbor Networks, that we had no venue to "show off" that didn't involve pitching our actual product. One of the great things about leaving Arbor and starting up with my friends was that I got my name back; instead of writing white papers and designing product demos, I got to work on and talk about stuff I was doing for love, not money. ------ vivekkhurana I like the idea in the end of the software, "Every designer on the planet has a portfolio of their designs, but how many have a portfolio of their minds?". Rarely you see a designer or an enterprnuer talking about what is in there mind. Portfolio of mind does not mean you have to spell out the idea verbatim, but you present a map of the path you are planning to tread. Having tried this technique of presenting what is going in my mind to potential customers, I can say when 'mind portfolio' is mixed with 'brand portfolio', you do get more customers. In my experience of running startups, customers do prefer startups that can think over startups trying to simply sell stuff. The caveat is, you should be capable of presenting the mind portfolio without appearing to be a smart donkey. Spelling out your mind portfolio during a general chit chat with potential customer over a cup of tea, is what I do.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nector, the french IA that codes for you - nectrium http://geekhebdo.com/nectop-lordinateur-francais-ethique-et-innovant/ ====== Nikko349 Awesome !	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bruce Schneier: We need ‘cyberwar hotlines’ to match nuclear hotlines - strawberryshake http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3251799/bruce-schneier-we-need-cyberwar-hotlines-to-match-nuclear-hotlines/?cmpid=sbycombinatoranguyen ====== iuguy Wow. I hope that's not what he actually wrote. If it is, and I realise it's a quote taken out of context then it's quite possibly one of the dumbest things I've ever heard him say. Nuclear hotlines work because there's a certain established protocol for nuclear weapons. Due to Mutually Assured Destruction no-one (at least no-one using hotlines) really wants to start the first strike because it will result in annihilation. Therefore there's a vested interest in having the hotlines to avoid accidentally starting World War III. With Cyberwar (and I'm referring to Computer Network Attack, not Computer Network Exploitation or espionage) there's no clear cut definition of what it actually _is_. Cyberwar means different things to different people in the same room, let alone different things to different people with different military structures and doctrines. CNA is a very exploratory field at the moment, partly because no-one really understands the structure or boundaries and partly because it isn't necessarily contained to a theatre of operations. Add to that the fact that it is extremely cheap (by comparison) to mount cyber attacks (i.e. any fool and a laptop can do it) and the rules of engagement for cyber warfare become murkier than ever. So to conclude, no I don't think we need cyberwar hotlines, at least until there's a broad military consensus on what cyberwar is, from which people can determine what type of communications they would need for such actions. ~~~ strawberryshake I think he's just saying that cyberwar should be taken as seriously as nuclear war...though I agree I do feel he may be exaggerating for effect. ~~~ iuguy _If_ that's what he's saying then he should just stop talking until he knows more about the subject matter, but I don't think that's what he's saying.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
An open letter to the media, by Anonymous - r0h1n http://pastebin.com/sK6Zi3EM ====== detcader The following quote is relevant here: “WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide. Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen. …Personal change doesn’t equal social change.” — Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Changes Does Not Equal Political Change Even if every Guy Fawkes mask were made at Foxconn itself, a boycott wouldn't do anything to the working conditions. Teens would still purchase them based on the movie (or, heaven forbid, the actual comic book). What is necessary is restructuring the world to make Foxconn impossible. [1] [http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801...](http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/) ~~~ raverbashing "wah wah wah corporations are bad, growth is bad" Corporations and economic growth are directly responsible for the possibility that this discussion is happening: the internet, cheap and powerful computers, etc Or even better: [https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/391943773963304960](https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/391943773963304960) ~~~ VikingCoder "wah wah wah monarchy is bad, empire is bad" The British government is directly responsible for the possibility that this discussion of "taxation without representation" is happening; colonization, trade, etc. Sometimes when you stand on the shoulders of giants, you realize that the old ways were lousy. America as it is today wouldn't exist without slavery and Native American genocide. I'm not comparing Capitalism to Genocide, but I am saying the form of argument you used is ridiculous, because I can use the same argument to defend awful things. If you stop and listen for one minute, people like me are saying, "Maybe the current system is TOO excessive, and should be reigned in, in some ways." We think laws should help fight the excesses of unchecked capitalism. We're not proposing the "share everything" that Kasparov ridicules, and posing our argument that way is an absurd straw man. That said, I don't represent a united front of people who believe identically to me, but your argument is so absurd that I think it might practically be targeted at only a tiny minority of people currently saying anything negative about corporations and our current means of economic growth. ~~~ raverbashing "but I am saying the form of argument you used is ridiculous, because I can use the same argument to defend awful things." Except you just used a straw man. Of course it's ridiculous then. "America as it is today wouldn't exist without slavery and Native American genocide." Of course not. But those things went away, and the USA is still there. But you can't have the internet without equipment, without servers built by guess who? Corporations. Take that away: no internet. ~~~ dasil003 > _But you can 't have the internet without equipment, without servers built > by guess who? Corporations. Take that away: no internet._ Now you're the one strawmanning by painting it as corporations existing or not existing. It's not a binary issue. A corporation is just an organization of people with a specific legal status. There will always be organizations of people. However, I don't think we need to confer the rights of personhood to a corporation even though they don't have the same responsibilities or vulnerabilities. Similarly, it doesn't need to be the case that corporations should be able to extract value from the commons at the expense of the poor so that the privileged upper-middle class can have the cheapest possible gadgets. It is definitely possible to draw a better line between individual freedom and the wholesale rape of the environment. For starters, those things aren't represented in GDP, and so it's of no real concern to those in power. What gets measured gets improved. ~~~ raverbashing "However, I don't think we need to confer the rights of personhood to a corporation even though they don't have the same responsibilities or vulnerabilities. Similarly, it doesn't need to be the case that corporations should be able to extract value from the commons at the expense of the poor so that the privileged upper-middle class can have the cheapest possible gadgets." Good, I agree with that. But the issue with cheap gadgets goes both ways. Chinese factories allow people in India and other 3rd world countries to have a cheap (read: affordable) mobile phone. Yes, they could pay more and give better conditions, the profit gains coming from economies of scale would still be there. ~~~ autonomy77 >>But you can't have the internet without equipment, without servers built by guess who? Corporations. Take that away: no internet.<< Partially correct - we need equipment, but mesh networking is becoming a reality. No corporate involvement beyond the hardware. have a look: [http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid- internet...](http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid-internet- mesh/) ------ veganarchocap I don't understand people who are even against sweatshops, do they really want to deprive these areas of the only jobs they do have? The middle-class westerners have good intentions, sure. Do they really think though, but starving sweatshops to the point of closure, all the staff will walk into well paid work? No, in all probability, the lack of competition and the low budgets will mean they have to fight over even worse jobs, if not... starve. If you really want to take the moral high-ground, you should _only_ buy from sweat shops, because the more they profit, the more you're contributing to bettering their lives and working conditions. Buy all the masks you need! ~~~ nisa That's cynical and easy to write from a warm chair in a western country. The problem are the conditions that make sweat-shops the least worst alternative for a lot of people. It's power, money and corruption. There is no financial gain for western corporations or governments to really solve these problems. We profit from the political and economical instability in these countries and therefore from the suffering these people have to endure. We make ugly deals using the World Bank and the IMF to destabilize their markets. We help to keep corrupt politicians in place and happily exploit natural resources in these countries. But nobody cares. ~~~ skylan_q _The problem are the conditions that make sweat-shops the least worst alternative for a lot of people. It 's power, money and corruption._ If the least worst alternative is taken away from them, then they have only the next least worst alternative. Asking to take this away is asking to take away the best thing they have. It's easy to write from a warm chair in a western country that people should have better job conditions considering the availability of jobs that allow for consumerism. ~~~ nisa I should have written that in a more neutral way. What I wanted to say is: Our corporations and our governments can and should be held partially responsible for these conditions. I'm not saying that it's only the fault of "evil corp" in the USA or any other western nation but saying it's their problem and sweat-shops are fine is in my opinion not the whole truth. ------ droidist2 People are too in love with the idea of seeing others get "nailed" for being hypocrites. All you have to do is say something that sounds vaguely clever or ironic in a snarky manner and people go "Ooooh, snap" even if it really makes not much sense. For instance: "Julian Assange of Wikileaks wants to protect his _own_ privacy." "Ooooh, snap." ~~~ socillion Accusations of hypocrisy are a form of ad hominem, so I agree it's amusing that so many people think they are good arguments. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque) ~~~ VikingCoder I think hypocrisy is a valid argument specifically when someone claims that they should be trusted with political power because they behave in a puritan, unassailable manner, while their opponent is merely human. When it turns out they're a hypocrite, it strikes at the core of why they were elected. Moreover, it SHOULD remind people that the guy who claims his morals are unassailable is lying to you. ------ ThePinion "Unfortunate" is definitely the word for the fact that these masks that hold such great symbolism to Anonymous (and other groups) are owned by the companies that want to control the internet. So they've called out the media for using products by Foxconn, okay. What do they expect to come from that? I'm really not sure. The main thing I got from this is that we should find another mask, or face, for Anonymous and activism/protesting in general. One that maybe holds more significant value in freedom of mankind, and one that is free of copyright. As much as I love Alan Moore, I think it's time Anonymous finds/creates an open- source mask. ~~~ pera What is actually "unfortunate" in my opinion is that so many people are using the v/guyfawkes mask without any knowledge of its origin (efg, /b/) and its meaning (a joke) ~~~ icebraining When David Lloyd created the Guy Fawkes mask, /b/ didn't even exist. [http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120918184420/marvel_...](http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120918184420/marvel_dc/images/4/4a/V_001.jpg) ------ paulvalley How does Ms Gill know that all those masks are made in the same factory and that all of them pay royalties? It would have been fair to mention that in the west at least 3d printers are becoming more and more common and anyone can download a Fawkes mask model and 3dprint it at home. [http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/v-for-vendetta-guy-fawkes- mask-481...](http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/v-for-vendetta-guy-fawkes- mask-48144.html) Or if you're feeling environmentally friendly, out of recycled cardboard. It's no rocket science really. Or how about this one as an origami? [http://www.instructables.com/id/Guy-Fawkes-Mask-in- Origami/](http://www.instructables.com/id/Guy-Fawkes-Mask-in-Origami/) It took me 5 seconds to find these on Google. Ms Gill comes across as particularly lazy and not very well intentioned. ------ KyeRussell Can we please stop with all this Anonymous BS? The point of the 'movement' is that it's decentralised. 'Anonymous' can't write 'open letters'. This is just pathetic. ~~~ alextingle Well, "Anonymous" didn't write that letter. Some specific activist wrote it, and has posted it under the Anonymous "brand". If the wider movement likes it (and they should because it's well written and spot on target) then they will promote it and adopt it as theirs. We don't know who wrote the piece. The author is anonymous, but their words will probably reach a far, far wider audience than if they _had_ published under their own name. That's the way the movement works. It _is_ decentralised. I'm sorry that you think it's pathetic. ~~~ floobynewb Yes! Not enough people get this. Anonymous is a name for a loose, evolving affiliation of ideas, it is not a specific group of people. It personifies a set of beliefs, a view of the world, it allows a hive mind to express itself as an individual. It allows the ideas to speak for themselves. In so doing it allows those ideas to evolve more rapidly. I am not well versed in history, so I can't say if this is novel, but it is a fabulous idea. It is clear to me that, just as thought can emerge from the movement of charge between networks of neurons so can it emerge from the chatter of a million people. The same processes are at work, you might call it 'emergence' but I suspect that our mathematics does not yet capture it's description adequately. This is the kind of system we need to develop and enhance if we are to create a better world. Our social structure is prescriptive and too rigidly hierarchical, it has broken away from it's dynamic, organic roots and lost touch with the magic that seems to generate flexible and resilient structure out of nothing. If you accept the isomorphism between the mind and society, then you may see that the internet is radically disruptive. It has made communication orders of magnitude faster and it has changed the topology of the network described by society. This is changing us, quickly. For better or worse remains to be seen. But I suspect the effects of the internet revolution are only now beginning. Perhaps I'm just seeing what I want to see... The battle outside ragin' Will soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin' (attribution should not be needed) ------ nonchalance Are the Guardian, the Telegraph and the New Statesman notable for their fair and balanced journalism (or are they the fox news of europe)? ~~~ anigbrowl A famous quote from the satirical political TV comedy _Yes, Minister_ sums up the British press fairly well. Amusingly, one of the characters is named Jim Hacker. Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is. Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun? Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits. (The Mirror is a leftish tabloid, the Sun a rightist tabloid, both are strident and stupid. The Guardian is a lefty broadsheet, very 'liberal media' by American standards. The Times is center-right, the Daily Mail is middle- class outrage and celebrity gossip (and outrage about our culture of celebrity gossip). The Financial Times is like the WSJ without the axe-grinding editorials; the Morning Star is now defunct but used to be a mouthpiece for the USSR communist party. The Telegraph, sometimes referred to as the Torygraph for its unflinching support of the Tory party, is basically a serious newspaper for people who are convinced the country has gone to the dogs, global warming is nefarious plot, and so on. There's also the Independent, which didn't appear until some years later, which can best be summed up as 'worthy but boring.') ~~~ sebkomianos Here is a the clip: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M) ~~~ nextw33k The really amazing thing about that show is that all the jokes apply to day as much as they did in the 80's when they first aired. I am not sure if that scary or a good thing... ------ ch215 Defending the Press is almost universally unpopular. However, I think there's a important distinction to be made here. Namely that Martha Gill's piece is comment and not news. Hence it's filed under 'blogs'. Opinion is free to be responsible or irresponsible, informed or misinformed, constructive or destructive but, by definition, it cannot be true or false. I don't see anything wrong with someone expressing an honestly held view based on photographs. It seems hundreds of Anonymous supporters have done exactly that beneath the column. ~~~ Zikes “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan Just because it's filed under "blogs" does not make it above refutation. ~~~ ch215 I'm not saying it's above refutation, quite the contrary. What I'm saying is the article is opinion--not fact--and it's presented as such. ~~~ Zikes Saying something is an opinion and that thing actually being an opinion are two fairly different things. It's sort of along the lines of saying "no offense, but" and then saying something obviously offensive. Regardless, Martha's piece is publicized and therefore open to criticism and debate. ------ aluhut If I would be part of them, I would create a 3D-printer model of the mask and share that all over so people can organise their own distribution... ~~~ Ygg2 Or you know, papercraft the suckers, its not like there aren't papercraft versions of it. My roommate made me one. ~~~ raverbashing Thanks, this gave me a smile People think "oh let's build a startup for 3d-printing model this on the cloud, blah blah blah" Where anyone with modest skills can build this using scissors, some cardboard, or Papier-Maché or some other technique. ~~~ ehmuidifici But this kind of mask won't protect your face against rubber balls shot by police - in Brazil, for example. Yeah, neither resine mask will do, but its slightly better. ~~~ Ygg2 In that case you need a gas mask. And kevlar. But those kind of protest require more organization. ------ acromankillah The Daily Telegraph is owned by the Barclay brothers who also own Shop direct, which transferred its call centers to Serco which outsourced them to India and South Africa because it is cheaper. Profit. You can connect anything to low wages and "poor conditions." The point is completely overhauling the corporate government and finding real freedom, real true freedom. The issue is finding people who are aware that the government and media have failed us in their original watchdog approach. Media employees have been sucked into the same trap, that maybe they can get ahead if they stick to the winning side. They are only winning because we, the people, are too comfortable with settling instead of opening our eyes to the truth. You cannot trust the media; it is ran by corporations that influence what we can see and what we can know. It influences what we think. The world must wake up, or we will all be hypnotized by the newest marketing ploy. ------ Anonheadlines Great Work my brothers and sisters at Yan It is indeed an outrage how they spread liez about us to get the world against us. we will cont To expose justice and light on there corrupt world and Make action many more times Our fight is far from over they cant ignore us forever seeing many more have came to join us after Nov 5 and will cont to do so with each passing day --- @AnonHeadLines ------ kelvin0 What if Anon was a 'covert' branch of the NSA? Or Wikileaks a CIA sub- contractor? Wouldn't that be an awesome twist on an already convoluted saga? I just like imagining such possibilities, of course this is probably not the case, but the implications ... I guess I have been watching too many Homeland episodes lately. :) ------ foucault The masks represent: Unity Equality Struggle against oppression That is all. Fuck warner brothers Guy Fawkes was the only person to enter the houses of parliament with honourable intentions ~~~ mhurron There is little honourable about Fawkes intentions, however the actual quote is "the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions." Which makes a lot more sense. He said he was going to blow things up, he went in to blow things up. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes) ------ evilrevolution Naww their feels got hurt.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
1/3rd of U.S. startups that raised a 2015 Series A went through an accelerator - sharkweek http://pitchbook.com/news/articles/one-third-of-us-startups-that-raised-a-series-a-in-2015-went-through-an-accelerator ====== sharemywin wonder how many of each were first time founders?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Smart Dust: The Sensors That Track Every Thing, Everywhere - selenal http://readwrite.com/2013/11/14/what-is-smartdust-what-is-smartdust-used-for ====== a3n What happens if you breath these things in? "The challenges for Smart Dust are to create a package that includes all the elements needed to perform sensory measurements, while also being able to communicate back to a base station to gather the data." I'm not sure I want radio transmitters in my lungs and bloodstream, especially not a lot of them, plus all the nasty shit that goes into electronics.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Visual OKRs - userium https://medium.com/@Userium/what-are-visual-okrs-c9dedea7c803 ====== verdverm [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22414628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22414628)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MacKenzie Bezos Pledges More Than Half Her $37B Fortune to Charity - atlasunshrugged https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/28/mackenzie-bezos-pledges-to-give-away-more-than-half-her-37b-fortune-to-charity-and-philanthropy/ ====== atlasunshrugged Of course I'm a huge fan of philanthropic initiatives like this and I hope more people do get involved but I also want to mention there's no reason to wait and that there are more and less effective ways to give in order to do the most good (as in have the highest impact) with your money. If you're a founder or have equity, I recommend checking out Founders Pledge ([https://founderspledge.com/](https://founderspledge.com/)). If you're someone who wants to just do good as an individual, I recommend checking out Giving What We Can which helps individuals direct their donations to effective causes that are the highest impact possible based on their assessment ([https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/giving- recommendations/](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/giving-recommendations/)) If you're just looking for a more impactful career, then 80K hours has a job board and great resources/quizzes to help point you in the right direction ([https://80000hours.org/](https://80000hours.org/)) ~~~ ChrisGranger I agree with your sentiment that there's no reason to wait. People need help _today_ , and giving now could even be done in the rich person's own self- interest: Who doesn't want to live in a better world?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A documentation generator for Python code (replaces epydoc) - burntsushi https://github.com/BurntSushi/pdoc/blob/master ====== stevejohnson This is a neat project (I used to use epydoc myself), but Sphinx just isn't that hard to set up with sphinx-quickstart, and sphinx-apidoc takes care of autogenerating docs without any extra files at all. I do not mean to be discouraging. I like the output of pdoc, and any tool that increases the amount of documentation where there would otherwise be none is great in my book. I simply recommend that you try to understand Sphinx a little better before claiming superiority. In my opinion, pdoc's real advantage is that it requires essentially zero setup and is probably easier to understand. (You should recognize, though, that sphinx-apidoc also requires zero setup.) ~~~ burntsushi Allow me to apologize in advance for a reply whose length isn't warranted by your comment. While you aren't the first to mention "just use Sphinx man" to me, you are the first who has spurred me into giving a concrete reply. With that said, don't think lower of me for my rant, please. :-) > but Sphinx just isn't that hard to set up with sphinx-quickstart, and > sphinx-apidoc takes care of autogenerating docs without any extra files at > all. I very very very strongly disagree. I was pretty short in my GitHub README because I didn't want to turn it into a rant about Sphinx, but I can assure you that I've tried. Ever since I started documenting my Python code a few years ago, I was given two choices: epydoc and Sphinx. Couldn't get Sphinx to work, but with enough massaging, epydoc produced something that I found usable (even though it visually offended me). Since then, I would annually get sick of `epydoc` and try out Sphinx again to see if things improved. I remember when `sphinx-apidoc` was added and thought it would solve all my problems. It didn't. For example, if I run `sphinx- apidoc` on my `pdoc` module, this is what I get in `pdoc.rst`: pdoc Module =========== .. automodule:: pdoc :members: :undoc-members: :show-inheritance: Hmm. OK? That wasn't what I was expecting, but the words "auto" seem promising. I run the necessary `make html` and look at the output: [http://burntsushi.net/stuff/pdoc-sphinx](http://burntsushi.net/stuff/pdoc- sphinx) (ignore the Markdown ugliness, I would be willing to live with RST). Seems plausible. But wait. My representation isn't documented! Dammit. So I look up the documentation for the `autodoc` extension. I find things like `autoattribute`[1] and an undocumented `autoinstanceattribute`[2] that look promising. But god dammit, I have to write `autoattribute` for each attribute I want to document. I googled for something that would do it for me (and looked at `sphinx-apidoc` more closely for relevant options). Maybe it exists, but I couldn't find anything. And the comments for the bug in [2] don't give me any hope either (where each attribute is delineated). Now I guess I could have written something that generates a Sphinx `rst` file with all the right `autoattribute` commands, but at this point, I'm drowning. After getting fed up with epydoc's own weird rules for documenting module and class variables, and its inability to look in `__init__` for instance variables, I had enough. To put a cherry on top of this, I've been spoiled by Go's automatic documentation[3] that you _literally_ get for free. You can generate documentation on the fly for any Go project[4]---no config files, no running commands to make HTML, nothing. Just an import path and some simple conventions. So I threw my hands up, proclaimed that I didn't deserve to be treated the way Sphinx treated me, and wrote my own in about ~6 days. It was harder than I anticipated, but now that it's done, I'm totally loving my choice to do it. You may note that there are other ways to document instance variables like `:ivar:` that both epydoc and Sphinx support. That's just a giant hack to me and is completely and utterly incompatible with generating documentation on the fly. For example, in one of my Python modules that requires a lot of attributes[5], it's practically suicide not to have a single point of truth[6]. Solution to that? A very simple convention that I haven't seen used in epydoc or Sphinx.[7] Maybe it exists, I'm not sure. (Don't you dare tell me to append to `__doc__` dynamically!) Basically, `pdoc`'s gimmick is that it can generate API docs for _any_ module on the fly if you run it as an HTTP server. Since it adheres to common conventions used to document module/class/instance variables, it can pick those up. Oh, and it makes it simple to reference other public members of other modules. Which I use All. The. Time. Love it. (I'm sure Sphinx has this too...) > I simply recommend that you try to understand Sphinx a little better before > claiming superiority. I have to respond to this. Even with my all my ranting, I really and _truly_ do not believe pdoc is superior. I certainly believe it is superior _for me_ , but I understand that people have different workflows. For example, I generally don't have too much of a problem following Sphinx documentation for other projects, although they can be difficult to navigate if the author isn't conscious about providing the right links in obvious places. > (You should recognize, though, that sphinx-apidoc also requires zero setup.) See above. Am I wrong with having to write out all the `autoattribute` stuff? If I am, that does make Sphinx marginally better. Not sure if it would have stopped me, though. (Because of all the other stuff I mentioned.) [1] - [http://sphinx-doc.org/ext/autodoc.html#directive- autoattribu...](http://sphinx-doc.org/ext/autodoc.html#directive- autoattribute) [2] - [https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/904/autodocs-d...](https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/904/autodocs- does-not-work-well-with-instance) [3] - [http://golang.org/pkg](http://golang.org/pkg) [4] - [http://godoc.org/github.com/BurntSushi/toml](http://godoc.org/github.com/BurntSushi/toml) [5] - [http://pdoc.burntsushi.net/nfldb#nfldb.Play](http://pdoc.burntsushi.net/nfldb#nfldb.Play) [6] - [https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/blob/master/nfldb/data-d...](https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/blob/master/nfldb/data- dictionary.csv) [7] - [https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/blob/master/nfldb/types....](https://github.com/BurntSushi/nfldb/blob/master/nfldb/types.py#L645) ~~~ stevejohnson You found me out: I haven't actually tried to use sphinx-apidoc. Its help page seems to imply that it actually generates all the output HTML, not just a prefab Sphinx dir. Sorry for spreading misinformation. You do have very good reasons for wanting a separate tool (or at the very least, for improving Sphinx's behavior for this use case). I think you can make those reasons clear in your docs without causing the sort of confusion I had. In my mind, pdoc's advantages are that (1) there really is no need for file-based configuration, and (2) (now that you've told me) it has superior discovery of instance variables. The hand-waving "I couldn't configure it" doesn't work in your favor. I'm no stranger to how bad/strange Sphinx can be; I work on this: [https://sphinx-better-theme.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](https://sphinx- better-theme.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) and I work with it a _lot_ to write the docs for this project: [http://mrjob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](http://mrjob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) and it's generally a monster to figure out the internals of. ~~~ burntsushi > I think you can make those reasons clear in your docs without causing the > sort of confusion I had. ... The hand-waving "I couldn't configure it" > doesn't work in your favor. Excellent suggestion. I'm still full of emotion after writing that rant, but when I calm down, I'll try and craft a section on "Why Not Sphinx" in my README. It's quite literally the only criticism I've received so far. I'll keep your interpretation of pdoc's advantages in mind. > and I work with it a lot to write the docs for this project: > [http://mrjob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](http://mrjob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/) You have my compliments. That is really beautiful (in every sense) documentation---you are clearly not among those who aren't conscious of putting links in obvious places. :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Android SSL was downgraded from AES256-SHA to RC4-MD5 in late 2010 - ge0rg http://op-co.de/blog/posts/android_ssl_downgrade/ ====== tptacek There's interesting technical content here, but it suffers from its alarmist tone. The MD5 hash function is broken, that is true. However, TLS doesn't use MD5 in its raw form; it uses variants of HMAC-MD5, which applies the hash function twice, with two different padding constants with high Hamming distances (put differently, it tries to synthesize two distinct hash functions, MD5-IPAD and MD5-OPAD, and apply them both). Nobody would recommend HMAC-MD5 for use in a new system, but it has not been broken. RC4 is horribly broken, and is horribly broken in ways that are meaningful to TLS. But the magnitude of RC4's brokenness wasn't appreciated until last year, and up until then, RC4 was a common recommendation for resolving both the SSL3/TLS1.0 BEAST attack and the TLS "Lucky 13" M-t-E attack. That's because RC4 is the only widely-supported stream cipher in TLS. Moreover, RC4 was considered the most computationally efficient way to get TLS deployed, which 5-6 years ago might have been make-or-break for some TLS deployments. You should worry about RC4 in TLS --- but not that much: the attack is noisy and extremely time consuming. You should not be alarmed by MD5 in TLS, although getting rid of it is one of many good reasons to drive adoption of TLS 1.2. ~~~ echohack On the contrary, "It has not been broken" is exactly what I would expect a programmer to say. If the security of an algorithm is weakened, then it's important to evaluate the use of the algorithm and make efforts to implement stronger security _now_. You should feel fortunate that you even get the time to move to something better before all hell breaks loose. This is the same kind of thinking I hear daily when people say things like, "Just use bcrypt" without thinking about the consequences. The tendency for programmers to think of security in a nihilistic way continues to boggle my mind. I don't think the article suffers from an alarmist tone. I think it's correct to look at something shitty and call it shit. ~~~ tptacek I have no idea what this comment is even trying to say. I have no idea what MD5 has to do with bcrypt, and I have no idea what "nihilism" has to do with the fact that HMAC-MD5 isn't broken. We didn't just "discover" that MD5 was weak; Paul Kocher knew it was weak when SSL 3.0 was standardized back in _1996_ , which is why the SSL 3.0 handshake PRF uses both SHA-1 and MD5. Yours is the kind of comment anyone can write without knowing anything whatsoever about cryptography, so I'm wary of going into more detail. ~~~ echohack Apologies. Perhaps I'm being a master of the obvious here, so I'll restate more simply: When people try to implement security without actually thinking about what the system is doing, it creates weaknesses in the security, not due to algorithmic weaknesses, but because the organization and the engineering discipline for the future is compromised. Thus, while "just use bcrypt" or "just use HMAC- MD5" might work today, the organization doesn't have the mind to update it when it finally does break. This is exactly what happened (and is still happening) today after MD5 was broken. ~~~ tptacek This is the same comment with fewer words, and while I appreciate the concision, it doesn't make any more sense to me. Bcrypt isn't broken or even weakened. HMAC-MD5 isn't broken. HMAC-MD5 and bcrypt are unrelated. Nobody is ignoring the problem of MD5; in fact, suspicion about MD5 animates the very first secure SSL specification we have, from almost 20 years ago. Nobody is saying "just use HMAC-MD5". ~~~ hackinthebochs What he's saying is these blanket statements "just use X" is what is broken. Sometime ago it was "just use md5" and we're still suffering through the fallout of that long after md5 has been shown to be broken. Now we're pointing everyone in another direction and at some point that will be broken too. His point is that we need to educate people on the _reasons_ why one algorithm is better than another for certain security concerns rather than relying on blanket catch-all declarations. ~~~ tptacek And now I'd like to say for the third time that no, there was no "just use MD5" meme in cryptography or in software development, and if TLS is an illustration of anything, it's of _not_ simply leaning on MD5. Once again: the TLS protocol itself is not vulnerable because of MD5, and it's not vulnerable because its designers and implementors both knew about and accounted for the weaknesses of MD5. The author took the opposite lesson from TLS than the one that it actually demonstrates, and the commenter above is harping on that broken lesson. ~~~ echohack As a computer scientist, it's a joy to discover when you're wrong about things. So I'm enjoying being on the wrong side of the discussion for once, because I'm learning lots. Thank you for your replies tptacek, I've learned much from this discussion. If I could edit my top comment, I would. ~~~ tptacek :) ------ p4bl0 Close to this subject there was a good invited talk entitled "Why does the web still run on RC4?" by Adam Langley at CRYPTO this year. I can't find a video online however someone from the Bristol crypto group wrote a small report of his talk here: [http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.fr/2013/08/why-does-web- still-...](http://bristolcrypto.blogspot.fr/2013/08/why-does-web-still-run-on- rc4.html). ------ celerity This beautifully illustrates the power of open source. One guy was worried enough about security to start checking the crypto source, and was able to alert the community. I hope this leads to a more secure platform. ~~~ marshray Not really. Basically of this info was transmitted in the clear and easily visible in packet captures. Admittedly it is quite a bit more convenient to look back in source code history rather than dig up and test old versions of the compiled code directly. ------ evmar I asked my local SSL expert, and he mentioned: the list the client sends is just a preference list; the server can choose what it wants. For example, nginx by default[1] specifies an OpenSSL cipher list of HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5, which you can examine by running $ openssl ciphers 'HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5' You'll see neither RC4 nor MD5 in that list. (You will if you run a plain "openssl ciphers", so you can see openssl knows about them but the config turns them off.) (I'm an SSL newbie, please correct any mistakes I've made in the above.) [1] [http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule#ssl_ciphers](http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpSslModule#ssl_ciphers) ~~~ ge0rg You are right, the final choice of the algorithm is with the server. I am not sure though if it is possible to give other ciphers a higher priority on the server without completely disabling RC4 (which is still better than no encryption / no connection). _Edit:_ effhaa mentioned [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslhon...](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslhonorcipherorder) for apache in another post. ~~~ mnordhoff_ Nginx has an equivalent preference, ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on. (Scroll down a bit on evmar's link.) ------ effhaa Why do you have to fix it in the apps? Iirc you just could specify a different order on the server side and enable "honor cipher order", so the servers preference is used? [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslhon...](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_ssl.html#sslhonorcipherorder) Not sure there, though. ~~~ Eiwatah4 Afaik, as long as a weak cipher is enabled on both client and server, a MITM attacker can force it to be used. It involves manipulating the handshake to tell both parties the other one doesn't support any better cipher. ~~~ xnyhps Eh, no. Maybe in SSLv2, but the first thing TLS encrypts is a hash of the entire handshake. Modifying the cipher list would change those hashes into something different. Unless you have a client which will happily disable a cipher and try again when encountering an error. But if you do that, you don't deserve any security. ------ Finster I'm usually the first to rail against NSA shenanigans but I also believe you shouldn't ascribe to malice what can more easily be explained by stupidity. ~~~ tptacek And you probably shouldn't ascribe to stupidity what can more easily be explained by "not at all stupid or malicious". ~~~ redcap I'm sorry, but I'm only a passing student of cryptography, and I've known that both RC4 and MD5 have been broken for quite some time now. I don't remember the timeline, but if you're implementing code for algorithms and you decide to use the defaults "just because", you're being negligent - that is to say being pretty damn stupid. ~~~ tptacek Once again, with feeling: the fact that an algorithm is "broken" does not mean that a cryptosystem reliant on that algorithm is necessarily broken. In this particular case, the MD5 breakage is not currently relevant to TLS, and it might be decades before it ever is. And, while nobody particularly liked RC4, it was deployed to mitigate an even worse vulnerability in the MtE CBC construction in TLS. Cryptosystems exist in strata: environments, algorithms, constructions, protocols, applications. A careful cryptosystem is designed so that a flaw in one stratum doesn't immediately destroy the entire cryptosystem. Not only did TLS largely succeed in that goal, _but it succeeded in part due to the availability of RC4_. So: no. No, no, no. ~~~ redcap I get your point about the security of the system as a whole: my point isn't that the algorithms are on the list, just that they're at the top of the list. RC4 may have helped TLS to succeed, but it's 2013 - surely there's something that is robust enough to be used instead by now? Of course the simple explanation could just be for performance reasons. ~~~ aidenn0 No, the simple explanation is backwards compatibility. There was a client-side mitigation to the MtE vulnerability, but it broke some tiny fraction of servers in the wild so it never made it to the stable release of NSS. ------ eksith "The change from the strong OpenSSL cipher list to a hardcoded one starting with weak ciphers is either a sign of horrible ignorance, security incompetence or a clever disguise for an NSA-influenced manipulation - you decide!" Survey says: Short-sightedness. Not really ignorance or incompetence (although that may be arguable), but it's certainly not "NSA-influenced manipulation". That's the sort of thing they reserve for countries, not consumers. For consumers, they rely on undisclosed 0-days with the severe ones reserved for high priority targets. It's _far_ more economical, considering the scales of this vacuum, to simply rely on service providers freely handing over data on their customers rather than breaking crypto. Side note: The "OMG NSA!!" hyperbole is starting to fray at my nerves. Not everything is a conspiracy. It doesn't need to be when willing participants are holding the keys to the castle in the first place. Relevant: [http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/) ~~~ ge0rg _The N.S.A. 's Sigint Enabling Project is a $250 million-a-year program that works with Internet companies to weaken privacy by inserting back doors into encryption products._ From [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-r...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents- reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html?_r=0) ~~~ eksith I could have sworn I read that as "that works _with_ Internet companies". Like I said... ------ meshko I bet this is stupidity, not NSA. ~~~ joelthelion I find it hard believing that stupidity explains a deliberate change by Google engineers. ~~~ mpyne If only there was some possibility of there been a third option instead of just stupidity or maliciousness.... ~~~ logn And I'll just finish that thought since there are real engineers involved who probably had good intentions and skills: (as the article stated) the Google engineers were trying to improve compatibility and also seemed to follow the path of what other platforms (Java) had done in he past. Code reviews happen every day in the industry, and often times it's amazing how many flaws and defects are found, but often internally and not exposed for the world to see and speculate on. The nature of open source is that this is all out in the open, and that's fine. It's also good that Google is actively paying bounties on discovering/fixing these types of bugs in a variety of major open source projects. ~~~ tptacek That's not the third option he was thinking of. ------ albert_holm There are some good advice on how to improve the situation in the appendix section. ~~~ ge0rg I will be adding advices from the discussion here, so feel free to comment! :) ------ gmuslera Hopely Cyanogenmod devs, if not Google itself, will fix it, now that they are aware. In 2010 it may not be seen as a priority, but since last June it is for everyone. ~~~ dbmnt CyanogenMod merged a "fix" into the repo earlier today: [http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/51771/](http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/51771/) ... only to revert it later: [http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/51794/](http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/51794/) The revert noted "TLS v1.0 + AES is a bad combo, and entirely possible to happen with these priority lists". In other words, the proposed "quick fix" was dangerous. There's some reading material on BEAST attacks here: [https://blogs.akamai.com/2012/05/what-you-need-to-know- about...](https://blogs.akamai.com/2012/05/what-you-need-to-know-about- beast.html) ------ JosephRedfern Would this flaw be "patchable" using Cydia Substrate for Android? Might be good as a quick fix. ------ genericacct <alarmism>oh by the way the stock android browser up to version 4.2 and maybe beyond LEAKS ANYTHING YOU TYPE IN THE ADDRESS BOX IN CLEARTEXT OVER THE NET. </alarmism>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Right a Good Internal Company Newsletter - mjh8136 http://www.inc.com/janine-popick/2010/11/how-to-write-a-company-newsletter.html ====== dotBen Given the nature of the post, it seems ironic you confused "Right"/"Write" in your title.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid - us0r https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/oracle-is-said-to-lead-anti-amazon-lobby-on-pentagon-cloud-bid ====== anoncoward1234 I currently work as a solutions engineer on Oracle Cloud. The product is absolute garbage and I'm miserable. If anyone has any good leads on other positions please let me know! ~~~ pubg Are you able to share any specific complaints, gripes or issues? This entire thread is an Oracle bash fest without much specific data or information. Don't get me wrong, not a huge fan of Oracle but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance. ~~~ anoncoward1234 Given that my comment blew up and has high visibility I feel I probably shouldn't share anything specific. It was a pretty much throw away comment that I didn't expect to get as much attention as it did. The best I can say is that after working for the company I think that the general news.ycombinator.com beliefs on the performance of Oracle are entirely justified. I thought going in that it may have been overblown, like you say some sort of "startups are cool, big corps are evil boo" kind of thing, but it is not. I love the people I work with in my section! Just, not the overall firm. ~~~ rdl I wonder if there will be a management witch hunt against the Solutions Engineering team on Monday provoked by your post. ~~~ stale2002 Well the joke would be on management. I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems. ~~~ userbinator _I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems._ On the other hand, without the problems, the solution engineers might not exist... ...which is, in one sentence, the reason why Oracle consultants exist. ------ Crontab Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit against Google. Fuck em. ~~~ gaius Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing. ~~~ provost > Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is > doing. Could you elaborate on why this is a good thing? ------ manigandham It's sad that these politics might win because the Oracle cloud is one of the worst products I've ever used, especially from such a massive company that could easily put out something better if it wasn't the epitome of misery in customer relations led by clueless management. ~~~ LarrysNeighbor Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to hear what issues you ran into with it. ~~~ manigandham \- Several slow disjointed UI consoles that will log you out when switching. The services dashboard has permanent warning that it might not show everything and you should just "retry the operation". The nav menu doesn't fit the names of the menu choices so you dont know what to click on. Same things are named differently depending on which console you're in. There is no categorization or organization of what is where. Would be 1000x improved if they just remembered your current tenant name in a damn cookie. \- Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books. \- There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use. \- Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account. \- There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes. \- Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products. ~~~ itronitron a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by DOD standards ------ ams6110 There was a time when Oracle's database product was kind of like IBM mainframes. If you could afford it, and really needed its capabilities, there was no substitute. As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts. Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community. ~~~ robbyt Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to use the product? ~~~ ams6110 Well, I used Oracle rdbms for a number of years and quite liked it. Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible. ~~~ enraged_camel They indeed are horrible. What is worse is that, out of the box, they don't do much, and the stuff they do is guaranteed to not fit your business. So you end up needing customization, and that's when shit gets _real_ expensive. ------ oneplane So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? That sounds like about half the stuff you get with politics and lawyers. I thought you'd get something more factual with technology, but I guess Oracle is more like a lawyer-lobby business that just happens to make or resell software. ~~~ sherminfermin > So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better > deal? How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid. > Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than > one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion- > dollar deal. ~~~ bobthepanda They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone. > _The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs > -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the > massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary > Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all > contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, > with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September._ What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality". ~~~ hueving What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective. ~~~ jjeaff Anytime that the main proficiency of this large organization is not data center management. Which is most of the time. ~~~ hueving This has to be willful ignorance designed to pretend its just about managing hardware while ignoring the elephant in the room of compromising your business's (and client's) privacy. You might not like data center management, but the trade you are making is giving hypervisor control to a third party with 10s of thousands of employees outside of your oversight which also happens to be one of the most valuable targets for hackers in the world. You could easily have AWS employees (or hackers who have compromised the control network) dumping everything interesting from your HD images to the highest bidder and you have no means to detect this. AWS is okay if you are only collecting relatively innocuous consumer account info, but it's completely unacceptable for any companies holding data/executing processes that can have a major impact on society when it leaks/fails. ------ youdontknowtho I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post? Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad. ~~~ manigandham And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public. ~~~ haimez Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product. ~~~ manigandham It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest. Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority. They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available. ------ mrb I think it's a terrible idea for the DoD (of all departments) to move all their infrastructure to any commercial cloud, Amazon or Oracle. So much critical infrastructure in the hands of a single company. What could possibly go wrong? They get hacked, experience significant outages, or worse, go out of business, and _poof_ there goes all of the DoD's infrastructure... Whoever wins the bid will definitely become "too big to fail". ~~~ ocdtrekkie It kind of shocks me that the DoD isn't looking for a vendor-agnostic implementation and then using the resources of multiple vendors. Not only is it key for resiliency from failure, but also it guarantees price competition, whereas being dependent on one vendor lets them jack up the price for all future transactions. ~~~ coredog64 Vendor agnostic solutions come with overhead. Check out the PCF sizing tool. Running just the EC2 instances required to _manage_ a production environment starts at $30k/year per region using 1 year RIs. That doesn't include the Diego compute nodes that actually run your workload. What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS. All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s. ------ notananthem Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry you are a true POS <3 ------ aidos Cheap, but let’s all enjoy Larry Ellison on “the cloud” [https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY](https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY) ------ ReverseCold Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc? I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things. ~~~ jjirsa Should they build their own planes, too? Just hire some engineers and make it happen, right? Governments outsource because the best people in various industries aren't working for the government (for lots of different reasons). ~~~ jknoepfler datacenter construction and management is not exactly rocket science in 2018. ~~~ manigandham It absolutely is not as simple as you seem to make it sound though... a poorly experienced team will end up costing more in time and money than the markup of an outsourced but scaled efficient team. ------ colek42 Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to embrace open source in this sector. ------ icegreentea2 Worth considering the anti-amazon lobby's position (I really would not want Oracle to get a single slice of the pie though). Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider? AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud. ------ chris_wot I can’t say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now. ------ gameswithgo If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not an efficient use of money. ------ suyash Amazon is definitely the current leader but in order to to make it a monopoly, competetion in cloud should be encouraged that will improve offereing and bring prices down for majority of the users. ------ davesque I'm calling it now. Oracle will succeed and be the primary benefactor of these efforts. We've already seen that they're in bed with Trump: [https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant- bankr...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankrolling- devin-nunes). The only things Trump understands are money and favors. ------ billsmithaustin Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends. ------ fapjacks Oh, _of course_ Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise. ------ diebir Oracle, I have a proposition for you. Why don't you release Java and then curl up and die? There is not a reason for you to exist. Your mojo was 20 years ago, why prolong the agony. Save us all trouble and go home. ~~~ gary__ I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested to hear some informed discussion on the topic. ~~~ coredog64 GLWT. Oracle's legal department aggressively prevents the publishing of benchmarks. The EULA for any version of the Oracle RDBMS specifically prohibits releasing benchmarks. ~~~ gary__ Yeah, they came up with the "DeWitt Clause" and it has made its way into other database EULAs as well. Benchmarks aren't everything though, and they do have their limitations anyway. ------ tboyd47 Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is mentioned. ------ jshaqaw Drain the swamp indeed. ------ s2g > Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than > one company sounds reasonable. ------ fibers People hate Oracle because they hate competition. ------ hueving About the only good thing that could come from this is destroying the ability for the DoD to move anything to the cloud. Huge SaaS and IaaS companies are squids wrapping their tentacles around everyone's data and sucking the autonomy out of organizations. An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Working two jobs - p0d I am fortunate in that I have two jobs. I work 3 days a week as a sysadmin and two days a week on my SaaS product. My income works out roughly the same as if I were full time sysadmin.<p>Having painted a picture I'd be keen to hear from anyone who knows about the mental gymnastics and motivation required to work two jobs? What have you learned and how do you stay on task? ====== davelnewton Honestly I never felt like I had to do any mental gymnastics. To me it's more or less the same as going home and putting on the dad hat for the rest of the day, but easier.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Watch Google Map Edits Live - NathanKP http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse ====== Acorn It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists. If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company. <http://www.openstreetmap.org/> ~~~ NathanKP I would say it is probably because Google makes it very easy to edit maps and it offers navigation. Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them. (At least not as far as I can tell.) Therefore if you are living in an area where you want that ability and your local area is not yet mapped, you will map it in Google, not in Open Street Map. Additionally if you are a business owner you are going to add your business to the map that has more users and searchers. There is little if any benefit to having your business mapped in Open Street Map, whereas having it on the Google Map could potentially bring some customers to you. ~~~ aw3c2 OSM is the data. It is not the example map rendering on openstreetmap.org. Sad but true. I wish there was no map at all but instead a selection of nice looking and more useful maps listed. For routing give these a try: <http://map.project-osrm.org/> <http://open.mapquest.com/> <http://maps.cloudmade.com/> <http://openrouteservice.org/> Compared to proper editors the Google map maker thing is horrifying. I tried to use it once and gave up because it just did not do what I was trying to do (adding 3 simply streets). ~~~ AndyJPartridge <http://openrouteservice.org/> The was the only one that opened upon a map over me :-) ~~~ aw3c2 That is bad (especially because I personally like that one the least). Could you share details about your configuration? ------ aw3c2 Watch OpenStreetMap Edits Live: <http://datenkueche.com/osmlive/> ------ buro9 What I learned whilst watching this for 5 minutes, was that a lot of escort agencies use Google Maps and Google Earth to advertise. I don't know how maps are classified, and whether data about businesses are adverts or just facts about places. But in the UK adverts have to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful, to the benefit of consumers, business and society". As such, it opened up a whole new world of spam-fighting to me. Google must be scrubbing this dataset as quickly as others add stuff. ------ nkassis I hope they replace the Google earth plugin with WebGL at some point. Kind of annoying having to install a plugin for this. ------ NathanKP I think it is incredible to see all the edits going on all around the world, and to see how Google is leveraging its huge reach to get its users to name roads and fill in businesses all over the world, even in remote areas. ~~~ mtogo And how sad it is that those edits are going to google maps instead of OSM. ~~~ NathanKP That is over-dramatic in my opinion. Google Maps is a good tool: it works well, and is already more complete than OSM is. Therefore I would rather see one extremely complete map than two half complete maps. In my opinion there is nothing sad about a good map getting better. ~~~ aw3c2 Think about it. OpenStreetMap is free data. You can make your own maps, your own selection of data, data analysis, your own routing, you can contribute and the changes are live within minutes, you can provide free maps to people, you can use open source software to edit. From Google you only get whatever they decide they want to give. Could you give examples what you mean by complete? POIs? In that case Google has a lot of leverage. Street/way-wise OpenStreetMap is vastly superior in many if not most cases at least here in Europe (not to mention countries where there is no monetary interest for Google). ~~~ NathanKP When I say complete I mean the entire system, from satellite imagery, to street view, to navigation directions. Additionally I am referring to the design polish that ties all these pieces together. From what I have seen OSM is a lot like Android, open source, but fragmented because of it. Google Maps, while closed source, is much more polished and feature rich compared with anything I've seen based on OSM. To be clear I certainly want OSM to grow to greatness, and it would wonderful if it was just as powerful and feature rich as Google Maps. I agree with you that OSM is a great project, and I like the open source aspect of it. That's not my argument though. My basic argument in the parent comment was that I think it is an over reaction to say it is "sad" to see the edits going to Google. Whether Google's map is getting better or OSM's map is getting better people who use the systems are benefiting, so there is nothing sad about edits made to either system. And Google Maps has a much larger user base than OSM, hence it is more practical for business owners to tag their businesses in Google Maps, and people to add their streets to Google Maps. ------ breck Just ate a sandwich while watching this. It was stimulating. If you ever have some time to kill when you can't use your hands, this is a cool thing to watch. ~~~ featherless Hah, just did the exact same thing with a chocolate cupcake.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Developing for the Amazon Echo - genadyo https://medium.com/@genadyo/developing-for-the-amazon-echo-2578339992dc ====== willu I'm actually impressed by the level of detail provided in the rejections. There's nothing worse than getting a rejection that does not clearly state the reason for the rejection and a path to resolution. Apple and especially Google are notoriously bad about this. ~~~ genadyo Yeah, it was half QA process. ------ mikeflynn You definitely can get an Alexa skill off the ground without using Lambda, but there are a lot of little details with their authentication to work out. I'd highly recommend one of the libraries that are out there: Go - [https://github.com/mikeflynn/go- alexa/tree/master/skillserve...](https://github.com/mikeflynn/go- alexa/tree/master/skillserver) (full disclosure: I created this one) Offical Java SDK - [https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa- sk...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills- kit/docs/using-the-alexa-skills-kit-samples) Node - [https://www.npmjs.com/package/alexa- app](https://www.npmjs.com/package/alexa-app) ...to name a few. ~~~ genadyo Thanks ~~~ nickclaw Shameless plug for my node skills framework[1] if you want something a little more flexible than alexa-app. Has express support as well[2]. [1] [https://www.github.com/nickclaw/alexa- ability](https://www.github.com/nickclaw/alexa-ability) [2] [https://www.github.com/nickclaw/alexa-ability-express- handle...](https://www.github.com/nickclaw/alexa-ability-express-handler) ------ bonobo_34 This article sums up my recent experience trying to get a skill published. It was slightly frustrating to receive multiple rejection emails, but at least the responses were detailed and helpful. While building some skills for fun, I also made some gulp tasks for locally testing skills and deploying the code to your lambda. [https://github.com/tmcleroy/alexa-skills](https://github.com/tmcleroy/alexa- skills) ------ jackcarter I built a similar app for Chicago's CTA trains, called CTA Tracker. There seem to be train tracker apps for most major cities, since they're easy to implement and legitimately useful. ------ altryne1 Nice write up! I can't wait to start developing for my Echo! ~~~ genadyo Just do it! ------ wyldfire Aside: > NextTrain {FromStation} to {ToStation} Does Echo have some concept of scoping for these skills? Or do you have to opt-in to the skill? ~~~ Linell You have to opt into the skill by enabling it via the app that was mentioned in the post. ------ dkopi Great write up. I wonder how developers can actually profit from developing apps for echo ------ gariany damn, this changes a lot. I was scared of Amazon Echo (or any other retailer's product) listening to me 24/7, but I guess it can't be avoided ~~~ stronglikedan Why would you be scared? The keyword(s) is processed locally, and it only sends the request following the keyword over the wire. If they tried anything fishy, such as sending everything it hears over the wire, then they would be outed within a day. ~~~ azinman2 It also makes a sound (tho not by default) and lights up whenever it's listening.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dealing with feedback when it's personal – Coding with Empathy - pavsaund http://codingwithempathy.com/2016/04/19/dealing-with-feedback-when-it-turns-ugly/?utm_source=news.ycombinator.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=hackernews ====== brudgers I read the previous piece. I suspect it was useful to people with interests other than being an asshat...and on Hacker News that's a disproportionate number of people relative to the internet at large. Thanks for writing it and posting it. ~~~ pavsaund thanks for taking the time to read not one, but two lengthy posts AND commenting. your encouraging words are well-received :) ~~~ brudgers Via HN, I became a fan of Derek Sivers and so I listened to his interview recently on Software Engineering Daily. He described the common internet behavior of a person saying "I like X" and a bunch of people reacting with "You are wrong. I don't like X". There's a big space for empathy in programming. And on Hacker News. And elsewhere. It's probably a project that can keep one busy for as long as they choose to write about it. ~~~ pavsaund Ah, yes Derek Sivers is a wonderful inspiration. I'll have to listen to that interview you're referring to. Thanks so much for sharing. ------ smilingtom This guy seems to have fully embraced the "Haters gonna hate" mentality that he advised against in the last article. Amazing what happens to some peoples' minds when they get hit with a little criticism. The "supportive comment" is just a 2-sentence opinion telling him exactly what he wants to be told. I would urge people to take any advice from this person with a healthy dose of salt.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What are the benefits of using PHP today? - denysonique Knowing Python, Ruby, Node.js, Meteor etc. Should one still consider PHP for some projects? ====== benzesandbetter 1) PHP is a great high-school job. Much better than a paper route, flipping burgers, or working at the car wash. If you freelance you can set your own schedule which can work well around your school schedule. 2) Hosting is cheap so your parents will probably let you use their credit card. 3) It's so approachable that it can help you get started with programming so that some day you can move on to better languages. ------ kephra The combination of lighttpd, fastcgi, php has a very low memory footprint. This is a benefit on Xen servers. PHP also offers a build in function for nearly everything. The main drawback of PHP are the tutorials, using mysql without the i, and teach how to implement a website that is vulnerable to SQL injection. ~~~ blibble 16GB of ECC RAM costs £150 to buy, how much RAM your webserver threads use should never be an issue. PHP's advantage is "apt-get install php5", copy your .php files in, and you're done. ------ gdp The advantage of any programming language, framework, or library is that you know it already and it allows you to achieve things. I wouldn't personally advocate learning PHP today, but the idea that any language has intrinsic value divorced from its ability to achieve your purposes is mostly untrue. ------ sbank It is widely used and sought after. Any average to decent PHP programmer can find work. Any average to decent Haskell programmer can't. ~~~ dwc Depending on your intent, this may be a great reason to _avoid_ PHP, or at least to leave PHP out of your job description. ------ yelnop I'm a longtime database developer, starting my first web 2.0 app. After much research (including Python, node.js, Go, Perl, Ruby, etc.) I've all but locked on PHP. While I can see that it has idiosyncrasies, I can also see that it's a very mature product. For example, when I search for "PHP function list", I not only get a function list as the first item, it's an amazingly comprehensive list. The hurdles I've had so far, I've been able to jump over them quickly (quicker than in any other language I've learned) if only because the community support is so good. Usually a simple web search finds the question and answer I'm looking for. I'm pretty blown away by the sheer volume of good info on PHP. Python is my second choice. There's a lot that I prefer of it, over PHP, but I find that in general its hurdles are higher. Having developed many industrial-strength apps using less-capable languages, I'm confident I can do the same in PHP. ------ 27182818284 I feel like it is pretty unusual these days to hear about a company moving _to_ PHP from some other language. On the other hand, you often here about a company switching or adding one of the other languages you mentioned to their company's stack ------ andrewhillman Another benefit... it's fairly easy to find a php contractor for any portion of your project that you want to outsource. The cost for a php contractor is relatively inexpensive compared to contractors for other languages. ------ Rust Requisite link to <http://appwithphp.com/> \- some basic minimal knowledge and stuff to make sure what you write is written as right as possible :) ------ glimcat <?php include("header.php"); ?> Between the above and the huge range of existing PHP projects, I always install PHP regardless of what else I'm using. ------ gopi In my opinion the great benefit of PHP especially for non-coder founders is the big offshore talent pool. ------ rmATinnovafy The tool does not define the problem. It goes the other way around.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Can your website be different than your LLC name? - TTDaVeTT I'm looking into setting up an LLC for my website. How do you go about including your website under an LLC that has a different name? For example, if my website is www.newsite.com and my LLC is CoolCorp? I saw something about using a DBA for this. How does that fit in? ====== dalke Why in the world would this be a concern? Just pulling an example from semi- random searches, "VJM Metal Craftsman LLC" has their web site at <http://www.historicbridgerestoration.com/> . I know an LLC where $NAME.com was already taken, so they had to come up with something else. The LLC owns the domain, but one question is if you push the domain name more or less than the company name. After all, you don't go to Reckitt Benckiser’s web site to find out more about Calgon, Woolite, Clearasil, or Lysol. ------ drawkbox You can simply make the website a 'product' and if you want trademark the name. If it is for the LLC legally the url and product are property of the LLC. Lots of companies have many products under one company. You can trademark it if you feel it needs extra protection. If it takes off you can make it it's own LLC or corp. ------ dctoedt 1\. If your LLC will be doing business (that is, holding itself out to the public) under a different name than its official name, you should probably file an assumed-name certificate in the appropriate office (which varies by state). 2\. If you put a copyright notice on your Web pages (a mouseprint copyright notice is normally a good idea for evidentiary purposes, although technically not required under U.S. law), then the copyright notice should use the official name of the LLC, not the site URL. Usual disclaimers: I'm a lawyer, but not YOUR lawyer, so this isn't legal advice, don't rely on it as such, don't disclose anything confidential in the comments (lest you waive any privilege that might apply), you and I aren't establishing an attorney-client relationship via this thread, etc., etc. ~~~ TTDaVeTT Ok, thanks a lot. In my example(www.newsite.com and my LLC is CoolCorp), what would be the correct wording? Something like: "NewSite © 2010 is an affiliate of CoolCorp LLC."? ~~~ dctoedt The usual statutory copyright notice is "Copyright © [year of first publication] [Owner's name]" In your hypothetical example -- assuming CoolCorp LLC was indeed the copyright owner -- a statutory copyright notice would be "Copyright © 2010 CoolCorp LLC"; there'd be no need to include the URL or name of the site. I _have_ seen notices that say something like, "NewSite Copyright © 2010 CoolCorp LLC"; I'm not aware that adding the NewSite name like that would cause any problems. Same disclaimers apply - I'm not your lawyer, etc.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
25 Things That Won’t Exist in 25 Years - jdhzzz https://hackernoon.com/25-things-that-wont-exist-in-25-years-1d475cd9590a ====== omilu >>Handheld smartphones transition to spatial computing / augmented reality head mounted displays Apple needs to upgrades eyeglasses like they did the watch. ------ jdhzzz I believe secretaries are largely gone already. So... I would add we'll see "peak travel" will occur within 25 years. Virtual reality will be so good and cheap that only the wealthy will be able to move their bodies from place to place. 2 car families will become 1 car families as autonomous on-demand local travel and work from home will eliminate the need for a second, or even a first car.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The 'Over-Parenting Crisis' in School and at Home (2015) - Ibethewalrus https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/07/24/628042168/the-over-parenting-crisis-in-school-and-at-home ====== christofosho As a teacher of ages 4 up until 14, I think parents and people in general need to be concious toward what constitutes "over" parenting. Too often we as teachers see students that are behaving poorly, or having more trouble in school, because they do not have enough help or consistency at home. Parents reading articles like this might take them too literally and step too far from their child's life. Parenting should be a balance. You should know, as a parent, what is happening with your child's schooling, and be there to help. But you should not micromanage the child. Parent involvement leads to more academic confidence and success[1], and more behavioural[2] success. [1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020099/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020099/) [2] [https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/sm6/McCormi...](https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/sm6/McCormick_2013_parent_involvement.pdf) ~~~ btilly Let me turn this around. As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best. ~~~ marcell > there is on average no academic benefit What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you learn integration if you don’t do some practice problems? ~~~ tofflos Parent also wrote "You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time" so he/she agrees with you but argues that there is enough time for that practice to take place at school. ~~~ btilly Exactly right. Practice is essential, but it is essential that it be correct practice. According to research, supervised practice in the classroom is both superior to homework, and sufficient for learning. ------ laurieg As someone considering starting a family, I have literally no idea what parenting is anymore. When I was younger I was pretty much left to my own devices, sent off to play with my brother and then packed off to school when old enough. My parents were too busy working, cooking and cleaning to do much fancy extra curricular stuff. I do wonder now what I should be doing to prepare for parenthood. I feel that perhaps it's not the sort of thing that can be distilled down into an easy to read 200 page paperback. ~~~ rayiner I'm working on kid #2, and my takeaway is this: "parenting science" is like "nutritional science." It's _almost_ entirely bullshit, and little to no progress has been made in the field ever. There is no use paying attention to it, other than doing/not doing the obvious things. (Don't eat too many calories; don't emotionally destroy your kids.) Your kids will turn out how they are going to turn out. Instinctively, you'll love them and want to keep them alive, so don't worry about that. Other than that, do what you think is right and hope for the best. ~~~ bkmartin This is wholly and categorically untrue. Parenting today is much different than it was 100 years ago. The way we approach children, discipline children, and help them grow into their best selves has changed a lot. And it is based on lots of research. It is also based on all of the work that therapists do with adults after their parents have messed them up so bad with their horrible parenting. Every child will be their own adventure, personalities makes parenting every child different. But to say that there aren't guidelines and that you should just do whatever comes natural is dangerous. Because beating children comes naturally to some people. Being passive aggressive or emotionally blunt with them can come naturally. Being an absent parent and not spending any time with them can come naturally as work gets in the way. If you are unsure then seeking professional help to make sure you have the basics covered is a great way to start. Parenting is very much an art, but like all art, there is definitely a science backing it up. ~~~ recursive The argument is not that parenting has stayed the same. It's that there's no measurable improvement in results from all the changes. So the argument goes, the changes aren't worth much, so don't worry about it. ~~~ Trill-I-Am What about crime rates going down and teen pregnancy going down? ------ jknoepfler I'd expect NPR to not use the word "crisis" in this context. There no obvious juncture, no imminent, looming problem that demands decisive action. There's just yet another op-ed pop-psyche piece about kids failing to learn "how to adult." I'm not surprised by the existence of the article, it's as inevitable as my curmudgeonly response. I'm surprised NPR stooped to publishing it. ~~~ tcfunk Yeah I was also thinking the term crisis was a bit of a stretch here. 'Over- Parenting Crisis' is in quotes, however, so I'm wondering if they've taken that title from one of the books? ------ tehabe Recently I watched a report by the US correspondent of the German public television. She spoke with parents who got into trouble because they let their children play near the house. A mom who put surveillance software on their children's phone. Parents who look on video feeds from the day care centres. I found this shocking and also dangerous in the long run, people are getting used to surveillance might also accept it by the state. ~~~ ajross FWIW: A "look at those crazy americans!" color story by a foreign journalist may, y'know, not be the most authoritative source for this kind of thing. Obviously those products exist (and probably do in Germany too) and I'm sure that parent who got in trouble was a real incident. Nonetheless those of us actually raising children in this country don't actually do that stuff. Chill. ~~~ tehabe Of course it is colourful, but the reporter was a parent too and neighbours wondered why they let their children play unsupervised outside. In Germany a court just ruled that a three year old can go alone to the bath room and their parents don't have to check on them. The child set the bath room under water and someone wanted the parents to be liable. Also some years ago, I saw a video from a school parking lot, where the hundreds of pupils where dropped off by their parents. So instead of building several schools close to the pupils, they build one big school, to which almost no pupil come alone. ~~~ Steltek > In Germany a court just ruled that a three year old can go alone to the bath > room and their parents don't have to check on them. The child set the bath > room under water and someone wanted the parents to be liable. Seems like the alternative is to declare the 3yo liable for the damage, which is absurd. Water like that can cause a lot of damage; it's not like they tipped over a glass on the table. ~~~ tehabe They wanted the parents to be liable for the damage, claiming they have breached their obligatory supervision to the child. The judge said that the parents are not obligated to surveillance their child 24/7 in the flat as it would hinder the development of the child. ~~~ nybble41 I would argue that parents (or legal guardians) should be held liable for damage caused by their minor children, period, without claiming that parents have an obligation to monitor their children 24/7\. The degree of surveillance is up to the parents, and I agree that continuous monitoring would tend to stifle development, but that does not remove the parents' liability. Someone has to pay for the damages, and it would not be sensible or just for that someone to be the owner of the damaged property. The alternative to parental responsibility is that property owners simply ban unsupervised minors from the premises. They represent too great a risk to be tolerated in the absence of legal recourse for whatever damage they might cause. ~~~ dragonwriter > I would argue that parents (or legal guardians) should be held liable for > damage caused by their minor children, period, without claiming that parents > have an obligation to monitor their children 24/7. The idea that _having children_ should be treated as a strict liability tort is...unusual. Without that treatment, the damages would need to stem from some other tort by the parent (such as negligence by failure to reasonably supervise), or a tort by the child with a rule that parents are liable for the children's torts. > Someone has to pay for the damages, and it would not be sensible or just for > that someone to be the owner of the damaged property. That's who usually pays for damages not resulting from some failure of a legal duty, so I do think see why a child being involved would change that. > The alternative to parental responsibility is that property owners simply > ban unsupervised minors from the premises. Well, that's _an_ alternative, and a fairly common one where it's not fundamentally incompatible with the purpose of the property. ~~~ nybble41 > The idea that _having children_ should be treated as a strict liability tort > is...unusual. Yes, but that isn't what I was saying. "Having children" is not the tort. Damaging others' property is the tort. The parents are liable because it was their child that caused the damage. The child is their responsibility. What the child does, _they_ did. > or a tort by the child with a rule that parents are liable for the > children's torts Yes, exactly this. > That's who usually pays for damages not resulting from some failure of a > legal duty... The legal duty which was failed in this case is the duty to not damage others' property. (You do have that, right? Or are property owners simply expected to absorb the cost of accidental damage no matter who was responsible?) > Well, that's an alternative... I argue that it is the only viable alternative. Why would property owners voluntarily accept liability for the actions of other people's children without some form of compensation? But we don't want this alternative, because it means 24/7 surveillance and stunted development—not out of legal obligation but simply because unsupervised children would have nowhere to go. ~~~ dragonwriter > The legal duty which was failed in this case is the duty to not damage > others' property. One doesn't have such a duty, otherwise we wouldn't have specific torts at all, you'd just jump straight to damages. > You do have that, right? No, the closest thing to that is general negligence, where you owe a duty of reasonable care. Damages resulting despite exercise of reasonable care (other than where a strict liability tort exists) do not generally create legal liability. > Or are property owners simply expected to absorb the cost of accidental > damage no matter who was responsible? If no breach of a legal duty occurs that produces the accident, yes, people are, in general, expected to absorb damages. > I argue that it is the only viable alternative. But the argument you make for that position is inconsistent with the results in reality. ~~~ nybble41 > No, the closest thing to that is general negligence, where you owe a duty of > reasonable care. So your legal system _does_ recognize a duty not to damage others' property. I think it is safe to say that flooding the room is a good example of not taking "reasonable care". > If no breach of a legal duty occurs that produces the accident... Irrelevant, as we've already established that there was a legal duty which was breached. > But the argument you make for that position is inconsistent with the results > in reality. Only if you start from the position that parents are not responsible for damages caused by their children, which is itself contrary to reality. ~~~ gowld Apparently, this German legal model is that small children are a force of nature, like a tornado or hurricane. That's...one answer, and maybe reasonable in the context of homeowners' insurance and social safety nets, but it's _not_ an indictment of some kind of crazy American helicopter parenting. ~~~ dragonwriter > Apparently, this German legal model is that small children are a force of > nature, like a tornado or hurricane. That's pretty much the US model, too; young children are unlikely to be subject to tort liability (under common law, there was a firm cutoff at 7 years for negligence, with a presumption against liability up to 14; now in most jurisdictions it's a balancing test of age, experience, and intelligence.) And even where a child is liable, they are likely to be effectively judgement- proof and many jurisdictions have fairly limited provisions for parent liability for minors torts (California, e.g., has a quantitatively-limited amount of parental liability, for liability from willful misconduct.) There may be some cases where there is a negligence action against parents for reasonable care in supervision, but it's not clear that the duty the would be judged that much differently than in Germany. ------ thorell I think a lot of parents don't know how to effectively parent and make up for that with enthusiasm. Too much involvement, not enough parenting. I am guilty of this. ~~~ MaxBarraclough Which leads to the question of how one teaches general parenting skill. ~~~ citizenkeen My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. My dad's always saying "There's no book on parenting." My response if always "Screw you, yes there is. But you went to business school." You can pay someone to fix your injuries, or broken pipes, but you can't pay someone to raise your kids. When my son was born, I went into it with the knowledge of three highly rated books on Amazon I had picked at random. My wife went into it with years of experience dealing with difficult kids. She worked at a feeding clinic at a research institute, helping parents figure out how to get their kids to eat their vegetables. I'm so grateful. My 2 year old helps fold laundry, says please and thank you, and knows to put away his toys before bath time. I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't married this woman. I don't know where I would have gotten the skills I have now. ~~~ nugget So what would you recommend for potential parents who don't have the years of hands-on experience that your wife had? ~~~ analog31 Be born with genes for incredible self discipline and emotional stamina, and your kids are likely to be born with those genes as well. In fact, all the books I read said that you have to apply the techniques with total consistency and regularity, or the method doesn't work. That's something I'm utterly incapable of doing. ~~~ dragonwriter > In fact, all the books I read said that you have to apply the techniques > with total consistency and regularity, or the method doesn't work. Note that's long been a line used when people are selling stuff they know doesn't work, because people don't do much of anything with total consistency and regularity, so when the inevitable failures occur, you've pre-biased the buyer of your woo to find an excuse to blame themselves, rather than the snake-oil you sold them. Even if it's not _knowing_ fraud, any parenting approach that doesn't accommodate and specifically address the reality that parents are fallible isn't going to work with real people very well, even if it might work for the mythical beasts it must be designed for. ------ jimhefferon I teach in a college. Many's the time I've been waiting to get into a classroom because the folks in there are wrapping up an exam, and students come out, instantly produce the phone, and I hear, "Hi mom, I did OK on the quiz, I think ..." That's too much. ~~~ donovanh What's wrong with that? ~~~ hamandcheese On its own, not much. But increasingly parents are involving themselves in their college freshman’s education, going to bat for them when they “unfairly” score low, etc. ------ squozzer I offer the following hypothesis - competition for entry into "the best" colleges, competition for "free money" through scholarships, and competition for "good jobs" after college has _driven_ parents to micromanage their children's school "career." The margins for "error" \- i.e. achieving suboptimal grades and cultivating interests outside of "school stuff" \- have shrunk since I was a kid. This is, of course, in addition to the need for parents to acquire bragging rights about their children. ~~~ gukov We gamified our kids. ------ smelendez > Some schools have an explicit policy against parents doing kids' homework > and in favor of kids raising issues and concerns themselves rather than > relying on their parents to do so. These schools are part of the solution. I'd love to see these policies tested, e.g., have five high school kids with class scheduling issues attempt to resolve them themselves, and another five have their parents call, and compare how the process goes. ~~~ thomasfedb High school kids have class scheduling issues that aren't just automatically sorted out by the school? Heck. Not my experience for sure! ~~~ throwawayjava Turns out a lot of the scheduling software out there was written by people who without formal training or who weren't paying attention in their algorithms course. E.g., one year: Me: requests A and B Friend: requests A and non-honors B hour 4: Me in non-honors B; friend in gym. hour 5 (only hour honors B is offered): Me in A; friend in honros B. Based on a few years of observations, I'm almost certain courses were filled using some variant of this algorithm: for each student s sorted by student number: for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n: if(s wants c and not in c): assign s to c and continue to next hour. for each non-filled course c in hour 1..n: if(s wants c' and not in c' and c is like c'): assign s to c and continue to next hour. because students with lower student numbers tended to get their choices (correlated with when student joined district far better than class status) and courses late in the day were always half empty while courses earlier in the day were always filled to the brim. Things got better each year but never in a way that would suggest someone finally decided to pick up an algorithms textbook. I suspect by now they've purchased something that works or else managed to prove P=NP and the solution is billions of if statements fixing special cases the teachers/students complained loudly enough about... ~~~ thomasfedb I don't know the details, but I know my school had a person from IT with a computer science degree on secondment to the studies department at the beginning of each year to get the timetable sorted out. The phrase "least constraints matching" is something I remember being mentioned when I asked. ------ stcredzero Jonathan Haidt thinks an earlier child abduction scare sparked the overly fragile undergrads that started to appear in 2014. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snqXOvnHzcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snqXOvnHzcQ) We are raising kids lacking conflict resolution skills who can't discuss and would rather coerce someone who doesn't conform to their ideas. ------ tarr11 I'm not convinced this is a real problem. The term helicopter parenting was first used in 1990 [0] New Yorker article on same topic from 2008 [1] Articles and posts like this are chock-full of anecdotes and head-nodding, but short on studies or other data to even correlate against. Seems like this "crisis" has been happening for a long time. Is there a longitudinal study on children who have been "helicopter parented?" vs those who were raised "free-range"? [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent) [1] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/17/the-child- trap](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/17/the-child-trap) ------ finaliteration It’s a difficult balance to strike and it’s easy to judge parents either way. I’m plenty guilty of being on both sides as a parent. My particular challenge, however, stems from PTSD from childhood abuse and neglect, so I feel even -more- pressure to give my child everything she needs and wants because I don’t want her to feel as alone and unwanted as I did. But I do worry that comes at the price of her independence, which is something else I definitely don’t want to take away from her. The paradoxical thing for me is that much of what I’ve achieved has come about because I was forced to do things on my own and fend for myself. It built a lot of “character” but at the same time I’m not anywhere near happy or content. ~~~ fatnoah >so I feel even -more- pressure to give my child everything she needs and wants because I don’t want her to feel as alone and unwanted as I did This is a tough one because I think how we parent is super-strongly influenced by our experiences as a child. I think the keys here are to make sure she knows that you love and support her no matter what and that's as much of a given as that the sun will rise in the east AND to support her on doing things for herself. It's one thing if you're there to provide encouragement or a bit of help doing something vs. telling her to get it done and walking away. She'll learn the least from having everything on a whim or you doing everything for her. If the answer is "no" discuss why. Be fair and not capricious. Kids are smart. They know the difference between a parent that doesn't care and a parent that's setting limits. ~~~ finaliteration > It's one thing if you're there to provide encouragement or a bit of help > doing something vs. telling her to get it done and walking away. The former is definitely my approach. I never just dump her into a situation and ignore her, nor do I do everything for her. For example, cleaning up around the house is a joint effort. And arguments and power struggles are always followed up by reconciliation and reassurance that I still love her despite us being angry at each other. My biggest struggle is not knowing whether a punishment or correction is too severe (because all of the ones I received were), so I tend to be more lenient in a lot of situations where maybe I shouldn’t be. ------ projektir If you find a behavior you don't like, figure out what's causing it. It's probably not random, parents are probably not just being dumb. Test scores, or minor misbehaviors, or other things, can disproportionately influence someone's future, to extents that are not realistic or human. Children, left to their own devices, will have trouble surviving in a world that runs on rules that don't actually make sense. Parents can sense this, so they try to protect their children, and they play by the rules that they see. There's no advantage to being fair, to doing things the "right" way, because the message has already gotten out that the rules are arbitrary. It's not important what you know, it's important that you pass the test. Or, as they say, "best predictor of future behavior is past behavior" (very horrible sentiment). If you don't want parents being overzealous and a bit crazy about their children, stop making society so damn competitive and inflexible. There are so many pitfalls someone can fall down just by accident, just by being human. ------ JTbane The eternal debate continues between the "overbearing fascist helicopter parents" and the "free-parenting grossly negligent degenerates". (I have no horse in this race and find these pieces interesting nonetheless) ~~~ mikec3010 Controversy sells/generates clicks. Nobody wants to read a well-reasoned, balanced article when they're jonesing for that next micro-dose of e-dopamine. ------ notadoc Related: > The research found, on average, children were playing outside for just over > four hours a week [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/27/children...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/27/children- spend-only-half-the-time-playing-outside-as-their-parents-did) ------ throwaway0255 This topic is always a great opportunity to share stories about what childhood was like just a few decades ago, so I'll share mine. When I was 5-10, a typical day for me was spent alone or with friends outside, from sun up to down, with zero adult supervision. There wouldn't even be an adult who knew where I was going or where I was. They simply gave me the responsibility of returning home before the sun went down, and over those years I always did, mostly because I was hungry. The only exception was one day when I traveled too far, realized too late that the sun was going down, and collapsed from exhaustion trying to get home. My family searched for and found me during twilight. I learned valuable lessons that day. I recently looked up my childhood home on Google Maps to see how far I would go, and I would regularly travel within about a 3-mile radius. The surrounding area was heavily wooded and mostly vacant. I would see a black bear probably once a month. My parents just told me to make noise as I traveled, to keep them scared off of my position. I knew never to play with their cubs. I knew never to run from them. I knew to stand ground and be loud and aggressive if I was ever approached or charged by one. I fell off my bike and skinned my knees probably 40 or 50 times. I have many memories of limping my bike home on foot for a mile while sobbing in pain, and then squeezing my dad's hand as hard as I could while he poured hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol over my bleeding knee. Every time this happened, he would just tell me I was going to heal up fast and get right back on the bike. A common route for me was to ride my bike along the side of the highway a few miles to a corner store so I could buy chips or candy, or visit a waitress my family knew at a local breakfast spot for some free eggs. Nobody ever stopped their car and tried to "rescue" me. The people at the shops knew how I got there, they were not concerned. When I was about 10, my family moved to a rich white suburb outside a major city. Their policy of letting me be independent and go wherever I wanted unsupervised continued, but in this new town I was regularly approached by adults asking if I was lost, strangers asking where my parents were, and adults on golf carts with walkie-talkies reprimanding me and sending me home for no particular reason. I found their concern for my well-being incredibly insulting. I was insulted that they thought I couldn't handle myself, and later I was insulted by the way I realized they were judging my family and my parents. As a result, I was downright rude to a lot of them, and kind of earned a negative reputation. Ended up getting blamed for a lot of vandalism despite never vandalizing anything, and causing problems between my family and other local families, simply by locals assigning blame to me for all kinds of things based purely on my reputation of being out unsupervised a lot and being rude to certain adults. So I got a taste of both worlds just by moving. I don't think the problem of over-parenting is restricted to time and trend. I think it has a strong geographical and cultural component, too. I suspect that if I went back to my hometown, I might still find kids unsupervised, riding their bikes and skinning their knees in the summer. I've also heard from people outside the country that this helicopter parenting thing seems to be largely restricted to the US. ------ guard0g What kind of parent does their kid's homework?! Here's an idea. Why not have "how to be a parent" classes taught in high school or college? ~~~ aiyodev Parents who understand what “tracking” is. If you aren’t, you’re setting your child up for failure. ~~~ seattle_spring What is "tracking" in this case? ~~~ analog31 Kids are separated into different classes based on ability, so there's a fast place class and a slower paced class at each grade level. My elementary school was tracked. My mom made damn sure that my brothers and me were placed in the fastest track, whether we belonged there or not. Tracking has a lot of ominous implications due to bias, and has been abandoned to a considerable extent, but teachers still unavoidably treat different kids with different expectations. And "involved" parents can influence those expectations. ~~~ laurieg Tracking (or setting, or grouping) essentially means that the higher level groups are freed from the more distracting characters in the lower groups. Great for them, but terrible for you if you end up in one of those lowers sets and end up with a loud, boisterous and violent class for a year. Teachers are busy and overworked. I'm sure they try their best to put kids in the correct group for each subject, but you could easily end up in the 'wrong' one with no malice on the teachers part. My mother was a school teacher and when she found out that I wasn't in the higher group for English she fought tooth and nail to get me up there. She knew exactly what could happen in those lower groups. ------ geoffreyhale "parents are more focused on keeping their children safe, content and happy in the moment than on parenting for competence"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Headphone inline controls – how they differ on Apple iOS vs. Android/Nokia - sengork http://www.head-fi.org/t/825485/xiaomi-in-ear-headphones-pro-hd-2-1-hybrid/210#post_13086213 ====== wlesieutre To be more precise than "they don't work because Apple is terrible," the two competing pinout standards are CTIA (previously meaning Cellular Telephone Industries Association) and OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform). According to Wikipedia, the OMTP devices include: * old Nokia (and also Lumia starting from the 2nd gen) * old Samsung (2012 Chromebooks) * old Sony Ericsson (2010 and 2011 Xperias) * Sony (PlayStation Vita) * OnePlus One * Xbox One controller with head phone jack * iPhone sold in China and CTIA devices include: * Apple * HTC * LG * Blackberry * latest Nokia (including 1st gen Lumia as well as later models) * latest Samsung * Jolla * Sony (Dualshock 4) * Microsoft (including Surface and Xbox One controller with chat adapter) * most Android phones [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)#TRRS_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_$audio$#TRRS_standards) I haven't personally tested most of those, but IIRC when I had a Surface Pro the iPhone TRRS earbuds worked fine with it. ~~~ stonogo CTIA is a post-facto 'standardization' of what used to be known as 'AHJ,' which came about once companies needed a name for 'Apple-compatible' without actually naming Apple. CTIA is primarily a lobbying organization, and their past hits include laws that made it easier for the US government to surveil email and an attempt to get the US government to shut off TV broadcasting entirely. OMTP was an actual standard from a real-life standards body -- the same one that brought us micro-USB across all non-Apple phones. We lost functionality when we lost OMTP; imagine a world where you had dedicated buttons for track forward and back. Having been involved in the design phase of devices that supported each standard, I miss OMTP. ~~~ comex > We lost functionality when we lost OMTP; imagine a world where you had > dedicated buttons for track forward and back. There's one argument, albeit small, for killing the headphone jack. USB HID has included track control keycodes since forever, so USB earphones should be able to control playback by appearing as a HID device... I think... Of course, there too Apple is off doing their own thing with Lightning. ~~~ stonogo You can indeed -- and Nokia was producing such devices in the mid-2000s. There are even some models of Nokia phone that did not have a headphone jack; they had a micro-USB port that was used for both charging the phone and attaching headphones. Sound familiar? The peak of that approach was the Nokia WH-501, which consisted of a micro-USB connector at one end and a clip on the other, which had several audio controls. IIRC: volume up/down, call answer/hangup, mute toggle, track forward, and track back. It came with a regular set of 3.5mm earbuds, but of course you could use whatever headset you wanted, as the mic was built into the clip. At the time I remember someone had written a linux driver for this device, which worked quite well. So, ten years ago, we had a cross-platform standards-based headset with audio controls and reconfigurable earpieces. Like I said, a lot has been lost in the recent past. ~~~ digi_owl From an European point of view, the mobile world was set back a decade (if not more) by the tech media's fawning over Apple and Google's entry. This in large part because they built products for the US market, and it was lagging the rest of the world massively. ~~~ coldtea > _From an European point of view, the mobile world was set back a decade (if > not more) by the tech media 's fawning over Apple and Google's entry_ As a European I couldn't disagree more. Have you see the crap (including Nokia and Sony) that passed for smartphones before the iPhone and Android devices came along? You also make it sound like some big conspiracy for "the tech media's fawning over Apple and Google's entry". If there was that much better European mobiles where were/are they hidden? That some standards (like the above for headphones) existed and were lost, I can accept. But nothing much else... ~~~ jnky > Have you see the crap (including Nokia and Sony) that passed for smartphones > before the iPhone and Android devices came along? I have to disagree with you here. The first iPhone was awful and the smartphones and PDAs of the time were in my opinion way ahead of the iPhone. I will concede that the established players failed their market, as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone. I know it's not to be taken seriously, but this neatly expresses my opinion at the time the iPhone came out: [http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone](http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone) ~~~ coldtea > _I have to disagree with you here. The first iPhone was awful and the > smartphones and PDAs of the time were in my opinion way ahead of the iPhone_ I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia communicator and others. Also crap. Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we can see if that was the case? > _as people in general (as opposed to techies) wanted a sleek device with > nice UI over the features that people took for granted until the iPhone._ If those devices didn't have a sleek device and a nice UI what did they have over the iPhone? More features? Features are nothing without the form factor and usability. The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were beyond crap. ~~~ jnky > I had the then reviewed as "best" smartphone pre-iPhone, a Sony top of the > line one with a stylus. It was crap. Have also played with the Nokia > communicator and others. Also crap. I strongly disagree. > Can you point to any "smartphones and PDAs of the time" that were "ahead of > the iPhone" with an actual link to a product page/review/wikipedia, so we > can see if that was the case? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II) The difference between these devices and the iPhone baffles me to this day. Yeah the iPhone had a better UI, but it didn't even have 3G, Apps, IM, MMS, Copy&Paste and a whole load of other features. You couldn't even open a socket or ping a machine with it. > Features are nothing without the form factor and usability. Again, I strongly disagree. Features are everything, while a sleek UI is worthless if you know your way around the apps you care about. Unrelated to the iPhone, I consider the trend to "dumb down" UI such that untrained users can have pleasant user experiences without prior knowledge to be annoying and misguided. Obviously that's what the market wants, but I find it frustrating when apps or services are lacking features that people have been taking for granted for 20 years. > [...] The internet browsing experience, for example, in those phones were > beyond crap. I'm willing to concede that the browsing experience on the iPhone was far superior to all other smartphones at the time. However, I would argue that even on the iPhone the browsing experience was kinda crap, as there was no mobile web to speak of in 2007 and the usability of desktop sites on mobile was hit and miss. ------ jws For the curious or confused by the _" when you tap the button it shoots an electrical signal that the phone will pick up and interpret"_ in the article, the control buttons are implemented as resistors switched across the mic/ground pair. The mic is 1000Ω or higher. The functions resistors are lower. You can see nice diagrams at… [http://source.android.com/devices/accessories/headset/plug-h...](http://source.android.com/devices/accessories/headset/plug- headset-spec.html) ~~~ hugodahl Very nice and handy reference! Will give me something to compare against and my Pixel and Amazon headset. Apparently, vol up on the headset triggers the assistant, while all other buttons work as expected. Oddly, the same headset worked flawlessly on a OPO and Nexus 6. And Google hardware support cannot recommend a specific make/model, just one with "an on/off switch for the mic". ------ rickdeckard Apple didn't patent a "resistance", they implemented a control-chip in their headphones starting from the iPod Shuffle in ~2009, and patented that chip. Purpose was to ensure a revenue-share from headphones so that every accessory- maker who wanted in-line controls had to pay a license to Apple to use the control-chip. (the control-chip was meanwhile reverse-engineered and its functionality is now integrated in non-licensed headphones as well) ~~~ bostand "ensure a revenue-share" Such a nice word for such an ugly business practice.... ------ mattkevan Has this got anything to do with the way inline controls seem to be unreliable in Android? I got out of the habit of using them as there was only a 50/50 chance of anything happening when pressing a button. Sometimes even when successful it would take a while to take effect. Pressing the button a few times in case it didn't register led to nonsense like it stopping and starting rapidly a few seconds later. I first noticed this on a Fairphone on 4.2 and just thought it was due to a sluggish phone on an old system, but the problem remained on a Nexus 6 with versions 5 and 6. Also Android seems to be bad at remembering the last audio app that was open. On iOS, you can listen to something, unplug the headphones, do something, plug them back in, hit the play button and you carry on where you left off. Android not so much - you have to manually open the app for it to work. Although I once had a podcast app and a music app start _at the same time_. ~~~ hsod > On iOS, you can listen to something, unplug the headphones, do something, > plug them back in, hit the play button and you carry on where you left off In my experience, this doesn't work very well anymore on iOS 10 ------ simonjgreen This is not a fair representation of the situation at all, and also doesn't even hold true. For example, I recently switched from iPhone to Galaxy S7. My apple earbuds centre button pauses and resumes but the volume controls do nothing. So the problem is not as straightforward as Apple vs Android. ------ codfrantic To make things even more complicated, I have a Sony Xperia Z2 which uses a 5 point jack plug TRRRS, as far as I know the extra connection is only used to receive microphone signal from the included noise cancelling headphones.[1] (Since the noise cancelling logic is handled on the phone). [1] [https://www.sonymobile.com/global- en/products/accessories/di...](https://www.sonymobile.com/global- en/products/accessories/digital-noise-cancelling-headset-mdr-nc31em/) ------ tener > In other words- you could have a device with the same TRRS Pinout as apple > products- but the headset wont work because the resistances (ohms) of the > headphones send signals that your phone is not allowed to interpret into the > correct actions (since apple patented these) Can you seriously patent actual resistances? ------ joecool1029 Pretty sure Blackberry use the Apple 'standard' as well. ------ nickcano This causes a ton of compatibility problems, and it's worse that a lot of companies don't seem to care and advertise compatibility anyways. I noticed this a while ago when I wrote this review: [https://www.amazon.com/review/R2RH78QWKSM5W7/ref=cm_aya_cmt?...](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2RH78QWKSM5W7/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B004SP0WAQ) ------ jswny Wow I had no idea this is why Apple headphones don't work on other devices. I was under the impression they did not work because apple devices are 3 pole vs. everything else being 2 pole. ~~~ davidbanham Everything with a microphone is 3 pole. ~~~ brians Everything discussed in the article is 4-pole, isn't it? L, R, G, Mic? These days, Apple devices are 8-pin 2-lane lightning, and use separate lanes for audio and control. The Apple EarPods appear to be _7_ -pole: separate grounds for each signal wire, all as twisted pair. That's pretty cool, as someone who wants earbuds to work well near RFI. ~~~ Godel_unicode > ...wants earbuds to work well near RFI. This is the first time I've heard that argument, what RFI are you near that was breaking normal headphones? ~~~ kuschku > what RFI are you near that was breaking normal headphones? Mobile phones. The good old _br t br t brrr tt br_ whenever the mobile phone thinks it has low signal and fires at full power and causes interference. A video demonstrating it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TWXCVbBTcc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TWXCVbBTcc) ~~~ tjohns That sound has less to do with power level, and more to do with what mode your phone's modem is using. Specifically, that sound is associated with TDMA-style networks (e.g. 2G GSM), since the transmitter has to rapidly switch on/off, giving other phones a chance to transmit. This induces a series of audible-frequency voltage spikes in nearby cables. CDMA-style networks (e.g. CdmaOne, 3G GSM, LTE) don't have that problem, since the transmitter is effectively always on while transmitting. That's why you don't notice that sound very often anymore. ~~~ kuschku > That's why you don't notice that sound very often anymore. Except yesterday. And today. And every second day in my life. Because even my Nexus 5X in a 4G network occasionally sends/receives SMS in GSM mode. ~~~ lightedman I hear it every day with my 4G Moxee X1 sitting next to my Technics stereo. Anyone downvoting you must not realize this sort of interference is UBIQUITOUS and can be triggered even by someone with loose spark plugs in their engine.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says - rbanffy https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-11-03/former-twitter-employee-says-fake-russian-accounts-were-not-taken-seriously ====== dogruck Duplicate: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625216) ------ iokevins From the article: "Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts." ~~~ ben_jones It's almost as if influential figures and _community forums_ have been spewing "fake it 'til you make it" heavily for the last decade... ------ MBCook Why it’s almost as if there can be really REALLY big downside to “move fast and break things”. At a certain point you get to a scale where you really have to take the stuff into account. But no one seems to be doing that among these big companies. I saw a quote earlier today that said Facebook has something like 200 to 300,000,000 fake accounts. That puts those fake accounts as something like the fifth biggest “country“ on Earth. At the sizes ignoring these kind of problems and not actively trying to find/fix them before they happen seems just reckless to me. But given that Twitter can’t even keep the most basic harassment under control… I mean is there anyway to fix this at this point? I don’t know what kind of law could be passed to fix it, I doubt it would be constitutional, and I doubt the government would be willing to pass in the first place anyway. If the companies get this big and have no sense of social responsibility are we just screwed? ------ ycaccount I'm still not clear if this is related to the forensic analysis of the DNC leak? Is the narrative now that American voters fell for social engineering perpetuated by Russian actors? So the attack was a psychological operation, in coordination with Paul Manafort's bad business practices 10 years ago...? How is this 'what happened' in light of Donna Brazil's new revelations? ------ ceedan Nobody is surprised by this. Nobody. ~~~ kurthr It's interesting how surprise and outrage can be orthogonal. ~~~ aaroninsf Indeed. The amoral (and I use that word precisely) shading into unethical cowboy culture of many lions of the contemporary bubble/industry playing field, have set the industry up for a major backlash. That's why the big three changed tune this week viz. Congressional inquiry. Just as no one is surprised, everyone knows the writing is on the wall. Harsh oversight is coming; if these firms want a voice when it's being crafted, the only productive posture to assume at this point is one of acquiescence accompanied by increasingly directly worded mea culpa.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Experimental replication: knives manufactured from frozen human feces don't work - nkurz https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19305371 ====== otterley This sounds like a future nomination for an Ig Nobel Prize, joining other illustrious publications such as “Nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring with stamps” - [http://ignobel.org](http://ignobel.org) ~~~ dmix Fits well in the definition: "first make people laugh, and then make them think" ------ Lxr Don’t miss the supplementary material: [https://ars.els- cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352409X193053...](https://ars.els- cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352409X19305371-mmc1.docx) ------ pazimzadeh They tried to cut cold, dead hide with the "3D printed" knife. Anyone else think the hide might be tougher than taut, live tissue? They also only went on the Inuit diet for four days before trying it. And they didn't say how long it was frozen for. They also pointed out that the knife started melting pretty quickly after being exposed to the hide - this wouldn't happen in the arctic. ------ dmix > In his book, Shadows in the Sun, Davis (1998: 20) recounts what is now > arguably one of the most popular ethnographic accounts of all time > Since publication, this story has been told and re-told in documentaries, > books, and across internet websites and message boards (Davis, 2007, Davis, > 2010; Gregg et al., 2000; Kokoris, 2012; Taete, 2015). So it's not entirely without merit. I'm sure beyond the ethnographic stuff it will fill many "well actually ..." type corrections you find by the know-it-alls on Reddit and elsewhere on the internet. ------ umvi How do we know the Intuit didn't have diarrea that day and created essentially a brown ice knife? ~~~ dboreham All this while also developing Quicken.. ------ masonic Monetization idea: new Copro-Lite brand lightweight knives with field- replacable blades. Coming soon to Amazon! ------ aklemm If you ask this question, imagine what other questions it leads to? Not a good path. ------ foldingmoney I hope this knowledge never ends up being relevant to my life. ------ kjofol Smells like new "Sokal affair". ------ 0x8BADF00D Sounds like it was a shitty knife. ------ abakker Good publication for an elsiever journal. ------ ropiwqefjnpoa Good to know. ------ new_realist Piece of shit research.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: GlitchTip. Open source error tracking, compatible with Sentry SDKs - tallblondeguy https://glitchtip.com ====== tallblondeguy Just released a stable version of this yesterday. It's open source, so feel free to pull it and give it a try locally! We have installation instructions on our site[0] for the Docker image. [0]: [https://glitchtip.com/documentation/install](https://glitchtip.com/documentation/install) ~~~ jamescontrol Clicking any of the blog posts takes me to the installation guide. I cant seem to find any feature overview? Id like to see screenshots and a nice overview of the features when browsing a project site like this ~~~ tallblondeguy Thanks for pointing this out. Looks like it could be a bug in the static site generator we're using; I'll look into it more today.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
AppSec USA Conference Videos - david_shaw https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpr-xdpM8wG8jz9QpzQeLeB0914Ysq-Cl ====== david_shaw I really like when conferences -- particularly ones I haven't been able to attend -- post their full videos online. It's even better when there's a short feedback loop, so that the videos are online almost instantly. It looks like AppSecUSA put their full tracks online, which is great. OWASP is a pretty nice organization for builders and breakers trying to learn more about software security. For those of you that aren't familiar with the organization, it's a great thing to check out!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Smalltalk to get a second crack at the whip - horrido https://medium.com/@richardeng/smalltalk-to-get-a-second-crack-at-the-whip-ecaeb8a94533 ====== louiscyphre Smalltalk is the second most loved programming language, according to the 2017 StackOverflow survey. (Rust is most loved.) If any language deserves a second chance, it's Smalltalk. Thus, there's no reason why Smalltalk can't be widely adopted, whether it's in the enterprise or elsewhere (teaching, hobbyist, research, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT, virtual reality, etc.). Teaching: [https://medium.com/p/an-open-letter-to-all-universities- ad98...](https://medium.com/p/an-open-letter-to-all-universities-ad98af4a96b3) Machine learning: [https://biosmalltalk.github.io/web/](https://biosmalltalk.github.io/web/) IoT: [https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/pharo- pi-9eef257b6a21](https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/pharo-pi-9eef257b6a21) Virtual reality: [http://www.opencobalt.net](http://www.opencobalt.net) and [http://www.3dicc.com](http://www.3dicc.com) ------ mstade It's too bad this targeted a language that's actually useful, as opposed to something like brainfuck. For me the joke fell flat because of it. I would've loved to see this kind of investment – alas, such are the follies of this day. ------ pebblexe Hopefully they introduce namespaces (like matriona) and the type system of strongtalk with gradual typing. edit: just realized this was an april fools :( ~~~ agumonkey I've a lot of Pharo (ex Squeak) since a few years. Even done a MOOC which was very interesting. I could have believed this blog. ------ aaroninsf A tear for the old skool. Never again shall the sun of youth shine again nor my code wander tended glades with wonder plain and vigor unbound, exposed, unashamed, all in one world ~~~ ljw1001 that's just what I was thinking ------ derrickdirge So is Smalltalk a joke language now? ~~~ throwaway7645 No the author Richard Eng has been doing a ton of short marketing blog posts trying to get more attention for the language and appears to have an April Fool's sense of humor. He's also been talking about Go a lot which is very different than Smalltalk in all but the simplicity aspect. ------ coldtea Month aside, it would be a great thing to actually happen... Instead of e.g. Google investing tens of millions on BS like Dart. ~~~ metricodus What's so bad about Dart, if you disregard the "Google is trying to subvert the web" angst from people who have invested heavily in the javascript world? I quite like the optional typing in the language, for instance. I just wish there was more serverside-development happening in Dart - it seems 95% client-side focused at the moment (dart2js and flutter). ~~~ coldtea > _What 's so bad about Dart, if you disregard the "Google is trying to > subvert the web" angst? I quite like the optional typing in the language, > for instance._ A new language that doesn't solve anything better than Smalltalk did. ~~~ metricodus It does provide the feature of optional typing, as I just said. I spent my formative years developing in a language with optional typing and really grew to like it. I think it's a great concept that has missed the mainstream somehow. Besides from that the syntax is completely different, being inherited from C. ~~~ throwaway7645 Is optional typing the same thing as gradual typing in Perl6 as in you can specify types, but don't have to? ~~~ metricodus I don't know much about Perl, but this describes Dart's approach to optional typing: [https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/optional- types](https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/optional-types) (But meh, it's not really innovative/new as this page says, just not popular.) Basically, it's a language that allows you to choose the level of type checking. You can be super strict all the time, or only when it matters. Or not at all. Like all other modern languages it naturally has the basic collection data types built in so that you don't have to reinvent them. ------ erikj I wish this wasn't a joke. ------ throwaway7645 Lol, I assumed a joke immediately due to the figure and subject, but forgot the date for a second :) Edit: I don't think Smalltalk is a joke, just that HP wouldn't think this a worthy investment. ~~~ pacaro I think "Sun Microsystems marketing muscle" was what made me raise an eyebrow ~~~ throwaway7645 They did spend a fortune marketing Java when Smalltalk was poised to be THE new enterprise language. ~~~ pacaro I remember all too well. Sun had mindshare at the time too, in a way that the far bigger IBM didn't. I'm just glad none of the 4GLs won ~~~ throwaway7645 I'll cede my past reading of internet blog articles describing a time I was pooping in diapers to your actual real-world experience :) 2 questions..why did the smaller Sun have more mindshare and what were the 4GLs? I might not be familiar with the term. ~~~ pacaro The Fourth Generation Languages where supposed to take over from the Third Generation Languages (C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL etc.) for higher level work (like business computing) Many have been successful within niches, but Java was a brand new 3GL at a time when a lot of industry focus was on 4GLs. I think sun had mindshare because they understood the nascent internet much better. From my perspective it was the first time I had seen a marketing effort of that scale behind a programming language. Sun also supported SunSITE which was pretty much the best place to find FOSS at the time [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth- generation_programming_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth- generation_programming_language) ~~~ throwaway7645 Interesting thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor - xigency https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths ====== burger_moon You know where there isn't outcry about this? In Seattle at the Amazon corp offices. There are regular company wide email threads (seattle-chatter@ among others) making jokes about the shitty working conditions of warehouse employees. Walking around the hallways and lunch areas you hear people making jokes about how awful it is. Nobody there cares. Change the type of free coffee in the lunch areas though and all hell breaks loose. Quitting that company was such a relief to myself, and cutting ties with everything Amazon was at least important to me. I cannot morally support a company that treats their employees in such a way. ~~~ jschmitz28 I've been subscribed to that mailing list for about five years and I've never seen anybody making jokes about bad warehouse working conditions. Sometimes it gets brought up to let someone know that overcrowded bathrooms or "bad coffee" aren't so bad in relative terms. Also, some people care enough to sign their names next to quotes in support of warehouse worker strikes: [https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes- of-...](https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes-of- solidarity-for-striking-amazon-warehouse-workers-fe6e1c1e3c61) ~~~ claudeganon Just to be clear - did you sign your name in support or are you a current Amazon employee defending the company’s reputation in light of these deaths? ~~~ slowdog How did you come to this conclusion... this is just flaming ~~~ netsharc Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well. With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN... ~~~ viridian I know in the twitter thread that went viral, most of the "Amazon workers" were actually satirical accounts, that kept ramping up the outrage. The whole situation is shitty to be sure, and encouraging employees to defend you from Twitter mobs is stupid, but holy shit did a lot of people get baited hard during that whole ordeal. ------ blakesterz The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense: ● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network ● “Every day, every minute… heads being cut off” Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings ● A former employee says: “I don’t think it’s possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD.” I know nothing at all about this org: [http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf) ~~~ theguppydream The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant- facebo...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook- content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) ~~~ watt3rpig I read it a while ago and wish I hadn’t. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk. ~~~ colinyoung I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram). ------ theguppydream James Bloodworth's book Hired is a good companion piece. It covers what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse in the UK, among other low paid jobs. I'm not sure if it was the tagline, but I think 'the last thing you'll buy on Amazon' would be a decent slogan for the book. He has a tendency to get a little purple with his prose, but if you can get past that it's a good precis of low pay jobs. Here's a link to the Goodreads page. [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired) ------ mr_tristan The weird thing to me was not just the delayed response by 20 minutes (reportedly), but that everyone was forced to get back to work. It just illuminates this very impersonal atmosphere bordering on the inhumane. I'm wondering if this opens up Amazon to more regulatory scrutiny, or even punitive settlements in the future. Something like this seems like actual evidence for very negative patterns of behavior. This seems like a new kind of "hostile workplace environment" \- one where your workplace will ignore your medical needs if an accident occurs. I just wonder if this is just some older pattern that's repeating itself, it's just not widely known. ------ watt3rpig I had a friend who worked as a software engineer at a big retail company that wasn’t Amazon. They had a tour at a distribution center. The place was a death trap. He got a bad concussion by walking into a low ceiling. No hard hats, no warning about it nothing. ------ kiterunner2346 I've taken Amazon's warehouse guided tours several times The surprise was that there is NO surprise: the entire process is merely the application of current technologies in warehousing and distribution, with humans in the few niches where machines are not quite "there" yet. in the places where humans are involved, there's just enough workspace so that, say, once Amazon develops a proper "binning" robot, the human can be fired and a machine rolled in to replace him/her. Place was nicely put together though: all the screws and bolts tight, racks and tracks level and properly aligned, sensors everywhere on the production line ready to alert of any problem. So kudos to the guys and gals who put it together and lined it up! Looks like the U.S. Army put it together (well, actually, if the Army did it, it would be use better parts and be more sturdily constructed). As for what it does, nothing there of interest to high tech. ------ 2rsf Totally coincidental collection of cases about > delayed medical attention to a warehouse worker during a cardiac arrest I'm not trying to say that Amazon warehouses are a good place to work for, but if you want to be taken seriously make an effort to bring meaningful numbers. How many workers work at Amazon's warehouses ? 6 out of 125,000 [0] seems like a rather low rate Were there any laws or regulations broken ? What is expected from a nominal workplace before and when a worker suffers from a heart condition ? [0] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon- warehouse...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse- fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations) ~~~ Cthulhu_ What is expected from a nominal workplace is that they spot someone collapsing on the floor and give that top priority - I mean the article mentions a 20 minute response time, that's not normal for a busy warehouse. Vs a 2 minute response time for making a mistake. Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon? It's known they pay people to say how great it is to work at Amazon on e.g. twitter - not dystopian at all. I get really paranoid whenever someone jumps to the defense (or in your case sows doubt about an accusation towards) of a major corporation which can afford to both halve workload and double wages of all of their employees without having to worry about their bottom line too much. ~~~ GarrisonPrime Considering how many blind spots their warehouses must have, and how rarely many of the isles might be visited, I don’t think any special maleficence or irresponsibility is required for some down person to be missed for a while. Not saying they shouldn’t be fixing this problem, just that it seems like a problem even the most perfectly humane company could easily have. And you might want to check your paranoia. It doesn’t make you a reliable source of opinion to flat-out say you don’t believe anything made in defense of your predetermined villains. Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard. It’s completely wrong to claim they could halve the work and double the wages. Such assertions make you come across as delusional and biased. ~~~ tareqak From the article: > “How can you not see a 6ft3in man laying on the ground and not help him > within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the > wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down > to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said. Amazon management was able to identify via a camera that the deceased individual previously put an item into the wrong bin and act within two minutes to speak to him about the mistake. Why can’t Amazon management use a security camera to detect the same individual laying on the ground and get to him in two minutes? Yes, this quote is from that of the deceased individual’s brother, but Amazon could easily confirm, or refute this account. ~~~ Nasrudith It in no way excuses any negligence but the likely reason for that is frequency of events and how attention is structured in designs and processes. There are /far/ more cases of hurried workers misfiling items than having heart attacks. Algorithmic assistance would lack the events to recognize and humans would lack the attention to surveil everything. They certainly should do better and make appropriate changes to practices but at that scale it would require something systemic by definition whether it is adding a tighter employee welfare patrols or say emergency fall detection gadgets that ask if they are okay and if not responded to within a certain time call for aid or similar. ------ londons_explore Amazon has 250,000 hourly employees in the USA? Can it really take nearly 0.1% of the US workforce just to deliver online goods? And presumably that's an under-estimate, because it doesn't include most courier work. I was sort of hoping that every item I order on amazon has only perhaps 30 seconds of human time going into it... Assuming I order 3 items/week, and am typical of US citizens, amazon ought to be able to serve everyone with 130k employees. ~~~ mrfredward 30 seconds to grab an item off a shelf in a huge warehouse, wrap it, put put in a box, tape the box shut, print and attach a label, load it on a truck, and complete all the required tracking steps? And we still haven't accounted for managing all these people, cleaning the warehouse, or even stocking the shelves. Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 ([https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon- warehouse...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse- robots/index.html)). And that's shelf to delivery truck, so there is plenty more in that process that it leaves out. ~~~ londons_explore I'm guessing most of those steps will be automated, or done in bulk, therefore only taking 1 or 2 seconds of actual human time. For example, sticking labels on a box could be entirely automated, with the only time use being 30 minutes to replace the printer once every million labels when it wears out. ~~~ mrfredward Sure, lots of it is automated. There has to be a fantastic level of automation to achieve that 1 minute per order. Amazon is one of the most brutally efficient operations in world history. We read every week about workers afraid to take bathroom breaks, and according to the article here workers seem too busy to notice their coworkers dropping dead of heart attacks. The sentiment of us here at our keyboards saying "wow, I can't believe it takes more than 30 seconds to put my order in a box" seems really wrong. ------ mapcars What is strange to me is that after a series of such incidents workers don't go out on protest or something, given this is happening in the US. ~~~ foxhop Amazon actively, proactively, and reactively busts all forms of labor organization, including unions. Hourly wage workers do not have the time, or runway to protest. The deaths are only witnessed by a handful of workers, as their zones are spread very far out in these enormous warehouses. Word of mouth flows very slowly as a result. During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans. ~~~ krapp >During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans. To be fair, some of us prefer it that way. ------ jrowley Amazon is the Foxconn of America (although Foxconn now has operations in the US too) ------ onetimemanytime >> _Amazon said it had responded to Foister’s collapse “within minutes”._ Yeah, in just 45784512 minutes. Actually less, but 20 minutes is not minutes when it comes to heart attacks. ------ Merrill A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap. Any large employer will have people die on the job. ~~~ PhasmaFelis An occasional random death at work is statistically inevitable. Six deaths in as many months is something else. A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work. The article links to the NCOSH Dirty Dozen report, which describes a well-documented history of Amazon mistreating sick and injured employees. [http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf) Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences. ~~~ gridlockd > Six deaths in as many months is something else. It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013." It doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died _on the job_. Six out of ~125,000 warehouse workers in one year would be double the average[1] (over all professions), but 13 out of ~100,000 over six years would be quite low. > A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite > clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him > to drink some water and go back to work. That sounds like medical malpractice, should be investigated on its own merits. > Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences. Yes, but also don't declare it a scandal before the facts are on the table. [1] [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf) ~~~ PhasmaFelis > _It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013." It > doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died on the > job._ One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't counting employees who slipped in the shower at home. But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable. It also mentions (direct quotes): * a high incidence of suicide attempts * workers urinating in bottles because they are afraid to take breaks * workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries * the company treated illness as a “misdemeanor,” assigning a point that could have led to dismissal when [an undercover investigator] took a sick day This is not a few bad apples. This is systematic. ~~~ gridlockd > One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't > counting employees who slipped in the shower at home. I disagree. With these kinds of sources, you can't reasonably assume this. > But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April > 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations > since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to > April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable. You're right, I should have paid more attention, because those deaths aren't Amazon employees _at all_ and _none_ of them are warehouse workers: _\- Andrew Lindsayand Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018._ _\- Brien James Dauntfell to his death during construction of an Amazon warehouse in Oildale, CA in January 2019. Falls from a height are a well-known –and preventable –hazard in the construction industry, with long-established protocols to reduce risks. CalOSHA is investigating the incident._ _\- Aviators Ricky Blakely,Conrad Jules Askaand Sean Archuletadied in February when an Air Atlas plane, carrying cargo for Amazon, crashed into Trinity Bay, southeast of Texas. Blakely and Aska worked for Air Atlas and were members of the Airline Professional Association (APA), Teamsters Local 224. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident._ None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon. This also explains why over the period of several years, Amazon workplace fatalities were well below average: They counted those properly. Working at Amazon is actually very safe, statistically speaking. ~~~ PhasmaFelis > _those deaths aren 't Amazon employees at all_ > _None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon._ Whether their paycheck is signed by Amazon directly or through a contracting service is irrelevant. Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the rules and standards it requires them to meet. If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent. ~~~ gridlockd > Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the > rules and standards it requires them to meet. I don't disagree that Amazon has _some_ responsibility here, but within reason. No evidence has been presented that Amazon has been neglectful. Accidents happen even in the safest of environments, but you also can't expect Amazon (or any other company) hiring a contractor to supervise them 100% of the time. It can't work that way. > If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent. Again, there is no known indicator that Amazon was being negligent in these cases, otherwise that would've been put forth. Whether or not such indicators will turn up during investigation, Amazon is already on that list. That's plain dishonesty. ------ gridlockd > The incident is among the latest in a series of accidents and fatalities > that have led to Amazon’s inclusion on the National Council for Occupational > Safety and Health’s 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in > the United States. Completely ridiculous. Look at the list: [http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf) In five out of these twelve, nobody actually died. Those may be shitty jobs/companies, but they're not exceptionally dangerous - especially not Amazon. This is spitting in the face of people who actually have dangerous jobs with exceptional risks: [https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most- dangerou...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerous- jobs-us-where-fatal-injuries-happen-most-often/38832907/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Yahoo protects user privacy and gets fined? - aj http://blog.cdt.org/2009/07/11/yahoo-protects-user-privacy-and-gets-fined/ ====== onreact-com Next time Yahoo hands over Chinese dissidents to the police we will be able to tell them that their "obeying by the laws" point is not valid, they don't abide by random laws elsewhere either.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives [pdf] - BurnGpuBurn https://www.ru.nl/publish/pages/909275/draft-paper_1.pdf ====== JoachimSchipper Duplicate, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382975) instead.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Churn Prediction with Automatic ML - pplonski86 https://www.r-bloggers.com/churn-prediction-with-automatic-ml/ ====== PaulHoule Yawn, another "data science" site with thin content and very thick ads. One thing I can predict is that the "popup that will not appear again" will appear again.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How's your mood (April 2016, regarding life, job, technology)? - sig_chld_mike ====== warriorkitty Well, I got a job as a Head of Software Development at one company with a great team and it's pretty hard. It's a great experience but I'm sad as I don't have much time to read and learn about topics I'm interested in. For example, Graph theory. I'm amazed with the topic but I just can't afford reading about it more than half an hour per day. I could say it's "okayish".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
First Functioning Touchable Quantum Model: Many-Worlds For High School - jonbaer http://www.science20.com/alpha_meme/first_functioning_touchable_quantum_model_manyworlds_high_school-125081 ====== officialjunk ... what?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Analyse Asia Podcast 4: JFDI, the Y Combinator of Southeast Asia - bleongcw http://analyse.asia/2014/09/28/episode-4-jfdi-asia-ycombinator-southeast-asia/ ====== bleongcw Synopsis for Episode 4: In this episode, Hugh Mason, co-founder and CEO of Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (JFDI) joined us on an interesting discussion on the role of incubators and accelerators in Asia @ Blk 71 (where most startups in Singapore are located with a total valuation of US$1.5B). We traced the story of JFDI, from how they started from the Hackerspace Singapore to the present state where they have incubated and delivered three batches of 100+ startups worth about US$36M all over Asia. In the same podcast, Hugh also shared his perspectives on the business models and business trends of incubators and accelerators across Asia and stories on what works and fails with entrepreneurs within the JFDI network. Hugh also shared his thoughts on how corporations can work with local incubators to jump-start new projects in coping with disruption and also providing a glimpse of what the future entails for JFDI in the next 3-5 years.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The FCC says Net Neutrality cripples investment, but that's not true - doener https://www.wired.com/story/the-fcc-says-net-neutrality-cripples-investment-thats-not-true/ ====== philamonster I live in a small-ish market in the Northeast that has been under Time Warner's thumb (now Spectrum) for some time. Since moving here ~2012 there has been the promise of fiber to the home by a small local ISP. To everyone's surprise, and even TWC, expansion started really happening in 2016 and has exploded since for this same small ISP. They're relying on actual order fulfillment with payment once property easements are settled and engineering completes in what they designate as individual districts. With packages promising 100mbit/10mbit as base for $50/month and up to 1gbps/100mbps for $100 ($110 for static IP) TWC couldn't come close (30mbit/5mbit for $70+ at the time I was able to switch in spring 2016). This expansion prompted TWC to expand their packages after the Charter merger but they still cannot deliver what this now growing ISP can promise at similar cost. This is what Net Neutrality means to these large ISP's. Giving equal footing to consumers and small businesses they have been fleecing for so long though nowhere near actually being equal. It's clear people are fed up and can express that. Pai & his FCC removing any semblance of voice to that public is shameful and unethical and clearly, as has been stated over the previous months, not based in fact. ~~~ treis What does Net Neutrality have to do with your story? ~~~ jjoonathan It's strong evidence that net neutrality wasn't the dominant factor "crippling investment." ~~~ treis Isn't it the opposite? A new ISP competing is presented as something noteworthy and unusual. That's exactly what we would expect to see in an environment of crippled investment. ~~~ philamonster >A new ISP competing is presented as something noteworthy and unusual. But it is. I moved here from a large city and my _first_ thought after having FiOS for a couple years was damn, TWC; throttling, data caps & absenteeism. I heard nothing but complaints and horror stories from locals but the only alternative was (only) Frontier which was somehow worse. In the view you present, how is overturning NN not benefiting TWC while at the same time allowing for more investment and growth? Wouldn't that be detrimental to TWC's business? Not to mention this new ISP's expansion didn't really start until after NN was enforced, whether coincidentally or not. ------ rectang Supposedly "anti-regulation" forces energetically oppose Net Neutrality -- but don't expect them to follow through and remove the regulations that protect the telco monopolies. "Anti-regulation" rhetoric against Net Neutrality is either sock puppetry or useful idiocy. ~~~ betterunix2 Actually, I and a number of other engineers submitted comments on this proceeding to that effect. Pai's argument is, in part, that ISPs provide access to information services (social networking sites, email, video streaming, etc.) and should therefore be considered information services. Of course, any form of communication, even carrier pigeons, can be used to communicate over the Internet, so in theory what he is saying is that nothing can be regulated under Title II. The FCC's draft rules respond to this objection by simply dismissing it. The draft rules basically dismiss all commentary that did not come from ISPs as "not persuasive." The only reason any of those comments were cited at all is to prove that all submitted commentary was considered, something that is legally required of them. ~~~ Delmania On multiple occasions, Pai has indicated he is going to roll these rules back regardless of what anyone says. He did claim that he would entertain a sound argument proving that Title II hasn't hurt investment, but the only way to prove that is with the cooperation of the entities that stand to profit. This is why there is a good chance this will be tied in the federal courts. The comment process is supposed to prevent an "arbitrary and capricious" decision by a federal agency. Pai's comments could be used to make a persuasive argument that this is arbitrary (says we're desperate doesn't help). Capricious is a much harder thing to prove. I think the fact that data shows the comment period was tainted by foreign entities, false entries, and that 98.5% of the valid comments were in support of NN could use to show this is capricious in that his actions show a disregard for the consumer. ------ DiThi I keep seeing everywhere comments against Net Neutrality using this argument. And saying that it cripples free market, because new ISPs wouldn't be able to compete having the expense of regulatory compliance. But _nobody_, absolutely no one explained to me _why_ would it cost even a cent to ensure Net Neutrality (that is not part of ensuring a quality service in general). We should ask this more when discussing that argument, because it seems there's a lot of people truly believing this having that notion unchallenged. ~~~ drieddust Unregulated Capitalism in the very reason monopolies are created. Founder of Capitalism favoured an economy where a lot of small companies competed together to the benefit of consumers. He also recommended regulations where natural monopolies arise due to limited supply. As an example, he recommended heavy taxes on rent seeking[1]. This is a case of American Capitalism taken to its logically conclusion where any regulation makes it anti competitive. American psyche is so attuned to "Free Market" that anything lazy argument will be invoked. On the contrary we have Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in India which has done wonders for us. Our market is highly regulated, yet we enjoy cheapest ISP services. We have also favoured Net Neutrality by opposing Facebook[2] when they came knocking on our door and now its part of our regulations after a year long deliberation [3]. [1] [https://www.prosper.org.au/about/geoists-in-history/adam- smi...](https://www.prosper.org.au/about/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-the- rentier/) [2] [http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/internet/TRAI- ru...](http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/internet/TRAI-rules-in- favour-of-Net-neutrality/article14068029.ece) [3] [http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/trai-differential-data- pr...](http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/trai-differential-data-pricing- regulations-net-neutrality/1/1104985.html) ~~~ drdaeman Counterexample: we had mostly unregulated (except for mandatory government survelliance boxes, billing software licensing, and a reasonably affordable license to provide telecommunication services if you have more than 1K subscribers or more than 2 years in business - but all of this wasn't particularly heavy) market in Russia and the competition had worked. From the subscriber perspective, it was a norm to have 5+ different options, that had actually competed on pricing, quality and features. Every year prices used to go down. Then, when they got real low (like 100-200 RUB - when it just didn't made sense to go lower), speeds and packages started to grow. And whenever one option did something wrong (like throttling P2P traffic) they started lose active userbase very fast. It really worked. Then things had changed. Last 5 years our Czar and his pet Duma noticed there is lack of regulation, so they started to write laws one after another. All sort of mandatory logging, censorship, peering policies (who can and who can't peer), extra licensing rules, UGC-related policies, etc etc - and, of course, all for the sake of subscribers' and national "security". Small ISPs died like it was a plague. Larger ones grow even larger - for obvious reasons. Various explanations are possible (and regulations here are mostly different from NN, just authoritarian government strengthening their hold), but here's what I'm absolutely certain of: not all regulation is good. At the very least, consider if you trust your government (and all future governments) with such powers. \--- Full disclosure: I've worked for 10 years for an ISP in Russia. Haven't been to the U.S. so don't know how exactly things are there. Yet, have a preliminary/uneducated opinion that they should've either hold NN (as a sort of a kludge - but there is no competition) and think how they can add more competition (=choice), or abolish NN but only _simultaneously_ deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market. ~~~ DiThi > and regulations here are mostly different from NN Not mostly, but totally. It costs very very little to comply with NN law, and protects the consumer. The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. > or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP > startups can actually enter the market. There's a lot of regulations that should be gone, but NN is not one of them. ~~~ drdaeman > The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. Also, the problem is sometimes things work differently. For example, licensing/certifying billing system (not a recent thing, though) was meant to protect customers from broken accounting. In reality it primarily worked as providing "certified billing providers" a source of revenue. And billing failures were still not unheard of. Data storage requirements (recent set of policies) were sort of pro-customer, with the idea to help privacy of personal information. In reality, it doesn't do any much (except for the fact every form with personal data now has an extra mandatory "I agree" field) > It costs very very little to comply with NN law The recent edition (as I've briefly seen it) - yes, probably you're right. It fixes the issues I'm about to mention. The "customer traffic is sacred" edition I think there was once (unless I'm mistaken - maybe I read someone's incorrect interpretation, or some early edition that wasn't complete) - nope. Having a ton of hacks that analyze traffic and policy/route it differently - I believe is a norm for every ISP that respects their customers. Without that you have phone lines full of customers complaining that YouTube buffers every minute, their favorite MMO ping is crappy so they can't raid, VoIP calls drop, commodity WiFi access point fails because it's overloaded by torrents, etc etc. In an ideal world, everyone would correctly tag their packets, no one would try to abuse the system and so on. In reality, sometimes even quite nasty hacks are necessary just to make users happy. Heck, I'd admit - we even had to intercept DNS records once as a temporary measure. It was early 2010s, Google had some issues back then - some of YouTube servers were just slow and no amount of routing hacks (we tried to use every upstream) had helped. A great sin, but at least users were able to watch videos they wanted. And we had "don't mess with anything" option, directly in the self-service area. That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition - when consumers can switch providers literally in a matter of days if not hours, so providers _deeply_ care about customer satisfaction. Otherwise it's just irrelevant, and I'm generally against useless regulations. Disclaimer (again): I've worked for an ISP so I'm probably biased. I try to debias myself (and I swear, I believe I write honestly), but still I can't be sure. ~~~ eropple _> That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition_ This is completely true. America, as it happens, _loves_ its natural monopolies wherever it can get them, and so that's why this kludge is our best (and only) option. ------ perlpimp Net neutrality cripples rent extraction by semi-institutionalized quasi monopolies and tapestry of highly bureaucratic resistant to instant competition environment. ------ Crontab In my opinion, FCC chairman Ajit Pai is corrupt as hell. The only reason to make this change is corporate donors. ------ kjrose While I agree it doesn’t cripple some investment. I can see how it can cripple other investments. It’s essentially choosing a winner and declaring the other folks to be utilities without actually calling them utilities. ~~~ tzs Who is the winner and who are the other folks? I've seen some similar language from some politicians, but they have been confused over the difference between an ISP and a web site. To use a meat space analogy, they can't tell the difference between a taxi company and Walmart, and think that they both should fall under the same regulatory framework and have the same rules. ~~~ kjrose The roads are still privately owned in the net neutrality analogy. So the government isn’t paying to maintain or upgrade them. However the taxi companies also don’t have any direct payments or influence since the roada must remain neutral. If we want net neutrality than make the roads a public good. To do this FCC political play is just silliness. ~~~ Kadin > If we want net neutrality than make the roads a public good That would be nice, but unfortunately the same corporate interests that are presently disassembling net neutrality rules already prohibited public-sector projects that might compete with them and interfere with their monopoly rents. There is no feasible route to public ownership of the infrastructure at the moment; ensuring reasonable and non-discriminatory access to it, on the basis of that infrastructure only existing due largely to license and permitting agreements (use of public land, pole leases, etc.), is -- or rather was, until last November's election -- a reasonable step in the right direction. I wouldn't mind a public conversation, though, about seizing last-mile infrastructure and making it a public good, just as a sort of Overton Window- shifting maneuver. Right now the momentum favors the ISPs, and they are going to continue to consolidate their monopoly positions and extract maximum rents from consumers while the regulatory environment favors them. Blunting the momentum and inevitability of their regulatory takeover would be good, although I'm pessimistic about being able to do it in the near term. ------ nkkollaw I'm European so I have no idea, but does the FCC not exist to protect you from things similar to what themselves are proposing!? ~~~ Kadin It used to, but the current administration is intentionally handing the control of various regulatory agencies over to the industries that they regulate. There is little reason in trying to argue with those in charge of the FCC, EPA, etc., because they very obviously don't care about arguments based on public benefit or their agencies' traditional mission. They are interested in creating a regulatory environment that is more profitable for the entrenched players, that is all. And they are going to do that, as long as they have the power to do so, and damn what anyone has to say about it. Ajit motherfucking Pai doesn't care what anyone in the public sphere thinks about him; he's almost certainly doing what he's doing, in full knowledge of how hated it's going to make him, in exchange for some sort of payback on the back end that he believes is worthwhile. Presumably "fuck you" money; enough that he thinks he can live comfortably and ignore the people he pissed off to get there. I do not think that there is much that can be done, presently, to stop these people. However, I do think there is, or rather will be, an opportunity once they leave office to discourage anyone from doing it again, by doing all that is possible to prevent them from simply retiring comfortably from the public eye and enjoying their ill-gotten wealth. Anything that can be done to disrupt their lives on a personal level, keep the public aware of their doings and whereabouts, and prevent them from knowing peace, will be a good warning to others who might consider doing the same. I have no faith in the legal system to do this, so it will need to be done extralegally through the press and social pressure. ~~~ nkkollaw Thanks for the ELI5. ------ CodeWriter23 I’m pretty sure I can explain the decline in investment in 2015. The tl;dr version: Time Warner cooked the books by cutting spending on essential maintenance during the proposed acquisition by Comcast. Here’s why I come to that conclusion. In early 2015, I had TWC Business Class installed at our Downtown LA warehouse. One day, the time between scanning a shipment to print the shipping documents and the acknowledgment beep from the system grew from sub-second to 15-30 seconds. The scanning would trigger access to an internet-hosted database to update the order, and would initiate a label request to our postage provider. The label requests would time out. It was huge headache for us. I begin my investigation by pinging my local router. Nice 1-2ms responses. Pinged the modem, again 1-2ms responses. Tried pinging 8.8.8.8 and WOW! 1200-15000ms response times. FIFTEEN SECONDS for an ICMP request/reply! And a lot of packet loss to boot. I worked around the problem by using my phone as a hot spot for the computers in the warehouse. I called TWC and since it was Business Class, they rolled a truck within 4 hours. The tech was from a third-party contractor and was very competent by all appearances. He was astonished by my observations. He put his scope on the line in my unit and saw a minor deviation in signal loss. He replaced the drop from the pole to my unit, and said the female receptacle on the pole looked a little worn so he moved the new drop to a new location on the terminal. And the ping times went back. But the story doesn't end there; in fact this went on for nearly 2 months. During periods of the day, the lag and timeouts would occur. I improved the software to add some retries to the postage provider if the label request failed. I started pinging 8.8.8.8 on a constant basis so I could show the patterns of packet loss and high latency. About the third visit from the same tech, he told me that card in my local node was oversubscribed. He said a single card was intended to serve about 250 customers and that my card had about 600 customers on it. I hammered on TWC for weeks. I coordinated with my neighbors who understood what "oversubscribed" meant and spoke decent English to do the same. After about 8 weeks, the same tech came knocking and told me the node had been upgraded and wanted to check in. Ping times were great. We had no problems after that. Sounds like a one-off just bad luck, right? Not so fast. Fast forward about a year. The TWC/Comcast merger is off. I'm sitting at home one day, using my TWC consumer service. Something took to long to load, so I looked a little further, and what do you know? Long ass ping times to 8.8.8.8 and packet loss. I call. I have to wait days for the truck to arrive because I'm not Business Class at home. One tech comes out and observes a few db of signal loss and decides to replace the drop from the pole. I point out the drop was only about 2 years old and was replaced due to a different problem. It's now a two man job, and we wait for the second tech. Once he arrives, they cheerfully install a new drop, and then the problem didn't go away. I told them based on my experience I thought the local node was oversubscribed. They punted and said someone else would come the following day. They arrive with two techs and a lead or engineer. The lead calls various plays to rule out numerous things. After about an hour, they have ruled everything out. He confirms my local node has an excess of subscribers on it but they had not seen it causing this kind of problem before. He pulls up a network schematic on his ToughBook, and isolates the identifier of my local node. Then he switches to - __THE SMOKING GUN __\- a list of about 25 or 30 node identifiers, each with a date in the second column. It 's a maintenance schedule to upgrade the nodes that they let languish during the TWC/Comcast acquisition phase. He tells me my node will be upgraded in about 3 months and they leave. About 3 months later, I got a follow up call. Things worked fine, case closed. I filed a story tip with Ars Technica about this. They never got back to me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Can someone help me get into copywriting for web? - els4283 ====== iamdave Check out <http://copyblogger.com> if you haven't already.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Resources for tech and regulations behind card processing - maged Any pointers to good resources to learn more about card processing industry? I've been interested in the idea of charging consumers their card fee, to not make high fee cards prohibitively expensive to small businesses. I assume this will be against credit card terms of service, but am interested in learning more. ====== treyfitty I like the idea. I don't have any tech resources, but from a regulatory front, look up "Regulation Z." [https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regzcg.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regzcg.htm) It's pretty comprehensive, and dense. But don't let it discourage you	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
What is the maximum length of a URL? - wslh http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-a-url ====== ojiikun No matter how long you think they can get, take care if you are going thru a load balancer - many, (those by Citrix come to mind) can mysteriously truncate URLs and cause all manner of weird bugs. And, of course, insert here a long-winded rant about how broken your data model is if you need more than about 1000 chars. ;) ~~~ afandian What about lots of GET params? Doesn't seem like lots of those means you have a broken data model. ~~~ mistercow I think if you have nearly 1KB of GET data, something is definitely wrong. ~~~ waitwhat 1KB of GET data is ~25 UUIDs. That doesn't seem excessive. ~~~ mistercow That seems like a lot of UUIDs to be passing via GET. If you send your UUIDs in base 64, you can fit 125 into 1KB. ~~~ mnarayan01 Even 125 is not all that much if the resources are not being directly shown to the user (e.g. automated services, etc). ~~~ mistercow I'm trying to understand why you wouldn't use POST in that case. ~~~ fusiongyro The choice between GET and POST should be driven by whether you're reading or modifying the resource, not the size of the request. ~~~ mistercow That's fine as an ideal, but can you give a non-aesthetic reason that it would actually matter? I can understand that for some APIs, it's cool that a human can read and edit the GET requests by hand and debug that way, but if we're talking about requests that pass around more than fifty UUIDs at a go, I don't think that's going to be a helpful approach anyway, and I'm really wondering if it isn't pushing the limits of a RESTful API to begin with. ~~~ fusiongyro Sure. All the proxies between you and the client are a lot more likely to cache a GET than a POST. ~~~ mistercow I've never looked at the code for caching GET requests, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that that code is probably not optimized for keying on 1KB URLs. In fact, caching seems like a really good consideration regarding the original point about 1KB being too big for a GET request in terms of architecture design. ~~~ fusiongyro You're really going to continue the debate by basically saying "I haven't read the code but it must not work like that?" In Squid it's 4K _by default_ : [http://www.squid-cache.org/mail- archive/squid-users/200208/0...](http://www.squid-cache.org/mail- archive/squid-users/200208/0423.html) I see no reference to a maximum URL size in Varnish, and a cursory glance through the source code is not revealing a hard-coded size. I'm not shocked. PHK is well-known for writing good code and good code generally doesn't have a lot of magic numbers. I really can't stand contrafactual arguing from first principles. I gave you a legitimate non-aesthetic reason and you came back with a softly wilted notion conjured whole out of your imagination. Shut up already. ------ bmuon Many comments seem to focus on traditional GET requests in which case long URLs are usually a smell. But there's a rather new requirement in the web that conflicts with limits on URL length: the use of modules for front-end JavaScript code. The best practice for modules is usually expressed as: 1) Write small modules 2) Concatenate scripts If you try to automate module concatenation then you'll get URLs like [http://example.com/combo?foo.js&bar.js&baz.js](http://example.com/combo?foo.js&bar.js&baz.js), which combined with "write small modules" can mean a long list of small modules that easily reaches 2000 characters. ~~~ grncdr What is the use case for concatenating scripts on request rather than as a build step? ~~~ jap One use case is if the scripts are part of a large framework on a 3rd party server. See e.g. the YUI 3 library configurator: <http://yuilibrary.com/yui/configurator/> ------ gcb0 It all boils down to the server/client. as in: does it matter if the http spec says X if the most used browser only sends X/2? back in 90-something i had to research that for url and cookies. msdn specs said something like "[url\|cookies] should be at least [some size]" mozilla's and w3c specs said: "[url\|cookies] should be at most [some size]" for everything. url lenght. cookie lenght. number of cookies per domain. number of cookies per subdomain... it was like that for ALL items. one said 'at least' the other 'at most', and for added fun, all the values where exactly the same on both. ~~~ jacques_chester The thing is that the RFCs use MAY and SHOULD for these things. Not MUST or SHALL. So it's implementation-defined from the get-go. I presume that the people writing HTTP servers and clients usually found it easier to allocate a fixed-length char array. ~~~ gcb0 May vs Should i can take. but At least vs At most I sincerely can't. ------ adamauckland What about a RESTful API where you pass in a list of IDs to retrieve from the server? You'd want to use a GET so it's idempotent but I can't see how you'd make an exceedingly long list of IDs without using a data payload underneath the GET statement. ~~~ darrhiggs Don't do it that way then. How about a using /queries collection? You could create a query there and have the server return a link to the results using the 'location' header. ~~~ mnarayan01 Or you could just use a PUT request with the ids in the request body. I get the reasoning behind doing it with a POST -> GET, but doing that as a default case would be nuts. If nothing else either I can a) DOS you trivially or b) you might as well use PUT because the result URI is going to be far from permanent. ~~~ adamauckland This is probably the most correct response. It still bothers me that because GET can't take bulk parameters I either have to use a PUT or spool many GETs (which still isn't as fast as one GET) ------ ry0ohki Another practical limit, I tried to register a 60ish character URL, and neither GoDaddy nor NameCheap would allow it. ~~~ bodhi In case you were curious, from Wikipedia[1]: > Each label may contain up to 63 characters. The full domain name may not > exceed a total length of 253 characters in its external dotted-label > specification. In this context "label" means a segment of the name, so in "www.example.com." "www", "example", and "com" are all labels. The next sentence: > In practice, some domain registries may have shorter limits. alludes to your problem somewhat ;) [1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System> ------ skwosh Other applications of long URLs: \- Unique and unforgeable references for capability-based security (e.g. the Waterken Server) \- Serialized continuations, or unforgeable references to server-side continuations (as in continuation-based web servers) ------ lucb1e I still think you should try not to exceed 255 characters, at least for the part before the hash sign. A good URL should not change, and anything this large is almost bound to change rather soon. The data URI scheme does not really apply here since it's never sent to any server. If a browser understands data URIs, it should logically also allow such long URLs. ~~~ Frozenlock I use long URL _because_ I want unique URL that will never change. Specifying what item(s) should be targeted in a pool of possibly millions, with endless possible combinations is bound to require some kind of precise pointer. Here is an example URL I use: [https://bacnethelp.com/vis/overview/KHs6cHJvamVjdC1pZCAiNTA1...](https://bacnethelp.com/vis/overview/KHs6cHJvamVjdC1pZCAiNTA1YTEyNWU0NGFlNDJlMDVhNzUwYzk3IiwgOm9iamVjdC1pbnN0YW5jZSAiMiIsIDpvYmplY3QtdHlwZSAiMCIsIDpkZXZpY2UtaWQgIjEyMzQifSB7OnByb2plY3QtaWQgIjUwNWExMjVlNDRhZTQyZTA1YTc1MGM5NyIsIDpvYmplY3QtaW5zdGFuY2UgIjEiLCA6b2JqZWN0LXR5cGUgIjAiLCA6ZGV2aWNlLWlkICIxMjM0In0gezpwcm9qZWN0LWlkICI1MDVhMTI1ZTQ0YWU0MmUwNWE3NTBjOTciLCA6b2JqZWN0LWluc3RhbmNlICIwIiwgOm9iamVjdC10eXBlICIwIiwgOmRldmljZS1pZCAiMTIzNCJ9KQ.). What I could do, however, is use some kind of shortening url scheme, kinda like google maps: <http://goo.gl/maps/3uP8y>. I'm still uncertain about which way is better. EDIT: Of course I mean a local shortening url, pointing to my own databases. ~~~ dorianj In the example URL you gave, the content of the URL (base64): ({:project-id "505a125e44ae42e05a750c97", :object-instance "2", :object-type "0", :device-id "1234"} {:project-id "505a125e44ae42e05a750c97", :object-instance "1", :object-type "0", :device-id "1234"} {:project-id "505a125e44ae42e05a750c97", :object-instance "0", :object-type "0", :device-id "1234"}) seems like it would be better stored on the server in redis or something (or, at least if leaving it in the URL, a more compact deduplicated format might be worthwhile) ~~~ mnarayan01 Part of me wonders what would happen if someone where to Base64 encode something like ({:project-id {:conditions "true); DELETE FROM projects WHERE (true"}}) ~~~ Frozenlock Nothing, it's not sql. It's a clojure map with all the necessary info to find the different components. But nice reflex! ;-) ------ asiermarques Depends on your web server configuration [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#limitrequestl...](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#limitrequestline) ------ jpswade As of 2012, they are as long as the platform will support because of the Data URI scheme. ~~~ cek The title of the post & the underlying SO article discuss URLs. A data: URI is not a URL, but a URI. People get confused about this all the time, but a URI is not necessarily a URL. A URL is always a URI. A URN is also a URI and might be a URL as well.[0] Interesting side note is how, in 1997, with the original uuid: draft[1] I goofed and didn't recognize uuid: was really a URN. This was corrected in RFC 4122 in 2005[2]. [0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_identifier> [1] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kindel-uuid-uri-00> [2] <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt> ~~~ jpswade The data URI scheme is defined in RFC 2397. See: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2397> Entitled as 'The "data" URL scheme'. Either way, it doesn't matter, because the OP has provided such limited details as to why this is required knowledge that the question is as irrelevant as the accepted answer. ------ martinced If you control both the client and the server you can have quite long URLs. I don't agree that a long URLs necessarily indicates a broken design. I've done it and configure my web server (Tomcat) to accept longer GET requests (so +1 to 'asiermarques' here, who pointed out that it depends on how the web server is configured too). There are services out there, like Google Charts if I'm not mistaken (but I may be mistaking it with something else) which, by the way they work, forces you to create quite long URLs. It generates a graph on the fly and nothing is modified on the server, so a GET is used, not a POST (which, IMHO, makes sense). From the thread I seem to understand that the Data URI scheme implies that company should start to upgrade or replace their broken load balancer that "mysteriously" truncate URLs and cause all manner of weird bugs ; ) ~~~ danielweber _If you control both the client and the server_ . . . and all proxies that may be in-between. I've debugged more than one client issue where people were doing something really weird over port 80.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Scientists have found a woman whose eyes have a new type of color receptor - wolfgke http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-found-a-woman-whose-eyes-have-a-whole-new-type-of-colour-receptor ====== vanattab I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Tetrachromacy and saw this interesting fact. "Humans cannot see ultraviolet light directly because the lens of the eye blocks most light in the wavelength range of 300–400 nm; shorter wavelengths are blocked by the cornea.[27] The photoreceptor cells of the retina are sensitive to near ultraviolet light and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) see near ultraviolet light (down to 300 nm) as whitish blue, or for some wavelengths, whitish violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to ultraviolet light, but blue cones a bit more." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy) ~~~ hatsunearu Hmm, I see those "blacklight" CFL ultraviolet lamps as violet-white. I see the sameish color on ultraviolet lasers. Am I the only one who sees it that way? Can anyone describe how they perceive those lamps? Communicating color is extremely difficult! ~~~ jhayward > Communicating color is extremely difficult! Odd personal anecdote: In first grade art class the teacher held up a piece of art paper and said "This is red". Being the curious student I was, I raised my hand and asked "how do you know?" I was looking for something that would answer both "how do you know I perceive red the same way you do" and also "what defines it to be red". Something about wavelengths and color spectrum etc. would have been a great answer. I was sent to the principal's office as a troublemaker. Never did like art class after that. ------ Roboprog Did anybody happen to see anything in the article about what wavelength the extra cone type was actually (most) sensitive to??? The article hyped the "millions of colors" aspect, but nothing about whether it was deeper reds, higher blues, or just more precise yellows (or whatever). ~~~ chriskanan cDa29 is a cone that is a deuteranomaly, which is a kind of altered sensitivity to green light. So, presumably she has better discrimination of yellows/greens/reds, and not blues. See this 2010 paper for details on this person: [http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...](http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf) ~~~ Roboprog Ah, thanks. So further improved primate detection of ripe fruit, then. ------ vanderZwan There's also the story of Concetta Antico, who is also supposedly a tetrachromat _and_ a painter.She claims to add hues to her paintings that she sees but we do not. Researchers are looking into her abilities. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds- first-t...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds-first- tetrachromat_b_5832242.html) [https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/](https://concettaantico.com/oil- paintings/) (watching her paintings through what is likely an LCD screen that isn't even wide gamut is a bit ironic, of course) ------ ryao Why would only women be capable of tetrachromacy? I am a man, but if the test is made public, I would be interested in testing myself. I am not color blind according to color blindness tests, but there have been instances where I disagreed on the color something was with others and while I could consistently use the name that they used for it, I felt it really ought to have been named something else. One involves "green" status LEDs on electronics, which seem more in common with yellow than green to me. They look different from yellow, but they seem closer to yellow than green to me and for lack of a better word, I would rather call them yellow. If I could use a different name for the color, mapping it to green when interacting with others would seem less weird. Another involved the paint of a house when I was young, whose color seemed to poorly resemble what my parents said it was when it was dark. The house has since been repainted. Having three primary colors never made much sense to me either, but that could just be my own ignorance. Anyway, I am sure that there are many more variations in human vision than we realize. The dress incident brought that to light: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_$viral_phenomenon$) It would be nice to have ways of categorizing them. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _Having three primary colors never made much sense to me either, but that > could just be my own ignorance._ Tree primary colors thing seems to be mostly ignorance of the educators teaching that stuff to children. There are no absolute "primary colors" \- basically, you can pick any colors at random and use them as a base for linear combinations; the set of colors you can express as such linear combinations form a color space defined by those base colors you picked. Red, green and yellow are a common historical picks, RGB is more common now because that's what is put on the computer screen, but CMY form a color space too. C.f.: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#/media/File:CIE1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#/media/File:CIE1931xy_sRGB.svg) \- the triangle inside is the color (sub)space of RGB overlayed on CIE 1931 color space ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space)). Source: I educated myself when I got asked by a local drunk to resolve a bet between him and (presumably) another local drunk while I was shopping in a local grocery store. Those two got into a bet over whether RGB or RGY are primary colors. ~~~ derekp7 I always understood it as RGB being additive -- each color directly stimulates a given color cone in the eye. Whereas process colors (CMYK) are subtractive, because they are a tint. White light hits the paper, but each color (Cyan, Magenta, or Yellow) takes out a certain RGB color leaving the remaining two colors to reflect off the paper. For example, Cyan is a filter for Red, leaving Green and Blue to reflect. ~~~ TeMPOraL I'd say it's a property of the medium, not of the colors. Computer screens blend additively because you emit a mix of light waves; pigments blend substractively because they are filtering out wavelengths from incoming white light. Color spaces and "primary colors" are orthogonal to that. ------ schoen I thought the discovery of individual tetrachromats had been reported several times in recent years. This article seems to suggest that women who were anatomically capable of tetrachromatic vision were found before, but that none of them were successfully confirmed to be tetrachromats in practice until this new study. Is this really the case? ~~~ dekhn yes. [http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976) [http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517](http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517) ~~~ schoen Hmmm, that shows that this research finding was published in 2010, which might be the timeframe I was thinking of. I first thought from the link that this article was newly published. ~~~ dekhn yeah, me too. ------ tvon Reminds me of this bit from BSG (a conversation between two "artificial" humans): Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova? Ellen: No. Cavil: No. Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe, other stars, other planets, and eventually other life, a supernova, creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. Ellen: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible. Cavil: I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way. ------ saganus It's very exciting for me to dream of a future where we manage to tap into the visual cortex and maybe then we'll be able to see as if we had 4 or maybe more cones. I really hope this result is verified and confirmed. It's very interesting to think what would it mean to see like this. Could we liken it to jumping from 8 bit color to 32 bit color for example? ~~~ schoen Nope, the trichromatic vision is the reason we use color spaces like RGB -- it means that combinations of three colors can produce nearly all of the subjective hues that we experience. The idea of "three primary colors" comes from trichromatic vision; there's nothing about physics that implies that there should only be three primary colors, and machines can be built to distinguish an unlimited range of hue combinations that are not regarded as built up from _any_ finite number of primary colors, whereas human vision simply can't make these distinctions. Tetrachromatic vision means a four-dimensional color space which will have to use four, not three, primary colors in order to represent all subjective hues through combinations. So you would need to add another channel on top of RGB. The bit depth in a color space is effectively about how many different intensities of each primary color can be distinguished (although you can have a system that measures or distinguishes colors in terms of other features instead). So if you have a greater color depth, you can make more fine-grained distinctions about the intensive of the primary colors, but having a new primary color (that reaches otherwise-unrepresentable colors!) is something else entirely. ~~~ gm-conspiracy What about CMYK for tetrachromatic? ~~~ scardine I think the primary difference between CMYK and RGB is that CMYK is a subtractive color space, while RGB is cumulative (I don't know if these are the correct terms in English). The first is used for reflective surfaces, while the other is used for light sources. On reflexive surfaces, you make colors by subtracting wave lengths (the paint has pigments that absorb specific wavelengths). On light sources, like our computer screens, we make color by combining primary wavelengths. ------ amai See also [https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of- tetrach...](https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of- tetrachromacy-if-12-of-women-have-four-cone-types-in-their-eyes-why-do-so-few- of-them-actually-see-more-colours/) ------ amai This is not news. This article is based on another article from 2012 ([http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with- supe...](http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human- vision)). ~~~ amai And actually the whole story is based on a paper from 2010: [http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...](http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Xmarks not quite dead yet - nod http://www.xmarks.com/firefox/upgrade/3.9.2 ====== pvg Xmarks might not be quite dead yet but it probably will and should be. They seem really attached to the idea that the data (or as they ponderously call it, 'the corpus') they have is very valuable. $9 million (with an impressive $2 mil/year burn rate) later they haven't figured out a way to extract any of that elusive value. Browser bookmark sync is becoming a built-in feature in many popular browsers. Cross-browser support is an edge case that overlaps with the functionality of a number of web-based bookmarking services which generally offer a richer and more useful feature set than in-browser bookmarking. In the period of about a week they've persuaded fewer than 30k of their users to _maybe_ pay them $10/yr. This is probably not all that surprising given the above and the fact they've already announced that should they run into difficulties, they'll simply give up. Short of Stockholm Syndrome, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to rely on their service going forward, even if someone is foolish enough to buy them out. ~~~ SkyMarshal Problem is I stopped using Delicious years ago. I need my bookmarks in my browser. If I have to go to a website to find something, that's going to be Google or DDG. A great solution would be for Delicious/Yahoo to buy Xmarks and integrate the two technologies - your bookmarks are stored on Delicious as they currently are, but synched to every supported browser you use. ~~~ pvg _Problem is I stopped using Delicious years ago._ That sounds like a personal problem! More seriously, there are several extensions that provide in-browser interfaces and local storage for bookmarking services. For the hardcore bookmarker, there are even a desktop apps - the ones I know of for OS X are Delibar and Pukka. Personally, I don't find the browser integration extensions terribly useful. In the case of Firefox, the Bookmark Manager is probably slower than using just about any bookmarking service. It's certainly slower and clunkier than pinboard. Firefox's Live Bookmarks can also be used to give you a local menu of bookmarks if you point it at the RSS feed of a bookmarking service. I think there are extensions that let you do that in Chrome and Safari as well. ~~~ blaix I tend to use Delicious for "this is interesting" type stuff, especially stuff I want to share. I use my browser's bookmarks for stuff that is only important to me: work-related stuff, bill stuff, etc. Having cross-browser syncing for built-in bookmarks in addition to my Delicious bookmarks has been great. I'm hopefull they can live on and pledged my support. Edit: There's also bookmarklets. These are not a good fit for Delicious. Having these synced as well is wonderful. ~~~ SkyMarshal Thanks a good system, I might start doing that too. ------ wyclif @PinboardIN _Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users._ @xmarks _@PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!_ @PinboardIN _@xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'_ <http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850> ~~~ hellweaver666 I love pinboard.in - I signed up when they were charging about $1 per signup and it works perfectly for me, the guy that runs it even setup a feature on my request and within about 24 hours of me requesting it! (tag specific user RSS feeds). ------ w1ntermute Why didn't they explore the possibility of being acquired before just deciding to drop everything and shut down? Or maybe this was their strategy for getting enough publicity to get more favorable acquisition offers... ~~~ agravier My understanding is that they did try to sell Xmarks, but noone would want of them until this announcement and the subsequent massively suportive reaction from the community that revealed that people seem do infact be ready to pay for the service. ------ dasil003 I don't mean to be cynical, but... well played Xmarks, well played. ------ Terretta I like to be able to use whatever browser I want, whenever I want, use the browser's native bookmarking, and have new bookmarks show up in whatever browser I run next (not to mention show up on iOS Safari). Bookmark something in Chrome, leave my desk, check the bookmark on the iPad. Surf on the iPad on the train, bookmark some things, review those bookmarks in Firefox on the PC. The built-in bookmark syncs don't do this, unless you're willing to only use a single browser on everything. Xmarks does this. If you're a developer using multiple browsers, seems like Xmarks would be essential kit. ~~~ blaix It is definitely essential. It is one of the first things I install when setting up a new computer. ------ cyunker Too late. I've already moved to Chrome sync. ~~~ cyunker Sorry for the snarky remark. I think Xmarks is an excellent service and I've been a happy user for 6 months+. But when you send out an email saying you're done, and I move my bookmarks over to another service...well..... For the record, Xmarks today is better than Chrome sync. If things work out for them, I'll move back. ~~~ bmelton I agree that it's better, but I don't think it's so much better that I'd be willing to pay them even $1 a year for the improvement. It would take them being insanely better, and offering something that I really need (the 'which bookmarks go where' feature is almost it) to entice me into paying for something I'm getting in-built onto my browser that is free. It sucks for them, really, because even a year ago I'd have happily paid them the money. Cross-browser (Firefox -> Chrome sync) would have been worth it then, as would the segregation of 'personal' bookmarks from my work PC, but at this point, Chrome sync is in place, it's the only browser I use, and what's left just doesn't convince me to give them money. I wish them well, but they should have been charging years ago really. ------ nod tl;dr: 27K people have pledged $10/year, they'll be viable with 100K ~~~ hop There is a big difference between anonymously pledging and cutting the check, but who knows. ~~~ jacquesm Yes, the one time I tried that the rate was about 100:0. It sure dented my confidence for a bit, I thought we had a deal there. ~~~ SkyMarshal Yeah, they probably should have skipped the pledge step and gone straight to the pay me step. Capitalize the attention while you've got it, and use real money as your metric for staying open or not. If you don't get enough, refund the credit card charges and close. ------ iburattini This is a very sad news...... I know I can find other services, but I added this to my mom and dad's computers, and they do have now all their bookmarks + passwords saved. No, they don't even know that (Xmarks) is running, and I don't even know how to tell then "hey, you should pledge 10 € here..." That made me think: how many moms and dads are using this service?? ~~~ leonroy My mum, my dad, my sisters, my wife, my grandpa, my grandma, my aunt, my cousin... Only one person's willing to pay in my family...me :-P ------ Tyrannosaurs Is the problem with starting free that you get people used to the idea that this is not a service you pay for? Freemium (get a small service for free, pay for a better one) is one thing but this is "this used to be free, now it's not". At the very least that jars. I think the real issue is that the likes of ChromeSync make the longevity of this business model very questionable. Joel Spolsky once described this sort of thing as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller - you're making money out of something that the product should or will inevitably do as a standard feature. Yes there is money there for a while but inevitably the steamroller is going to flatten you. ------ mike-cardwell I would happily have paid $10/year, but as soon as they made the announcement I went looking for alternatives. I was surprised to find that if you're happy just syncing between Firefox installs, "Firefox Sync" does everything XMarks does, (Bookmarks, Passwords, Preferences, History and Tabs) but with a slicker interface. And it will also be built into Firefox 4 rather than having to install the addon... I no longer see the point in paying XMarks for it... ~~~ ldh There are fine solutions within any single browser. But that's just a non- starter for those who don't want to be restricted to one browser across all environments. ~~~ mike-cardwell I tend to stick to one browser across my various machines. If I wanted to start using Chrome I'd just export my bookmarks from Firefox, import them into Chrome and set up syncing with Chrome. ------ blaix When I read the announcement that they were closing, my first thought was "I would have paid money for this". I'm glad I may be able to if it means I'll get to keep using it. ~~~ DougWebb When I read the initial announcement, and the subsequent comments, by first thought was "Oh, I didn't know Firefox provides this functionality now." I switched over immediately, and I don't plan to go back. Occasionally it's annoying to only have my bookmarks on one browser, but I typically only use one browser anyway. Most of the time I'm on Firefox, but when I need the corporate intranet I use IE. I have no desire to share all of my bookmarks with the intranet's ActiveX controls, so I'm happy to not be syncing them over. ------ FindSimilar It is a sad story. Xmarks is the best sync tool now but competition is coming from two big guys. ------ lotusleaf1987 Why don't they just charge for their iPhone app and use a fremium model? I'm blown away that they can't figure out a way to monetize 2 million users. If they don't get acquired I will be very shocked. I pledged that I am willing to pay, it's a bargain for how useful their service is. Also, why don't they just use kickstarter.com?? ------ McKittrick It's just a flesh wound! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Revisiting iChat Hacking - ditados http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2012/01/07/2350 ====== there i'm curious why people go through all of this work to hack ichat instead of just using adium. ~~~ ditados Probably because Adium tries to do too much, whereas iChat comes with the OS and does the job.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Integrated chat for your web app - fjabre I've been looking for a way to integrate gmail/facebook style chat into our web app.<p>I've checked out www.cometchat.com which looks promising. Does anyone know of any other existing solutions?<p>Mind you I'm talking about Gmail/Facebook style chat where push is employed.. not the old school polling chat apps that a lot of 'corporate' sites still use. ====== aymeric Not really a chat as it is a shoutbox, but I use <http://www.shoutmix.com/> in my facebook apps. Really easy to integrate. If you want a chat between you and your users, I know that MixPanel (<http://www.mixpanel.com>) is using <http://www.olark.com/> ------ bjclark Inbelieve meebo offers a widget that does just what you want.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week - uxhacker https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-six-hour-workday-trial-runs-into-trouble-too-expensive ====== fetbaffe This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc). Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours. I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this fact. You have to read the report to get that. Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day. report after 18 months 2016-10-11 [https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/75...](https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/757fe9ed-702f-401a-b275-c3c45fcfae99.pdf) ~~~ marzell Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about the specific details. ~~~ fetbaffe Yes, that does not really help. That shows that it is important for journalists to read the fine print. In Sweden, 6-hour workday is a well known political slogan, probably why that was used. ------ mhurron They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload? ~~~ bogomipz Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax: "Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported." Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no? That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment. ~~~ failrate My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit might have been considered worth the cost. ~~~ bogomipz I see. That certainly makes much more sense. Thanks. ------ ArlenBales My utopian society workweek is 4 days/8 hours. That extra day off would do far more for people than one or two less hours every day. So 4x8=32 hours, vs 6x5=30 hours. I would even bargain for 4 days/9 hours, or 4x9=36 hours. That third day is huge. It's the difference from having only enough time for some leisurely weekend activities, to having enough time to take a mini-3-day- vacation every week (short flights, etc.). ~~~ alkonaut I'd much rather do 5x6h, I suppose the difference might be if you have small children. ~~~ ArlenBales You're probably right, if I did have kids I would prefer 5x6h until I shed that responsibility (they leave the house once adults). But as someone without kids, being able to take short flights or trips every week over 3 days would be awesome. I guess ideally, since 5x6h and 4x8h are only two hours apart, a utopian workplace would offer its employees either option -- the people who chose 4x8h would make 2h more wages weekly. ~~~ alkonaut I do 40 flexible hours already, so I do a couple of hours in the evening or on the weekend, just to get a 6-7h typical day, to fit the schedule with school pickup etc. If I wanted, I could work 4x10 (With some sweet talking to a manager perhaps). I'd very much prefer to have 30, 32 or 35h to distribute over the week though, it would make the planning a lot easier. In that case I'd do e.g. 5x6 now that my small children needs early pickup, but I'd go to 4x8 when I have larger children who can bike home from school, so we can go on a weekend trip with friday off. ------ JamesBarney I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted. I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers. ~~~ mordocai And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well. IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time). Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we should move to a more flexible approach. ~~~ scarecrowbob So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year: how do I know how much work is enough? If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever. But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work. When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals. But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours. I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance. This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult? ~~~ kcorbitt Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done. Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though. ~~~ pkaye Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work done". If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale and "gets his work done"? ------ fnordsensei It doesn't seem like the best type of business to experiment on. It would make more sense in a business where hours worked more obviously is not the same as productivity. When I read about this in The Guardian way back when, they mentioned three other cases: _Brath_ For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath. The company, which has 22 staff in offices in Stockholm and Örnsköldsvik, produces as much, if not more, than its competitors do in eight-hour days, she says. “It has a lot to do with the fact that we are very creative – we couldn’t keep it up for eight hours.” _Toyota_ At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a 7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme. “Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.” Profits have risen by 25%, he adds. _Filimundus_ Linus Feldt, boss of Stockholm app developer Filimundus, says the six-hour working day his business began a year ago is about motivation and focus, rather than staff simply cramming in the same amount of work they used to do in eight hours. “Today I believe that time is more valuable than money,” Feldt says. “And it is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you focus more and are more efficient.” Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency- up-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover- down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day) ------ trynewideas In the Bloomberg story, but not in the Independent story: "Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the interim report." ------ loup-vaillant Something in those numbers doesn't add up. I gather they maintained the salaries. Good. They had to hire more people, at a cost of 12 million kronor. This mechanically reduced unemployment, and saved the state 4.7 million kronor. Shall I deduce the unemployed people were paid 40% less than the salary they got? Something is wrong there: in France, unemployment insurance maintains 75% of the base salary. Saving only 40% looks quite low. I need a more detailed analysis. If generalised, this would significantly reduce unemployment. We could thus lower the unemployment insurance rates. I've seen predictions this basically balances out: we can sustain the current effective salaries at no cost. The way this is presented here, this theory appears to be false. Does it? I'm sure we can draw a more definite answer, but this article is not enough. ~~~ Klockan It could be their first job, they could have been long-term unemployed (you don't get aids forever) or they could have had jobs with lower salaries before. ~~~ lapinrigolo So far we haven't been able to cure aids. ~~~ yazaddaruvala I think the parent meant: "you don't receive aid, forever" ------ stinos _the costs outweigh the benefits_ Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess. Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts. ~~~ giarc The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc. ~~~ rogerdpack Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were... ~~~ giarc As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a bit longer of a day. I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of benefits from 3 day weekends. ------ jahaja The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age, employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams about costs. ~~~ CaptSpify Source on that? ~~~ jahaja Only in Swedish unfortunately: [http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-s...](http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet- skrotas-i-f%C3%B6rtid-1.5343) It seems like the experiment was concluded as planned in the end but they still tried to end it early. ------ qntty I'd like to see more experiments with a 4-day/8-hour work week. [https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour- workweek/) ~~~ cylinder Agree. Six hours a day seems foolish. All that time getting ready for work, commuting, etc only to spend six hours at work. I'm a much bigger believer in just being closed on Fridays if possible ~~~ DCoder Somewhat on topic: I work 4-days/10-hours: 2 morning hours from home, commute to the office clears my head, 8 hours in the office, and Friday is free. Pros: \- three-day weekends all year long \- 20% less commute time \- magically enforces the "Read-only Friday" rule \- if I have to handle an emergency on Friday, it means overtime pay \- Friday is good for running errands Cons: \- clients/coworkers still work on Fridays, so I can't ignore my email entirely \- occasional meetings happen on Friday This is probably not a good schedule for everyone, but I have been working it for 2 years now and I like it a lot. Although none of my coworkers are following this example... ------ fetbaffe Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it. These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school education. 97% who works with it are women. What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours, instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme. Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up for work in the public sector. Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better pay. ------ jinfiesto This was a bad industry in which to pilot this. There are obviously hard time requirements in terms of when such a facility has to be staffed. Obviously, cutting everone's hours means that other people will have to be hired to pick up the slack. It's hard to believe that no one saw this coming. I'd be more interested in seeing the impact of a 6-hour working day on a business that doesn't function in this way. ------ falcolas So, 1.5 million US dollars over two years (less, if you account for the saved unemployment costs. ref. trynewideas comment), for happier employees and better care. I personally have a hard time seeing this as any form of indication that it's "spiraling out of control". I agree with other commenters, this smells of politics more than economics. ~~~ giarc $1.5 million for 68 employees at a nursing home. I work in a healthcare system with 120,000 employees. Let's say we reduced hours to 6. Using the Swedish numbers, that would cost our organization $2.6 billion dollars, or roughly 10% of annual budget. ~~~ falcolas The costs are not trivial, I agree. But neither are the stated benefits. I personally value those benefits, even at a 10% premium. ~~~ tdb7893 I personally would be willing to have a 10% pay cut to work only 6 hours a day ~~~ falcolas Unfortunately, at least in the US, going down to 6 hours a day makes you a part time employee, at which point you lose a lot more than even 25% of your pay. Frequently benefits are pared down to the point of extinction, including health, vacation and holidays. ~~~ tdb7893 what's stopping you from being a salaried employee that just happens to work 30 hours a week? ~~~ falcolas Employer expectations of 40-50 hours of work a week, with corrective action as the stick that enforces it. ~~~ tdb7893 Yeah, that's true. My point is that nothing is stopping companies from offering 30 hour work weeks and also benefits. ------ alistairSH I'm mostly amazed that their nurses are only working 8-hour shifts. In the US, it's common to work 12-hour shifts (but only 3 days/week). ~~~ giarc This was in a nursing home, so depending on the level of care, there might only be 1 nurse on staff overnight. They could still be doing 8 hour shifts. ------ xolb If this experiment shows that the costs are too high reducing working hours, I wonder how UBI could be cost effective. ~~~ twblalock UBI can't be cost-effective as a living wage. Living wage UBI would cost more than the entire current US government budget. Some UBI proposals aim to replace all of the current welfare systems with one UBI system that costs the same. (That wouldn't be what happens, but let's consider it for the sake of argument.) Those proposals have to limit UBI benefits to an amount that is below a living wage in order to stay within the budget of the current welfare system, assuming everyone receives the same amount of money (that's the definition of UBI, and any system that gives different amounts to different people is not universal or basic.) Plus, the government's budget would have to shrink if tax receipts drop, which they would clearly do if lots of people chose to live off UBI instead of working. So even the non-living-wage UBI proposals are probably unrealistic. UBI seems like a good idea at first, but it seems less attractive the more you look at it. ------ wlll My own really short story, I (sysadmin/ops/programmer) currently work remotely about 4 hours per day, and I'm way more productive than when I worked 8. ~~~ guntars Do you mind expanding on why that is? I hear this often and I'd like it to be true, but I find it hard to believe. ~~~ wlll I suspect it's a number of reasons. \- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none, or just a couple of hours. \- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable. \- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better. \- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments". 6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was in 8 at my old job. I _feel_ productive. This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time. ~~~ guntars I agree, working 4 hours a day will feel more effective than the last 4 hours of an 8 hour day, but the question is whether it's actually twice as effective. And perhaps it's so for very high level tasks, but I'm pretty sure for some things you just need to clock in the hours, like closing 100 tiny bugs because you're launching in a few days. ~~~ wlll I agree, though a lot of the time what I need to do requires just thinking about stuff, sometimes I need to plough on and just _do_ stuff. 6 hours of coding something, writing, whatever. When that happens I just do the work. I'm lucky in that I can work the hours I need to work. Last week I did days that lasted 4, 6, 1.25, 1.75 and 4 hours (the 1.x days I had other stuff on). ------ Vaebn To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis. To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved the cost of the extra cost. But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy. The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been taken into account? ------ BurningFrog Note that "Sweden" did not conduct any 6 hour day experiment. This was done in one municipal workplace with a few dozen employees. [http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour- workday/](http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour-workday/) ------ dang Url changed from [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden- six-h...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-six-hour- working-day-too-expensive-scrapped-experiment-cothenburg-pilot- scheme-a7508581.html), which points to this. Submitters: please don't submit an article that's clearly lifted from another publicly available source. Submit the latter instead. This is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). ------ baldfat What a waste of a study. If they the end result is that they didn't realize the cost up front. I think this is just a poorly written click bait title. 100% they knew the cost. The outcome was : >The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving. While we are headed to super automation and the reduction of workforce (And a stagnant or growing GDP) it is either free money for the non-workers or reduced work hours. It's Jetson's again. ------ acd If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with [4,6,8] working hours? ~~~ jmcomets In general it's difficult to measure the productivity of developers, since the a single commit can mean years of maintenance. Measuring the code quality is equally hard: linting and code conventions will only get you so far, designs need to be reviewed by humans. In short: [http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste- of...](http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste-of-time) ------ kuprel Maybe instead of automation taking away jobs, people will end up working less hours. This was a reduction of hours without automation, so 17 nurses had to be hired ~~~ anoplus You absolutely nailed it. ------ alexellisuk This felt like click bait, it's about a Swedish nursing home - I was assuming this was related to office / tech work as it was high up on HN. It does sound ridiculous that reducing hours mean hiring 17 other staff - I've heard of tech companies being able to handle a few less hours per working week and benefiting from it. ------ basicplus2 Everyone in the job market needs be on such a roster or it won't work, thus it is not a failure in itself. If every business was required by law to have a tea lady (or man) per every 50 employees it would not make any business uncompetitive, and would be sustainable, and it would reduce unemployment, and I'd get a cuppa. ------ CodeSheikh I would take a 10 hours day, 4 work days and a three days long weekend over a 6 hours workday routine. Edit 1: 9-6 is 9 hours -_- ~~~ pessimizer Would you take it if the 10 hour day was 8am-7pm with an unpaid hour for lunch, and the 6 hour day was 9am-4pm (with something approaching a 25% pay reduction.) 9-6 is 8 hours + lunch, aka a standard work day. ~~~ CodeSheikh We do 9-5 or 8-4 and everyone "kind of" take lunch during those 8 hours and managers don't throw a fit about it. Unlike my last employer, where managers were sticklers about covering lunch hour or favored eat your lunch at desk kinda deal. I would be totally fine with a 8am-7pm -- disciplined 10 hours day. I don't have a family, but i can see people appreciating and spending a three day weekend with their kids. Also for young people, this can take the concept of "seekender" to more literal levels. ------ saverio-murgia Here on HN I always read people saying that you are more productive working 5 to 6 hours a day instead of 8. According to the people claiming that, the people who got a 25% cut in working hours should have performed better thus accomplishing the same amount of work. That obviously did not happen. ~~~ herrkanin I think it's different with physically intensive jobs, such as nurses in the trial, and mentally intensive jobs, such as programming etc. The latter may very well end up being equally or more productive, while physically intensive jobs probably would end up with reduced productivity. ------ vesinisa I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it? ~~~ donmatito This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication. I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations. ~~~ dijit This is not my experience. I work for a French multinational games company and I'm situated in Sweden. It's astonishingly common for my French counterparts to "arrive" at there computer at 10:30 each day and head out the door shortly before 17:00. Not to mention the 1.5hour or so lunch they tend to take. This is a sample of maybe 20 people, and maybe it's a culture of the company more than the country, but I've noticed they like to shake hands with everybody on the floor before starting their day, and they also like to take a coffee first and have a chat. For me though, I operate "remote" and when they are not available on Lync/Skype then they may as well be not working because they're.. not.. working. it is a stark contrast to my team who are jacked in before 9, and save for a few hourly strolls to the canteen and lunchtime do not leave until 18:00. (unless something breaks then we stay, which is common in crunch times.) ~~~ gambiting I think I work for the same French multinational games company ;-) I do work with people from both our Swedish and French studios and I can definitely confirm what you said, both ways. ------ christofosho I'm wondering why they didn't begin with 7 hours, if it should have been expected that more money would have been spent. I feel the world is so wrapped in money that we are stuck choosing money over wellbeing... ~~~ clay_to_n Probably so the shifts could be organized better. If the nursing home runs 24 hours, it's easier to move from 8 hour shifts to 6 than to find a way for some people to be on 7 hour shifts. ------ rocky1138 The article is light on details. What "costs" are they talking about? ~~~ tunnuz They needed to employ 17 extra people on top of the 68 employees taking part in the pilot, in order to guarantee the level of service. Which to me is a win (17 people got a job) but it is clearly a cost increase that the employer was not ready to accept. ------ tu7001 I think it's not a good business example to test cutting hours. Taking care of somebody 6 hours instead of 8 leaves a 2 hours shortage, which therefore must be covered. ------ maceo The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits." Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life for all participants. ------ douche I still miss the days when I was working in a power plant and worked a 40-hour week, over four days. Especially since the schedule was arranged so that the off-days were staggered to produce a four-day weekend every other week. The only downside was, ironically, on holiday weeks, because the holiday pay was only 8 hours, which resulted in still having to work four shorter days, and often screwing up a long-weekend cycle. ------ mikaeluman Wow. The sad state of journalism... and of critique from readers at this site. Obviously bumping salaries by 1/4 is not reasonable. In order for costs not to outweigh benefits that clinic would need to be some kind of utopia...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Where to find a great iOS developer? - patel Looking to hire some iOS developers for a new company. Thinking about outsourcing to India possibly for the initial build for the product. Has anyone used developers abroad? Experience? Do you have any referrals?<p>Any and all feedback is great. ====== checker659 What kind of app. are we talking about? ~~~ patel A developer with the abilities to create an app with the capabilities of FaceTime. reply	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
First PyCon in the Philippines - jpanganiban https://twitter.com/pyconph ====== itsacezon The presentations were awesome! Can't wait for the sprints!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Earth-observing companies push for more-advanced science satellites - Zuider http://www.nature.com/news/earth-observing-companies-push-for-more-advanced-science-satellites-1.22034 ====== Zuider Congratulations to Juan Vuletich! [http://cuis-smalltalk.org/pipermail/cuis-dev_cuis-smalltalk....](http://cuis- smalltalk.org/pipermail/cuis-dev_cuis-smalltalk.org/2017-May/001319.html) Hi Folks, Satellogic was featured today at Nature News! [http://www.nature.com/news/earth-observing-companies-push- fo...](http://www.nature.com/news/earth-observing-companies-push-for-more- advanced-science-satellites-1.22034) I helped design and build the hyperspectral cameras in our satellites Fresco and Batata. And I wrote the geometric and spectral processing software for that image. This is not completely off topic, though: The geometric software (image rectification and correction), the most complex part of the processing, was written by me in Cuis Smalltalk, and runs in a Cuis Smalltalk + OpenCL application. Please share my joy today! \-- Juan Vuletich www.cuis-smalltalk.org [https://github.com/Cuis- Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev](https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis- Smalltalk-Dev) @JuanVuletich	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The plan to let anyone become European – digitally - kamikazi http://www.zdnet.com/this-is-so-freaking-huge-man-its-insane-the-plan-to-let-anyone-become-european-digitally-7000029486/ ====== kamikazi Opening lede: "In the near future, those from outside the country will have an opportunity to apply for an Estonian e-resident ID card — which means that they can use Estonian online services, open bank accounts, and start companies without ever having to physically visit Estonia"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
University of California Sells $200M Fossil Fuel Holdings - dtawfik1 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-10/university-of-california-sells-200-million-fossil-fuel-holdings ====== dogma1138 What should be taken from this is when a university has more money than GDP of 2/3rd of the nations in the world (individually ofc) something has really went wrong. Not saying the educational institutions shouldn't have money but when you have more assets than the GDP of Luxembourg you maybe should stop charging 25K a year...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Please make your SASS' invoices filenames human-friendly - andrei_says_ I have a favor to ask.<p>Please make your SASS' invoices filenames human-friendly and save your clients hours of frustrating, menial, error-prone work.<p>Every month I and countless other paying customers of yours have to download your invoice and have it processed with my company's accounting.<p>I need to do this for 5-10 SAAS services every month.<p>Most of these files are named completely randomly, often like this (ex. - 'Browserstack: Invoice-8a28fd166d2cace7016d34cbe6f06e11-20190915.pdf') or just the word "invoice", or just a hash, or sometimes, the invoice date but no company name. Some don't even allow a downlnoad so I have to save the screen as PDF myself.<p>Here's what would make mine and many, many others' lives easier and happier:<p>Use a filename like this:<p>saas_name--date_of_invoice--amount_of_invoice.pdf<p>This is what my accounting dept is asking for and is a major PIA.<p>It is trivial to automate and would make me and countless other <i>paying customers</i> delighted by the thoughtfulness and care of your company much much more than any PR initiative you can think of.<p>Please, please bring this up to the decision-makers in your company. ====== Blakestr There's no way to pull the data out of the image, even if it is a raw scan, wouldn't there be some OCR function that exists? Honestly I'm a bit surprised there's nothing that has solved this problem. You would need a template for each customer on where in the file the data exists. Error checking would be an issue but you could bypass that a bit by using the same information and generating a receipt to the user. You could also have filters in place that would require a human to intervene if the amounts are too high case something goes wrong. I get that you're not asking for an app idea or anything but I'm surprised there's not some solution you can use that already exists.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On the dangers of autoincrementing: SmugMug's private pics are public - edw519 http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-28-n59.html ====== sanj This article is important, but seems a little technically sloppy. The issue isn't about autoincremented IDs, but the fact that they are used as external identifiers. The specific reason they shouldn't be used is that they are guessable. It also confuses the concept of a GUID a little, I think. That refers to a global UID, which could reasonably be a URL+autoincremented number: global and unique. But guessable. Which is the core issue. I try to consider external IDs like passwords: create a cryptographically strong hash, using some salt, and externalize that. ~~~ brlewis Worse, the most common GUID is 128 bits formed from (I think) a MAC address plus a timestamp. They are designed for uniqueness, not non-guessability. On ourdoings.com photos are given unique, random URLs. No nude photos allowed, though. ~~~ sanj Pikans responding to pikans. The world continues to shrink. ------ raghus Joshua Schachter's (del.icio.us) views on auto-incrementing: <http://joshua.schachter.org/2007/01/autoincrement.html> ~~~ jgrahamc Another problem with auto_increment occurs when the user id comes from an auto_increment field. By signing up as a new user once a week and observing your own user id you can measure the rate of growth of a competitor. ~~~ xirium "By signing up as a new user once a week and observing your own user id you can measure the rate of growth of a competitor." I've done similar with cheques. In a previous job, I was paid by cheque. Each month, I logged the cheque number. From this and taking into account other payment methods, I determined that the company had significantly fewer transactions than the boss claimed. ------ toffer Don MacAskill (SmugMug CEO) has posted a response on his blog: [http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/01/28/your-private- photos-...](http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/01/28/your-private-photos-are- still-private/) Says Don: "To us, privacy and security are two separate, but related, issues. One analogy we use often is that security is like locking your front door and arming your alarm (no-one can get in without a key), and privacy is like closing your window blinds (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key)." ~~~ sharksandwich There's a lot of wisdom in the saying 'when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging' His explanation isn't convincing, and certainly doesn't reassure anyone whose private photos were revealed ------ scooter53080 It seems like this is working as designed. The problem is different definitions of "private," which I think SmugMug is wrong on. While the setting is functioning as they intended, I do not consider it to be private. If the label were "not displayed" this issue would probably not have come up.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why do so many people hate Ruby? - eric970 I've been a Ruby dev and a Rails dev for about two years now. I've always found the former to be an enjoyable, elegant language to write in, and the later to be a wonderful framework that makes use of some great patterns and gems. I'm not <i>only</i> a Ruby and Rails dev; I also enjoy programming in JS and I've been teaching myself Python as well.<p>Lately, especially after these security vulnerabilities became public, I've seen a lot of hate directed towards both the Ruby and the Rails community.<p>I'm curious as to why this is, and I'd like to get HN's input on this. The Ruby community has a lot of drama from time to time, but that's the only reason I can think of. Where is the hate coming from of people who say everybody should just throw out Ruby, stop using Rails, etc.? ====== btilly To me the biggest annoyance about the Ruby community is the belief that they invented everything and know how to do everything right if others would just listen. And then, through unfamiliarity with what others learned a long time ago, they do it wrong. As a random example, unit testing has been the standard for perl (note capitalization - I'm referring to the interpreter here) since it was released in the mid-80s, and for the Perl community since CPAN was created in the mid-90s. And when I say standard I don't mean that someone writes tests, runs it, then packages. I mean that - by default - nothing gets installed anywhere until it has passed its full test suite. Furthermore if I release a module to CPAN, I'll get automated emails about every OS and version of Perl that it didn't work on. Core ruby still does not have good unit tests, and you have to go out of your way to run unit tests for gems. If you do that, you will find that a good portion were only set up for the author to run - they didn't think anyone else would ever do that. And yet I've had Ruby devs with a straight face trying to tell me that Ruby is awesome for its testing culture, and everyone else has a lot to learn from them. They are missing a lot, and don't realize it. ~~~ hilko Could it be that Rails (and by extension Ruby) is the first _really_ popular post-web-revolution language used for development since PHP, and, unburdened by lots of bad practices having evolved alongside (not necessarily because of) PHP, re-introduces a whole bunch of good practices like unit testing? And could it be that as a result young, excited and still green developers, comparing themselves to the 'bad' previous web generation, get a bit cocky about it? These are not rhetorical questions; I'm actually asking this. I came from humble hack-together-crazy-bad-php-apps, went through getting used to more frameworky stuff with Drupal, and then ended up at Rails with a certain comfort and a definite increase in best-practice. My first introduction to unit testing was through Hartl's tutorials, perhaps because I have no formal programming background. I could see how some people after a similar process get cocky about how great they are because they write tests. I'm not defending cockiness or whatever characterizes the Ruby community. I'm just wondering. ~~~ btilly People who come to a better environment from a worse one often do get "true religion", and I am sure that happened to a lot of Ruby devs. You cite PHP. I would also cite Java devs whose first dynamic language was Ruby, and then went overboard. Either way, enthusiasm combined with lack of perspective leads to annoyance for people who have that perspective, who realize that you're still missing some basic lessons. (Monkeypatching anyone?) ~~~ hilko Ah, great observation. That really does explain it. It's not unlike the zeal of just-reborn Christians, or even just-'deconversed' nonbelievers. ------ memracom I used to code in Ruby before Rails existed and I switched back to Python because they had addressed a lot of the problems with object-oriented and functional programming that made me look for something else. And then there was this wave of arrogance when Rails popped up and it seemed that lots of people with little standard of comparisons made outrageous claims about Ruby. Rails and the Ruby community borrowed a lot of work from Python and other communities but claimed that it was "invented here" and did not give credit to those upon whose shoulders they were standing. Ruby is overrated. Python is in most ways Ruby's equal, and in some ways a superior community. Groovy, on the JVM, with Grails can do the same sorts of things as Rails and gives access to the whole JVM ecosystem of libraries that is far larger than the GEMs collection. Scala is an important language that more people should use because it guides a developer towards writing cleaner code and using architectural patterns that lead to much more maintainable code. That said, I would rather see people build things with Ruby rather than with Java or C++, so I am not one of those who would throw Ruby out entirely. If people decide to replace PERL with Ruby, I would applaud that action, even though I believe that Python is a better way to go. But due to the negative factors in the Ruby community I would not advise anyone to learn Ruby as their first language because of the great risk of becoming a first-language fanboy. Better to start with something else, even PERL, C++ or Java, so that they have some perspective on programming languages. ~~~ hilko > But due to the negative factors in the Ruby community I would not advise > anyone to learn Ruby as their first language because of the great risk of > becoming a first-language fanboy. Perhaps that danger is very situational. In my surroundings Rails/Ruby is not the hottest thing anymore, but we work with it for generally well-considered reasons. I was introduced to Rails at this company, and never had any illusions of it being the end-all of frameworks and Ruby that of languages, as none of my 'mentor' coders at the company did either. But in my general surroundings I can definitely imagine high rates of fanboyism. ------ phatbyte People don't hate ruby, people hate the ruby on rails community. Personally I don't have any beef with them, but when I ask people about the RoR community I hear lots of douchebagery stories. One of the most frequent is how cocky everyone in RoR feels towards other programmers in other languages and how "cool" their framework is and so on. This started towards PHP programmers, then moved to Python(Django) and recently it's Node.js who's getting lots of flames from them. So yeah.. ~~~ steventruong This. I think in all the years of talking to folks in the rails community, only 2 people were decent. Literally hundreds of arrogant assholes otherwise. ~~~ hilko Fascinating. May I ask where you operate? Reason I'm asking is that my main client works with Rails, but it's a big and rather old-world company where this choice was shockingly 'modern'. There's little to none off this sentiment you describe though. Rails was a pragmatic choice, so we use it. ~~~ steventruong All this was in the Bay Area ------ mingpan From what I've seen, people are angry at a certain subset of the Ruby on Rails community, but then they take that anger and generalize it to the Rails community or even the Ruby community as a whole. ------ orangethirty You really can't hate a language (well, I do have a complex relationship with PHP). What people hate are stereotypes built around communities. Usually from the conduct of some individuals. Every community has them. I mean, even the COBOL guys must roll their eyes anytime someone writes some douche comment about the language. Don't pay attention to them. There are many nice people in the Ruby community. People who are there for the code, and not the drama. Now, don't get me started about those Visual Basic guys... :) ~~~ amikazmi I think you _can_ hate a language.. you can hate it because you hate yourself, for the things the language make you do. Coming from a Java background, I used to bang my head on the desk everything I had to write a boilerplate code for anonymous functions/classes.. luckily, there was Intellij IDE to ease the pain. ~~~ orangethirty You don't hate Java. You hate the decisions that ultimately led you to working with it. :) (Joke) ------ xijuan Like many of the comments have already mentioned, people in the Ruby on Rails community are arrogant. They think they are doing things in the right way. ------ csense The syntax. Python's syntax is much cleaner. I tried to find examples of Ruby's awful syntax in tutorials, but much to my surprise, the code in the introductory sections of a couple tutorials picked at random looks clean and the language seems nearly Pythonic. Contrast that with a function from an actual Ruby on Rails project [1]: def fresh_commits(repo, n = 10) commits = repo.heads.map do \|h\| repo.commits(h.name, n).map { \|c\| Commit.new(c, h) } end.flatten.uniq { \|c\| c.id } commits.sort! do \|x, y\| y.committed_date <=> x.committed_date end commits[0...n] end Whoa! This code apparently calculates factorials (with the ! operator), absolute values (of course \|x, y\| looks like the length of a vector), and biconditionals (to someone with a math background, a <=> b means a => b and b => a). The function ends with an expression on the last line that doesn't look like it would have side-effects. WTF? There are question marks and colons in weird places in that file, too. I started to translate the function into Python, to show you how much cleaner it would be, but I simply couldn't follow what the multiple nested map's and uniq is supposed to do. I'm certain that the Python equivalent would be much easier to follow. (Even if you take "equivalent" to mean "list comprehension" or "itertools.map" instead of the most readable alternative, nested-for-loops.) I don't think this project is particularly good or bad. I merely picked a random piece of Ruby code from an app I installed recently, and I feel the difficulties I had with the syntax of this function are representative of my struggles with Ruby as a whole. All the strange symbols make Ruby code very hard to read. For me, the effort required to learn a language is directly related to the number of operator symbols it contains. Ruby is nearly as bad as Perl or shell scripts. (The operators-are-bad penalty to my impression of a language is reduced if same operator exists in other languages I already know well, like Python, C, C++, or standard mathematical notation.) In Python, by contrast, you can usually get a fairly good idea of what syntactical constructs do without consulting the manual, even if you're unfamiliar with them. (To be fair, lambda is an exception.) [1] [https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/5a214ee6f198a90f41...](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/5a214ee6f198a90f41a54b3dd7f2ff6a318a8deb/app/models/commit.rb) ~~~ amikazmi I understand you.. this Ruby code is unclear. There is a lot of bad code out there, but you shouldn't judge Ruby by a random code snippet- Ruby is just the tool, and the developer is responsible to write clean code. I don't know what the code is trying to do with all the nested mapping.. it seems like the first 2 lines break encapsulation of the Repo model, trying to gather all the commits. This is unrelated to Ruby, it's a "bad" OO design (might be wrong, I didn't read the rest of the code) So lets ignore that, and just rewrite from line 3 and below: def fresh_commits(repo, n = 10) commits = repo.heads.map do \|h\| repo.commits(h.name, n).map { \|c\| Commit.new(c, h) } end commits.flatten.uniq_by(&:id).sort_by(&:committed_date).first(n) end Do you agree that the last line is clean & readable, even if you don't know "exactly" what "&:function_name" does? ------ drstewart I see more arrogance here than I ever have in the Ruby community, to be honest. I guess all communities can't be as tolerant and high-minded as C++ and the level headed discussions I see going on in the Linux kernel mailing list. ------ MrBra > Why do so many people hate Ruby? Because they have sweated too hard to get a > productive knowledge of their own favourite language with so much of "adapt > your brain to the tool and remember how you did by heart" which in ruby > never happens( it adapts to your human brain) and then they are turned off > by the feeling of envy for this. ~~~ cincinnatus Nice example of RoR user blinders. ~~~ MrBra If you criticize what I say, then please bring arguments against what I said, i.e. bring me an example of a more Expressive, Flexible, Real world ready, community supported programming language to code in... (except ruby derivatives) I'd love to learn it. Don't forget any points please, because this is what made ruby so popular and adopted... Oh and don't even start with "expressive is subjective" thing. We are talking about a language, not an abstract art painting. ~~~ elbear Is there an objective way to measure the flexibility and expressiveness of programming languages? ~~~ lutusp No, not "objective", because languages fill different roles, and it is the language's role that determines its "flexibility and expressiveness" for that specific purpose. This means comparisons cannot be based on shared criteria. ~~~ MrBra Excuse me, what do you think it is the role of a programming language usually ?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why I Left the Thiel Fellowship for Quora - gailees http://lucyguo.quora.com/Why-I-left-the-Thiel-Fellowship-For-Quora?share=1 ====== _qc3o Hmm, the essay does sound like it was written by a 20 year old indeed. Unfortunate then that she is maximizing learning by going to Quora. What exactly is she going to learn at Quora? The industry has very little to offer in terms of learning unless you are in the top echelons of Google's, Microsoft's, and Facebook's research divisions. Most software and product engineering is mundane drudgery and even if there is room to learn and grow you still have to deal with workplace politics, credit stealing, jealousy, etc. All those things are detrimental to learning. Within the first 3 months she is going to learn everything there is to learn about Quora. By her own admission she will then move on to the next learning experience until one day she will realize academia is the only place that true learning happens. ~~~ CaveTech What a horribly depressing view of engineering culture. I've dealt with very little politics, credit stealing, and jealousy as a % of my time since joining the workforce. They definitely exist, but to say they're so bad that they prevent you from learning is laughable. I still find opportunities to grow and learn on a weekly basis. I don't work at one of the worlds top research divisions, but that's never stopped me from improving/developing myself. ~~~ dkarapetyan Most work is what you make of it but don't fool yourself into thinking that you are going to learn and grow at an optimum rate in an industrial setting. Your emotional reaction to the reality of the situation does not change the fact that learning is maximized in an academic setting. ~~~ CaveTech With what end goal? I could also never leave a library, ever, and maximize my learning that way. And I'd die alone and inexperienced. Of course there's some give and take... I trade my "pure learning" opportunities to be able to still grow and develop while earning an income that empowers me to live my life as I desire. I get to solve real world problems and challenges, rather than open ended ones. I'm not trying to take anything from academics, but the most useful result will always come from a combination of academia and business. Neither would exist without the other, and there's and endless amount to learn from either side. ~~~ dkarapetyan Any end goal. The fact that there are no distractions to purely pursue a specific goal is what makes an academic setting special. There are no managers and business specialists hovering over every single decision being made. ~~~ icebraining That doesn't jive with everything I've read - some of which here on HN - about universities. Grants, tenure, cost-cutting by administrators, ego, are all said to be sources of politics and distractions. And teaching, of course. Are they wrong? ~~~ dkarapetyan They are not wrong. If I were to go back then the situation for me would be quite different. If your intent is to go for a tenure track position then you have to put up with all sorts of stuff but if your goal is to learn and write a thesis with the intent of going back to industry then you'll have a much easier time. The usual teaching and class load is easy to handle and you don't have to worry about grants and all the other stuff especially if you have a bit of savings. The difference is between maximizing tenure-track job prospects vs learning. Surprisingly those two goals can sometimes be at odds and that is usually what you hear about on HN. People that were trying to maximize for both learning and future job prospects inadvertently running up against academic bureaucracy. If you have a clear goal then you'll have a much easier time. ------ logn _Grinding is okay and sometimes necessary for a startup, but it was during this time that I realized I was not passionate about ours._ ... _I tried convincing myself that "changing people’s behavior and making delivery the default way to get food" was a mission important to me. That revelation along with the fact that my learning had slowed meant that it was time to quit._ If that's really your feeling, you should be in college. Any job is like this. ~~~ fossuser It might be that 'making delivery the default way to get food' is just an uninteresting goal to dedicate your life to working on. I'm unconvinced Quora is much better. ------ drawkbox It is rare to get one infinitesimal chance (CMU), then another (Thiel Fellowship), and move on from both. She is either a genius or squandering opportunity. Opportunities can become what you make them if you go all in, hopefully she is doing that at Quora, there are only so many opportunities in life. ~~~ logicallee >She is either a genius or squandering opportunity. what a ridiculous meme. I guess if it works out we should praise her and if it doesn't we should lambast her. you know, for being a genius or squandering opportunity, respectively. ~~~ maaku I would lambast anyone who leaves a top-tier university for the Thiel fellowship, regardless of whether they are financially successful or not. ~~~ edanm Why? ------ ahmacleod "However, we continued our attempts at possibly making our product work but by mid-February, we realized that we were grinding through our days. Grinding is okay and sometimes necessary for a startup, but it was during this time that I realized I was not passionate about ours." Five months in, grinding is pretty much the job. Everybody’s passion wanes when faced with (potentially) years of hard work. It’s legit to decide you don’t want that for yourself, but it’s sad to see someone abandon a viable funded business. As an aside, I dislike the criticism “doing a startup for the sake of a startup.” It implies that someone needs a special calling, and provides an easy out in the absence of one. “Starting a business thinking it looks easy,” might be closer to the truth. ------ bhayden I find it odd that anyone respects Quora when they do the horrifically annoying bullshit of hiding answers to questions you Google until you log in. They also require you to log in to view their front page (coming from Google) which is another extremely annoying trend. They are a step below Yahoo Answers in my opinion. ------ zeeshanm I think passion is a function of success. If you are not seeing any signs of "success" it is really easy to lose "passion." I think if you keep a bigger picture in focus and can bare the pain from short-term failed experiments things will work out in the future. And a good thing is you can make decisions to change your direction. :) ------ bambax From Thiel Fellowship to Quora?? If you've never heard the phrase "from charybde to scylla", now is the time to look it up. ------ mathattack I'm trying to figure out if I find the focus on Learning refreshing or self- centered. I've worked with a lot of folks who optimize their lives around short term money and title. A focus on Learning will help grow both in the long term, and it is good to work with curious people. Is the highest level a commitment to customers, team and mission? Will someone optimizing for learning drop those three at the first sign of a shiny new toy? ------ cafebeen Either college has gotten way less fun or Quora is a lot more fun than other tech companies ------ jak0bbbb I am little sad that she choose to accept her fellowship just for the sake of doing a startup. She probably took the spot of someone really interested in making a difference rather than hanging out at mundane events, branding yourself as "thiel fellow and startup CEO". Good luck to her but that kind of people make me sick to my stomach. ~~~ kzhahou Sick to your stomach? Such outrage! Thiel Fellowship is all about startup-for-startup's-sake. The premise is you get more out of startup than school, or joining a company. Now this person decided Nope, I followed a lame idea with no huge biz potential, and it's time to get out. Kudos for NOT sticking to the startup for its own sake! Maybe Thiel, with his experience, could have seen that food delivery is an insanely hard operations challenge? ~~~ jak0bbbb I am not sure how familiar you are with the Thiel fellowship but the application process is designed to make sure that applicants think twice about what they want to accomplish. You can't realistically get accepted without convincing the admission committee that you are not this kind of person. If she made it to the fellowship she must have lied on her intentions to be an Entrepreneur. Don't be naive. She gamed the system, fair enough. Let's just not pretend that all of this happened by chance and that she did not know what was going on. ~~~ loopyz Hi! Id just like to clarify a few things: a) I have never actually introduced myself as a Thiel Fellow because I didn't want to immediately be associated with the stereotypes that come along with the title. It's not on my resume nor my LinkedIn. b) I completed my application the night it was due. I told the foundation & mentors it was rushed. They noticed this too because my responses were pretty incomplete. c) I had full intentions, and still do, of becoming an entrepreneur and working on my own startup. However, I don't think now is the time. I thought I had all the skills I needed, but I realize that I have a lot more to learn. In a few years, I'll be much better equipped. I also need time to come up with something I'm _really_ passionate about. There are lots of successful startups that solve first world problems, but I don't think I can dedicate the rest of my life to one. ~~~ dang Thank you for posting so admirably level-headed a response! I wish all HN users would respond so well when treated poorly. Best of luck going forward, and please feel more than welcome to participate in Hacker News discussions.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nvidia Shows Off New Ray-Traced Minecraft Screenshots - jonbaer https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/308582-nvidia-shows-off-new-ray-traced-minecraft-screenshots-modding-resources ====== Dahoon This is not an apples to apples comparison. Minecraft could look 99% like the RTX photos with RTX off it was coded that way easily. This smells like pure marketing.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
User-Built tDCS Research Device - i4i http://speakwisdom.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/user-built-tdcs-research-device/ ====== i4i Especially see the .doc he links to at the end of his post. [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/491815/tDCS%20Session%20Setup%20with...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/491815/tDCS%20Session%20Setup%20with%20tDCS%20Research%20Device%20OR%20ActivaDose%20II.doc)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why the free upgrade to Windows 10 still works - miles https://borncity.com/win/2019/11/30/why-the-free-upgrade-to-windows-10-still-works/ ====== chipperyman573 This is just blog spam of this reddit comment: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/e35i4i/apparently...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/e35i4i/apparently_microsoft_is_still_allowing_free/f92802f/) Which contains a bunch of questionable statements, such as "this was brought up by the brick and mortar stores that they were doing simple clock changes on customer devices during the upgrade challenge to get around it" This doesn't really make any sense because windows connects to a Microsoft server to validate keys, so it would presumably be possible to not allow the keys to unlock entirely different software, regardless of the PC's time. ------ Animats Because Windows 10 has a negative real price. It's adware. ~~~ kyberias Can you elaborate? I have been using Windows 10 for years on multiple computers and yet to see a single ad. I haven't taken any steps to disable them either. ~~~ simion314 It is a well known fact, so if I think you should elaborate what Windows version you use, what country etc. Though I am expecting you are throwing a bait and when someone gives an example you will respond that that obvious advertising is not ads ~~~ DuskStar > It is a well known fact, Many things are well-known while not actually being facts. This may be one of them. (At the very least, the _amount_ of advertising is enormously exaggerated) ~~~ simion314 OK, so check this article [https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable- all-of-windo...](https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of- windows-10s-built-in-advertising/) tell me if the images are faked and maybe point to an MS website that will show that they never pre-installed candy crush, never suggested paid apps in your start menu, I am thinking maybe this people that do not see this ads are maybe considering as not ads. they used a different installed for windows that changed the settings to turn off all the crap. ~~~ kyberias I don't consider any of those to be advertising. But that's just me. I accept that they are ads for other people.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dear NSA, let me take care of your slides. - janerik http://de.slideshare.net/EmilandDC/dear-nsa-let-me-take-care-ou ====== ColinWright Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861415)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. (1995) - ohjeez http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/100.html ====== DiabloD3 The classic that I read every time it is posted. It is just perfect. Gloriously perfect. ------ dekhn One of my all-time favorites. Gnomes of zurich indeed.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Building dark mode on Stack Overflow - lobo_tuerto https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/31/building-dark-mode-on-stack-overflow/ ====== userbinator As someone who really _really_ hates the "reduce contrast" trend, I personally thought the screenshot labeled "have to do better than this" was the most readable. The one after that just looks faded. Then again, I also find it funny that "dark mode" is heralded as something revolutionary, when long ago people could customise UIs far more. You can still do that with userstyles, another thing that seems to have gotten mostly ignored these days... ~~~ thaumasiotes > I personally thought the screenshot labeled "have to do better than this" > was the most readable. The one after that just looks faded. Hm. I like the "better" one more. However, it's cheating -- the first screenshot displays a lot of white text in the filters and the text of the questions. The text of the questions is most of what I find off-putting about the first screenshot. The second screenshot displays no white text at all. The filters menu isn't visible. The text of the questions isn't visible. Text that's gray in the second screenshot is also gray in the first screenshot. What kind of comparison is this? ~~~ marksomnian It's because the first two are actually not a comparison. The first image is a screenshot of author's first attempt, while the second is a designer's (maybe the author's?) mockup. For an accurate comparison, compare the first and last screenshots in the article. ------ beders It is comical we are getting excited about a bunch of CSS files and other assets. As others have pointed out: Desktop apps never had this problem and decent operating systems gave you much more freedom to adjust the color style to your liking. Now we have half-assed solutions running in a hypertext display engine. Amazing! ;) ~~~ noahtallen IIRC, Windows and macOS only offered built in dark mode in the system UI components until the last year or two, and definitely don’t offer much color customization freedom... except for the global highlight or accent color ~~~ userbinator It used to be far more customisable for Windows; this is Windows 2.03: [https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...](https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win203-1-1.png) 3.11: [https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...](https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win31-1-2.png) 95: [https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...](https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win95-1-2.png) ...and that dialog remained almost unchanged up until Windows 7: [https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers_new_2/windows-7-s...](https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers_new_2/windows-7-settings- border-color.png) Unfortunately, after Win7 it was removed, and they basically took away customisation completely in Win10. ~~~ noisem4ker What's left of customization is the choice of an "accent color", plus light and dark modes. ~~~ jussij Except this new Windows light and dark mode option only changes the colors on a handful of applications, meaning most Win32 apps then look out of place. Whereas that older style of Windows color configuration would automatically adjust each and every _well behaved_ Win32 application. ------ ucarion The article mentions they use Bezier curves over the HSB colorspace. > I used Lyft’s amazing Colorbox to help normalize our colors. Instead of a > naive linear scale at 10% increments, I used bezier curves—a vast > improvement at the more extreme ends of the scale. Linear HSB is _very naive_ , but HSB is still _quite_ naive. It's just a cylindrical version of a color space optimized for displays, not human perception. I don't understand why they wouldn't instead opt for the CIELAB color space, or its cylindrical equivalent. IBM does this, and it gives them effortless support for dark mode, by just flipping the luminance component of colors: [https://www.ibm.com/design/language/color](https://www.ibm.com/design/language/color) You can visualize the CIELAB behind IBM's color scheme here: [https://cielab.io/](https://cielab.io/) (go to "IBM Carbon") ------ butz Great, now every visit from private mode shows huge "dark mode" banner. How about just using prefers-color-scheme media query? ------ shakermakr When you have your OS set to dark mode and a site blinds you with it’s whiteness...you see the total UX fail. UX is about the U. If they’ve specified I want things black on contrast, then support it. Because they expect it. Post shows how feasible it is...and users, the U, will respect you for it and keep coming back. Otherwise your first impression is simply _blinding_ and not in a positive way ~~~ ken In a sense, I suppose it is one aspect of accessibility. It's not a "total UX fail", though. You can still read the text and accomplish your task, even if the brightness isn't ideal. Speaking of _blinding_ , it's too bad the other aspects of accessibility aren't as popular. When screen reader support was broken, they didn't write blog posts about fixing it. ------ dreamcompiler This is a good article. I'll bookmark it and probably refer to it in future. That said, why does everybody care about Dark Mode so much these days? It's an interesting problem; I worked on it 20 years ago and solved it adequately for my own purposes. But it's not a very _important_ problem, especially right now. ~~~ userbinator _That said, why does everybody care about Dark Mode so much these days?_ My guess is that people either don't know/can't be bothered to adjust their monitors' brightness and contrast to a comfortable level, so they're left at the default which is usually eye-burningly bright, and they're trying to work around this in software by reducing brightness and contrast. Unfortunately this also means those who _do_ have their monitors adjusted comfortably are subjected to much worse contrast. ~~~ Can_Not I have had many devices where "minimum brightness" is brighter than the brightest I would have actually wanted. ------ nikivi Hope GitHub is next to release dark mode ------ megavolcano Dark Reader extension does a better job than their design, what a waste of time, effort and cash. ~~~ nhumrich Dark reader actually has a js library you can add to your site to allow people to essentially toggle it on, wothout having the extension. Dark mose for free, basically. ------ FpUser I can not digest dark mode when working with the text. I know it is individual as I saw that many programmers do use it. To each their own I guess. ------ BubRoss I'm not sure choosing a color scheme for your CSS is really 'building' anything. ~~~ arkitaip It could be a major undertaking for a sufficiently complex site like Stackoverflow, just like the article illustrates, because there just so many UI elements to re-color. ~~~ BubRoss Thinking that choosing colors is a major undertaking is one of the most preposterous things I've read in here in a long time. Everything in this article should take a morning at most. People need to stop pretending trivial things are difficult just because they want to write a blog post. ~~~ dwaltrip Design is an actual discipline that people work hard at to produce the results that they do. Colors are a core aspect to UI design. ~~~ asjw It is true But not 100% in this case They just recoloured something that already existed Design must also account for spacing, layout, positioning and emphasizing things, according to the colour scheme ------ ssivark I think site/application-specific _toggling_ of dark mode is a fundamentally broken idea, since the default on the web is white background pages. It’s an awful experience to turn up the brightness when viewing dark pages, when most pages you open will be white by default! Ideally, all portals must support theming modes, but I’d like the switching to be seamless, to prevent such nasty surprises. Maybe based on a standard (something like the site delivers both CSS sets, and logic in the browser chooses which ones to display, or suitably “invert” the default) ~~~ saagarjha You're thinking of prefers-color-scheme, which already exists and is adopted by Stack Overflow. ~~~ ssivark My question is this: Why would I use dark mode on SO, or specific sites, if the next site I open will be rendered with the light theme with high probability? ~~~ saagarjha Hope springs eternal.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why should open source support be free? I don't think it should. - hoodoof i.e. the software is free and open source but the developers only answer questions from those who pay.<p>Got a question, maybe the community will help. Definitely want an answer? Pay the monthly support fee.<p>How would you feel about that?<p>I'll say how I feel - I think it's entirely reasonable that you get to use free software for free, but if you want the developers to answer your support questions it hard for me to see why they should be at your service for nothing.<p>Software free, sure thing, great. However, I can't see why any open source support should be free.<p>Tell me why it should. ====== gus_massa If it's a small project, you can do whatever you want. Most (all) open source licenses don't force the owner/maintainer to provide support. They have big "AS IS" clause. For a big project, you can try it, but it's very difficult to build a community around it without some free support. Also, you want (good) bugs reports, so you have to allow free bugs reports. (It's also allows bad bugs reports, but it's difficult some user to tell them apart.) Also, you want to provide some babysitting of good pull request from power users, in spite perhaps some of them don't pay. (For example, at some low levels of academic work, they can run/install whatever they want, but they have no money.) And you want some free support for people installing it only for testing. Usually Windows box are very homogeneous and you an provide a foolproof installer, Linux has usually more configuration details. With all of these, you will have a group of users that get to a big company that can invest some money to hire you as consultants, pay to attend conferences or make donations. It's possible and legal to attempt your method, but I don't know a big project that was successful without some free support. Also, I you don't provide support, you will get anyway an unofficial support group in StackOverflow or a subredit. And you still have the possibilities of a hostile fork. If the hostile fork has approximately the same capacity to produce new code and better free support, it will probably take over. ~~~ psook The implicit fault in the OP is that the developers don't get anything out of providing support. This is entirely false, however, as your users are your testers. If the product isn't good enough to pay for, as many projects are when they start, or fills too small of a niche to justify a payment from someone, you risk your project becoming stagnant due to no user-input. When others use open source projects, their specific goals for using the project might vary slightly from the developer's, and the use-case will never be fleshed out--leaving the project at a lower quality than it could be, limiting appeal and growth. That doesn't mean it's the wrong choice all the time, but these are the tradeoffs that you're making when you make that choice. ------ skewart Does anyone actually think it _should_ be free? Are there really people who think a developer who creates and maintains an opensource project should be obligated to answer any and all support questions and requests?! I assume you must have run into people who think this way OP, or else you wouldn't be asking the question. I can't say I've ever heard anyone argue that though. Offering free open source software with paid support is a well-established business model. It's probably hard to scale quickly, but if you have a popular project with decent enterprise adoption you can probably make it work. In fact, offering paid as opposed to free support will probably help your project get traction with enterprise users. They'll feel more comfortable knowing they can have a contractual guarantee for support as opposed to just hoping you follow through.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bust a Name - Great way to find available domain names - exogen http://www.bustaname.com It's like Instant Domain Search taken to the next level - give it some words and it'll help you find something. Sorting by length and readability are great ideas. ====== dshah Once you have a few domain names picked, you can use <http://www.DomainGrader.com> (still in alpha) to see what score it gets. ------ deramisan That's a good one - but upon testing it does produce a lot of domains quickly that are similar, using only a few of the list of keywords in some cases. Still worth my upvote tho. ------ waleedka Excellent. Goes to show that even when there are great products in the market (like pcnames.com and instantdomainsearch.com), someone will come up with something better. ------ exogen Instant Domain Search taken to the next level. Sorting by length and readability is a great idea. ------ 7media but why are they using tapefailure? are they checking out what users type into the forms? ------ seer wow! that thing is simply amazing - I remember just a month ago we did a domain hunt for our app, and it was so slow and frustrating. But with this I found a couple of great names in a matter of minutes! Definitely goes to my favs! ------ plusbryan excellent work! i love this ~~~ mdolon What makes it even more amazing is that it has a business model. Great to see a fresh, simple and smart execution of a useful tool. ------ brianmckenzie Wow, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile. Nice work! ------ joshwa well, there goes another one of my startup ideas... I suppose there's room for more than one in the market, though, as it's an implementation game.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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