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In a Twitter Age, Even Bad News Like Layoffs Is on the Company Blog - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/technology/start-ups/05blog.html?pagewanted=all
======
namnori
It is inevitable. When there is not enough work to go around, spider senses
start tingling and employees start seeking information; a lot of it. They look
to upper management (good luck there buddy boy!), and worse, their cubicle
neighbors.
From personal experience, I can tell you that the cynical tendencies of the
office will distort and magnify layoff gossip, spreading it like wildfire and
killing productivity. Managers, in general, must realize that workers are
uncomfortable with an absence of information. They will in most cases choose
the most convenient sources to fill in the void.
It has been once said that all information is good, even if it is bad. Those
few that survive the latest brutal round of job cuts will expect a certain
level of frankness from upper management to preserve motivation, as well as a
sense of job security. Therefore, I agree and say the best option is
transparency, but only on one condition. Cut once, cut deep, and prevent a
demoralizing series of job layoffs that will only keep the workers guessing
and the monster.com server busy.
I think the layoff blog is a great step; companies finally dishing the honesty
and respect its workers deserve.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Learn indexing dammit - tejay
http://gun.io/blog/learn-indexing-dammit/
======
jmngomes
Maybe those 5 "conventions" are in no particular order, but I'd argue you
should first check your indexes and only then consider "trying cacheing".
Also, I'd think it'd be better to create indexes after "rewriting your code to
use raw SQL", as indexing is usually (meaning almost always) designed to
support queries; hence, you need to have queries first.
------
mjhea0
agreed. yes, they are a bit out of order.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SFO near-miss: Air Canada flight got as low as 175 feet to planes on taxiway - mbgaxyz
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/11/sfo-near-miss-air-canada-flight-got-extremely-close-to-planes-on-taxiway/
======
DrScump
This provides added detail to the original article from mercurynews:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741605)
474+ points, 415+ comments
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mars water surprise in Curiosity rover soil samples - doublerebel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24287207
======
startupfounder
"If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little
bit - a few hundred degrees - you'll actually get off about two pints of water
- like two water bottles you'd take to the gym," Dr Leshin explained.
This is huge for Mars exploration by humans.
1\. We can send unmanned expeditions to stockpile large tanks of water.
2\. This would allow us to literally 3D print structures on the surface and
allow us to significantly decrease the amount of materials we need to
transport to the surface in order to build a habitat.
Edit: 3\. And ALICE rocket fuel could be created using this water and the
aluminum found in the Martian soil.
~~~
warfangle
They also suggest that one of the main components is perchlorate -- which, if
turned into lithium perchlorate can be used for oxygen generation, and if
turned into ammonium perchlorate can be used for solid rocket fuel.
~~~
jonnathanson
The perchlorate hypothesis seems to be getting a lot of confirming evidence:
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130926143246.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130926143246.htm)
While the science dailies are pitching the perchlorate finding as a "setback"
(because it complicates the search for organic molecules), it's indeed
promising for fuel usage.
------
bfe
The primary reference behind this is the new Special Issue of the journal
Science with several research papers on Curiosity data:
Curiosity at Gale Crater
[http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml](http://www.sciencemag.org/site/extra/curiosity/index.xhtml)
INTRODUCTION: Analysis of Surface Materials by the Curiosity Mars Rover
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6153/1475](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6153/1475)
------
abduhl
For a comparison, typical values for water content on Earth are in the 15 to
50% range for the inhabited world.
This is kind of an awkward way to present this data. They are talking about
water content (which is by weight) and then translating to volumes which is
not straight-forward in all cases.
I don't know how revolutionary this is. A cubic foot of soil is, in my
experience, quite a bit larger than most laymen think and heating something a
"couple hundred degrees" on a world with no established infrastructure (e.g. -
there are no large scale solar panels or nuclear reactors set up on Mars)
seems like quite a problem.
~~~
ricardobeat
> A cubic foot of soil is, in my experience, quite a bit larger than most
> laymen think
Larger than a cubic foot?
------
tocomment
I have questions about this. Can anyone help?
How do they know the water is everywhere? How do they know it's not just in
the one place they dug and nowhere else?
Why hasn't the water evaporated? Isn't Mars almost a vacuum?
Why didn't the water evaporate from the soil after being dug up but before
being put in the oven?
Could there be large underground frozen aquifers?
~~~
Coincoin
There is no water per say. It's just that the soil chemical composition is so
that if you heat it a "few hundred degrees" a chemical reaction will produce
water.
~~~
tocomment
Are you sure? If that's true I totally misread the article. I'll go back band
check
------
5avage
Where do you get the energy to heat the soil?
~~~
dombili
It's nuclear. You can read about it here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#Specification...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_\(rover\)#Specifications)
SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) then uses this energy to heat the soil and
analyze it. I recommend everyone to read about the SAM, it's a fascinating
instrument. Arguably the most complicated instrument we've (humans) ever
built.
(If you're curious about the SAM, read this article:
[http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2012/curiosi...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-
lakdawalla/2012/curiosity-instrument-sam.html))
~~~
morsch
[https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/spacecraft/...](https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/images/spacecraft/2012/20121130_sam_from-
side_PIA16100_fig1.jpg)
Nuts.
------
methodin
The irony - water everywhere yet the inhalation (or ingestion?) of space dust
proves detrimental to the thyroid system. Wonder what else is in that crazy
dust?
------
gexla
> . This striking block was dubbed Jake Matijevic, in honour of a recently
> deceased Nasa engineer.
They are naming rocks. They haven't even stepped foot on Mars yet and they are
already going space mad.
And what's so special about getting a rock named after you? I'm sure there are
enough rocks out there that everyone can have their own rock. Why not name a
canyon or mountain after him?
~~~
sanxiyn
There is a bureaucracy involved. To name a feature, you need approval from
International Astronomical Union Working Gruop for Planetary System
Nomenclature. No, I am not kidding.
[http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/](http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/)
~~~
menubar
Ah yes, the IAUWGFPSN. You don't mess with those guys. I think they have Gary
Coleman on staff. He's a real hard case. Ironically, he killed a man for using
the word "ironic" incorrectly.
------
ChikkaChiChi
Every time I read Curiosity stories, David Bowie starts playing in my head.
~~~
generj
♫ Bowie's in Spaaace ♫
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why RSS is Broken (and how to fix it) - moses1400
http://www.centernetworks.com/why-rss-is-broken
======
bootload
Use Atom? ~ <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287>
_"... I thought it is a great time to talk about why I think RSS is "broken"
and in it's current form isn't sustainable over the long-term. Before I begin
let me state that I like what RSS offers a lot and do read several feeds.
Let's look at RSS from two different "broken" angles: subscribers/metrics and
marketing ..."_
Eek! From the same author who bought you, _"Is Scribd a Porn Document
Network?"_ , <http://www.centernetworks.com/scribd-porn-document-network>
There is no real discussion of how RSS is broken or how to fix it. Instead of
reading this authors comments try listening to Tim Bray [0] ( co-creator of
Atom spec ) who talks about building Atom, a replacement for a broken RSS. and
the dynamics of online collaboration.
[0] Tim Bray, _"Atom As A Case Study", 36min 17Mb_
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1155.html>
------
bct
That my news reader tells you nothing about me is a feature, not a bug.
~~~
natrius
If you're using a web-based feed reader, as most subscribers do, it's telling
sites almost as much about you as visiting the site itself would.
The problem the author refers to is the same problem any site has to deal with
when they offer content without requiring authentication. The solution is
cookies. If the subscriber is using a web-based feed reader, any images
embedded in the feed will send the same cookie that viewing the page itself
would. Any data you've collected about registered users can be associated with
feed subscribers until the cookie expires.
The other option is to use a third-party ad service that has a super-cookie on
file for your readers already, like DoubleClick. Almost all of the user-
tracking strategies available to you on a regular web page are still available
from feeds.
The linked article is what happens when people who don't actually build things
try to prognosticate.
------
henning
Yes, the solution to 9-10 mutually incompatible syndication formats is to
introduce a NEW mutually incompatible syndication format -- one riddled with
adware. That'll go over like a fucking lead balloon with users!
And think of the $$$! We gettin' hella paper all up in this piece, son!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I like Meteor.js because I'm lazy - halisaurus
http://paul.molluzzo.com/i-like-meteor-js-because-im-lazy/
======
ilaksh
There is an unfortunate belief that any programming system which is
significantly easier to use must automatically have caveats that make it unfit
for 'production' use. And another similar belief that such systems are unfit
for use by 'real' engineers. For example, if AngularJS had come up with an
easier-to-understand way of creating components (directives) then it may have
been dismissed as just another tool for novices. But some aspects of AngularJS
are sufficiently complex that it is acceptable to 'real' engineers.
These are false beliefs and one of the reasons that (this is obviously an
estimate off the top of my head) about 95% of programmer time is wasted
solving problems that have already been solved numerous times. I see people
hinting at security or other concerns related to using Meteor in production,
but I have yet to see an example where one of these concerns actually caused a
production issue.
I would be very interested to hear if anyone had actually tested Meteor in
production, or had specific concerns related to security or anything that
leads them to the conclusion that they must come up with their own
different/more complex solutions to problems that Meteor solves.
Taking advantage of a system that solves 90% of your problems rather than
reinventing six wheels is not lazy. Its just sane and mature.
The psychology of programmers related to tools and frameworks is childlike.
Its as if everyone is in a playroom with a bunch of tiny blocks of different
shapes. Every once in awhile a kid figures out how to construct generally
useful connector shapes or recognizable objects from the smaller blocks. Then
when another kid wants to use the larger pre-composed structures to play with,
everyone makes fun of him because he is 'cheating' and must be too dumb to use
the tiny blocks.
~~~
eatmyshorts
I've used it on a production site. There still is a learning curve, as with
any new technology, but I've been very happy with it. I hope to do more with
it. I'm working on a CMS built with Meteor, as my clients tend to be less than
technically proficient.
The main problem I've had with it relates to IE7/IE8. The standard password
encryption results in a JS error on those browsers due to the password
encryption taking too long. We run the whole site on top of HTTPS, though, so
we took a little hack to remove the extra client-side encryption on IE7/IE8.
It's not ideal, but then again the default encryption for passwords is there
primarily for those that don't use HTTPS (passwords are sent over the wire
hashed such that HTTP sessions still maintain safety with the passwords...this
hashing is slow by design, and the IE7/8 javascript engine isn't good enough
to do it in a reasonable time frame).
------
muraiki
I've been learning programming for about a year and Meteor was the first
Javascript framework that I used. I found it remarkable how quickly and easily
I was able to get something up and running, given that I had relatively little
experience with Javascript (I read most but not all of Eloquent Javascript).
I used it to make an online multiplayer Go board where you can see your
opponent moving the pieces, for the purpose of teaching games:
[https://github.com/muraiki/senseinogoban](https://github.com/muraiki/senseinogoban)
Being able to make something like this as a beginning programmer was really
exciting! Since I'm pretty new to programming I don't know if the code is that
great but it might give some ideas to people who are interested in using
Meteor in a graphical way (as opposed to something like a To Do list).
------
rglover
I'm a big fan of Meteor. As a front-end dev that got his start in JavaScript
with jQuery, it's been really easy to settle into. I did a pre-release of a
Meteor app into production today
([https://properapp.com](https://properapp.com)) and it's running pretty well.
The latest dev shop outlines what's in store for the 1.0 release
([http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/10/01/geoff-schmidt-at-
devsh...](http://www.meteor.com/blog/2013/10/01/geoff-schmidt-at-
devshop-8-getting-meteor-to-10)) and based on where they're at now, it's
exciting to think of what will be possible.
Definitely not a toy, though, and something that should be evaluated
carefully.
~~~
creamyhorror
I'm surprised that you're using Meteor for what would seem to be a single-user
use-case. Meteor's strength seems to be multi-user real-time apps, but this
looks more like a job for Angular/Ember plus an API backend.
I was looking toward Meteor for a similar project because of its handy client-
server syncing capability, but decided not to use it because it didn't seem to
suit the more traditional webpage model and the click-to-save-changes
paradigm. But your site is making me reconsider this. I've been learning and
implementing my site in Angular/Restangular, which involves me writing code to
POST to/GET from my Rails backend. I'm aiming to let users add and remove
nodes in a plan/document and rearrange their ordering - would that be easier
to do in Meteor? I'd love to make use of Meteor's object syncing and other
features. What's your experience been like? Did you try Angular or other JS
MV* frameworks?
By the way, I love your site's design and iconography. If you built the whole
service alone, I'd be very impressed.
~~~
rglover
Re: the choice for Meteor, this was somewhat of a fluke. I'm not a traditional
developer, and only dabbled with Rails and the like on an anecdotal basis. My
past experience with things like jQuery made it easy to pick up Meteor and its
basic concepts, so I just started building the app above (it's something I
really wanted/needed and I didn't want to waste a lot of time inner-bickering
about what tech to build it with).
I guess for your idea I'd have to see a sketch, but on the surface, yes, I'd
say something like that would be pretty easy. The cool thing about Meteor is
that it takes a lot of the thinking/logic out of the loop. So for example, you
would have the nodes as a Mongo collection and for each plan/doc, just store
their position info. Meteor/Mongo update automatically, so if say you used
something like jQuery UI drag/drop, you would just have it update the given
object in Mongo when you pick it up or put it down. Make sense?
My overall experience has been that I haven't gotten frustrated with Meteor
like I did with other frameworks. It's not as rigid, sure, but if you take the
time to develop a good design practice, it can be really efficient. Plus,
having both front and backend code in JS is a serious time saver.
Thanks for the complements on design. Save for the octopus, logo, and animated
gifs outlining the process (oh, and the nice header on the blog), this was a
100% solo effort.
------
nonchalance
Have you tried similar frameworks like Derby
([http://derbyjs.com/](http://derbyjs.com/))? If so, can you compare your
experiences?
~~~
hansgru
> Have you tried similar frameworks like Derby
> ([http://derbyjs.com/](http://derbyjs.com/))? If so, can you compare your
> experiences?
I tried Derby.js because of one important for me missing feature of Meteor:
serverside HTML rendering - required for search engines and also for CMS or
content like applications. IMO Derby.js got it right there.
Unfortunately Derby.js is seriously lacking professional documentation of any
kind: Meteor already has books and 2 very good and long enough video courses
(from pluralsight and tutsplus)
~~~
andersnolsen
Did you check out the meteor package "spiderable"? It might need to mature a
bit but it might do the trick
~~~
hansgru
> Did you check out the meteor package "spiderable"? It might need to mature a
> bit but it might do the trick
Of course I did :). It's not usable at all :). It's also not reducing the
initial loading time (very high for any public webpage).
------
wc-
It was fun developing the MVP for
[https://lawyermatch.me](https://lawyermatch.me) on top of Meteor. Would I
recommend meteor in its current form (v0.6.5 or so) for a large production
website? No, but neither do the core meteor devs. Would I use it again for a
quick prototype? Absolutely, especially if you are already planning to use
mongo, node, handlebars, or the other core meteor technologies.
I saw one of the core devs speak in Chicago a week or two ago, and the main
feeling I came away with was that the Meteor team has a well planned roadmap
of features, solid funding, and a plan for generating revenue, all of which
will hopefully mean Meteor isn't going anywhere.
Edit - I think this article hits on some of Meteor's strengths re: ease of
development, but some of the features Meteor uses to accomplish this turn into
gotchas later. For example, the autopublish and insecure packages are awesome
for a 5 minute demo but for anything further they should be removed. Without
them, devs are back to thinking about queries and what clients receive what
data, permissions, etc. These are very important things obviously but it might
be a little misleading for someone using Meteor for the first time.
------
prezjordan
Totally acceptable to use Meteor first because you don't want to "reinvent the
wheel" so to speak. It's fantastic for prototyping real-time concepts.
If your idea works, then you can "mature" your codebase a little. But, from
the get-go, you'll want to make something usable, to see if your idea works at
all. Meteor is perfect for that sort of thing.
~~~
ilaksh
If you build a working system with Meteor and then re-implement some or all of
it, doesn't that mean you are in fact re-inventing the wheel?
~~~
mercer
Maybe it's more like custom-building a wheel to the exact specifications that
you figured out when using a 'normal' wheel. Sometimes customization matters.
------
jumpman222
I really like Meteor too. It makes developing a sophisticated app incredibly
easy. Even though it is only in preview mode, it is extremely polished. I
can't wait to see what version 1.0 has in store!
------
joecarpenter
Interesting enough, I found that Meteor is not production ready, in both
current implementation (not mature) and some design decisions. I was thinking
about writing blog post about it, but no idea when I'll have time to do it, so
I decided to stop by.
I have experience with Meteor in production and had some serious performance-
related problems. Not that they're not solvable, but some solutions kill some
core design decisions of Meteor. Just in case - I didn't pick Meteor for the
project, I was asked to help with it.
Anyway, here's short list:
1\. Collection synchronization does not really work even for relatively small
amounts of data (say 10k records).
\- It does not make much sense to send few MB of initial data to the client.
Paging API was moved to some distant future and you end up writing REST-like
API on top of Meteor, which breaks idea of collection synchronization, which
contradicts statement on their website - "no need to write REST APIs anymore".
I don't say it is not usable at all, you just need to be really-really careful
about what you send to client and it is easy to fail at this.
\- SockJS (transport protocol used by Meteor) does not have rate-limiting
built-in. If client connects using one of the polling transports and payload
is too large to be received in 30 (? - vanilla SockJS uses 5) seconds, server
drops connection thinking that client timed out. Partially, it is SockJS
problem and partially it is Meteor problem, as Meteor will just send all
outgoing data without caring if client is on slow connection. But because of
previous point, generally it is bad idea to send large amount of data anyway.
\- Server-side subscription API is very limited. Official documentation has
following sample: reactively count number of admins in collection. This is
done by listening on collection changes and counting admins by incrementing
(when admin is added) and decrementing (when admin is removed) single
variable. If there are 10k admins in database, increment function will be
called 10k times.
2\. Minimongo is interesting concept, but fails on many levels:
\- It is MongoDB written in JS, but slow
\- Does not have indexes ("client won't handle amounts of data for indexes to
be viable"), aggregation, map reduce, etc. There's no official API to create
index on server-side either.
\- Its reactive - whenever model is changed, Meteor figures out which fields
were changed and broadcasts changes to all listeners. And this is _not_ fast.
Inserting 10k items to collection will take around 2 minutes on AWS large
instance with node executable using 100% CPU.
\- Because MongoDB is not "reactive", Meteor just polls collections every 5
seconds to see if they changed by outside application. I really hope it only
tracks addition/deletion of records and not scanning through all rows in
database during each polling iteration
\- Meteor API is hiding MongoDB handle, but there's a way to get it (through
hack) and use it directly. And it takes 3 seconds to insert same 10k items
3\. Client-side is not as convenient as current MV* frameworks
\- Meteor is using non-reactive templating engines and attempts to make them
reactive. And this might be performance bottleneck, especially on mobile
devices. When single variable changes, Meteor will re-render whole template.
If you have some 3rd party plugins (like WYSIWYG editor, which injects own DOM
markup), you have to wrap it with special blocks, which prevent Meteor from
re-rendering them.
\- As a result of previous point, DOM is not stable.
\- Unlike AngularJS/Ember/etc, Meteor does not track individual variables.
AngularJS does it by checking if variable changed in digest loop, Ember uses
property-like system, etc. Meteor has global, flat namespace called
"Meteor.session", where application stores _all_ reactive variables that can
be referenced by their name. `Meteor.session.set('mymodule.hello', 10)`. It is
hard to structure application, when core reactive part is just a singleton
dictionary.
\- Once you get used to bidirectional data binding between forms and models,
it is hard to get away with events. But that's minor.
4\. Overall architecture (nitpicking):
\- Meteor API likes singletons. `Meteor.session`, `Meteor.methods`,
`Meteor.templates`, etc. Single, flat namespaces everywhere
\- Even though code can be written in a way it can run on both client and
server, there are subtle core API differences. Like it is not possible to use
`HTTP.get` on the client without callback, but it works on the server, just
blocks the fiber. If you use callback on the server, you need to block the
fiber manually (using future or fiber API), etc.
\- No server-side templates. Yes, there's crawlable package for Meteor, but it
is just PhantomJS (WebKit) that runs on the server and renders pages for
crawlers. Yikes.
This pretty much sums my experience with Meteor.
~~~
chandika
I'm running a Meteor production app myself and found similar performance
bottlenecks.
However, the Meteor community has really done some great work in solving some
core issues and others are on the 1.0 roadmap.
Some comments on this below based on our own experience.
> 1\. Collection synchronization does not really work even for relatively
> small amounts of data (say 10k records).
The issues around polling and how the server side cursors/observe works is
definitely not perfect. Started using the SmartCollections package which
ditches polling altogether and goes with the MongoDB OPLOG for synchonization.
Has been performing well for us so far and solved many issues around
performance.
[https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-smart-
collections](https://github.com/arunoda/meteor-smart-collections)
>2\. Minimongo is interesting concept, but fails on many levels:
Really depends on the usecase. I'am not sure if there is any other alternative
to MiniMongo at the moment for other frameworks.
The key thing is you really shouldn't expect to do many MB's of client data
storage in your app.
>3\. Client-side is not as convenient as current MV* frameworks
The key issue here is the how the DOM is re-written with the current rendering
engine.
The new 'Meteor UI' rendering engine and component architecture is promising
to solve this issues with html element level reactive-rendering as well as an
method for proper UI components delivering similar capability to what Angular
offers.
\---
The framework is still growing up, but we are hard pressed to find something
that delivers similar developer productivity.
Once you understand the framework and IF it fits your needs, Meteor can work
well for production.
~~~
joecarpenter
> Started using the SmartCollections package which ditches polling altogether
> and goes with the MongoDB OPLOG for synchonization.
Yes, I'm aware about this package. However, in my case, I had to reactively
count number of items in collection. SmartCollections does not have `observe`
for server-side cursors and core Collection implementation is slow, so I
decided to use `setTimeout` to check collection size every few seconds, which
turned out to be much faster than generic collection implementation.
> The key thing is you really shouldn't expect to do many MB's of client data
> storage in your app.
True, it just contradicts point 003 on
[http://www.meteor.com/](http://www.meteor.com/)
Plus, I was also referring server-side. Application does not work with node.js
MongoDB driver, it still goes through thin minimongo layer, which hides most
of the driver API. And it is not fast either (due to reactivity) - see insert
performance example.
Overall, I don't say it is not possible to run Meteor app in production (I
have one). It is just there are alot of different quirks and gotchas in Meteor
that should be worked out manually or with help of community-created packages.
And all this information is mostly scattered around StackOverflow, Meteor
bugtracker or in Meteor source code itself.
It is quite unpleasant to stumble upon collection synchronization performance
when you have most of the application in place.
------
dpearce
We ([http://differential.io](http://differential.io)) have been using
Meteor.js almost exclusively since switching from rails about 5 or 6 months
ago and are very excited about where the framework is headed.
Obviously, it's still new and has some kinks but 1.0 is around the corner, and
we've found the ease of development is well worth the few issues we've had to
work around.
An example app: [http://assistant.io](http://assistant.io)
------
sgdesign
If you're curious, here's another example (open-source) Meteor app:
[http://telesc.pe](http://telesc.pe)
------
Herbert2
I was hoping some of meteor's users could answer a few questions about it.
Can meteor use Postgres instead of MongoDB? Could meteor do sync with the
database through a server-side rest client (instead of mongodb)? Is TDD
possible? Is CoffeeScript possible?
------
omarrr
Always amazes me how some posts like this one have zero comments in the blog
itself but a dozen in HN.
~~~
flylib
that's pretty common, HN threads usually get more comments then on the actual
site, comments on actual sites usually don't do that good at all
------
oddshocks
Stop it, JavaScript.
Stop it. Stop being used for application programming.
Stop.
~~~
collypops
Why?
~~~
sfjailbird
Because JavaScript sucks in a multitude of ways? I don't think anyone with
experience developing in a few different languages disputes this, nor do I
probably have to namedrop A-list developers who have renounced JavaScript for
large systems.
It used to be the only choice for cross-platform web applications, but with
cross-compilation emerging as a real alternative that is no longer true, so
the sentiment has merit, and it is a proper criticism of a framework that
relies entirely on writing everything in JS.
~~~
tete
I am sorry, but this sounds like you simply don't know the language.
Javascript has one big problem and that is that most people either know it
from front end people who are NOT really into programming and on the other
side there are many people that just don't know JavaScript and use it like
C-style languages, just because it might have some similarities with it.
That's actually a problem a lot of multi-paradigm, flexible, expressive and
powerful languages suffer. People want to use it like the language they mostly
used, get frustrated about how it's a different language and not just a
slightly different syntax.
So either you do it like Python and force people into something or you have to
deal with a lot of people, complaining about something they don't understand,
which simply is easy with JavaScript, because it has a lot of features.
I mostly blame it to the fact that most people learn Java and a certain style
of Java as their first language. It's actually saddening, because it causes
computer science to become more and more a "just good enough" thing. It's sad,
because it started with people (and with that I mean Ada Lovelace, just like
various scientists in nearly every decade of the last century) who did what
they did not because it was cool and well-paid to do computer stuff, have your
own startup, etc., but because they had enough enthusiasm and imagination to
make this possible. Lovelace in the 1th century(!) imagined that there could
one day be "calculating machines" used to draw paintings!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The secret to success many don’t want to hear - kevinxray
http://amazingserviceguy.com/2655/the-secret-to-success-many-dont-want-to-hear/
======
patrickk
there's a lot of words in this article without anything really noteworthy
being said
------
kevinxray
One dude's opinion...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Which Types of Businesses Will Be Affected by Net Neutrality (And How) - psogle
http://www.focus.com/fyi/information-technology/which-types-businesses-will-be-affected-net-neutrality-and-h/
======
adelevie
What's completely missing in the "consumers" section is any discussion on the
positive network externalities that come with a a highly interconnected
network.
Without net neutrality, Comcast could simply throttle speeds to sites that
compete with their own business interests (Hulu and Netflix come to mind). So
sure, Comcast could make more money, and yes they could reinvest it to build
out the network so we can all have 1gbps connections for $11/mo. But how good
is that connection if the CEO of Comcast gets to decide which web sites we can
use? If that's what consumers want, I could just set up a 1gbit connection to
my next door neighbor's house and get roughly the same utility.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Goxel internals: how to store voxel data - guillaumec
https://blog.noctua-software.com/goxel-internals-part2-data-structure.html
======
guillaumec
Author here: feel free to ask me any question about the code.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ranking crowdsourced data with curves - timcederman
http://www.cederman.com/?p=116
======
ojbyrne
As someone who works (sort of) for Tripadvisor, I found this interesting. I'm
a little suspect that "Since I changed tactics, I have been having great hotel
experiences." is confirmation bias, though.
~~~
timcederman
Maybe. I had a string of pretty crappy hotels, so started paying more
attention to the reviews and noticed that although the hotels I had been
staying at had higher averages, they had a lot less 5 star ratings. Next few
hotels were much better, and when the option to get a hotel with a better
curve wasn't available, I was appropriately disappointed. While I would like
to think that I don't suffer from confirmation bias, this certainly isn't a
double blind trial.
I have also seen a similar phenomenon with restaurants on Yelp though, which
has been slightly easier to test in that I can try two similar restaurants
with the different shaped curves.
------
greendestiny
I tried a similar approach with the netflix prize, although in that case I
fitted truncated normal distributions to the data.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Japan's older hikikomori live in isolation, shunning society for years - pmoriarty
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/03/21/national/social-issues/japans-older-hikikomori-live-isolation-shunning-society-years/
======
buf
I believe a lot of the fear of hikikomori can be resolved by working remotely.
I'm an American who spent only 5 years working in an office before coming to
the conclusion that it wasn't for me. I spend most of my time working from
home these days, with the occasional trip to San Francisco to make an
appearance at HQ.
Because I still contribute to society, my relationship with my wife stay
strong, I am able to socialize without anxiety, and depression from conforming
to office society is long passed.
I still shun society in many other ways. I disagree with some schooling
systems, most political systems, and others beyond the scope of this comment,
but working from home gives me the willpower to make compromises.
------
huangc10
"There are more than half a million hikikomori in Japan — according to the
latest government survey published in 2016 — defined as people who have stayed
home for more than six months without going to school or work and interacting
with no one other than family."
One question for the hikikomori. If they don't work, how do they get money?
I'm sure they can live relatively inexpensive lives but how do they get money
to pay for rent? Does he work remotely? Bitcoin investments? So many
questions...
~~~
maxerickson
Many of them are staying at their parents still.
~~~
mettamage
I actually think more or less similar developments are happening in the US and
Europe. Instead of the specific term hikikomori, they call it an extended
adolescence or something similar. Though, 'extended adolescents' do not
necessarily shun society. They do live with their parents in most cases, from
my own experience at least.
Having said that I may be completely off base here since I do not know
Japanese culture well enough.
~~~
klokoman
It happens in all societies where people are forced to conform and markets are
closed to people without a license. Japan is economically the mono-ethnic
version of what US/EU are moving towards: a society where you must fill in the
boxes given by the system or f* off.
On hacker news since most people are in CS/IT, a field that is almost free
(but not for long), it may look like we still live under goverments that are
business friendly. But that's not the case at all in other sectors, and many
people aten't allowed to find a place in the market.
People today can't get their feet wet when trying to find a place in the
market, they must immediately do a full dive. No wonder more and more are
drowning.
~~~
Executor
What an anti-social sentiment. It is not the responsibility for the market to
find a "place" for you. It is your job to make that happen. What are you...
unemployable? Spending too much time playing video games instead of learning
multivariate calculus?
------
buf
Hikikomori are a result of Japanese salaryman-esque jobs. In order to heal
hikikomori, you first need to evolve work.
~~~
RayVR
I think you’re basically proposing that someone with a cold should get rid of
their runny nose to fix their headache.
------
aerialcombat
Personally the sad part is that I wouldn’t mind living like him given my
current life situations.
------
mgamache
I am not Japanese, I can only marvel at the complexity and subtleness of
Japanese culture. But I sort of get it, you start interacting with anyone and
it opens you up to the pressure and the questions and with Enryo you can't
really talk openly and be accepted. Would these people be happier living
outside of Japan?
~~~
ohiovr
I'm not japanese so I don't know. But I know that human beings are intensely
social creatures and being alone, even if in self exile must be painful. The
pain they have must be less than the pain they feel being around others. Some
would probably consider going to other lands but sounds like they don't have
money for the option. The $25 million the japanese government needs for them
sounds like a really small number for nearly half a million of them..
I do well in the states but I think I could relate to what they did in Japan
since Japan places such huge amounts of value on honor and self success. It
sounds like a double edge sword. It's good to have a society that values
success but leaving about half a percent of the population as shut ins doesn't
seem right.
~~~
wanda
> But I know that human beings are intensely social creatures and being alone,
> even if in self exile must be painful.
I'm not diagnosed as autistic or as a psychopath, but I'm really not a very
emotional or social person. I take great pleasure in being alone, _far from
the madding crowd_ , and I find it much more difficult to be among other
people, mandating the menagerie of masks necessary for me to get where I want
to go in society w.r.t. my career etc. I say masks, because unlike many people
I seem to meet, I do not have any enthusiasm for consumption, decadence and
self-gratification.
I mean, I'm no buddhist or anarchist, I just prefer to perfect my craft over
going out on the town or accumulating wealth I'll never use. I'm happy with
cereal, I don't need some kind of smoked dolphin's nose on squid-ink dyed
seventy-seed toast. I therefore have to act in a certain way, other than as
myself, in order to be perceived to be relating to people I meet and work
with.
In reality, you might call me a stoic, to use a loose definition of the term.
I don't find it painful to act like someone I'm fundamentally not, indeed to
act in an archetype I internally find rather absurd, but it is _tiresome_. It
tires me greatly to be among other people, and I try to keep my relationships
with others to a minimum. I have nothing to hide, I just prefer to spend time
in solitary and uninterrupted recreation or study, refining skills and
knowledge of topics I find interesting.
I'm not disagreeing with you, and I'm not saying that my individual existence
is a significant indicator of anything contrary to your point, but my
existence does at least indicate that _some_ humans (since I find it difficult
to believe I am alone) aren't as intensely social or pained by isolation as
you say – and I dare say there's more than a little overlap between the set of
asocial humans and the set of self-isolating _hikikomori_ who prefer no
company at all.
Though, in my experience on anonymous message boards over the past fifteen
years online, _hikikomori_ (or at least the western equivalent) seem to prefer
the company of others like themselves whom they may encounter on said message
boards. Or some certainly act like they prefer the imagined company of
anime/video game characters to the company of other human beings, most of whom
will never, ever come close to understanding them or what they're about.
~~~
HumanDrivenDev
> I say masks, because unlike many people I seem to meet, I do not have any
> enthusiasm for consumption, decadence and self-gratification.
You sound insufferable. It's fine not to have in common with people, but
pretending you can't get along with others because of their "consumption,
decadence, and self-gratification" sounds like nothing more than an excuse for
poor social skills.
Every day I break bread with people I have almost nothing in common with, and
still manage to have interesting and pleasant conversations. I don't feel the
need to collapse into a ball of self-righteous contempt.
~~~
wanda
I _am_ insufferable. Were I not insufferable to people like yourself, for one
reason or another, I would not need to wear masks.
I have social skills, and a tongue of only the finest sterling silver, so I
need no excuse for a lack of such things. I just wanted to speak frankly about
how much I loathe socialising with people, because I find them essentially
hollow and/or self-interested.
Any given person may see me as both hollow and self-interested from their
perspective, but this is irrelevant to the point I'm making. I see no reason
to _want_ to talk to people who are not really listening, so I try to avoid
it.
There are times when it cannot be avoided, but that's the price one pays to
earn money, which is in turn required to pay live for a home with electricity
and an internet connection. I suppose I could just become a bum, drifting
between coffee shops with WiFi, but then where would I sleep? Pretty sure I'd
have to socialise more if I were to go down that route anyway.
Also, if I 'collapsed into a ball of self-righteous contempt', I'm pretty sure
I would be saying 'I cannot socialise' not 'I hate socialising'. Just a minor
detail about your slightly rude reply, it doesn't matter that much.
~~~
myt6fore
This thing you describe comes from internal resistance (may also be called
self-reactive filtering) where environment -say, groups of people that you may
have some rigid bindings with,(like workplace)- display just the slightest
(very toned-down) air of viscious but very real and directed hostility. It's
the artifice that bothers you, but this stuff goes deeper. You can fix that by
building friendships with open (foolish) people, you just need to find some
good ones. Friendships do take some effort, though.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Liskov Substitution Principle (2019) - juanorozcov
https://www.brainstobytes.com/the-liskov-substitution-principle/
======
sumanthvepa
BTW if anyone is wondering why deriving class Square from class Rectangle is
an error, it is primarily because the interface of the Rectangle class is
mutable. If instead the Rectangle class was not mutable then deriving a square
from it would be perfectly fine. Discussion on StackOverflow:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030521/is-deriving-
squa...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030521/is-deriving-square-from-
rectangle-a-violation-of-liskovs-substitution-principle)
~~~
mjburgess
I disagree with the mutability argument... the Square constructor is "not a
subset" of the Rectangle constructor,
Compare: new Square(side) new Rectangle(width, height)
In this way, a Rectangle is more like a child of a square: widening its
capabilities.
~~~
chrisoverzero
Subclasses get narrower (that is, more specific) than their parents. Consider
those constructors. In order to constructor-chain from a Square up to a
Rectangle, duplicate the single parameter:
Square(side) : Rectangle(side, side)
There's not a well-behaved way to go in the other direction.
Rectangle(width, height) : Square(width) // ???
Rectangle(width, height) : Square(height) // ???
~~~
pdpi
> Subclasses get narrower (that is, more specific) than their parents.
That's precisely the problem. Subclasses have to less restrictive than their
parents. If a subclass adds observable restrictions, it fails the LSP.
~~~
Twisol
Conversely, if a subclass adds observable flexibility -- such as the ability
to stretch along a single axis -- it also fails the LSP.
Subclasses can really only add _orthogonal_ properties, such that influencing
one of these properties doesn't perturb properties observable from the super-
interface.
~~~
BeetleB
> Conversely, if a subclass adds observable flexibility -- such as the ability
> to stretch along a single axis -- it also fails the LSP.
That's not a given. If the new capability is only in new methods of the
subclass, then the program expecting the parent class will never be impacted
by it.
To be fair, I suppose you agree:
> such that influencing one of these properties doesn't perturb properties
> observable from the super-interface.
~~~
Twisol
Right, that's why I qualified both times with "observable". ~_^
It's worth noting that even if this capability can only _occur_ due to methods
on the subclass alone, it can still fail LSP if those manipulations are still
_observable_ to a client using only the superclass.
This is pretty much only possible because multiple clients can have a
reference to the same object, since it allows one client to observably
transition the object into a state that should be unreachable from the
perspective of the second client. (This is the root of the need to make
"defensive copies" [1].)
If one imposes a strict single-ownership discipline, then it doesn't matter if
super-interface properties can be violated by subclass-only methods, because
for the duration of its use via its super-interface, those violations are
impossible (and hence unobservable).
[1]
[http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=15](http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=15)
------
gregkerzhner
I feel like the real Liskov Subsitution Principle should be "if you have a
subtype P of type S, redesign your code so that there are no subtypes".
Seriously though, I have been a professional developer in a classical object
oriented language for the last 5 years and have written 0 class hiarchies.
Common functionality can be mixed in by composing "parent" objects around
common child objects. Passing multiple types of objects to a single function
is better handled via interfaces, not inheritance.
Is there a good reason to have a class hierarchy in modern programming?
~~~
mumblemumble
You're contradicting yourself a bit here. Implementing an interface is just a
special case of inheritance.
The fundamental reason why some languages make a formal distinction between
interfaces and purely abstract base classes is that using the "interface"
keyword is effectively signing a contract that says you will not do this one
thing (implementing virtual methods), and in return the compiler will allow
that base type to participate in multiple inheritance.
_edit:_ I should also mention that it's entirely possible to violate LSP
using only interface inheritance. Java's collections do this:
Collections.unmodifiableList() returns a List<T> that can't be modified. But
List<T> is rotten with methods for mutating the list. So what happens if you
try to mutate one of these? You get a rather surprising exception.
I suppose you could argue that this isn't _technically_ a violation of LSP,
because the JavaDoc for List<T>::add says that it might throw
UnsupportedOperationException. But UnsupportedOperationException is a
RuntimeException, not a checked exception, and it's rare for Java developers
to make a habit of handling UnsupportedOperationException when mutating
collections. So I'd argue that it's only a part of the method's spec in the
most pedantic of ways. IMO, the more pragmatic perspective is that creating a
subtype that inherits a whole bunch of interface methods that it has no
intention of implementing is just about as clear-cut a violation of LSP as you
can get.
~~~
rovolo
Yep, the read-only List<T> implementations definitely feel like a violation.
For the benefit of people using older languages, I'd like to point out that
newer languages tend to split collection interfaces into ReadOnly and
ReadWrite variants, where ReadWrite subclasses ReadOnly. This means that a
mutable list can be assigned to a read-only list variable, but a read-only
list can't be assigned to a read-write list variable (because you can't write
to an unmodifiable collection).
~~~
nybble41
There is a third variant which should also be considered: Immutable. It offers
exactly the same interfaces as ReadOnly but with the additional guarantee that
not only can _you_ not mutate the object through that reference, no one else
can either. Enumerating an Immutable collection or getting the item at a
particular index multiple times is certain to always give you the same result,
which allows simpler code and (with compiler support) better optimization.
This would be superfluous in Rust since the borrow checker ensures that no one
else can mutate data that you have a reference to, but most other languages
with mutation would benefit. However, the only mutable-by-default language I
am aware of which directly distinguishes between read-only ("const")
references and immutable data is D.
------
pdpi
One apparently minor change in Kotlin coming from Java is that classes are
final by default, and can be made inheritable from by qualifying them with
`open`, instead of being open by default and requiring
This seems small, but is a major shift in mentality: Classes shouldn't be
inherited from unless they were designed to be inheritable from, and this
usually comes with non-trivial invariants you need to document and respect
(one aspect of this being the LSP). Therefore, inheritability should be opt-in
rather than opt-out.
~~~
gHosts
In fact, skip all the natter about subtypes and the like and think _purely_ in
terms of class invariants.
A class invariant holds at the end of the constructor and the start of the
destructor and at the start and end of every public method.
A class invariant check for the child class _must_ invoke the class invariant
check of the parent class up the class hierarchy.
And that is the point and the whole point of the exercise.
You can utterly rely every on instance of the parent class or any descendent
class obeying the class invariant for the parent class.
This allows you to reason about a broader group of types without getting
bogged down by concrete details.
~~~
Noumenon72
What's the invariant for the problem in the article, where set_height on a
square mutates @width? Seems like you don't want to prevent width from
mutating _everywhere_ , you just want to ensure it doesn't mutate during
set_height.
------
jrockway
I have always felt that people use OO exactly the opposite as Liskov suggests.
Liskov says that subclasses must be fully substitutable, and that implies that
any valid operation on the superclass must be valid on the subclass. So say
you have a Bag class. You can add elements to it at will. Then you create a
Set subclass, and now inserting a duplicate throws an exception. You just
broke substitutability. Even though the code is easy express with this
hierarchy (if exists(element) throw else super(element)), your program blows
up if you try to substitute. Doing the opposite is safe, of course, but the
code reuse doesn't work when you make your Bag a subtype of Set. From an
algorithm standpoint, a Bag isn't really implemented in terms of a Set, so
you're writing a new data structure from scratch (rather than just changing
one condition in insert() like the invalid example).
What I take away from this is that people are mostly using OOP to cut-n-paste
code when two things are similar. I see the value in not wanting to rewrite
code (or to create a third "common factor" that you will never use, to
implement Set and Bag), but I think this use of OOP basically precludes any
computer science reasoning when looking at your classes. Apparently that's not
a problem, as people are ignoring Liskov right and left while building good
stuff. But thinking about it deeper, I fear that we didn't find the right
model when we invented OOP, and that is why newer languages are ignoring OOP
in favor of composition.
~~~
narag
For some people, programming languages are much like math, so there's right
and wrong, and there's a right way to do OOP, or even OOP is or isn't right in
itself.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I tend to see language features as a usability question.
In different human languages (or even in the same language) you can say the
same thing using different syntax, but one way of saying it is more clear or
more inspiring. It's not what some object _is_ , it's how it works better what
makes sense to me. Again, that's just me, YMMV.
~~~
mumblemumble
I agree, it's better to be pragmatic. So it's not _super_ useful to say that
LSP is about whether you're doing it right or wrong.
I prefer to think of it in terms of making the codebase intuitive to work in.
So I like to formulate it as, "You should be able to safely and fearlessly
plug any subtype of a class into a method that accepts that class as an
argument."
This is a bit of a departure from how Liskov originally formulated things, but
I think it is fair to say that it's a refinement that better captures the
spirit of how she talks about it in more recent interviews. And it also
captures why it's such an important principle, especially if you're working on
a team: Nobody wants to get stuck working in a codebase where Widgets are
partitioned into two different categories that can only be distinguished by
carefully reading their implementations, according to criteria that can only
be understood by carefully reading the implementations of methods that operate
on Widgets. It's not _wrong_ , per se, it's just not a working environment
that any self-respecting person wants to be stuck in..
------
evdev
Meta comment, but I would love for there to be more insight into the sociology
of Hacker News. I feel like in the last couple of years we've seen a _stark_
decrease in the frequency of "What to expect when you're expecting (to be a
millionaire founder)" articles and a stark increase in "Enterprise Patterns"
discourse. The latter is oddly at pretty serious tension with PG's ideas about
development and Scheme.
I find the "Liskov Substitution Principle" is an awkward way of pointing at
the idea that your usage of subtyping should not render the type variance in
your system nonsensical.
~~~
Jtsummers
It's cyclic. When I first joined over a decade ago there seemed to be a lot of
technical posts and discussion at the time, which gave way to a lot of SEO
discussions, which gave way to technical discussions, then shit tons of Erlang
(not that I minded), then other stuff for founders, etc. People tend to post
interesting things which leads to other interesting and related things. So
you'll see a lot of a certain topic or field, maybe a surge in new users or
user activity because it interests them, and then some new topic or field
becomes dominant for a while and appeals to a different subset of users who
become a bit more active with submitting, posting, and voting.
------
loopz
If you absolutely must use subclassing, remember that whatever code is
operating on your base class, would need to be able to operate all your
subclasses in identical fashion without introducing accidental surprises and
unanticipated side-effects. If this seems restrictive, please consider that
changes to one unit of code should ideally be unrelated to other separate
units of code, and how to better accomplish this. Later usage of subclassing
can at any time introduce similar leakages of encapsulation and temptations
around that theme.
------
Fatalist_ma
I don't think this is a good or even valid example. Where do we see that the
method that depends on the Rectangle class no longer works correctly for
instances of Square? Why does it depend on the exact value returned by the
object?
The example from the Stackoverflow link makes more sense: " ssert.AreEqual(20,
rect.Height); ... because changing a rectangle's width does not affect its
height. " Well, we may choose to not follow that assumption in our project.
Let's say we're making a graphical editor, our rectangle could have various
restrictions - like fixed proportions, max/min area, etc; so I can imagine how
we may not have a guarantee that changing 1 side does not change another side.
If it's just for general-purpose geometric calculations - then sure, but then
it better be an immutable object.
I mean, you should not use inheritance for things like these but I don't think
this always violates LSP.
------
memco
I think the concept of the article is great but the explanation could use some
work. Given the code it does not seem clear to me why the test case of an
explicitly requested rectangle now returns functions from a square that was
not initialised or requested in the setup. Maybe this is specific to the
language the author is using?
~~~
juanorozcov
Thanks!
I will try to make the explanations clearer, I'm still trying to improve my
writing and this is very much appreciated, oh, and the code is Ruby.
I forgot to add the source code for the article, I just pushed it to a git
repo and added a link to it at the article's footer.
Thanks again!
~~~
TheTaytay
Thanks for the article!
In school, I believe I heard this summarized as something along the lines of:
"a derived class should require no more and deliver no less than its base
class". I have always liked that succinct phrasing of the principle.
~~~
juanorozcov
"a derived class should require no more and deliver no less than its base
class"
Uh, very nice, I need to write that down, it's by far the most concise version
of the principle I've heard!
Thank you
------
toolslive
In golang, X is a subtype of interface{}. But []X isn't a subtype of
[]interface{} (according to the compiler). Doesn't this violate the above
subsitution principle ?
~~~
zozbot234
In golang, a white horse is a horse: If you ask me for a horse, I can give you
a white horse. But if I want a stable for _n_ horses, it's not correct to give
me a stable for _n_ white horses, because that doesn't account for yellow or
black horses. Does this violate the substitution principle?
(inb4: "It depends on what the meaning of 'is', is!")
~~~
toolslive
To continue your analogy, I want to be able to see the stable of white horses
([]X) as a stable of horses ([]interface{}), since a white horse is a horse
after all. In java (or C++ or most other languages), you can do the following
String[] strings = {"x0","x1"};
Object[] things = strings;
They can't be both right.
~~~
zozbot234
But a stable of horses, can accept yellow or black horses. A stable of white
horses, cannot accept yellow or black horses. If what one can accept in both
cases was the same, it is evident that "white horse" would not differ from
"horse". But acceptable and unacceptable horses are mutually contrary. Thus it
is clear that a stable of white horses is not a stable of horses.
~~~
toolslive
> Thus it is clear that a stable of white horses is not a stable of horses.
You're not making sense any more.
~~~
nybble41
A stable that can _only_ contain white horses is not a stable that can contain
_any_ kind of horse. Whether you can ignore that distinction depends on
whether the stable is in a covariant or contravariant position, i.e. whether
you want to get horses _from_ the stable or put horses _into_ the stable.
These would be fine:
Horse[] genericStable = …;
WhiteHorse[] whiteHorseStable = …;
genericStable.insert(new WhiteHorse());
Horse someHorse = whiteHorseStable.first();
However, these can fail due to type errors:
whiteHorseStable.insert(new BrownHorse());
WhiteHorse horse = genericStable.first();
Because the ability to substitute a subtype for a supertype (or vice-versa)
depends on whether the use is covariant or contravariant (or invariant) it
becomes difficult to have proper subtype or supertype relationships in object-
oriented languages where this distinction is not factored in to the type
system. Simplifying a bit, to apply the LSP the language needs to distinguish
between getters and setters at the type level and can't treat all methods
equally.
~~~
toolslive
Yes! it's about (co|contra)-variance and mutability, and your type system
should understand this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Using a piano keyboard as a computer keyboard - fock
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5928061/using-a-piano-keyboard-as-a-computer-keyboard
======
melling
“I have RSI problems and have tried 30 different computer keyboards which all
caused me pain. Playing piano does not cause me pain”
What is it about computer keyboards that are so bad? How can a piano be that
different?
~~~
saghm
I think the key thing (pun intended) is that the piano is large and therefore
people using it move their hands to accommodate, whereas a keyboard is small
enough to reach all the relevant parts while not moving your hands but instead
stretching the fingers/twisting the wrist, which is great for maximizing
typing speed but not for minimizing RSI. It's been pet theory of mine for a
while that the reason I don't have RSI despite typing a lot every day is that
my technique is absolutely horrendous; I never learned to type properly, so I
move my hands a bit while typing and don't always use the same finger for the
same key, depending on the surrounding letters, which makes me a relatively
slow typer (although not as much as you might think!) but seems to have
prevented me from ever getting RSI.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ship it, already - nbrogi
https://medium.com/p/fb3ada43f760
======
officemonkey
I really need to ship this sucker, but I'm still feeling a lot of resistance.
I know, I'll write a blog article! That's a useful piece of procrastination...
~~~
nbrogi
Hahaha!
You totally got me, officemonkey :-)!
Going back to it _now_.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How to make Numbrosia 2 and 3 descriptions more comprehensible? - amichail
See descriptions here:<p>http://www.numbrosia.com (Numbrosia and Numbrosia 2)<p>http://amichail.posterous.com/numbrosia-3-screenshot-and-description<p>The Numbrosia 2 and 3 descriptions are probably incomprehensible to most people.<p>I realize that videos would help considerably and I plan to make them, but I would also like to have text descriptions that are more comprehensible.
======
ScottWhigham
Cool looking game - am DL'ing now. The first thing to me is that you should
NOT have both on the same page - that is confusing as hell to me. Each version
should have a separate page/section.
Okay - DL'ed and am playing. Tutorial is very well done - that is, until I got
to the first Math move explanation. "Try adding 1 to row 2 by tapping it twice
with the second tap to the RIGHT of the first one"
Whoa!
I did it but I don't know what happened. A highlight of, "Here's what happened
after you did that" would have helped. I have no clue what I did because the
popup screen completely covers up that section.
I was able to "get it" after going through the tutorial though (and solve my
first one). I dig it - very cool idea.
So... to your question:
The terms "rotation moves" and "math moves" are confusing. I get "math moves"
better than the other but it still isn't great. I don't think, actually, that
you need to name the moves. In your explanation, you simple explain that you
can move entire columns and rows and you can add or subtract 1 to entire
columns and rows. "To move columns and rows, simply swipe the column or row in
the direction you want it to go."
Thats the simple part - the hard part is explaining addition/subtraction. I
think it needs more text than you currently have yet without the term "math
move"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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What I learned about the iPhone AppStore over the last 2 months - c1sc0
This summer I was tasked to evaluate the AppStore and advise our company on whether to pursue a native iPhone app or a web-based approach. I decided against the AppStore for all of the reasons that have been floating around the blogosphere & which pg has summarized more eloquently than I can.<p>But learning about the AppStore piqued my interest and I set up a little private project. This is my humble story & what I learned.<p># THE STORY<p>After brushing up on my Objective-C, I set out to build the minimal viable iPhone App. A flashlight was out of the question because I wanted something that: 1) makes people smile 2) uses <i>some</i> native iPhone functionality (accelerometer) 3) tests the AppStore approval process. Oh, and I like irony.<p>$DRUMROLL: My application named 'Reject' was APPROVED last week after two months in purgatory. $BADABING<p>Granted, the app is fairly trivial like many of the other apps in the CrappStore. This is due to the very nature of said store. Building complex apps is actively discouraged by the approval uncertainty and huge waiting times. As a beginning developer you minimize risk, pump out a few silly things while you are learning & once you are more confident you tackle a bigger project. After 2 months, I've only now started my first big project.<p>If you could all buy the app to help me recover my dev-license and dev-time, that'd be grand. If you're too poor I've reserved the 50 promo codes exclusively for HN users surviving on ramen noodles, screw the press ;-)<p># WHAT I LEARNED (CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG)<p>Here are a few dirty tricks & ideas that I hope will make life in AppStore purgatory easier:<p>Use the 'Easter Egg' field to plead directly to the reviewer. It's a free-text field that every reviewer will read and a little social engineering will work wonders.<p>If the app name is important to you, reserve it by submitting a dummy app without binary. You'll need dummy 512x512 and 480x320 artwork in order to be able to fill out the form.<p>Phone contacts at Apple are pure gold. I consistently got on the line with the same reviewer. Depending on their mood reviewers can expedite things. But it's still pretty random.<p>Set your app price low ($0.99) while it is in the review queue & jack it up immediately on release date. I got an app rejected because the reviewer did not like the price I set.<p>It pays not to be a bottom-feeder. Maximize revenue, not units of sales. Often a slightly higher price will give you more revenue. There's more than the $0.99 price-point. At a higher price point you can also afford to pay higher CPM/CPC for initial customer acquisition.<p>Count on doing your own marketing. The time when you could solely rely on rankings to boost your sales is over. The AppStore UI is so broken right now that you have to assume that your customers will <i>not</i> find your app without some effort of your own.<p>Expect long approval times. I've started thinking in development/update cycles of at least one month. Agile is not the mindset at Apple. Work on new apps while your other apps are in the queue. I wish Apple would crowdsource the approval process or look into setting up community-managed 'repositories' like Linux.<p>App Complexity <i>is</i> a good predictor of approval time. This is a big problem because it does not reward taking on the risks of building better apps. It took me 2 months to build up the confidence to start a more complex project.<p>Private API calls are an absolute no-no: even if you were approved before, your next update will be rejected because Apple started using automated tools to inspect your code.<p>If you give unlimited access to the internet through a UIWebView, your app will be pulled unless it has a 17+ rating.<p>There's no (easy) way to measure where your app sales come from. This makes traditional SEM/SEO difficult. You have no conversion numbers so your marketing funnel is broken.<p>Don't mention Apple products in your description. Don't use images of Apple products. Don't mention real-life persons in your description, I got an app rejected for that last one.<p>Don't count on being able to schedule a release date. Once you do get the approval mail, go into iTunes Connect & set your release date to $NOW. Remember, this can work both ways: I got surprised by an early release before my marketing materials were ready.<p>Yes, you <i>will</i> be pushed back to the queue upon rejection, even if you have the reviewer on the line and <i>beg</i> him to make an exception.<p>In all fairness, not all is bad. Apple seems to have started picking up speed lately. My experience with App approvals has been that it got faster in the last 2 weeks, at the same time when the AppStore itself went in disarray (wonky rankings, wrong release dates, ...). However, take care and remember "Correlation, Causation et Al.". Also, once I was in contact with Apple over the phone they were very courteous and professional in resolving issues. Slow & polite.
======
cpr
Great, some nice tips there, even for veteran developers...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Curiosity Rover Finds Rock Type That's Never Been Seen on Mars - drp4929
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/curiosity-strange-matijevic/
======
tribeofone
I'm all for what they are doing. And I'm for releasing articles to try and get
press and awareness about the Mars rover and the efforts at NASA. But, yea,
its supposed to be discovering new things, and its not like there has been
some exhaustive study done on all the rocks of Mars (so I believe). They keep
it up with these non-news news releases, people are going to get saturated or
just plain fatigued.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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The Refuseniks - wallflower
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/11/09/in-the-magazine/the-refuseniks.html
======
trhway
USSR, night, 4am, door bell ring in Rabinovich apartment.
Rabinovich : "Who is there?"
From outside of the door : "Just postmen. Rabinovich, would you agree that
USSR is the best country in the world for people to live in?"
Rabinovich : "Yes, i agree."
From outside of the door: "Then why do you want to leave this best country?"
Rabinovich : "Because in the other country there are no postmen coming to your
apartment at 4am."
------
googamooga
Nice story, but as somebody who lived in 1982 in the USSR, I should note that
there was no first class on flights between Moscow and Leningrad
(St.Petersburg), incoming and outgoing international calls did not work in
automatic mode - all calls were switched through operator, only Beriozka
stores accepted foreign currency, GUM was local currency only.
~~~
ikonst
Yeah, I was somewhat surprised by those. "Classes" on domestic flights in the
USSR?! And yeah, GUM was (and still is) a department store for Soviet citizens
-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUM_(department_store)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUM_\(department_store\)).
~~~
thriftwy
Actually I won't be surprised about classes, given that railway trains had up
to 5 different classes of carriages.
~~~
googamooga
No, long-distance trains had four classes: SV (two beds per cabin), Coupe
(four beds per cabin), Platzkart (six beds per cabin) and Sitting (no beds,
just benches). This classification goes back to Tzar (pre-revolution) times.
It has nothing to do with air transportation which has been developed in
Soviet era, where everebody was equal.
edit: minor mistakes.
~~~
thriftwy
Weren't there also Soft ("мягкий", two posh beds per cabin)?
~~~
googamooga
This is exactly SV ("спальный вагон").
[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BD)
~~~
thriftwy
Apparently it's a different thing:
[https://www.ozon.travel/help/railway/preparation/trains/](https://www.ozon.travel/help/railway/preparation/trains/)
As far as I understand, М has private bathroom but СВ doesn't. It's confusing
but I'm sure I saw them sold at different prices.
~~~
googamooga
Are we discussing 1982 or 2017? :-)
There were no bathtubs on the trains in 1980-s in Soviet Union...
------
andreiw
Nice story, but the USSR has been gone for more than twenty years. What value
does this add to HN’s audience, beyond stoking more russophobe hysteria? There
are plenty of other awful things that could be covered - ranging from
lynchings to police brutality...and all of this is largely irrelevant to the
tech community.
~~~
toomuchtodo
So many downvotes but no explanation.
This story is important from both a historical as well as philosophical
standpoint. Historical, so as to understand what those in the STEM field
endured in the Soviet Union. Philosophical, in that there are those who thirst
for knowledge and may not have the luxury others do of unlimited information
(for a variety of reasons, whether that be logistical or political).
I hope this helps! Knowing history helps us prevent repeating it. Think of
growing wiser as hacking yourself ;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
CEO's INTEL Trades on NASDAQ - T2_t2
http://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/insiders/krzanich-brian-m-872413
======
T2_t2
I don't know how to read this, as Krzanich "traded" 889,878 shares 11/29/2017,
but 11/01/2017 lists that he had 495,743 "Shares Held". Can someone explain
this to me?
~~~
bonzini
He exercised options before selling the 900,000 shares, so that his total was
a bit more than one million.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sex and the single black woman - cloudkj
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15867956
======
byoung2
There's another factor working against black women: the article mentions that
96% of Black women are married to Black men, but research by Dr. Julia Hare of
San Francisco's Black Think Tank finds that 10% of Black men marry non-Black
women.
~~~
spamizbad
I can't cite where I've seen the statistics, but I recall seeing a similar
discrepancy for other races in the United States.
I suppose it's to be expected: women, compared to men, tend to face more
pressure from their families (and society) to conform to "tradition."
~~~
roel_v
It is analyzed in quite a bit of detail on
[http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-
affec...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-
whether-people-write-you-back/) , maybe that's where you saw it; I think it
was on HN for a while, too.
------
maxklein
I wish they would use the term "African American". The internet is global, and
the 500 million other black people in the world are not affected by sentences
like "Some 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock".
The problems the article speaks about are relevant only to U.S-American-Born
blacks or African Americans, and not black people in general.
~~~
ricosroughnecks
As a black American, I'm glad they didn't use the term African-American. It's
insulting. While I love the African people, many (if not most) blacks in
America have no African ties (at least not for the past few centuries). It's
just PC nonsense and a gross misnomer.
~~~
maxklein
Then how about they use Black-American? The article is not about blacks in
general, it's about black people within the U.S.
~~~
ricosroughnecks
Then all would have been well. ;-)
------
beloch
Problem: 1 in 9 black men are in jail, 1 in 3 will wind up an ex-con. What's a
black lady to do?
Solution: Stop being a friggin' racist and try dating men who aren't black.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A site for nerds who love numbers and watching ads - iamemera
http://truereach.org/
======
JBDJ
And you thought just checking the YouTube counter gave you a comprehensive
total of all the views a video had, guess again! It's never that easy!
------
katrinamel
I love having one place to watch all my favorite ads! And see how popular they
really are holistically.
------
Rou3323
Finally, tracking video views beyond what agencies and clients pay for
------
Digdeeper
youtube view counts don't tell the whole story. this is exactly what we need!
------
trulyhung
another reason why youtube viewcounts aren't everything.
------
mmcveigh13
a way more holistic view of campaign reach, I like it!
------
mrussell15
data is awesome! keep scraping those view counters!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Some AngularJS pitfalls - shawndumas
http://branchandbound.net/blog/web/2013/08/some-angularjs-pitfalls/
======
KeyBoardG
Thank you so much for writing this. My company is planning a move from Fat-
client + in house server model to web based likely a SPA solution.
I've spent the entire weekend pouring over JS frameworks and have had a rough
time trying to compare Angular vs Ember vs Knockout. From a newby, they all
seem to be very similar without having written large systems with each to
compare.
------
beefsack
Some suggestions from someone using AngularJS in a significant sized
commercial project, which manages pages with complex DOM structures with tens
of thousands of nodes on some pages:
* Don't modify the DOM with anything other than Angular, not with jQuery, not with anything. You will create a maintenance hell for yourself if you try to do things Angular isn't good at, but if you work well within it's strong areas you will achieve bliss.
* Make everything a directive if possible, Angular performs much better when you are dealing with much smaller scopes contained in directives.
* Angular watchers (including ng-repeat) can be very slow when handling large complex data sets. Create a $watch on the set length, and use that to create a flat index and ng-repeat over the index.
------
Oculus
Sometimes the drawbacks of a framework are more important than the features.
Most competing frameworks (i.e. AngularJS, Ember.js, Knockout) keep on par
with one another when it comes to features. Their real differences comes out
in the drawbacks of how those features were implemented and whether you're
willing to deal with those certain drawbacks.
------
marquis
Another good reason to use ng-bind is that you have your UI ready to
localization and could save a lot of work later on. We use a combination of
ng-bind and ng-cloak, where the first page view is fairly light so the loading
time is insignificant. It's also an easy matter to write your own Loading
directive which could pop up a loading notification modal for example, though
I personally tend to hate those - I'd rather have a light page view that shows
me something to start looking at and have the main data lazy-load in the
background.
------
greaterweb
Nice writeup, here is my input on the points OP makes.
_The flickering UI_
A quick fix would be to extract the problematic markup, place in a separate
template file and leverage ngInclude[1].
If you find yourself having many instances where this is a problem, chances
are you aren't doing a good enough job of breaking up your application into
controllers, page components, directives, etc.
_jQuery and Angular_
In my opinion the example is little weak in terms of demonstrating a pitfall
of AngularJS.
Based on AngularJS best practices you'll find yourself only doing any sort of
DOM manipulation in the context of a directive (much like your example).
Bringing jQuery into your Angular app for the sake of using .hide here
probably won't make much sense. Chances are pretty good you'll leveraging
directives such as ngShow[2], ngHide[3], ngIf[4] (version 1.1.5). No need to
bring jQuery in for that.
If there is indeed a valid reason to bring jQuery into the project, I'd say
the responsibility lies more so on the developer ensuring the dependency is
met.
_Minification_
With the addition of ngmin[5], this isn't necessarily a pitfall just something
to consider in your workflow. There is a ngmin grunt task[6] that works as
advertised! I've been using it for quite some time now and never an issue.
My thought overall though is if you've conceded minification is a step in your
project workflow, you'll be using tooling to make that easier. Bring ngmin
into the mix and all is well.
_Directives are never 'done'_
I would suggest looking into using $watch[7] within the scope of that
directive or making use of compile post linking over the linking used in the
example. Check out the compile section [8] of the directive guide for more
information there.
[1]
[http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngInclude](http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngInclude)
[2]
[http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngShow](http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngShow)
[3]
[http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngHide](http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.directive:ngHide)
[4]
[http://code.angularjs.org/1.1.5/docs/api/ng.directive:ngIf](http://code.angularjs.org/1.1.5/docs/api/ng.directive:ngIf)
[5] [https://github.com/btford/ngmin](https://github.com/btford/ngmin)
[6] [https://github.com/btford/grunt-ngmin](https://github.com/btford/grunt-
ngmin)
[7]
[http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$rootScope.Scope#$watch](http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$rootScope.Scope#$watch)
[8]
[http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive](http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive)
------
avolcano
> Another option is to completely hide elements, or even your whole
> application, until Angular is ready. Angular provides ng-cloak to this end.
My issue with this is that it doesn't solve the problem of binding to
asynchronously-loaded resources. You have to manually implement your own ng-
cloak logic, or use ng-bind, to not have {{mustaches}} waiting for data to be
loaded.
Compare to Ember, where {{mustache'd}} data-bound bits aren't rendered until
their bound variable is defined.
(the, other fix, of course, is to do something like `<span ng-hide="foo !=
undefined">{{foo}}</span>`, but that doesn't scale particularly well)
~~~
oinksoft
You are somewhat misinformed: If you are using more than one template, this is
a non-issue. Only the HTML from the initial page load will ever display
template bindings, that being the purpose of ng-cloak, ngBind, etc.
$templateCache can be pre-loaded with something like the ng-templates Grunt
task, so excessive HTTP requests are not an issue either.
------
marknutter
For Minification, Brian Ford's ngmin grunt task works perfectly. The OP says
they haven't tried it which to me suggests that they may not be using grunt at
all, which is a mistake. Grunt takes care of a lot of workflow and deployment
details, including minification, and should be part of every javascript
developers toolset regardless of whether or not they use Angular.js.
For the "Directives are never 'done'" issue you should be able to attach any
jQuery plugins to the DOM in question inside the directive compile function.
~~~
SanderMak
Correct, the particular system I encountered this minification issue has an
Ant-based build (which calls r.js for concatenation and minification).
I'll have to check on your compile suggestion. I tried lots of things,
including using the postLink etc. Do you have an example?
~~~
marknutter
Here's an example using the jQuery UI draggable plugin:
[http://jsfiddle.net/marknutter/hSbjX/4/](http://jsfiddle.net/marknutter/hSbjX/4/)
~~~
SanderMak
Thanks! I also just found out about angular-ui-utils, where they have a
generic pass-thru directive for initializing jQuery plugins. Interestingly,
they opted to use $timeout inside the compile function:
[https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-
utils/blob/master/modules/j...](https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-
utils/blob/master/modules/jq/jq.js)
Wonder why that is, are there cases that would otherwise break?
~~~
marknutter
I'm not sure, that's a good question.
------
sequoia
Nice writeup! I'm using angular now on a work project for the first time.
My observation here is the same as what I've had for many "look how easy it
is!" frameworks: A lot of frameworks sport "look how easy it is!" syntax, but
using the easy/short syntax actually isn't adequate in some (sometimes most)
circumstances, and often it isn't even "recommended." So you start using the
longer, more explicit syntax, and all those short/sweet syntax features are
out the window.
For example, the easy-to-read {{obj.prop}} data-binding syntax is basically
dis-recommended here with three workarounds given (use ng-cloak, declare
databindings on element attributes, externalize & `include` the offending
markup). Once you have 3 different workarounds for what's basically the most
fundamental framework feature, I can't help but wonder "why offer this
short/sweet/brittle syntax in the first place? Most 'power users' can't really
use it." The dep injection one in particular- basically any shop worth its
salt is going to use a minifier on big JS applications- none of them (us) can
use the short dep injection syntax. Why even teach it/include it at all?
I guess it gets people up & running faster, but eventually you have to deal
with these pitfalls.
~~~
oinksoft
Why even teach it/include it at all?
I fear that other developers will read a comment like this three months down
the road and take it hook, line, and sinker. It is in line with the narrative
that AngularJS and similar tools hide their complexity/inflexibility, and that
the up-front examples are marketing fluff. I know I am guilty of this when I
look to comments like this one for the "on the ground" perspective.
Real-world AngularJS applications use multiple templates and {{ o.p }}. {{ o.p
}} is the recommended way to render scope 99% of the time.
ngmin[1] solves the DI minification/annotation problem transparently and is
trivial to integrate into any existing build process.
[1] [https://github.com/btford/ngmin](https://github.com/btford/ngmin)
~~~
sequoia
take it hook, line, and sinker.
:( I'm not a framework developer at all, just a user; this is just my
observation. Maybe it's incorrect or poorly informed, just how it appears to
one person. Anyway I'm not trying to sell anyone anything, neither am I a
fisher of men, so feel free to spit out my tackle. :)
~~~
oinksoft
Perhaps then the lure leads to a tree branch, snarled by a poor cast from
another angler earlier :) I didn't mean to imply devious presentation on your
part.
------
TeamMCS
My biggest issue with AngularJS is the inflexibility of it to play nice with
existing '1.0' sites.
Almost all the sites I'll develop take advantage of progressively enhanced
components or at minimum, widgets that are bootstrapped server side. Angular
wants you to load everything via AJAX - that can get heavy very quickly.
This is also evident within the codebase. You find yourself dancing around DRY
violations as you pass models to your markup rendered server side and also
serve the same/similar content to Angular via JSON.
Now this aside, Angular wouldn't require much work to let it play an
enhancement or migration role. You can already see Google have implement their
own 'private' method on the homepage of Angular.
Another problem that grates me about Angular is dynamic routing and loading
additional Javascript on the fly. I was recently building a portlet based
site. The intention was to make each module entirely configurable by other
developers - that meant passing control to their controllers and allow them to
enhance routing. As it stands you have to do it declaratively or using some
nasty hacks.
~~~
avolcano
> Almost all the sites I'll develop take advantage of progressively enhanced
> components or at minimum, widgets that are bootstrapped server side. Angular
> wants you to load everything via AJAX - that can get heavy very quickly.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen a library for any JavaScript framework that
elegantly handles loading JSON returned within a server-side template. It
seems like the best of both worlds - use your server-side template, but then
also get the data as JSON so that you don't have to do a second request to
populate your Angular $scope with data.
The easy way to implement this would be a library that automatically added
<script> tags containing the JSON that you could then reference from your
Angular template. It could even wrap the JSON in an Angular module of some
sort to keep your global namespace from being polluted.
~~~
SanderMak
Agreed. I tried to explore this issue a while back:
[http://branchandbound.net/blog/web/2012/11/unify-server-
side...](http://branchandbound.net/blog/web/2012/11/unify-server-side-client-
side-rendering-embedding-json/)
Turns out that using script-tags is somewhat problematic, but as a comment
points out, data-attributes could work.
~~~
esailija
This is not a problem in e.g. PHP, out of the box it can embed json in script
tags, with default settings you never get the sequence `</script>` (you get
`<\/script>` instead) and it even escapes U+2028` and U+2029 which are syntax
errors in Javascript string literals but not in JSON.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Do I need to learn GIT? - psteve710
I am a web design,do is it necessary to know how to use GIT?
======
frozenport
Yes because we collaborate using it. Its certainly easier then understanding
the js this pointer.
------
walid
If you use SVN, CVS or mercurial on a regular basis in your projects then you
will probably need to use git in the future and the answer will be yes. If
version control is not something you handle then the answer is no.
~~~
viraptor
Do you think that there's really space nowadays for someone who works with
files containing any kind of code (ui, markup, program, ...) and doesn't use a
VCS? I find it really hard to find people like that and working with them is
rather painful (they will end up in a position where they just have to know
git, or someone will have to do their work for them).
------
groundCode
I would say you don't need to know the minutiae, but having at least a basic
understanding will be very helpful.
------
cptfullhouse
yes! not only will it add value to yourself, a day will come on which you will
need it so badly that you'll hit yourself in the foot with a shovel for not
having learned it!
------
psteve710
Thanks guys, I have started learning it
------
dylanhassinger
yes
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The teleology of Internet congestion control [pdf] - gioele
http://www.wischik.com/damon/Work/Talks/ipteleology.pdf
======
voltagex_
Title of the talk is: The teleology of Internet congestion control
Teleology is: "The doctrine or study of ends or final causes, especially as
related to the evidences of design or purpose in nature;"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Myth of Cosmopolitanism - kawera
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-myth-of-cosmopolitanism.html?pagewanted=all
======
trajing
As stated in the article, it's not that genuine cosmopolitanism doesn't exist-
it's just rare. I'd be somewhat hard-pressed to find a political ideology that
does not consider itself to be superior to the other ideologies, one in which
the majority of members follow the 'full' ideology rather than a watered-down
version. This article seems to be complaining that cosmopolitanism suffers
from the same issues as any other ideology, and while that does not make the
complaints invalid, it does raise questions as to why it's specifically
cosmopolitanism that's being called out on this.
I may be missing something here, or misinterpreting some section, though, so
please correct me if I've said something wrong.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why Words Are So Important - ColinWright
http://anniemurphypaul.com/2012/12/why-words-are-so-important/
======
theanalyst
Word learning process almost reaches a plateau after leaving school,
interesting to see vocab given more importance than math
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mystery of Antarctica's Blood Falls Is Finally Solved - Mz
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/04/28/mystery-of-antarcticas-blood-falls-is-finally-solved/#347c454c2ef8
======
Safety1stClyde
That page delivered so many javaturds that it was impossible to read the
content without the javashit.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
264 SPAM hosts on Google's own CIDR range - jebblue
http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/209.85.128.0-209.85.255.255
======
jebblue
It's bad when a major ISP like Time Warner has spammy servers and my email
server has to reject email from even my own family members. It's really bad
when email from professionals using their Gmail address gets rejected by my
server because Google's own servers are spamming as listed by SORBS.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Hacker Eva Galperin Has a Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware - cschmidt
https://www.wired.com/story/eva-galperin-stalkerware-kaspersky-antivirus/
======
justtopost
As long as law enforcement has access to these tools, so too will the tech
savvy public. The only protections are enforced universal human privacy
rights, for everyone.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Promise and Price of Cellular Therapies - gringoDan
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise-and-price-of-cellular-therapies
======
vikramkr
As someone working in this field, I'm naturally a complete optimist in the
promise of what it had to offer. The work done by june et al is amazing, and
hopefully it is only the first step in what's to come. I do think that with
great time and effort we will be able to tackle these manufacturing issues,
and I'm particularly excited by the promise of applying synthetic biology
tools like genetic logic gates to create more and more powerful cells. Here's
to cautious optimism about the future of cell and gene therapies.
On a different note, look, Penn, I get it. You want "cellicon valley" to
stick. But it's not happening. Stop trying to make "Cellicon valley" happen.
Or at least pick a better name.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Android user tries out the iPhone - usaar333
http://aaronstaley.blogspot.com/2010/06/android-user-tries-out-iphone-for.html
======
potatolicious
> _"The iPhone dominates in UI performance"_
This is compared with a iPhone 3G, which already has somewhat pokey UI
performance compared to the 3GS. On Tuesday we will likely see an even faster
CPU running the same codebase. Apple is moving the goalpost for UI performance
seemingly faster than Google can keep up.
It is IMHO one of the main failings of Android - the UI is pokey in places
where it will significantly and negatively affect adoption rates and user
behavior. Scrolling is a pain on a Nexus One (haven't tried Froyo though,
so...)
~~~
masklinn
> This is compared with a iPhone 3G
But it's comparing with a HTC Hero. While a year younger than the 3G, it's
still not a "modern" android phone (not that your argument is completely wrong
as it does seem, from the reviews I read on e.g. the N1 or the Incredible,
that this impression of UI slowness/unresponsiveness is still there)
> It is IMHO one of the main failings of Android - the UI is pokey in places
> where it will significantly and negatively affect adoption rates and user
> behavior.
I think a bigger issue is the interface's customizability, leading to HTC
shipping its own Sense UI rather than working on improving the "main" Android
UI (by folding their improvements upstream)
~~~
timtadh
I have not noticed any slowness on the Droid however ... ?
~~~
enjo
My HTC Incredible is every bit as fast as my 3GS (which is to say, no
noticeable lag or slowdown what-so-ever).
~~~
masklinn
Which says a lot considering it has twice the RAM and 66% more CPU power...
(though it has nearly 4 times the surface)
~~~
nailer
Keep in mind things get even faster with 2.2's JIT.
------
dieterrams
This is actually a pretty good comparison, and I can get behind his critique
of the iPhone's mail app.
It's worth noting, though, that several of his major issues with the iPhone
will disappear with OS 4.0, such as undesired screen rotation and lack of app
switching (though only for 3GS or newer phones). The mail app will also get
improvements like conversations, though I don't know how good its
implementation is compared to Android's. I wasn't particularly impressed by
it.
~~~
masklinn
> This is actually a pretty good comparison, and I can get behind his critique
> of the iPhone's mail app.
Likewise. On the other hand, I find interesting that (I think) he compared the
iPhone's mail application with Android's GMail application. I was under the
impression that Android's own mail application (for everything other than
GMail) was less than stellar, but that it would be a better comparison basis
(general-purpose MUA)
> The mail app will also get improvements like conversations
I was under the impression that it would only provide threaded view (much like
Mail.app's own), which is a far cry from GMail-type conversation views. A nice
improvement for e.g. mailing lists, but not the same thing as GMail's convos.
~~~
dieterrams
You're right, I should have said threads, and yes, they're a far cry from
GMail conversations. I actually don't understand why conversations aren't more
widely implemented. Is it particularly difficult to determine which messages
belong to the same conversation?
You're also right that he compared iPhone Mail to Android GMail, which offers
a better experience than standard Android mail. On the other hand, the iPhone
Mail interface doesn't get any better if you use MobileMe. Using MobileMe
would have given him the equivalent of Where's my Droid?, though.
~~~
masklinn
> Is it particularly difficult to determine which messages belong to the same
> conversation?
Probably, the outbox might have a different structure than the inbox, and lack
some kinds of IDs.
> On the other hand, the iPhone Mail interface doesn't get any better if you
> use MobileMe.
Absolutely (well I think you get push support, but that's about it), and I
think this here is a core difference between Apple and Google: with Google,
the Service (Gmail) is given a seat front and center (its own MUA) because
it's what Google "sells", whereas with Apple the service (MobileMe) is really
nothing more than a perk, it doesn't have any kind of primary status on the
device, and it's not expected that it be the main service for users of the
device.
~~~
rbanffy
> Probably, the outbox might have a different structure than the inbox, and
> lack some kinds of IDs.
It should be trivial to associate the messages the mail client sends to the
messages it gets from a server. If nothing else, you have the full original
message.
------
axod
I just moved from iPhone to Android. The only thing I can't do is scroll an
_element_ in the browser. For example a DIV element with overflow:auto. On the
iPhone, you just use 2 fingers to scroll it. On Android it seems to be
impossible to scroll. Which means certain websites are a bit broken.
~~~
zzzmarcus
I did not know you could do that on the iPhone! Thanks for the tip. It should
probably be a lot more obvious, there aren't even scroll bars on overflow:auto
divs.
~~~
axod
Agreed. It's not all that obvious... I think I just _tried_ using 2 fingers to
scroll and it worked. Unfortunately not the case (yet anyway) on Android :(
------
snitko
On Ubuntu 10.04 iPhone sync is supported out of the box by Rhythmbox, so this
is no more an issue.
~~~
ZeroGravitas
Note that out-of-the-box here refers to Ubuntu, not the iPhone, as I believe
it still needs to be initially synced with Mac or Windows before use with
Ubuntu.
------
pilif
There are two reasons I switched back to my iPhone after three weeks of having
fun with the Nexus one:
1) the iphones touch screen. I don't care that much about the smoothness of
the scrolling, but I _really_ care about the ability of the touch screen to
accurately track my finger position. While the N1 often is /good enough/,
sometimes it fails badly and recognizes taps miles away from my finger. This
is really bad when trying to type.
2) this might be an issue of my specific device, but sometimes I have a really
bad hissing noise in my headphones. I'm constantly listening to Podcasts and
Audiobooks and I can't live with that. HTC has some knowledgebase entry about
this one and recommends to periodically shut the device down, remove the
battery while holding the power-off button, and then reversing the steps.
This, of course, isn't something I'm willing to live with.
So in the end it's build-quality that kills an otherwise superior phone for
me. Too bad.
I hope Google rev's the hardware and we get a N2 that fixes these issues.
Seing all the trouble with manufacturers not updating the OSes, I'd rather
stay with a "Google Experience" phone as that more or less guarantees updates,
so no Desire or Droid or whatever for me.
~~~
mitchellhislop
One small point, "Google Experience" refers to the OS installed, not who the
device is made by. The Desire and Droid are both Google Experience devices-
Those are the only devices that get access to all the Google API's and apps.
Also, updates being slow are more often than not the fault of the carrier, not
the manufacturer.
~~~
drivebyacct
That's not true. Non-"Google Experience" have plenty of access to all of the
Android Google APIs, etc. If they didn't no apps that used Google Maps,
Navigation, etc would work. The Google APIs are something that 3rd party apps
rely on. Google restricting their availability would literally destroy the
Market in one fell swoop.
The only thing that changes is whether or not they can print "Google" on the
phone.
~~~
mitchellhislop
Not true. There are 2 different versions of every android release-the "google"
version and the non-google version. They have different capability. We just
havent seen a major device launch without the google version.
As an android dev, you learn not to rely on google api's for things. Much like
twitter devs have learned not to trust the platform
------
aaronbrethorst
wait 9 more hours. really.
~~~
tuacker
To spare someone else the confusion I just had for a moment: Aaron talks about
the WWDC Keynote that kicks off in a few hours
------
kennu
Not a very useful comparison at this time, since iOS 4 is about to change the
email, multitasking etc. very soon.
------
wglb
Ah, no comparison of video resolution.
~~~
masklinn
They're the same. Nice try, no sugar.
------
confuzatron
Scrolling in the browser is indeed a little smoother on the iPod Touch
compared to my HTC Desire.
But on the Touch, when you scroll past a certain point nothing is rendered
except a 'transparent area' style chequerboard. You then need to wait for the
browser to re-render the page. By contrast, the Android phone always renders
the page, so you can scroll to a particular point by looking at the page as it
scrolls past.
Given this implementation I'm not surprised that scrolling is smoother on the
Touch.
Perhaps this limitation is Touch-specific and doesn't apply to the latest
iPhone.
Re: autorotation - I much prefer the hysteresis algorithm used by Android when
screenflipping - I can use it when lying on my side, because the screen
doesn't flip until I've 'fully' turned the phone on its side. The Touch flips
after less rotation.
~~~
masklinn
> But on the Touch, when you scroll past a certain point nothing is rendered
> except a 'transparent area' style chequerboard.
It's likely an issue of RAM starving, is your Touch a first or second
generation? (they have a quarter of the Desire's RAM, even the third-gen has
only half the RAM)
~~~
confuzatron
It's a 2nd generation Touch. I've used a 3GS, but I just can't remember if it
behaves the same way.
~~~
ROFISH
Since the 3GS (and 3rd generation iPod Touch) has both more RAM and a faster
processor, you don't see checkerboards much. You still see them a lot if you
scroll while the page is loading.
An example, I just did: take a big, long, complicated page with lots of
Javascript (say engadget.com, the regular non-mobile version) and wait until
Safari is 100% done loading. You can scroll at skimming speed and I only saw
the checkerboards once. But if you scroll like a madman trying to get to
something near the bottom, it'll still checkerboard and make you wait for the
roughly 500 milliseconds to render.
------
drivebyacct
What an unfair review. Compare like units. My Droid (especially now that it is
running Froyo) has literally none of these problems. There is no lag between
launching applications and when you replace the terrible stock launcher with
LauncherPro, it really gives great performance. I have no shuddering and I
also have Flash in my browser. Works reasonably well, especially when using
'On Demand' mode.
Reviewing Android on the ram/cpu starved Hero doesn't really give Android a
chance to shine.
~~~
sambeau
I thought this was very fair, balanced and interesting. He was comparing an
old Android with an old iPhone.
Hopefully someone this balanced will do a fair comparison of the iPhone 4G
when it comes out to one of the new Android phones hyped up after Google I/O.
~~~
ZeroGravitas
I agree that balanced reviews like this are needed but it would be even better
if they compared more than one phone. On the Android side there are obviously
a bunch with different manufacturers and target demographics, but even on the
Apple side I believe that the 3GS will continue to be sold as a cheaper
alternative to the 4G (or HD or whatever the new model is called).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Despite concerns, FDA approves new opioid 10x more powerful than Fentanyl - anigbrowl
https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2018/11/02/fda-dsuvia-fentanyl-approval/
======
sweetcherrypie
Naloxone is the drug used to block the effects of opioids. LE carry them, but
at the cost of $4500 for two injectors. The Narcan spray is slightly lest
costly iirc. I'm a uni student working on designing an auto-injector that
could be used instead (the medicine itself is very cheap) and potentially to
administer epinepherine too (also a case of cheap medicine - expensive
administration device).
I've made some progress but have no mechanical design experience. I'm not
optimistic about the time period needed for FDA approval so I'm really doing
it for the learning experience. I'd love some help!
~~~
mv
It is absolutely criminal that a <$20 drug can be sold for $4500... Auto-
injectors have been a solved problem for decades, and there is nothing special
about naloxone vs any other drug. Treating auto-injecting tech as different
for each drug only helps drive up prices and keep out competition by making
FDA approval very expensive.
I hope you are successful getting a generic auto-injector approved, but I
don't think your biggest hurdle will be design or engineering.
[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1609578](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1609578)
~~~
DanBC
> Auto-injectors have been a solved problem for decades,
And yet we still have stuff like this:
[https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/natasha-ednan-
laperous...](https://www.judiciary.uk/publications/natasha-ednan-laperouse/)
>(3) In the Emergency treatment of anaphylactic reactions Guidelines for
healthcare providers the preferred needle length is 25 mm for adrenaline
injectors to access muscle in most people. I heard during expert evidence that
Epipen needle length was 16mm - suitable according to the UK Resuscitation
Council for “pre-term or very small infants”. The use of needles which access
only subcutaneous tissue and not muscle is in my view inherently unsafe. An
alternative autoinjector, Emerade has a 24 mm needle.
>(4) The dose of adrenaline in Epipen is 300mcg. The UK Resuscitation Council
recommends a standard emergency dose of 500mcg. Emerade contains a dose
including 500mcg. The combination of what my expert told me was an inadequate
dose of adrenaline for anaphylaxis and an inadequate length needle raises
serious safety concerns.
~~~
mv
The Auto-injector's themselves are a solved problem and the device itself did
not fail. However,
-For over 10 years, It well documented in literature that even in normal BMI women the needle is not long enough to reach muscle. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=15945556](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=15945556)
\- Prior to around 2003 IM and subcutaneous routes were both listed as valid
treatments for anaphylaxis. (See
[https://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/1001/p1325.html](https://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/1001/p1325.html))
-Depending on her weight 300mcg may be an appropriate dose for US guidelines (listed at 0.01mg/kg).
The listed issues may be from a company taking a 'one-size-fits-most'
approach. They also do not update their product with respect to new guidelines
and recommendations (new doses, new needle lengths, etc) Possibly to avoid
further FDA approval processes? With such large profits and so little
competition there is no incentive to innovate/update.
------
etrevino
It's worth noting here that not every opioid is metabolized the same. I can't
speak for this medicine, but different metabolic pathways are used to process
opioids.[1] Having more tools in your toolkit means that you are more likely
to be able to treat a patient's pain.
That being said, I think that one of the major uses for this drug will be to
treat acute pain in chronic pain patients. Those patients aren't opioid naive
and may need something that will "override" the tolerance these patients have
developed. I'm guessing that they'd also work for patients on the opioid
agonist/antagonist Buprenorphine, which is used for chronic pain, but tends to
block other opiates.
Lastly, while potent, this drug appears to wear off very quickly. That's going
to be key here, because it's simply not useful unless you're able to
administer a high quantity of the medicine.
__To boot, I believe that the manufacturer claims that this drug has less
cognitive side effects than other opioids. [2]
[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704133/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704133/)
[2]
[http://www.acelrx.com/technology/publications/arx-04/MHSRS%2...](http://www.acelrx.com/technology/publications/arx-04/MHSRS%20ProjTeamPresentation%202016%20FINAL%2008_10_16%20MRC-0076.pdf)
~~~
jplayer01
The last time these companies promised it wouldn't be as addictive as previous
opioids, they were pulling numbers out of their ass and straight _lying_ about
it. I think we should all be alarmed if they're releasing a new drug that's
even more potent.
~~~
etrevino
It's definitely concerning, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be
released. It's the sort of drug that will find an appropriate use, though
pretty much only in edge cases.
~~~
jplayer01
> It's the sort of drug that will find an appropriate use, though pretty much
> only in edge cases.
You're way too trusting. While I do think drugs like this should exist for
those who really need it (particularly terminally ill patients), I'm
incredibly worried about how these drug companies intend to profit from the
drug (by selling these drugs to doctors in a way that encourages their use in
circumstances that in no way warrant it). Their profit motive and the
incredible expense of developing a new drug directly contradicts the need for
restrictive and sparing use of the drug to appropriate contexts.
------
esotericn
This article seems pretty low on detail. Almost all of it seems to be talking
about, well, not the drug in question.
What, exactly, does "10x more powerful" mean?
Potency? Presumably it'd then be prescribed in lower doses?
~~~
dogma1138
It’s the the binding strength which has direct impact on addiction and
withdrawal which is a bit scary since Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than
morphine already, heroine is only 5 times as strong for comparison.
~~~
skellera
No way that’s true. Buprenorphine has a much higher binding affinity than all
the worst opiates yet you don’t see people trying to do that over heroin and
all the others.
The strengths you’re speaking of are potency. And even then, most addicts I
know would rather have an unlimited supply of oxymorphone than fentanyl or any
of the others. At a certain point, cost outweighs all of that.
There’s so much misinformation out there about these drugs.
~~~
dogma1138
Buprenorphine is a partial agonist of the Mu receptor (the one which causes
the most physical dependency) and is antagonist for the rest, it’s also has a
very high affinity which displaces other opioids which is why it’s used in
addiction treatment.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2581407/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2581407/)
Yes is more to this than just affinity the type and level of the binding to
each receptor is also important but on the grand scheme of things in this
context it’s not because all the opioids which are primarily used for pain
relief are full Mu receptor agonists which is when the simple affinity
strength estimate is pretty much sufficient to estimate potency and potential
harm.
Also last time I checked the potency is derived directly from the Ki value of
the Mu receptor which represents the affinity (regardless of agonism) of the
opioid, so these are essentially interchangeable.
------
post_break
All the negativity aside, my mom had a very aggressive cancer. Found in
October, she passed in May. She was getting doses of fentanyl and it was the
only thing numbing the chronic pain. I'm pretty sure it was a patch like a
bandaid. That said I'm glad it was available because she would have suffered
even more without it.
~~~
josephv
For those of us that have had to use opioids for cancer treatment to the point
of being addicted, then kicked the habit after treatment, all of the asinine
demonization of opioids is absolutely infuriating. I used ate percs like candy
during treatment and rehab, then used fentanyl patches to wean off. It was
hard, like really hard, but life is hard.
It's not worth it to try and convince anyone that hasn't knocked on deaths
door that sometimes you need palliative care in the form of narcotics to make
it to your destination, recovery or otherwise.
I'm sorry about your mother, she wasn't bad for using fentanyl or anything
else. She did great things with her life, you're proof. Don't let the stupid
media or internet SJWs try influence you. After my ordeal I haven't watched TV
or the news in years and am much happier for it. Family, work, and video games
(or hobby of choice) is all a person needs IMO.
~~~
erulabs
> Family, work, and video games (or hobby of choice) is all a person needs
> IMO.
I hate listing credentials in online forums, but as someone who lost two
grandparents to painful cancer, yes opioids are useful medicine. Additionally
as someone who lost 2 cousins, a best friend and more than a couple
acquaintances, there is a very real issue with opioids, and "a hobby of
choice" is _NOT_ all a person needs. I'm extremely glad you kicked it, but
please don't anecdotally shrug off an issue that is currently killing young
people at an unprecedented rate. My home town looks like it had a draft for a
war that was lost terribly - there are no young people left, we either fled or
died.
~~~
lj3
> "a hobby of choice" is _NOT_ all a person needs.
That's why he said family, work AND a hobby. He missed one, too: a close
relationship with God goes a long way. Family, community and faith are the
most effective ways of dealing with addiction.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg)
~~~
coleifer
That's been my experience as well.
------
valarauca1
If you are interested in learning more the general name for this drug (outside
of the US) is ARX-04.
The maker has some data that compares it to Fentanyl [1]. Their numbering
states that is closer to 100x, and crosses the blood brain barrier in around 6
minutes.
[1]
[http://www.acelrx.com/technology/publications/arx-04/MHSRS%2...](http://www.acelrx.com/technology/publications/arx-04/MHSRS%20ProjTeamPresentation%202016%20FINAL%2008_10_16%20MRC-0076.pdf)
here
~~~
vilhelm_s
Interesting. I'm a bit confused about slide 6, which says that it has a
theraputic index which is 100 times better than fentanyl. It cites the
reference [1], which indeed has those numbers in it, but the full table there
is:
ED50 LD50 Theaputic Index
Fentanyl 0.01 3.1 277
Sufentanil 0.007 18 26716
The therapeutic index is the ratio of LD50:ED50.
This clearly makes no sense, someone must have moved a decimal point, and got
a number which is wrong by a factor 10.
EDIT: Ok, it seems that it is indeed an error in the cited paper, but the typo
is for the ED50 number. In the original source[2] it's given as 0.00071, which
agrees with the "10 times stronger than fentanyl" claim in the original
article, and gives the correct theraputic index.
[1]
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1440-1681....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1440-1681.1995.tb01945.x)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/davidjuurlink/status/859227636400349184?...](https://twitter.com/davidjuurlink/status/859227636400349184?lang=en)
------
cperciva
The supply of Fentanyl on the streets is not coming from FDA licensed
manufacturers anyway.
~~~
onemoresoop
Yes but the doctor prescribes it first. When addicted, and the doctor doesn't
want to prescribe it anymore, the street becomes the supplier. Most likely
some politician or lobbyist out there is gaining on this whole chain of supply
and demand, how else would a stronger drug get approved in the light of the
opioid crisis we already can't handle.
~~~
leetcrew
> Yes but the doctor prescribes it first.
fentanyl sold on the street is generally not diverted from prescriptions.
fentanyl that you can actually take home tends to come in something like a
patch where the drug is suspended at very low concentrations in a gel. illicit
fentanyl sold at scale usually comes from illicit labs overseas.
> how else would a stronger drug get approved in the light of the opioid
> crisis we already can't handle
in this context, "stronger" simply means more potent by weight. you shouldn't
assume that more potent opiates are more addictive; fentanyl is not the drug
of choice for most opiate addicts.
------
olliej
What could go wrong?
I think a solution to a lot of this would simply be to make the manufacturers
of such be responsible for the costs of getting people off them. And the
cleanup costs for cities that have to deal with the results.
------
rscho
For the record, a large part of anesthesia worldwide is done with that
molecule. Potency is not everything, and using sufentanyl in hospital contexts
is very much justified. The tablet formula of course makes it far more prone
to misuse, though... I can also add that iv remifentanyl is on the market in
the US, prescribed routinely, and is much more powerful than even sufentanyl.
In fact, so powerful that getting high on it would most certainly kill you,
making it pretty much useless to drug users. So again, potency is not
everything.
~~~
DanBC
> In fact, so powerful that getting high on it would most certainly kill you
To be fair, this is what we used to say about fentanyl until recently.
~~~
rscho
The problem is that with high potency, you also get more side effects for the
same "painkiller" effect (also depending on absorption velocity). Therefore,
using something such as remifentanyl in the mix would almost certainly be
counterproductive if you are looking for the "high". It would displace
fentanyl, and be more risky. And first of all, it is far more expensive than
fentanyl.
------
fromthestart
I just want to point out that the words "10x more powerful" serve no purpose
other than to sensationalize the headline.
Potency doesn't matter; pills are mixed with fillers to adjust dosage.
Now, if street drugs start being cut with this new drug, that's another story,
if the mixing is poor.
------
whoisjuan
This dissipates any doubt I had about the influence of lobbying.
FDA, a federal agency that is fully aware of the harmful and addictive nature
of opioids (and its impact on the public health system) approves one of the
most powerful opioids ever, disregarding the fact that its unique advantage is
the fact that this is a non-intravenous administered opioid...
Ohh, and the argument for approving is basically that they believe is good to
have more alternatives to existing opioids. Really? Like is not fentanyl
strong enough to address every possible medical use case for a powerful
opioid?
~~~
chimeracoder
> This dissipates any doubt I had about the influence of lobbying.
Who are you accusing of lobbying here? It's pretty clear from the article that
the primary advocate for this drug is the military (DoD).
> Like is not fentanyl strong enough to address every possible medical use
> case for a powerful opioid?
Strength is not something that's assessed along a one-dimensional axis, much
as popular reporting on opiates and pharmaceuticals would have you believe.
~~~
whoisjuan
> Who are you accusing of lobbying here?
AcelRx, the pharmaceutical company that produces and distributes DSUVIA. You
understand how lobbying works right? Even if the Department of Defense is
advocating for the use of a drug, they don't have any input on the safety of
whatever they are advocating for. This is the role of the FDA. AcelRx happens
to have something that the DoD wants so they lobby for its approval. In this
case, DoD, FDA, and AcelRX are all different parties but is clear that AcelRX
is the only party that will benefit financially from this.
Just from an anectodical perspective, so you can understand how this works,
check ACRX stock closing price today. It closed 16% up today.
Just because the DoD is advocating for this drug, that doesn't mean that
there's no pharmaceutical lobbying behind this. By that logic then all defense
contractors and weapon manufacturers wouldn't have to lobby as much as they
do.
~~~
chimeracoder
> You understand how lobbying works right?
Yes, I do. There's no need to be condescending.
> clear that AcelRX is the only party that will benefit financially from this
The DoD benefits as well.
> Just because the DoD is advocating for this drug, that doesn't mean that
> there's no pharmaceutical lobbying behind this.
Thr converse applies too. Just because FDA approved a drug that the military
wanted, that doesn't mean that the approval was the result of their lobbying.
------
Zelphyr
Is the FDA stacked with industry insiders like the FCC? Is that what's going
on here? Or does the DoD have that much influence?
~~~
chelmzy
Why would the DoD have a hand in this?
~~~
0d311
In the article, they discuss a few times how a consideration for this drug is
servicemen in the field.
------
d--b
I don't understand, the article states the distribution is very controlled and
geared towards the military. The problem with Fentanyl is its widespread
prescription by family doctors.
If the US doesn't allow its distribution through mainstream channels, it's no
big deal. I'm pretty sure that stuff is weaker than morphine, yet morphine is
quite available in hospitals...
EDIT: ah, apparently it's quite stronger than morphine. The argument still
holds. Hospitals do have stronger stuff :)
~~~
arebop
Fentanyl is much stronger the morphine, so if this is 10x stronger than
Fentanyl then it is also much stronger than morphine.
~~~
PhasmaFelis
Yeah, but what does "strong" mean in this context? If it means you can get the
same effect with 1/10th the dose, then you just put 1/10th as much active
ingredient in each pill and nothing effectively changes.
There's some discussion at the top of the thread that suggests it's more
complicated than that, and may make it either more or less dangerous,
depending.
------
gammateam
The FDA approves things based on the purpose they were presented to the
FDA/market for.
It isn't based on danger, it is based on evidence backed disclosure of the
danger.
In the specific use the company told the FDA about, it passed, and that will
usually happen with some objections or outright denial. The denial didn't
happen and that isn't article worthy.
------
microcolonel
Before you rage against this; fentanyl has been an immense asset to medicine,
and when dosed correctly it offers much more manageable side effects (and
greater control) than many other opioids. Just because the drug is more potent
per microgram, that doesn't mean there's some sort of moral failing involved
in bringing it to market.
When you're in immense pain, and the only safe way to relieve that for you is
some potent opioid, I guarantee you will thank people for bringing these
things to market.
------
droithomme
What could possibly go wrong?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Containers and Cloud Security - ofrzeta
https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/containers-and-cloud-security/
======
ofrzeta
The author is James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and
Linux kernel developer. I think it also serves the purpose of plugging (or at
least preparing the ground for) IBM Nabla, "a new type of container designed
for strong isolation on a host".
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Telemetry Data on All Satellites Orbiting Earth - seanwessmith
http://www.celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/
======
seanwessmith
Found this data set from reading SpaceX's public rebuttal to Intelsat's FCC
investigation.
[https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=164950&x=](https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=164950&x=).
------
GregQuinn
Travis Goodspeed had a nice hack using Celestrak data
[http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.co.uk/](http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.co.uk/)
------
jlgaddis
If this is interesting to you, you might also find the SatNOGS Project [0] of
interest.
[0]: [https://satnogs.org/](https://satnogs.org/)
------
unsignedint
This headline "Telemetry Data on All Satellites Orbiting Earth" is a little
misleading -- they are orbital elements. I looked for actual metric of
satellites that is remotely obtained (thus, "telemetry") like voltage, etc.
~~~
seanwessmith
Thank you for the correction, Orbiting elements would have been a more
appropriate title.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Why I Like Mercurial More Than Git - gvnonor
http://jhw.dreamwidth.org/1868.html
======
tobylane
Articles like this make me wonder how git would be without the rebase command.
Would it look any worse than mercurial? It (rebase) is kind of a stepping
stone from non-dvcs, where an input is just a file, not data with history.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How do you use SSH? - markgamache
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/V7B88XX
I've seen SSH authentication done in many ways by different companies. I'm curious how the masses to SSH.<p>Please take my survey! =)
======
sumeeta
Cool. Now what?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Viaweb was the first level 3 web platform according to the definition given by Andreessen? - drm237
http://lispmeister.com/blog/lisp-news/ning.html
'd like to point out that, as far as I know, Viaweb, an online shop system build by Paul Graham and Robert Morris, was the first level 3 web platform according to the definition given by Andreessen:
======
falsestprophet
Better: Paul Graham invented the internet.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Where can I find examples of complete AngularJS apps? - tacon
https://harmlesscodingtips.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/where-can-i-find-examples-of-complete-angularjs-apps/
======
SchizoDuckie
You can find my quite heavy live app DuckieTV (think popcorntime/sickbeard for
TV-Shows, but with your own torrent-client) here:
Live demo:
[http://duckietv.github.io/DuckieTV/](http://duckietv.github.io/DuckieTV/)
(v1.0 w.i.p.)
Homepage: [http://duckie.tv/](http://duckie.tv/) (v0.94 latest release)
Source:
[http://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTV/](http://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTV/)
It's not just a plain old 'todo' style simple app, but has grown quite big
over the last year and is still a continuous work in progress. Since i'm
working with a team of people that are not angular pro's yet (nor am I, but
I'm getting there) I'm trying to document nearly every js file and it's
functions, so it might be an interesting read :)
Some Features:
\- Translated using angular-translate
\- Uses UI-Router and UI-Router extras for navigation
\- Works on Chrome, Opera, Node-Webkit, Android, iPad(somewhat), Safari
\- Grabs your TV-Show data from Trakt.TV's API and stores it locally to
present you a calendar.
\- Local data storage using custom-built WebSQL framework (therefore webkit
only). Supports auto-db-creation, fixtures, migrations, JS get/set property
Accessors (You can use a db bound object in a template)
\- Cross-domain XHR support detection and auto-fallback to a proxy
\- DOM Parsing from external services to return extrernal sites' data as JS
objects
\- Connects to your local uTorrent / qBittorrent / Tixati / Transmission
\- Autodownloads
\- Sync back watched statusses to Trakt.TV
\- Experimental chromecast integration
\- etc etc etc.
~~~
stevenjohns
The "Click here to turn off your uTorrent ads" link on
[http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTV/](http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTV/)
appears to be broken.
~~~
SchizoDuckie
Thanks! Fixed by adjusting my release notes.
------
merpnderp
I can't show you the code because it is proprietary, but maybe you'll find
this useful.
At my place of work we are in the process of moving over a hundred apps of
differing levels of complexity into a single app suite. Each app is simply a
pluggable module we add to the suite, with user permissions, and it just
works. So far we've moved about 20 apps (and created some new ones) and it is
working great.
My only advice would be to make sure any shared resources between "apps" have
full testing implemented from the beginning.
------
franklovecchio
[https://github.com/franklovecchio/running.budget](https://github.com/franklovecchio/running.budget)
Never completed the linked docs (there are some, though), but there's quite a
bit here if you dig into the source.
~~~
gknoy
Thank you for sharing this! I really liked your explanation of why you made
it. I'm a little lost at how one might go about installing and running it --
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. I've starred in hope of re-finding
this later.
~~~
cpursley
Yeah, looks awesome. Looking forward to documentation on running it.
~~~
franklovecchio
Thanks!
I guess I'll work on the documentation :)
TLDR for now (pretty standard): npm install, bower install, update the .env
file with creds/specific config, grunt run, foreman start.
~~~
franklovecchio
Updated enough to get you going! Docs linked in the readme.
[https://medium.com/@franklovecchio/3878951179cd](https://medium.com/@franklovecchio/3878951179cd)
------
latchkey
I've got an example seed project [1] for angular that uses the latest ES6
modules specification. I took the approach of not only giving an example of
just an app, but also the entire workflow. Bundling together a bunch of
different technologies to make a really well integrated solution. Most
importantly, testing is treated as a first class citizen.
[1] [https://github.com/lookfirst/systemjs-
seed/](https://github.com/lookfirst/systemjs-seed/)
------
andrewrice
I found this sample application to be a good learning resource:
[https://github.com/lifeentity/chat-app/](https://github.com/lifeentity/chat-
app/)
There's also a corresponding YouTube video that walks you through the
development:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXDVmAwmux8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXDVmAwmux8)
------
aflinik
I'm curious to see real world deployments of Angular based apps, even without
the source code.
FB's React is much younger and we already can see it used in lots of popular
web apps, but given the Angular popularity among the devs there's surprisingly
little.
~~~
jonas21
Do you happen to know of any large React apps with source available? I've been
looking for some.
------
FredDollen
I found this example helpful:
[https://github.com/DanWahlin/CustomerManagerStandard](https://github.com/DanWahlin/CustomerManagerStandard)
------
susi22
Kibana is a pretty big one:
[https://github.com/elastic/kibana](https://github.com/elastic/kibana)
~~~
merb
Kibana doesn't follow the current recommended style guide. However I see both
worlds, Google currently recommends a flat style, like
component_a/ component_a-service.js component_a-controller.js component_b/
component_b-service.js ...
while most people will do: services/ customer-service.js hello-service.js
controllers/ controller_a.js controller_b.js ...
However thats the hardest part of your application, to find the style which
suites your use cases
~~~
SchizoDuckie
Also, for instance in my case, The new code organisation styles didn't come
out until after the whole project was set up and grew fast. Migrating them can
be a PITA.
------
timboslice
[https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg](https://github.com/HabitRPG/habitrpg)
habitrpg.com
------
ziahamza
I wrote a very neat web ui client for managing remote downloads in angularjs.
It has a simple codebase to learn from:
[http://github.com/ziahamza/webui-aria2](http://github.com/ziahamza/webui-
aria2)
------
apertoire
There's a quite complete angularjs + go app from this blog post:
[http://jbrodriguez.io/introducing-
mediabase/](http://jbrodriguez.io/introducing-mediabase/)
------
rch
GridCraft is a relatively full featured spreadsheet app built with Angular.
The source is proprietary though.
[http://gridcraft.com](http://gridcraft.com)
~~~
Trufa
IMHO, you should try to setup some kind of minimal demo that doesn't include
signing up, looks nice on the videos, but I would like to give it spin without
handing out all my personal data.
~~~
rch
Fair point. I know them, but I'm not involved.
------
cpursley
This looks like a great one:
[https://github.com/twostairs/paperwork](https://github.com/twostairs/paperwork)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Best environments to hack in SF - EddieB
Hi all,<p>I'm in SF for two months to explore and take some time out to work on personal projects and I'm looking for some nice places to hack on my projects.<p>Places with WiFi are preferable but not a necessity. I'm just looking for good environments from calm to busy. So if anyone has any good well known/not so known spots, please share :)<p>Thanks!
======
yid
I worked on a startup for a month from the SF public library near the Civic
Center. The trick is to go up to the 4th floor, where they have some really
nice reading rooms with power and free wifi, and pretty nice views of the
outside. Good light, too. Just make sure to empty your bladder before coming,
because you sure _as hell_ don't want to use the restrooms (I've seen homeless
people bathing in the sinks).
------
BillSaysThis
If you're willing to go to Mountain View, as suggested by jwb119, Hacker Dojo
(<http://hackerdojo.com>) is a much better choice IMO than Red Rock. Don't get
me wrong, Red Rock is probably the best of the downtown MV coffee shops and I
worked there many mornings before the Dojo opened, but the Dojo is much
larger, has far less ambient noise and the people are much more amenable to
conversation.
------
_pius
The POPOS.
<http://www.spur.org/files/u7/POPOSGuide.pdf>
------
EddieB
Wow, thanks for the great responses!
I will definitely head up to the public library near the civic center and
checkout the POPOS guide.. great information :)
As for the hackerdojo, I already plan on heading there but wont be down that
way for a couple of weaks yet..
------
LarryMade2
Seconded on the library - make sure to get a card and access their on-line
catalog - besides the HUGE computer book section in the library itself there
are many e-editions available for on-line patrons.
------
jwb119
Not technically SF, but if you are down in the Valley you have to check out
Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View at least once. Great spot.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change - ScottFree
https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00165
======
tlb
The title seems way overblown. The actual paper observes that cloud cover went
down at the same time as temperature went up over the last few decades, and so
perhaps the temperature went up because cloud cover went down rather than
because of anything humans did. The IPCC has one correction factor for clouds,
but they argue for another.
It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are
both anthropogenic.
~~~
topmonk
> The actual paper observes that cloud cover went down at the same time as
> temperature went up over the last few decades, and so perhaps the
> temperature went up because cloud cover went down rather than because of
> anything humans did.
It does more than that. It predicts that for every 1% decrease in low clouds,
the temperature goes up 0.11 C. They also used all available data (25 years)
of cloud cover.
The correlation is very high. Figure 3 shows this.
> It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are
> both anthropogenic.
Perhaps, but it's entirely unproven that co2 affects low cloud generation.
I get that dumping a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and hoping nothing
will change seems scary. But so is converting a large portion of land into
farmland and cities, drilling into tectonic plates for geothermic energy and
oil (which seems to correlate with earthquakes forming nearby), etc. And keep
in mind it's a trace gas. We're talking about parts-per-million here.
With 8 billion people on the planet, we are going to be making changes to the
environment regardless. It's important to understand what we are doing, and
not blindly try to stop co2 production, when something else could be much more
problematic.
~~~
tlb
They only show a correlation between cloud cover and temperature. There's no
evidence for which causes which. If causation runs the other way, then that
for every 0.11C increase in temperature, clouds decrease by 1%.
The problem with this line of thinking is that, when you do something to a
system, usually lots of properties of the system change. So you can always say
"Look, properties A and B changed at the same time right after we did X! So
maybe A caused B, not X."
~~~
topmonk
> There's no evidence for which causes which. If causation runs the other way,
> then that for every 0.11C increase in temperature, clouds decrease by 1%.
What sort of evidence are we talking about? We don't have a another exact copy
of Earth so we can't perform a controlled experiment by somehow inducing low
clouds to form in one and not in the other. But if you need this sort of proof
then how can you turn around and justify the belief that CO2 is definitely
causing climate change?
Even NASA would disagree with you
([https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=54219](https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=54219)):
_Clouds play a complex role in the Earth 's radiation budget. Low Clouds
reflect much of the sunlight that falls on them, but have little Effect on the
emitted energy. Thus, low clouds act to cool the Current climate._
(Note the paper is specifically referring to low clouds)
> The problem with this line of thinking is that, when you do something to a
> system, usually lots of properties of the system change. So you can always
> say "Look, properties A and B changed at the same time right after we did X!
> So maybe A caused B, not X."
Sure, but also, when you make changes X1, X2, X3, ... Xn, you can't just
arbitrarily say that X1 must be the cause and X2 .. Xn are not.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Khan Academy Lite - aronasorman
http://bjk5.com/post/101915851596/ka-lite
======
jamalex
Thanks for the very sweet blog post, Kamens!
We would love to answer any questions about KA Lite or Learning Equality, and
where we're headed. I'll be on a plane for the next few hours, but others on
the team can chime in and I can respond a bit later as well.
Also, note that we're hiring! We're building a scrappy team of passionate,
dedicated devs down in San Diego:
[https://learningequality.org/about/jobs/](https://learningequality.org/about/jobs/)
------
AjithAntony
KA Lite is great. I was working on an educational computer lab in a prison,
and it was moderately easy to deploy on our Windows Multipoint server.
Unfortunately we had to delete it becuase there was too much video content for
the prison administration to screen and approve. FWIW, we also had to delete
the offline wikipedia (kiwix) for the similar reasons.
~~~
comrh
Approve for what out of curiosity? I'm sure they don't expect a how-to on
making a shiv half way through a KA video.
~~~
jamalex
We did hear a story in Idaho where they walked in on prisoners watching a Khan
Academy video about building a motor
([https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-
projects/dis...](https://www.khanacademy.org/science/discoveries-
projects/discoveries/electric_motor/v/build-your-own-motor)). Since motors are
contraband (see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edc37hoSD7Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edc37hoSD7Y)),
they had to remove the video.
------
sp332
You can install KA Lite and other educational packages on a LibraryBox, which
is basically a router with a web server on it.
[http://www.hackersforcharity.org/librarybox/](http://www.hackersforcharity.org/librarybox/)
~~~
jamalex
Cool! Yep, you can install it on anything that runs Python (it's all written
in pure Python, with no libraries that have binary dependencies). We run it on
Raspberry Pi's, netbooks, server racks, Sandisk Connect hotspot devices, old
Pentium III's, and now (thanks to python-for-android) even standalone on
Android devices (which should be released soon). We want to support any old,
existing hardware, as well as the cheapest stuff available off the shelf
today.
------
q4
Thanks a bunch!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Adding a Working Headphone Jack to an iPhone 7 - mef
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j557j3/a-diy-hero-added-a-working-headphone-jack-to-an-iphone-7-plus
======
stevefeinstein
The way he hand-waves away Apple's statement about there being no extra space
in the device is arrogant and disingenuous at best.
Does the phone altimeter work as designed? No Does the phone remain
waterproof? No
Deal breaker.
~~~
apostacy
Apple are the ones who are arrogant and disingenuous. It would be easy enough
to waterproof the headphone jack, and there is otherwise no serious technical
impediment to having one.
Apple is just trying to kill off the open standard headphone jack.
~~~
ballenf
They were pretty open about exactly that -- wanting to kill off the headphone
jack. Since they have gone to all industry standard ports on new MacBooks, I
don't know that the argument holds that Apple is against industry standards.
When the lightning port was introduced was there an industry-standard small
reversible port in use? Just my sense that Apple hasn't been as bad as, e.g.,
Sony with inventing custom memory sticks for the sole purpose of profit.
Firewire _was_ better at the time than USB, etc.
I would be curious whether the headphone port backlash was stronger than Apple
predicted. They had to know there would be one. I really don't see how any
financial model would have driven the decision -- even a small percentage of
lost iPhone sales would easily dwarf profit on a few extra headphone or dongle
sales.
Is there any chance the new iPhone will use a USB-C port?
~~~
Tsiklon
I'd say there's a relative but slim chance of the new phone having a USB-C
port, they changed from the 30Pin to Lightning after 5 iterations of the
iPhone (and that was 5 model years ago...).
But I think it's more likely they will keep Lightning around for a few more
years as they are using it on more than just iOS devices now (see their
keyboard and mice, and some of their wireless headphones).
Though it would be nice for them to release an updated version of the standard
that can use the higher data transfer speeds afforded by USB3. Especially
seeing as they're using NVMe for local flash storage, it could potentially
speed up the restore process for iOS devices from your computer.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Paralegal with U.S. Attorney's Office accused of tipping off Mexican drug cartel - randycupertino
https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/paralegal-with-us-attorneys-office-arrested-accused-of-tipping-off-mexican-drug-cartel
======
seibelj
Make $50k government salary or make $200k tipping off the outlaws with
information? Probably a lot of people choose the latter, in all sorts of
industries...
------
1996
Why would we be surprised that illegal organizations will be very interested
in having moles at the higher places??
Government is not an invulnerable entity, akin to a magical/mystical creature
that would be superior to the private sector in every case. It is just
concentrated power with a legal monopoly on violence.
If anything, this concentration of power makes it a more appealing target --
see also regulatory capture.
Also, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more frequently. One person was
caught, for how many that will never even be suspected??
------
jdkee
Perhaps the US Attorneys Office should do a better job of vetting persons who
have access to sensitive investigatory information.
------
DisjointedHunt
This should be a must-read for engineers designing systems requiring security.
Once you wrap your head around the sheer volume of vulnerabilities from the
human angle, a lot of the "Zero trust" methods enshrined as best practices
start to make a lot more sense.
Acquisitions like this one: [https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/facebook-buys-
secure-serve...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/facebook-buys-secure-
server-technology-provider-privatecore/) early on were, in part, in online
forums i was a part of at the time, ridiculed for being tinfoil-hat. Fast
forward a few years and that would be laughable.
The history of Computer Science has been full of open collaboration and
trusted, tight groups. We're now in a different world.
------
RickJWagner
Outrageous. I hope it's just not true.
Such crimes could put lives in danger, fan flames of racism, etc. Horrible.
------
haram_masala
Side note, San Antonio is a wonderful city. Friendly people, good food, nice
downtown.
~~~
Rapzid
I hope our downtown and food culture can survive the shutdown.
------
networkimprov
Off topic on HN.
~~~
pests
If it's interesting, it's on topic. HN is not just tech or startup. Here's the
guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
~~~
1123581321
It’s a stretch to call it interesting in that way, even if it ends up
receiving a lot of upvotes and few flags. Is there anything that gratified
your intellectual curiosity in the body of the article?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
WannaCry savior is rewarded with a year's free pizza and $10K for saving Internet - dsr12
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/05/16/wannacry-savior-rewarded-years-free-pizza-10000-saving-internet
======
SideburnsOfDoom
FYI, the pizza freebe from JustEat will be due to this tweet, where the
company logo is visible.
[https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/82757171061030502...](https://twitter.com/MalwareTechBlog/status/827571710610305024)
------
gopalv
> The British press essentially doxed him, stripping him of his anonymity and
> privacy.
Good news and bad news ...
~~~
John_Cena
Its unfathomable to me how many of my engineer graduate friends are sharing
the information of his person on Facebook and other social media sites. Why
don't people understand this is dangerous?
~~~
lithos
The original malware author is probably already dead for affecting Russian
banks. Or having a bad time somewhere for hitting someone outside the law.
Don't people realize how dangerous it is to write untargeted malware.
:mostly joking:
------
rootsudo
While, how much money did the Wanacry black hat pocket?
Really makes you wonder if it was worth it.
Granted he did it out his own curiuosioty with no promise of a reward.
But still. It seems a bit petty. 10K and pizza.
~~~
Iv
If you are in for the money, being the good guy is not worth it. Which,
counter-intuitively, is how you get incorruptible good guys.
Also, if he were in to save the world, I would bet he had a good week.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Can Technology Help Fix the Housing Market? - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/upshot/can-technology-help-fix-the-housing-market.html
======
resalisbury
Here's and oversimplified way to thing about the housing problem. It's 90% a
policy problem and 10% a technology problem. Todays technology allows you to
build economy housing for $200 / sqft. That's pretty much no different from
the 1960s when it also cost $200 / sqft. There has be no productivity growth
in the construction industry [0]. But that's not the real problem! In San
Francisco the median price per square foot is just over $1000 [1]. That's a
gap of $800 /sqft between the raw production cost and the market value. That
gap has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with policy
(zoning, historical association, neighborhood review, environmental review,
various other forms of NIMBYism). If we had a HUGE productivity boom in
housing production, we could maybe knock 50% off the construction cost. That
would save $100 per square foot. Only policy can help bring down the rest.
If you want to nerd out a bit, you can read Ed Glaeser who wrote a piece "The
Economic Implications of Housing Supply" which seeks to calculate the Minimum
Profitable Production Cost (MPPC) per square foot for every place in America.
He then compares that to the actual price per square foot. Anytime there is a
gap there is a huge public policy failure.
[0] [https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/08/17/the-
constructio...](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/08/17/the-construction-
industrys-productivity-problem) [1] [https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-
ca/home-values/](https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/home-values/) [2]
[https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.32.1.3](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.32.1.3)
------
resalisbury
This is the key line "the fundamental tension [is] that Americans want housing
to be both affordable and a good investment."
You can't have both! You cannot have your home be a good investment because
prices keep rising and have homes be affordable. We have a national narrative
that the best path to wealth accumulation is through home ownership. That is a
terrible terrible narrative to promote. You can make it true, but only if you
massively subsidize home ownership (which we do) and make in incredibly
difficult to build homes in desirable locations like most of California (yup
we do that too).
We need a new national narrative. Housing is not a tool for wealth
accumulation. A home is a place to live. The cheaper that place is the more
people will be able to live in one.
------
anovikov
Start fighting zoning laws and you will pay for your housing with the time you
spend to commute - because traffic will become insane as cities will be
overfilled with people who will live in new unrestricted density communities.
There is no problem with housing costs. A median existing house in U.S., as
well as just in any country, is affordable for the majority of people. Problem
is concentration: there are few places where people want to live and costs in
these places are insane. And it has no fix because this is dictated with how
digitalized economy where almost every success is infinitely scalable, works.
Face it: housing is about social competition, 1% will pay a lot for their
places, 99% will be quasi-unemployed, that's how the future will look.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tell HN: Share your $75.00 free (new user) adwords credits - aresant
Not sure if anybody else still subscribes to actual paper magazines, but my Wired subscription keeps giving me a $75.00 new user adwords credit - I posted in a comment below.<p>I imagine others might have similar, please share.
======
aresant
Anybody who wants it, the info is below, I assume it's one time use - please
respond if you use it and get it to work so we know it's gone:
<http://www.google.com/adwords/75offer>
COUPON CODE: 4Q4U-9VPC-YQ76-ZJ7N-83K2
------
fname
Thanks for sharing.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: CryptoTrader.Tax – Tax calculator for your crypto trading - wiidude32
https://www.cryptotrader.tax
======
masonic
This is their _tenth_ Show HN.
~~~
dang
Yes, that's enough. The FAQ says a small number of reposts is ok, but ten is
not small.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
My Chrome Extension: Unencrypted Password Warning - swolchok
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mjpinemnkjlppmemjfabdaelpfgfjgkj
======
swolchok
A few questions I'd like to see discussed:
1) Do you find the description convincing?
2) Are you put off from installing by the warning that the extension has
"access to your private data across all websites"? This warning is mandatory
for extensions that can access the DOM on all websites, which, of course, this
extension needs to do.
3) Is a warning like the one this extension provides a good idea? Why don't
browsers ship with such warnings? Does it go too far in preventing you from
submitting your password in cleartext?
By the way, this will prevent you from logging into Hacker News until you add
news.ycombinator.com to the list of whitelisted domains on the options page.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Received an offer to buy out my web app, what do? - zlappo
I literally just launched my MVP last week and signed up my first few users, one of whom turned out to be an angel investor.<p>After exchanging a few emails about my app, he offered to buy out my app "as-is," since he'd have access to the talent, capital, and resources to really develop it.<p>What should I do?
======
gus_massa
Does he have a verifiable trajectory as an angel investor? Is he going to pay
you in cash now?
1) Get _your_ lawyer review the paperwork. Not _his_ lawyer, _your_ lawyer.
2) Is he going to pay you in cash now? Not equity, not a % of future earnings,
not some money in 6 months. Green cash now. (Euros are fine too.)
Assume that this is all the money you will get. Are you happy with this
amount? You may negotiate something else, but assume that you will not see the
money.
3) Are there any strings? Do you have to keep working on this project? If you
"quit", does he get all the money back?
4) Is there a non compete clause?
Let's be as negative as possible and suppose this is an scam and he's idea is
to "invest" money paying himself as the CEO, some money to one of his friends
as the CFO and more money to other of his friends as CTO, some peanuts for a
freelance developer and some worthless equity for you that must do all the
real work. Get a lawyer to be sure you are not getting screwed and get the
money upfront for the same reason.
------
FpUser
Way too many unknowns to give meaningful advice. However unless you believe
that you've developed a money printing machine you can do the following: Say
you spent 1 year developing it. Say you believe your fair salary for that year
is XXX pesos and you've also incurred YYY pesos in expenses. So calculate the
final price as (3.14 * XXX + YYY * 2 ) and offer to sell at this price.
~~~
zlappo
Where do 3.14 and 2 come from?
~~~
FpUser
Well, make it 2.98 instead.
Comes from "take your estimate and multiply by Pi ;)" I think 1:3 ratio is
about right. If you do not agree you are more then welcome to make your own
number
------
samstave
Sell him some stake - build a clause that you retain ownership and input and
control until he can prove he really wants to take it over, once you can
assess the value he sees, then you can negotiate what to fully sell to him
which works for both.
But don’t be scammed and also don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,
Think deeply about what you want, but do not sell 100% - retain 10% at least
no matter what
~~~
zlappo
Hm. I'm open to something like that, but it sounds like he wants me to hand it
over and walk away from it. So it's like a "his way or the highway" kind of
thing. That's the vibe I get anyway.
~~~
samstave
This is all about your ability to negotiate.
“Bob, I’ve been thinking a lot about you offer, and I’ve sought advice from
people I really trust. I’d like to take you up on that offer, however, I’d
like to propose we discuss how to structure this.”
Then you ASK him, what were your thoughts.
This requires him to show his hand.
Which gives you information on how to respond.
Then he will say what he wants, and this is where you counter.
But I recommend you start high and whittle down to your actual goal of
retaining 10%
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: How did you build a relevant audience on Twitter? - danielfone
I'm a freelance Ruby on Rails engineer trying to build an audience and develop a personal brand on twitter. To do so, I want to understand how to provide consistent value to a technical audience in 140 character chunks.<p>I'm especially interested in hearing from folks who've built a large audience themselves. What works? What doesn't?<p>Thanks.
======
AskMentii
There are thousands of blogs available on every subject now a days that its
pretty hard for people to find yours until you have some kickass content. But
there are ways.
Create a Quora Blog, write terrific. At the end of the post, leave your
Twitter handle for people to connect. There is this unique feature about Quora
blogs, you can promote your blog to targeted audience using Quora Credits. You
get these credits by asking questions, answering questions. Use it to build
audience.
------
NameNickHN
Pretty simple, really. First I've tweeted a couple of things like my own blog,
other articles, news, comments, opinions - all related to my area of
expertise. Then I searched for related keywords and started following other
people. A bunch of them followed back and now I'll get retweets, replies and
traffic to my site when I tweet.
------
meerita
Writing mostly will reward you many followers, of course if you tweet relevant
stuff for you audience. The more retweets you get, the more people will follow
you.
Having a blog will surely increase following ration, again, you must write
interesting things and share.
The more you share the more followers you will get.
------
olalonde
I don't tweet a lot but most of my ~250 followers came mostly from my blog (as
far as I know). My blog traffic comes mostly from HN and Google Search.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Open Library - nomdep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library
======
nomdep
Fun fact: The Open Library is the largest and most well known project still
using the web.py framework.
That's because Aron Swartz (you remember him) and Anand Chitipothu were the
creators of both projects.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Wrte.io – Charge for each email you get - ivanpashenko
http://wrte.io
======
keesj
Is the payment to get the email delivered or to get guaranteed response?
I'd prefer the latter for two reasons: 1) as a receiver I don't want to miss
out on a potentially interesting email just because the sender couldn't pay
(for technical or financial reasons), and 2) as a sender I'd like some sort of
guarantee if I'm going to pay for something.
It's probably the more difficult approach of the two so I suggest testing both
approaches and see what works best.
Congrats on getting this far already. Like you say it's not a new idea, but
who cares about ideas. It's about execution anyway. Looking forward to the
launch!
~~~
ivanpashenko
Thanks!
1) I think the fact of paying is already a good enough barrier. The price
could be just a couple of dollars, which would be enough to convice sender to
spend sometime on writing a personal email instead of using cold mail
template.
2) Because of this barrier user will receive much less email + with much
relevant content. As a result sender will have much higher chances for reply.
------
onion2k
What a great way to make sure you only get emails from rich, tech-savvy
people.
~~~
ivanpashenko
Hahaah :)
We think it will work for public people with tons of cold emails daily, like
pg
~~~
onion2k
The problem is that as soon as you tie the ability to send someone an email to
your bank account you immediately put poor people at a grotesque disadvantage.
I wouldn't presume to speak for pg, but I doubt any savvy investor would be
happy passing up the opportunity to be the first to hear about the next
Google/Uber/Facebook because the founder couldn't afford to send you an email.
If you want to limit the number of emails people can send then you need to tie
the ability to something else.
That's why Bill Gates' idea was so good - his plan was to make people's
computers have to do useful work (say, Folding At Home or the distributed Seti
search client) rather than merely transferring money around. Wealthy people
wouldn't be at an advantage because the work unit would be _time_ : a rich
person with a fast laptop that can test 1,000,000 protein folds in 2 minutes
has to do 1,000,000 tests to send their email while a poorer person whose
hardware can only do 1,000 folds in 2 minutes only has to do 1,000 tests to
send their email. Time is effectively the same for everyone. It's a
_beautiful_ solution. Far better than boring old money.
~~~
MetaCosm
While we are getting good at proof-of-work stuff -- we aren't great a proof-
of-power.
Meaning, it would be easy for me to emulate 10,000 slow computers with one
powerful one, doing 2 minutes of work 10,000x parallel (claiming each of these
computers is very weak) and that completely bypasses the "beautiful" solution.
Sending BTC works because it isn't gameable (at this point). I like the idea
of a ฿0.0001 (or even ฿0.001, 20 cents) fee for each email sent to me. It is a
little over 2 cents US -- would absolutely stop spammers (most it cost
prohibitive for them), but hopefully would not stop normal users.
------
MetaCosm
This could be interesting with an API to control pricing, that way it could be
adjusted by BTC => local currency -- but also based on other things.
I for example, would like a multiplier based on my backlog. I might start at
20 cents an email -- but if I have 1,000 messages waiting for me to read, I
would increase the price to contact me to $20 an email -- because at a certain
point I can't keep up and the value per email drops to 0.
------
olla
If you have to pay for an email anyway, would You instead call or pick some
other way of direct communication? Not quite sure that replacing the indirect
communication, where You can procrastinate to some extent, with direct one
will solve the issues it promises.
------
mister_l
Why limit this service to bitcoin if the generalized version for any currency
exists already? Head over to [https://ningo.me](https://ningo.me)! Shall we
join forces?
------
dkaigorodov
Is it like $100 or like $0.01? Look like very old idea of Bill Gates.
~~~
ivanpashenko
You can hover with a mouse the bitcoin price and it will show you amount usd.
Probably it is Gate's idea and many others :)
------
aminok
Nice!
Any plans to use micropayment channels?
~~~
iovdin
micropayment channels ([https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-
micropayments](https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments)), are
used between 2 parties to send a lot of micropayments. But here there is only
one transaction even small. Also micropayments may help against spam but not
agains cold emailing
~~~
aminok
You can have a micropayment channel between the user and their email provider,
and between email providers.
When User A wants to send an email to User B, he sends a micropayment through
one of these channels to his email provider. His email provider in turn sends
a micropayment to User B's email provider. User B's email provider sends a
micropayment to User B.
So in this way, value can be transferred without any on-chain BTC
transactions, zero fees, and instantly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Traveling to the Sun: Why Won't Parker Solar Probe Melt? - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-sun-wont-parker-solar-probe.html
======
ArtWomb
Baby steps to humanity's first Dyson Sphere ;)
Graphene oxide sheets may be the ideal candidate for solar harvesting. Full
radiation spectrum absorbance. High conductivity. Thermoelectric power
generation that increases at very high (3000K+) temperatures. Lightweight.
Inexpensive. 3D-printable. With cloth-like flexibility.
Might be time to fund a zero-gravity graphene factory in low Earth orbit.
[https://phys.org/news/2017-07-gravity-graphene-space-
applica...](https://phys.org/news/2017-07-gravity-graphene-space-
applications.html)
~~~
Robotbeat
Thermoelectric has terrible efficiency, tho. Also, graphene isn’t inexpensive,
and actual macroscopic conductivity is much worse than aluminum or copper.
~~~
taneq
Efficiency may not be much of an issue if you're spinning up a kilometers-
wide, microns-thick graphene sheet at a Lagrange point or something.
~~~
endymi0n
At the solar flux levels at the point of that probe (light intensity decays by
distance squared), efficiency is probably mostly irrelevant. What's the
challenge though is how you irradiate all the heat away to provide a large
enough temperature delta.
~~~
throwwit
It’d be neat to see a divergent lens made of carbon metamaterial at the aft of
the craft. (... or convergent depending on the shape of the craft)
------
MarcScott
I thought at first that an IMAX projector must be some sort of solar
simulator, and the similar acronym to the ones in movie theaters was just a
coincidence.
Turns out I was wrong and they just used old IMAX projectors they purchased
off eBay.
[https://astronomynow.com/2018/05/01/old-imax-projectors-
simu...](https://astronomynow.com/2018/05/01/old-imax-projectors-simulate-sun-
in-key-test-for-parker-solar-probe/)
------
apatters
This is a very naive question, but is there some distance from the sun at
which it would heat an object in space to a temperature that we would consider
comfortable?
I guess the obvious answer would be "the distance which the Earth is at," but
what I really mean is could you be floating around in a spacesuit or some
object with minimal shielding and you would neither overheat nor freeze to
death.
~~~
DoreenMichele
As a wild guess, probably further out then the Earth. The atmosphere here
plays an important role in keeping us comfy. Even so, the tropical sun can be
too much. Heat waves can be too much. Desert heat can be too much. Etc.
~~~
Groxx
A brief google informs me that the sunny side of the Moon is around 127˚
Celsius, while Phobos goes up to about -4˚. So somewhere most of the way to
Mars probably?
~~~
DoreenMichele
For other half-asleep Americans, 127 C is about 260 F.
(100C is the boiling point. 0C is freezing.)
~~~
Monory
At 1 atmosphere of pressure. Important to remember when we are talking about
Moon and such.
~~~
DoreenMichele
I had to think about that for a bit. I've tried to Google it to better
understand it. I am not immediately coming up with an elucidation.
Anyone got a link to a quick and dirty explanation of how the vacuum of space
would impact this?
~~~
Groxx
Air pressure on earth literally squeezes the water together, preventing it
from turning into a gas until it's at a higher temperature.
More generally: practically all phase-changes depend on both temperature and
pressure. Lower pressure almost behaves like higher temperature... within
certain ranges (and it varies for every material).
E.g. for water, note that there are three major regions in its phase
diagram[1]. At human-normal scales (the red horizontal line is 1 atmosphere)
we see water boil/freeze at 100 and 0 celsius. If you lower the pressure
though, you'll see there's a spot where all three phases meet, and below that
there's no liquid phase separating solid and gas. When it's in near vacuum,
you literally can't have water - ice evaporates (sublimates) directly into a
gas, with no intermediate phase.
Given the diagram, this seems to happen somewhere around -60c in a serious
vacuum. So in space or on the surface of the moon (without an atmosphere /
something pressurizing it) you simply can't have liquid water - a portion of
it will evaporate almost immediately, which steals energy from the remaining
portion, causing it to freeze. After that, the solid portion just sublimates
away (because the sunny side is 127c, well above the temperature needed to
turn it into a gas).
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram#/media/File:Phas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_diagram#/media/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg)
~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you.
What I am trying to figure out specifically -- to mental model -- is what
impact this has on human comfort, per the original question.
So I have lived in very hot and humid places -- like Georgia, where it is
often around 100F in summer -- and I have lived in even hotter places with a
much dryer climate -- like the Mojave Desert, where it can get to 115F and I
would wait until nightfall to go for walks for exercise at 99F and no sun.
Humidity does make a big difference in how uncomfortable a temperature is. If
it is hot and dry, you can stay reasonably comfortable if you get enough
fluids and electrolytes into you and stay out of direct sunlight.
I'm trying to fit this into a mental model of that sort. Like is a boiling
temperature going to burn you? Or, you know "It's a dry heat, man!" only "It's
in the vacuum of space, man!"
Thanks to anyone who replies to this.
~~~
Groxx
Aaah, gotcha. Yeah, that's definitely fuzzier... like, what does boiling feel
like if it's room temperature.
I imagine some of it depends on what our heat-sensors actually react to. At
the least-interesting case, seems like being above boiling without heat would
feel fizzy, just because it's physically doing that to the outer layers of
your skin. Or something like laser hair removal, where it kinda feels like a
hard slap.
~~~
DoreenMichele
Thanks.
------
blacksmith_tb
A very cool mission (pun intended)! It makes me wonder if it would be possible
to exploit that huge temperature differential behind the heatshield to
generate power...
~~~
AngryData
There are ways, piezoelectric devices can generate power off temperature
differential. And mechanically you could put a stirling engine on although the
torque and rotational force likely would not be ideal.
~~~
jschwartzi
That seems really complicated for something that the solar arrays do with no
moving parts.
~~~
greglindahl
Note the quote from a while ago:
> They are mounted to motorized arms that will retract almost all of their
> surface behind the Thermal Protection System – the heat shield – when the
> spacecraft is close to the Sun.
Yes, there's a moving part. It only has to move twice (deploy, mostly retract)
but it's still a moving part.
~~~
jschwartzi
A motor that predictably moves an object from one point to another can be much
more reliable than an array of heat-driven reciprocating engines that have to
be in constant motion and rely on conducting heat toward the internals of the
spacecraft in order to function.
------
carloscm
From the article:
"The chips that produce an electric field for the Solar Probe Cup are made
from tungsten, a metal with the highest known melting point of 6,192 F (3,422
C). Normally lasers are used to etch the gridlines in these chips—however due
to the high melting point acid had to be used instead."
I had no idea tungsten was used to make ICs. What kind of density is achieved
by laser etching (on tungsten or otherwise)?
------
sp332
That's not as close as I was expecting for a solar probe. It's about the same
distance as Mercury.
~~~
dmurray
The folksy comparison in the article is misleading, or just wrong. The probe
is going closer than they imply.
> If Earth was at one end of a yard-stick and the Sun on the other, Parker
> Solar Probe will make it to within four inches of the solar surface
Perhaps they meant 4 cm.
~~~
Udik
This stuff with yardsticks, inches,and Fahrenheit is annoying.
~~~
duxup
Cubits it is then!
On a side note I always thought AUs were a bit silly and self centered....
~~~
ekimekim
IMO light-seconds is actually a really nice unit for interplanetary distances.
1AU ~= 500ls. Not only is the scale nice for human arithmetic, but it serves a
dual purpose of also telling you the light delay.
~~~
adrianN
Lightnanoseconds are a useful measure in everyday life as well. A
lightnanosecond is about 30cm, or 1 foot.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ&feature=youtu.be&t=275)
------
TheOtherHobbes
I love the technology on this - Niobium wire inside sapphire tubes is a total
geek out.
------
lukasb
This is SO COOL
------
gok
Why don’t they just go at night?
~~~
redial
They want to study the sun not the moon.
~~~
Pulcinella
Well actually at night the Sun is called the Moon.
~~~
mirimir
In Morgan's "Land Fit For Heroes" trilogy, Ringil does talk about the "pale
sun" in the Grey Places, which people there call the "Muhn". But he'd just
never heard of the Moon.
Because it had been destroyed, and became a ring, home of the Sky Dwellers. Or
perhaps an orbital ring, as Stephenson has it in _Seveneves_. But there's
nothing about a bombardment in Morgan's "Land Fit For Heroes". And that brings
up the question about how a Moon breakup would really go.
~~~
skgoa
If the Moon just broke up and did not blow up, the piece might not have been
given much momentum towards Earth. In such a case they would slowly spread out
in a ring. Their orbits would be stable and would decay outwards ever so
slowly, as Earth seeps off their angular momentum.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Pysendfile - A Python Unix tool for sending files. - thetabyte
https://github.com/mrjordangoldstein/pysendfile
======
thetabyte
OP and script author here. You can read a blog post about it at:
<http://jordangoldstein.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/pysendfile/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Murray Gell-Mann talks about Feynman's idiosyncrasies - crazyfrog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMsgxIIQEE
======
dmfdmf
This link was dead but I vouched for it. I know on HN et. al. Feynman is a big
hero but Gell-Mann was totally respectful and just gave his view on the person
of Feynman, not his image that he apparently spent some effort cultivating.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Discover product ideas for SMEs in developing countries - jibril-gudal
https://customerzero.substack.com/
======
jibril-gudal
Hey everyone. I've starting a newsletter, CustomerZero.
Each month I interview 4 small to medium sized businesses operating in
developing countries.
I provide the context of their market, the specifics about their business and
most importantly the biggest problems they face (and would pay to solve!).
I try not to suggest potential solutions to their problems, the goal is to
inspire the reader to get in touch with the business and build them an
interesting product.
If you want to see the style/format for yourself you can check out
[https://customerzero.substack.com/p/dubbing-in-south-
africa](https://customerzero.substack.com/p/dubbing-in-south-africa)
Speaking with SME's about their problems is something I normally enjoy doing
anyway. Thought others might find it useful!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dying baby saved when doc designed & built dialysis machine from scratch in garage - kirubakaran
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7542404.stm
======
sspencer
That doctor deserves some serious kudos. I cannot even fathom how grateful
those parents must have been for his work after being told by all other
doctors that the baby was too small for dialysis. That kind of fuck-you-I-can-
make-it-smaller ballsiness is why I am proud to call myself a hacker.
~~~
ajross
Not to belittle the doctor's work, but the truth is this isn't _that_ hard a
hack to imagine. Dialysis is a pretty simple process, done with a diffusion
membrane. No doubt what he did was take a membrane intended for a normal
machine and size it down with "plumbing" appropriate for the patient.
But then, that's kind of an essential quality of all great hacks, isn't it?
They all look straightforward and simple when they're finished.
~~~
qwph
I couldn't see any mention of the time it took to build the device, but I'd
hazard a guess that the lifespan of a 6lb baby with failed kidneys could be
measured in hours, which would seem to imply that the design was reasonably
straightforward.
Not to devalue the doctor's work though. He did save someone's life.
~~~
akd
Yes I'm sure it's "reasonably straightforward" to build a dialysis machine in
a couple of hours, racing against a dying baby.
~~~
qwph
I said "design", not "build".
------
occam
You would think that someone is already manufacturing infant-sized dialysis
machiness. Throughout the story they emphasize that NHS has no such machines,
never quite saying if hospitals elsewhere have them. Is that because NHS just
refuses to buy any?
------
jedc
I'm really surprised that the NHS let it happen!
~~~
jedc
To clarify, the NHS is a VERY risk averse organisation. And a home-built
dialysis machine is a very risky machine to build and use. Well done to the
doc.
~~~
a-priori
I think even a risk averse organization would realize that when the options
are A) baby will die or B) baby may be hurt by untested machine, option B is
clearly better.
~~~
hugh
Even a very risk-averse _person_ would see B as clearly better, but a risk-
averse _organization_ will usually prefer option A.
Nobody gets in trouble for following the rules. Besides, the NHS, as an
organization, sees thousands of dead babies a year, why should it care about
another?
~~~
thaumaturgy
This is a perfect representation of the classic ethical dilemma, the Trolley
Problem [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem>].
Risk-averse organizations fall into the same category as people who would
decide not to throw the lever, because if they don't take any action, then
they aren't responsible for any of the consequences (which is stupid, imo).
------
swombat
Dr McGyver?
~~~
smhinsey
If I'm not mistaken, there actually was a McGuyver episode where he made a
dialysis machine out of spare parts.
------
stcredzero
The headline makes this sound like MacGyver, which it's not. But still
awesome!
------
flipbrad
a true hacker. inspiring stuff.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dotsies (2012) - tosh
http://dotsies.org
======
c517402
It seems like the correspondence should be something other a-z. Something like
making the vowels or more common letters more distinctive. E.g., making the
vowels the lightest weight, that is make aeiou use the single dot letters
dotsies uses for abcde.
------
vortico
Was about to pass this off until I starting reading the sample near the bottom
of the page that gradually teaches you. It actually amazed me that I could
sort of read it halfway through. I can't get to the end though, but at least I
have an idea of the difficulty level to read it naturally.
~~~
nerdponx
Couldn't get past "if you can read this, keep going."
~~~
nerdponx
Update: it's just because I was doing it on my phone. Having a blast learning
this!
------
jensenbox
I cannot tell if this is a practical joke or what. At first, I tried to learn
it in earnest but then I fell totally apart and virtually threw my hands up.
Either I have some sort of learning disability or this is there to simply
waste my time.
Is this a real thing?
~~~
andai
Have you tried using a spaced repetition system? Sometimes it takes the brain
a couple exposures until you "get" it. Otherwise you might think of ways to
make the learning more engaging or stimulating: if you can present the same
information in a different way, that might work better :)
------
rcarmo
Reminds me of Marain, which I actually wish was in use:
[http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/marain.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/marain.htm)
~~~
snailletters
As a note, the further reading links are dead.
They are available [0] on Web Archive, if anyone is interested.
0\.
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080524200838/http://homepages.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080524200838/http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/artikel/marain.html)
------
dzmitry_lahoda
Title shoud be `Dotsies - dot based read optimized font (2012)`.
------
johnnytieszoon
I learned it back then. Used it for a while as a privacy feature for my phone.
~~~
anotheryou
how was it? easy to read after a hwile?
I whished the downloadable font would be the "densest" setting, not just abc
encoding
~~~
johnnytieszoon
I can read 10-20 words per minute. The main problem is that you cannot "scan"
for a word.
------
vinchuco
Why not follow the 'natural' scheme of binary? A picture is worth n words:
[http://i.imgur.com/3XIMXcD.png](http://i.imgur.com/3XIMXcD.png) (added the
0-9 digits for emotional effect)
I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than
another.
Edit: Reminds me a lot of Chinese, but in this case there's a clear procedure
to decode glyphs as a word!
~~~
amelius
> I can't seem to put my finger on what makes a scheme more 'readable' than
> another.
I think one constraint is that the meaning of glyphs should be translation
invariant. But this does not hold for dotsies either (the glyph for "a" could
be interpreted as "b" depending on where the baseline is chosen). I wonder how
subscripting or superscripting works with this font :)
------
brad0
I like this. I spent 15 minutes playing the game and I feel like I can pick up
the basics. I'll try the bookmarklet from time to time.
------
duckwho
Korean is structured this way
~~~
jwilk
I don't see any similarity.
~~~
idle_zealot
It's a loose similarity to be sure. In Korean, syllables are written as a
constricted glyph. In dottsies, words are written as a constructed glyph.
~~~
ivanbakel
That would be like saying cursive Latin alphabet produces constructed glyphs.
Dotsies is just an alphabet - no letter or syllable acts as a modifier on any
other.
------
baalimago
imagelike alphabets and languages are harder to process, takes more time, not
effective
signs needs to be distinct
~~~
vinchuco
Under this system the words are what become easier to distinguish (after some
practice?), not the symbols.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ed Lu (NASA astronaut and CEO of B612 Foundation) Video AMA - dwynings
https://shortwave.co/c6070856/
======
tchae
is shortwave a video AMA platform?
------
clicks
So, to be clear, this is not a Reddit AMA.
Which he did do, some while ago:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y5vn0/i_am_ed_lu_forme...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y5vn0/i_am_ed_lu_former_nasa_astronaut_and_now_running/)
sadly, it didn't take off very much.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Silicon Valley Is Lying to You About Economic Inequality - bootload
http://mic.com/articles/131861/silicon-valley-is-lying-to-you-about-economic-inequality
======
bootload
_" using the power of monopoly to squeeze others out of a market, and hurting
the ability of workers to secure their own rights."_
This kind of assertion will not go away. There is some truth to this. What I'd
be interested to know is, does the same argument hold with the industrial
revolution?
Did the advent of railways squeeze ship, barge, horse and cart transport
companies. Did you it hurt workers organising their rights in the existing and
new industries? I ask this because the comparison between the mechanical and
silicon revolutions may yield some insight into what is happening now.
_" tech companies don't have to break down unions. With an app, you can start
a business entirely outside of existing legal frameworks and compete using
your own set of rules."_
Now it's bad to create new technology and applying it to new business? Since
when has this been a bad thing? The legal profession has always trailed
business. This is called _" progress"_.
~~~
supercanuck
Classifying a worker as a "contractor" instead of an employee is not a
technological innovation.
~~~
bootload
_" worker as a "contractor" instead of an employee"_
Gotta agree this is scumbag move on companies behalf. This post/article give
some examples:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10855666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10855666)
------
dikdik
"Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be
released by startups."
That is viscerally disgusting.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
UEFI boot: how does that actually work, then? - justincormack
https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/
======
ackalker
From the article: "it’s a really good idea to go and read the UEFI
specification. You can do this. It’s very easy. You don’t have to pay anyone
any money. [...] You can find it [right here on the official UEFI site]. You
have to check a couple of boxes, but you are not signing your soul away to
Satan, or anything."
Before people click on that link and start thinking the author of the article
is a damn liar (the link takes one to a menacing "Access Denied" page which
prompts users to login or register (which in turn involves filling out a form
and possibly paying a large amount of money)), here is a link to free
downloads of the specification documents (as PDF files):
[http://www.uefi.org/specifications](http://www.uefi.org/specifications)
And by the way, no need to check any boxes at all, just click any of the links
and the download should start right away.
~~~
pgeorgi
But also read the blurb on the page: "By downloading any of the UEFI
Specifications, you acknowledge that no license, express or implied, is
granted to you to distribute, additionally reproduce, implement or otherwise
use for any purpose (other than to read only) the UEFI Specifications, and
that all rights, title and interest in and to the UEFI Specifications,
including all intellectual property rights of any type whatsoever, are owned
by the UEFI Forum, or subject to rights granted to the UEFI Forum."
So if I download these files, I acknowledge that I may not use the spec to do
anything useful with it. It might be better to derive UEFI knowledge from the
Tianocore sources, since those come with no strings attached.
------
bo1024
As as someone who just wants to install the OSes of their choice on their
machines, the main takeaway I got was
> _there used to be a thing called BIOS that was dead simple to deal with and
> did what you want. Now there is a replacement called UEFI that is insanely
> complicated to deal with and (at least in practice) makes it hard to do what
> you want._
Is that accurate?
~~~
josteink
Not really.
I'd amend your statement to be "There used to be a very limited thing called
BIOS, a collection of historical hacks, which only did one thing decently, but
not really well. To make matters worse, in all cases but this one, it
completely fell apart. There was no consistent tooling, and when it worked, it
was non-inspectable black magic even to the most sophisticated power-user. The
limitations of BIOS booting caused different OSes to constantly step on each
others feet."
UEFI is different, but actually has a _design_ , supports tooling, any OS can
work with it seamlessly without fear of collision, and as result it handles
all scenarios simple or complex equally well.
As a bonus it can also do a million things BIOS couldn't, like loading a
Linux-kernel directly, from acoss the network, without any intermedia-
bootloading proxy or iPXE shim.
Now you can actually put your bootloader setup in source-control. I'm not sure
_why_ you would do that, but please go ahead and try that with BIOS.
So yeah. UEFI really isn't that complex. It's just different. It just seems
more complex because now even regular guys like us can see all the moving
parts, where in the past only OS-designers could peek in.
~~~
epistasis
Really weird to see this downvoted. IMHO, UEFI is a godsend from the terrible
BIOS days. Things like ipmitool could sometimes be used to control the BIOS on
server hardware, but efibootmgr is much better, and available everywhere now.
~~~
bo1024
(Not a downvoter, but) I'm just saying that as a user who doesn't know what
things like ipmitool or efibootmgr are, all I know is that it was very easy to
install OSes as I wanted, dual-boot, etc with BIOS and whenever I hear about
UEFI it's scary/intimidating, for instance this article says:
> If you absolutely insist on having more than one OS per disk, understand
> everything written on this page, understand that you are making your life
> much more painful than it needs to be, lay in good stocks of painkillers and
> gin, and don’t go yelling at your OS vendor, whatever breaks.
I've dual-booted with multiple OSes per disk with BIOS several times and had
no problems at all. So I can't help but get a bad impression of UEFI.
~~~
josteink
> I've dual-booted with multiple OSes per disk with BIOS several times and had
> no problems at all. So I can't help but get a bad impression of UEFI.
I think this article was written back when you had to setup everything UEFI
manually, at least in the Linux-world. I don't think all parts still applies.
These days most of these things should be taken care of automatically for you,
by the OS vendor, just like they used to in the BIOS past.
Except now you wont have to mess around with installation-order, custom
bootloaders or weird grub-entries. It's all handled natively by UEFI.
------
pudquick
One piece that was not mentioned is the necessity of your UEFI / EFI
implementation including integrated chipset driver support for talking to
various devices (mass storage, USB, etc) at boot. Additionally how that can
interact with legacy Option ROMs.
It also didn't cover the replacement of the BIOS VGA baseline graphical
communication standard with GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) - meaning that your
graphics card itself specifically needs to be compatible with UEFI / EFI to
even boot.
I'm sad he took a negative stance to Apple in the article. Their
implementation (of EFI) is very interesting in the choices they made and it's
worth noting the differences (they do not, for instance, provide a graphical
configuration choice "boot menu" like most PCs - they only provide visual boot
media selection).
Another interesting thing Apple did was, prior to all Windows editions
natively booting to UEFI / EFI, they still wanted to provide dual boot support
for OS X and Windows on their Intel Macs. But this meant that while OS X was
EFI booting and required GPT drives - Windows was BIOS booting and required
MBR drives. As such, Apple used a hybrid GPT/MBR format where the partition
maps in both were in synchronization and GPT reserved the areas where MBR
information was stored on the drive.
~~~
cmurf
Apple makes some of the best and worse choices, often even simultaneously.
Good: No firmware setup UI. Leave the user out of it.
Good: Firmware built-in GUI boot manager that discovers _currently_ bootable
OS's dynamically. Plug in an external, an icon appears with an animated
reveal. Animation in the f'n firmware built-in boot manager.
Bad: That boot manager hard wires a label "Windows" for any legacy CSM-BIOS
installed OS, even if it isn't Windows.
Mixed: Apple's firmware is mainly based on Intel 1.10, with some extensions
such as UEFI GOP, and some Apple stuff. It's not a standard UEFI 2.x firmware
at all, and it's not documented at all. 3rd party bootloader programs have to
have physical access to Macs to poke them with a stick in order to figure out
how they work due to Apple's closed nature. So if you care about running open
source OS's on Apple hardware, this is probably more "bad" than "mixed".
Very bad: There's a long standing pernicious bug with Disk Utility, on Boot
Camp'd drives (OS X + Windows) which permits the user to resize the OS X
volume thereby creating a 5th partition: ESP, OS X, New Partition, Apple Boot,
Windows. And Apple's tools remove the hybrid MBR, replace it with a protective
MBR, and now Windows is unbootable. All without warning. This behavior
violates their own proscription against manipulating drives with hybrid MBRs.
Technote 2166: "If block 0 contains any other form of MBR, it should refuse to
manipulate the disk." Their message boards have hundreds of such complaints.
This isn't new, it's been a problem for years, it was bug reported years ago,
and Apple basically blamed it on Windows rather than their own tool which
actually causes the problem by wiping out the PMBR.
[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2166/_in...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2166/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003927-CH1-SUBSECTION11)
So I'm not a fan of their hybrid MBR hack, even though earlier on it was
probably unavoidable. Windows has supported UEFI booting since Vista, but
Apple's kinda dragged their feet on supporting UEFI Windows boot until very
recently, and I'm not even certain Boot Camp Assistant defaults to this
behavior yet.
~~~
pudquick
For Windows 8, yes, it defaults to UEFI now, thankfully.
~~~
cmurf
This support must require relatively recent hardware with newer firmware
because it's definitely not doing a UEFI install on a 2011 Macbook Pro.
------
jhallenworld
EFI Shell is the new (built-in) MS-DOS. I'm waiting for someone to make
doom.efi :-)
The the entire OS to BIOS API changed with UEFI. I've seen bugs where the BIOS
int 15 ax=E820 memory map does not match the EFI memory map passed to Linux.
All of this to support > 2TB drives.
~~~
wtallis
EFI isn't about 2+TB drives. That's just GPT, which could have been
implemented in a traditional BIOS. EFI was created because Intel needed
_something_ for the Itanium chips to run, and they didn't want to implement
OpenFirmware.
EFI came to the PC because Apple wasn't interested in starting a 16-bit 8086
programming division, and the rest of the industry followed suit because it
was easier than squeezing more things into the 16-bit BIOS. Now that we've got
both EFI and GPT widely available, we can have machines that can do things
like fetch and install their own firmware updates and we can have sane dual-
booting.
~~~
barrkel
However, in the meantime, we have to live with "complications" like a frequent
lack of support on Linux for decent console drivers in UEFI boots. For
example, technically the nVidia proprietary driver doesn't support framebuffer
console on UEFI boots, and if you don't get the parameters just right, you can
end up in the hilarious situation of typing your full disk encryption password
blind to a blank screen visibly indistinguishable from a crashed bootloader.
~~~
yuhong
I have been saying that BIOSes needs a proper support lifecycle and bug
reporting channel for both security and non-security bugs for a while now.
------
orbifold
I feel like Coreboot would be a much saner alternative to UEFI.
------
upofadown
From this I get that "BIOS compatibility mode" is a required specification.
Then I can ignore all the rest of the article.
I have recently been learning about OpenBSD. I really like how they have
handled all the weirdness associated with PC architecture
booting/partitioning. OpenBSD simply ignores it and does everything on top of
it. Once you have a partition marked as OpenBSD you are done the architecture
specific stuff. Then you go on to do things the OpenBSD way which is the same
over all architectures. So when Intel comes up with UUEFI (or whatever) you
can continue to ignore the whole mess.
~~~
pgeorgi
Compatibility Support Modules ("BIOS compatibility mode") aren't required. The
text states "many UEFI firmwares implement some kind of BIOS compatibility
mode, sometimes referred to as a CSM.".
"many" not "all", and the article sticks to that.
Since CSMs are incompatible with Secure Boot (since they can run whatever,
without extending the trust chain), I expect them to be on the way out. Same
as with the "Secure Boot optional" requirement on x86, by the way, since I
guess that the real reason Microsoft added that to their Windows Logo
requirements is that their large customers wanted to be sure that they can
image Windows 7 onto new machines for a while longer.
Once this kind of legacy is gone for good, Microsoft may tighten the screws
there. And since all big Linux vendors support Secure Boot now, that part of
the PC landscape won't make many noises either.
~~~
upofadown
Last I remember the Linux distros were just using a shim to get around the
secure boot stuff. In other words, something that just boots from the
partition that Linux just happens to be in with no verification of what that
is. If things are to be tightened then the keys for the shim would have to be
revoked. Then everyone is sad. Otherwise the OpenBSD approach still works as
normal with the shim.
~~~
geofft
That's not how the shim works.
The shim loader is an MIT-licensed piece of code that's signed by a Secure
Boot CA, typically MS for off-the-shelf x86 hardware. The shim has another
public key hard-coded into it, and verifies that the next bootloader (usually
GRUB 2) is signed with that key. It works around a couple of issues:
\- The turnaround time for getting something signed by MS is slow. Linux
distros want to be able to push out a new version of GRUB on their own. So by
having the CA sign a shim loader, new versions of the boot loader can be
signed with the distro's key alone, which they can automate as much as they
want.
\- There's some ambiguity over the GPLv3's TiVoization clause, so to avoid any
interpretation that MS would have to hand over its own private key, MS won't
sign any GPLv3 software directly (like GRUB). The distros think this is a non-
issue, and they're happy to sign their own GRUB binaries without imagining
they'd have to give up their private keys.
It doesn't change the security model of Secure Boot at all. You're still
verifying that someone whose key is in hardware has a trust path to your
bootloader. It's just that the trust path is one more step away.
If you want to include your distro's key in the UEFI variable that lists your
Secure Boot CA roots, you can do that, and skip the shim. (You probably can't
remove MS's key because UEFI drivers are signed with it, but that's a
different issue.)
Some distros (notably Ubuntu) have their _bootloader_ willing to boot unsigned
kernels, on the grounds that Secure Boot protects UEFI "boot services" (things
that run while UEFI still controls the machine, including access to certain
UEFI variables like Secure Boot config), but does not protect ring 0. Other
distros (Fedora, SuSE, etc.) think that that's nonsense, and Secure Boot
obviously protects ring 0. So their bootloader only boots signed kernels, and
those kernels, in turn, only load signed kernel modules.
MS has complained about Ubuntu's interpretation, but has so far not shown any
signs of forcing Ubuntu to change their practices. (I suspect with no real
information that MS is worried that, if they're holding the only CA for PC
hardware and they revoke the most popular Linux distro, they're going to be
reminded of what antitrust lawsuits feel like.) You can see MS's signing
policy here, including a link to the (non-MS) shim:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archi...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_certification/archive/2013/12/03/microsoft-
uefi-ca-signing-policy-updates.aspx)
------
crdoconnor
>Most of the unhappiness about Secure Boot is not really about Secure Boot the
mechanism – whether the people expressing that unhappiness think it is or not
– but about specific implementations of Secure Boot in the real world.
Unfortunately, people in the real world use implementations of secure boot,
not its specification.
>If you want to get cheap volume licenses of Windows from Microsoft to pre-
install on your computers and have a nice “reassuring” ‘Microsoft Approved!’
sticker or whatever on the case, you have to comply with these requirements.
That’s all the force they have.
Post-US vs. Microsoft, MS does not want to be seen to be explicitly violating
anti-trust law, which is why in public and on the record, they will say and do
nothing wrong. This has actually done a lot of good, because it does shackle
their ability to engage in anti-competitive behavior.
It just doesn't shackle it completely, and it means that in order to do it
they have to be a bit more creative.
They still wield a large amount of power over the PC market, and manufacturers
know this. They still have several ways of opaquely favoring or disfavoring
some manufacturers over others. Manufacturers, on the whole, dont't mind being
opaquely favored and don't want to be opaquely disfavored and know that crying
foul about Microsoft abusing its market power in secret won't do them any
favors either.
It's a cut throat market and nobody is going to feel sorry for you as a
manufacturer if you died out because you didn't get an Microsoft promotional
tie in.
Thus sometimes, all it takes for anti-trust violations to continue and to go
unpunished is a nudge and a wink or an off the record conversation between MS
and manufacturers, and a decision made by either party that falls in a _gray
area_ of legal defensibility.
Here's where it gets evil, and here's the bit you are glossing over:
Secure boot PROVIDES that gray area while maintaining a veneer of
respectability.
>If you have an x86 system that claims to be Windows certified but does not
allow you to disable Secure Boot, it is in direct violation of the
certification requirements, and you should certainly complain very loudly to
someone. If a lot of these systems exist then we clearly have a problem and it
might be time for that giant lawsuit, but so far I’m not aware of this being
the case. All the x86-based, Windows-certified systems I’ve seen have had the
‘disable Secure Boot’ option in their firmwares.
Certainly you seem to be able to turn it off in most implementations I've
seen, but I haven't seen any that let me add trusted keys myself. Another gray
area methinks.
Nor is turning it off particularly easy. I know where it is and what it does,
but I know the history behind it.
MOST people draw a blank stare when they look at it and CERTAINLY don't get to
the menu and look at it and think "oh, for sure this is the thing that stops
me from installing linux".
Oh, and incidentally I've never eer seen a coherent error message caused by
secure boot's "protection". Not "you appear to be installing an untrusted OS".
Just blank screens and opaque error messages.
Let's say hypothetically that instead of being buried three menus deep, it was
a physical switch, with a clear explanation about what it actually does.
Let's say hypothetically that adding a key for secure boot were done using a
clean and simple UI that my mother could follow. Flip the switch, plug in a
USB key to boot from, menu asks if you want to trust this OS. You say yes and
flip the switch back on.
Let's say hypothetically that trying to install an "untrusted" OS gave you a
clear error message.
If these were the case (and these things certainly adhere to the spec), I
wouldn't have a problem with it either. Let's be realistic, though. It's not
that. It was not ever intended to be that. It was not supposed to be used to
secure your system, and while Microsoft did just enough to avoid a lawsuit
over it, their intentions are crystal clear.
Hardware manufacturers also know what's up, and won't be making it an easy to
use feature any time soon.
MS is playing the same game they did pre-DOJ, they're just trying to keep
plausible deniability at the same time as greasing all of the right palms. MS
pretends not to violate antitrust law. Microsoft contributes to all the right
election campaigns. DOJ pretends not to notice that Microsoft's secure boot
_initiative_ (if not the spec) is anti-competitive.
>As far as x86 devices go, though, right now, Microsoft’s certification
requirements actually explicitly protect your right to determine what can boot
on your system. This is good.
Microsoft is not explicitly breaking the law here. This is indeed good. Let's
award them a fucking medal. By the way, I didn't deal drugs today. This is
also good.
As for UEFI itself - it reminds me of XML - designed by committee, and yes,
strictly speaking it _does_ do the job, but it's ridiculously overcomplicated
and the market is littered with terrible implementations because of that
complexity. Worst of all it was never truly necessary because a simpler
specification (where's the UEFI equivalent of JSON?!) would have sufficed for
all use cases.
Another thing reminds me of XML too. There was a good market in being an
expert in XML for a while. It was almost a club, in fact. The arcaneness plus
the reliance the world had on it made for some excellent opportunities.
Opportunities that, say, JSON never provided.
There appears to be a good market to being the go to guy for UEFI too.
Just sayin'
~~~
mjg59
> Certainly you seem to be able to turn it off in most implementations I've
> seen, but I haven't seen any that let me add trusted keys myself. Another
> gray area methinks.
Which systems have you seen that have Secure Boot enabled by default and don't
provide any mechanism for key management? Many vendors won't provide a UI for
adding additional keys but _will_ let you remove all existing ones and then
enrol your choice - that's pretty much how the spec envisages this working.
> Let's say hypothetically that instead of being buried three menus deep, it
> was a physical switch, with a clear explanation about what it actually does.
And let's say that, hypothetically, hardware vendors refused to add a physical
switch that would cost a few cents extra per board and have an effect on their
bottom line. What then? And how do I prevent someone with brief physical
access from flicking that switch and replacing my bootloader?
> Let's say hypothetically that trying to install an "untrusted" OS gave you a
> clear error message.
Microsoft don't have enough leverage over the firmware vendors to be able to
mandate choice of language, so what you'd end up with is a variety of vendors
with their own idea of what a clear error message is.
> DOJ pretends not to notice that Microsoft's secure boot initiative (if not
> the spec) is anti-competitive.
The number of lawyers I've found who, after having had all aspects of this
explained to them, thought that Microsoft's behaviour here was anti-
competitive is zero. There was a much stronger argument before Microsoft
mandated that vendors provide a mechanism for performing key management and
agreed to sign third party bootloaders. Now? Not so much.
> There appears to be a good market to being the go to guy for UEFI too.
I'm doing pretty well out of it. But I did pretty well out of BIOS before
that, and if the market decides that Coreboot with a non-Tiano payload is the
way forward then I suspect I'll be fine there as well.
~~~
crdoconnor
>Which systems have you seen that have Secure Boot enabled by default and
don't provide any mechanism for key management?
All I've come across so far. Dells, Toshibas, a Lenovo, etc. I literally
haven't seen a UI for key management at all. Ever.
MAYBE that's because it's too well hidden or maybe those machines I've looked
at simply didn't have it.
>And let's say that, hypothetically, hardware vendors refused to add a
physical switch that would cost a few cents extra per board
I'd say that non-hypothetically speaking, they were trying to stay on
Microsoft's good side and coming up with a lame fucking excuse to do so.
That is, unless they came up with an equally good UI that didn't require a
button, which is possible.
Someone on this thread mentioned that chromebooks have a button. When pretty
much the lowest-cost point in the market can do it....
>Microsoft don't have enough leverage over the firmware vendors
Yes they do. If they have enough to mandate that it's written they have enough
to mandate that it's written coherently. They just have every incentive to
ensure that it isn't, and with a nod and a wink they can get their way.
>The number of lawyers I've found who, after having had all aspects of this
explained to them, thought that Microsoft's behaviour here was anti-
competitive is zero.
I wonder how many of those lawyers have ever tried to install linux with
secure boot turned on.
Maybe they all thought that if the spec was kosher that's all that matters.
>I'm doing pretty well out of it.
That certainly explains the apologetics.
~~~
mjg59
> MAYBE that's because it's too well hidden or maybe those machines I've
> looked at simply didn't have it.
Maybe you don't know what you're doing.
> I'd say that non-hypothetically speaking, they were trying to stay on
> Microsoft's good side and coming up with a lame fucking excuse to do so.
I'd say that you don't know what you're talking about.
> Someone on this thread mentioned that chromebooks have a button. When pretty
> much the lowest-cost point in the market can do it....
Except Google _are_ able to precisely define what a Chromebook looks like - if
you don't manufacture to Google's specifications, you don't get to ship
ChromeOS. Which, if Google were to dominate the market, would probably be the
point where you'd decry them as behaving in anticompetitive ways.
Microsoft have to perform an interesting balancing act. Vendors will adhere to
the Windows hardware certification requirements because it saves them money
per-unit. Microsoft can demand new firmware features because that's a one-off
cost per new platform. Hardware features cost per unit, and if they push that
too far it's cheaper for manufacturers to tell Microsoft to fuck off and
market their hardware without the Windows sticker. That's simply not an option
in the ChromeOS market. You can't compare them.
> Yes they do.
So cool you don't know what you're talking about.
> I wonder how many of those lawyers have ever tried to install linux with
> secure boot turned on.
Linux distributions having fucking dreadful installers really isn't what
determines whether something is an antitrust violation or not. Linux
distributions not being able to get their shit together sufficiently to get
things signed isn't either. Canonical, Red Hat and Suse (and a _whole_ _host_
of smaller distributions and specialised products) have managed to deal with
this.
> That certainly explains the apologetics.
I've also done pretty well out of OpenStack, but I'd be the first to admit
that it's dreadful.
~~~
crdoconnor
>Maybe you don't know what you're doing.
I triple checked on two computers to be sure. Nada. Maybe go fuck yourself.
>I'd say that you don't know what you're talking about.
And I'd say you should stick to low level coding and not comment on the
economics of competition and the contents of the US vs. Microsoft dockets...
unless you are an antitrust lawyer, an economist AND a kernel hacker?
Thought not.
>Except Google are able to precisely define what a Chromebook looks like
So a single switch is monstrously expensive unless Google mandates it, in
which case it's not a problem.
>So cool you don't know what you're talking about.
Jesus Christ you are so fucking lame.
>Linux distributions having fucking dreadful installers really isn't what
determines whether something is an antitrust violation or not.
It's the FIRMWARE's job to tell you that it's "saving you from yourself", not
the installers.
>Linux distributions not being able to get their shit together sufficiently to
get things signed isn't either. Canonical, Red Hat and Suse (and a whole host
of smaller distributions and specialised products) have managed to deal with
this.
Funny. I tried installing (the latest release of) Ubuntu the other day and got
nothing but a cryptic error message because secure boot was turned off.
~~~
mjg59
> I triple checked on two computers to be sure. Nada. Maybe go fuck yourself.
For the Thinkpad I have here:
1) Enter firmware 2) Go to security 3) Select "Reset to Setup Mode" 4) Enrol
keys using UEFI SetVariable() interface
What models are you talking about? Shipping with no mechanism to do this is in
violation of the Windows hardware certification requirements, and vendors
falsely claiming compliance are both falsely advertising and breaching their
contracts with Microsoft, so it's a pretty big deal for them to do so.
> And I'd say you should stick to low level coding and not comment on the
> economics of competition and the contents of the US vs. Microsoft dockets...
> unless you are an antitrust lawyer, an economist AND a kernel hacker?
You _are_ an antitrust lawyer and an economist?
> So a single switch is monstrously expensive unless Google mandates it, in
> which case it's not a problem.
In the Windows world, if Microsoft's demands become too extreme you can ignore
Microsoft, undercut your competitors and ship Windows anyway. In the ChromeOS
world, you can't.
> Funny. I tried installing (the latest release of) Ubuntu the other day and
> got nothing but a cryptic error message because secure boot was turned off.
If Secure Boot is turned off then your inability to boot Ubuntu has nothing to
do with Secure Boot.
------
pgeorgi
Interesting overview. I just dislike how it sets the tone with the 'everything
on the internet is crap except for what my Red Hat buddies and I say' intro
which is then followed up with several minor inaccuracies in the text.
~~~
crdoconnor
>I just dislike how it sets the tone with the 'everything on the internet is
crap except for what my Red Hat buddies and I say'
The UEFI world seems to be very clubby. I suspect its arcaneness and the
lucrative nature of working in it contributes to this.
I've seen this patronizing straw man "you don't know the spec like I do" from
a few other UEFI blog posts, too.
------
rbanffy
After fighting an eMMC-based "Windows Chromebook" for the last couple weeks, I
think I can answer how its specific implementation of UEFI works with one
word: "poorly".
~~~
arthurfm
What were you trying to do with it?
~~~
rbanffy
I was trying to install Ubuntu so that it boots off the eMMC. No luck there,
but Fedora can boot from a tiny USB stick that barely protrudes from the
chassis.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Richard Stallman Collapses At Barcelona Conference - nutmeg
http://www.publico.es/ciencias/432664/richard-stallman-rajoy-nos-quiere-matar-a-todos
======
me_myselft
Hi, I am from Barcelona, and I was there. Stallman is a great man. I dont know
what happened at the end, but when we were in the talk the organizers told us
that the talk is suspended because Stallman was not well. The medical service
arrive 20 minutes after Stallman ask for attention. This delay was used by him
to say: "Son los recortes, Rajoy nos quiere matar a todos", meaning: The delay
is because of the cuts in the spanish health systems, Rajoy (the president)
want to kill us". :-).
~~~
planetguy
Wow, if only he were in the United States where you don't have to rely on the
Government for medical care...
~~~
me_myselft
Yes, but in US you have to have a lot of money for receiving a very basic and
fundamental human right: medical care...
~~~
jdminhbg
I wasn't going to respond to this to avoid prolonging this burgeoning off-
topic health care flamewar, but I figured that in the name of cross-cultural
understanding, I'd correct you:
Hospitals in the US are obligated to treat any emergency patient regardless of
whether they can pay.
~~~
brudgers
They then charge those people least able to pay a higher rate, add interest,
and turn it over to a collection agency.
[http://www.democracynow.org/2012/2/15/new_york_hospitals_sad...](http://www.democracynow.org/2012/2/15/new_york_hospitals_saddle_uninsured_patients)
[http://www.democracynow.org/2004/1/7/state_secret_why_are_un...](http://www.democracynow.org/2004/1/7/state_secret_why_are_uninsured_patients)
[somehow Democracy Now seems appropriate for a Stallman discussion]
~~~
ismarc
This isn't entirely true and varies from state to state and hospital to
hospital. We had a trip to the hospital last year (non-ambulance, but was an
actual emergency). Prior to checking out, we refused to sign anything from the
hospital itself until checkout time. (quick sidebar, I've never seen anything
as sleazy as an administrator trying to get someone who's heavily sedated and
mediated but hasn't been fully diagnosed yet (triage and stabilization only)
to sign paperwork related to billing and insurance, and then to authorize a
room change to long term and the to an overnight room...all before they even
knew what was going on). At checkout time, they had no insurance info...if we
had no insurance, they would consolidate the fees from all groups (contracted
doctors, anasthesiologists, equipment use, medications, etc.) and waive 2/3 of
it and set up a payment plan (non-loan style, so no interest, or fees). This
total was lower than if we used insurance and paid what was remaining on the
deductible for the year and happened late enough that we wouldn't have
benefited from using the insurance. I have no idea if it was attitude,
handling it like business, persistence or just how they do business, but it
greatly impressed me.
------
patrickaljord
He's ok [http://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-speech-in-
barcelona...](http://www.fsf.org/news/richard-stallman-speech-in-barcelona-
canceled)
~~~
tomrod
Thanks for letting us know. I really like rms, even if I don't agree with his
every position. Here's to hoping he gets into good health soon.
~~~
hkmurakami
RMS is controversial, extreme, and perhaps even crazy.
But it's scary to imagine a world without the counterpoint that RMS singularly
embodies.
In a way, he evokes images of the Dalai Lama: In (metaphorical) exile,
regarded as a heretic from many, and revered as a guiding beacon by others.
~~~
Produce
One step ahead of the curve and you're a genius. Two steps and you're crazy.
Three and you're dangerous. RMS#2
~~~
mibbitier
Actually, I believe he's _behind_ the curve.
There was a time when some of the things he talks about mattered (1980s), and
that time has long gone.
The general public don't buy "computers" to tinker with any more. They buy
them just like they buy a toaster. As an appliance to use. The software or
hardware it runs is irrelevant. All that matters is the user experience, and
if it fulfils the purpose - does it make good toast.
~~~
jerf
I find it ironic how vocal the anti-RMS contingent is being in the same week
that Microsoft is locking Firefox out of one of their Windows 8 lines, while
we live in a world where Apple rigidly controls what you do with everything
not-Mac and continue making strides towards locking down the Macs as well,
where consumer electronics like eBook readers are rapidly displacing
computers, and where Google's dedication to openness seems to come and go and
is held hostage by hostile phone carriers and indifferent-at-best hardware
manufacturers. Let us not forget Microsoft's ongoing efforts to ensure BIOSes
can only boot approved (read: Microsoft) OSes. I can barely even remember all
the ways in which almost every tech company under the sun right now is trying
to lock us in a box.
The Open Web Honeymoon is rapidly coming to an end and our ability to ignore
his ideas is also rapidly coming to end. His ideas are regaining their
importance fast, because the victories circa 2000 that allowed us to pretend
he was crazy because our world was comfortable are being walked back. The
classic Right to Read [1] is no longer a far-out vision but very nearly a
matter of some switches being flipped in existing software and hardware. I see
a developing consensus group on HN that we can ignore RMS as a loon, but now's
a terrible time for that to take root. We're going to get stomped in the next
several years if that happens. The fight for the openness of the next hardware
generation has started and we're barely showing up.
[1]: <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>
~~~
mibbitier
The sky is not falling. In fact, if you look at the situation now, with real
browser choice, IE declining market share, and with Android, then the
situation is better than it has ever been. Most games consoles have
opportunities to write software for them. Something you could only dream about
in the 90s.
The market decides these things extremely well. We don't need people shouting
and taking extremist positions.
The only thing that matters is "Does this device solve a problem I have, and
satisfy my needs?". If the answer to that is yes, then I don't care how
open/closed/walled garden it is.
~~~
jerf
Yes. We have real browser choice on our conventional computers and Android.
Less on iPhone, none on Windows 8 for ARM. Game consoles are walled gardens
and I'm not sure what you mean by "most" because I'm pretty sure it's only the
XBox 360 that is open to all, and that a hugely restricted sandbox as well.
So, your bright spots are a fading category under active attack (web browser
choice), a dubious walled garden (XBox 360) from the same company working to
kill our browser choice, and a phone platform which as I've said goes back and
forth between open and not depending on the who, what, and when, with
basically a single project standing between us and the whole platform being
effectively closed (CyanogenMod). (I'm assuming you're not claiming the PS3 as
open after the openness was retroactively removed by Sony. There is nothing
stopping Microsoft from doing that either.)
This isn't extremism to be ringing the bell, our insertion into the trunk is
nearly a _fait accompli_ , and again, we're barely showing up to the fight.
------
firichapo
I just wanted to add that at no point does the article mentions that he
collapsed. Looks like he suffered an increase in blood pressure and decided to
call it of. A doctor was contacted and he was able to walk away by his own
means.
~~~
squidbot
Google's translation made the article a bit more amusing: "The president of
the Free Software Foundation has begun to feel ill, apparently due to a power
surge"
He needs better line filtering I'd guess!
------
jonknee
Ironic that the only way I was able to read that article was through non-free
software (Google Translate). Hope he's OK.
~~~
hub_
Nope. You could learn Spanish and understand it. It is not like the content is
encoded in a proprietary or patent encumbered format.
------
me_myselft
Here, there is a picture when he was in the ambulance:
<https://p.twimg.com/AsjR-wCCEAEVxLa.jpg>
~~~
Cribstopper
Here's my original post of the picture from Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/#!/Cribstopper/status/200641059389313024...](https://twitter.com/#!/Cribstopper/status/200641059389313024/photo/1)
------
tree_of_item
Shit. I hope he's okay, it's difficult to tell what happened through the lens
of Google Translate. Anyone have more information?
~~~
andos
My Spanish is rusty, but the article says that:
\- Stallman felt ill halfway through a lecture he was offering in Barcelona,
probably due to a blood pressure spike;
\- he asked the staff for medical assistance;
\- meanwhile, he continued the lecture with some difficulty, but in a good
mood;
\- the lecture was suspended when the ambulance arrived, and was eventually
cancelled;
\- after being attended by the medical staff, he was well enough to walk out
of the building;
\- no further details on his health.
~~~
Nrsolis
Of course, the big question is whether the firmware in the EKG machine was
open or not.
~~~
carols10cents
I seriously wonder if medical care done by proprietary devices with
proprietary software is something that he would object to!
------
kprobst
One of these days it's going to be for real and I wonder how many of his fans
will be enraged when someone says something like "I'm not glad he's dead, but
I'm glad he's gone".
~~~
billpatrianakos
All of them. It's been my experience that Stallman fans refuse to deal with
even fair criticism of him. That aside, I hope no one says that about him or
anyone else ever. I have a lot of problems with Stallman and his ideology but
when he dies I hope we can all take the high road. We may _think_ it's the man
we don't like but it's really his actions and beliefs we have a problem with
and when a well respected public figure like him dies it's just common decency
not spit on his grave like that. When someone dies you should get past all the
negativity you hold for a person and remember their humanity. To some he may
have been an asshole in life but in death we're reminded that the deceased had
family they loved, hopes and dreams, and changed people's lives in a small way
just by having lived and interacted with others. I was one of the people who
was outraged by what he said when Steve Jobs died but I'll forgive it when
Stallmam goes because of what I just said earlier. Let's hope he's alright and
take the high road.
By the way, "he did not, for example, have a heart attack". Really? There are
no confirmed details but he definitely didn't have a heart attack? Well are
there confirmed details or not? If he didn't have a heart attack then there's
at least one confirmed detail, right? Why the need to clarify that one point?
I'm not saying its a lie but whenever someone tells me "I don't know what
happened but I know this one thing _didnt_ happen" they're either guessing or
hiding something.
~~~
lwhi
It amazes me that Stallman is viewed in this way. Steve Jobs was undeniably an
asshole to many .. and Steve Jobs' fans refuse to deal with even fair
criticism of _him_.
There's a strange warped perspective at play.
~~~
billpatrianakos
You're missing the point and rushing to defend someone I'm not trying to
insult. I never said or implied Jobs fans aren't the same. The point is that
when someone dies or has something bad happen to them saying something like
"I'm not glad he's dead but I'm glad he's gone" is like spitting on their
grave and in such times we should remember that they were human like you or me
and forget our petty grievances out of respect. When someone like Stallman
dies it reminds us of our own mortality as would anyone's death. I'd hope no
one was a dick about it "because Stallman said this and that about Jobs after
he died" or "because he promoted some awful ideology" or something like that.
I don't even like Stallman but when someone has a health crisis or dies you
don't celebrate it no matter who they are. It's just common decency. Don't
make this a Stallmam V. Whoever comparison.
~~~
lwhi
I find the way many people talk about Stallman to be patronising and bitter. I
believe this is partly just because he's fighting against the current, whereas
a person like Jobs oiled the wheels of capitalism. Stallman has a huge
positive effect on the world, it's a shame any recognition will need to be
balanced against so much negativity.
------
tranzparency
What's strange is Wikipedia shows him as deceased. First sentence says:
Richard Matthew Stallman (16 March 1953 – 10 May 2012), often shortened to
rms,[1] was an American software freedom activist and computer programmer.
------
raganwald
Social/Moral question: Is it acceptable to wish Mr. Stallman well in light of
allegations that he has advocated for truly awful practices?
e.g. _Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for
legalization. I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms
children._
<http://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html>
~~~
skrebbel
There, you're doing it.
It is all right for someone to be skeptical about any commonly held view,
_except_ when it's about sex with minors.
In any discussion about any kind of sex with anyone under 18 whatsoever, if
you're not 100% fully completely convincedly against it, then _you're a bad
person!!1_
Why can't we just discuss this? Like we can discuss anything else?
_Especially_ in the US, where the norm appears to be that the KKK people and
the Westboro Baptist nutcases are insane, but they should still be allowed to
say what they think? Why is that ok with nazis and homo haters, but not for
people who are merely _skeptical_ about the current social norm wrt sex with
minors?
It's this same attitude that allows governments to block half the internet,
it's to seek out the child pornographers! What, you're against my law? Hey
guys, this one here is in favour of child pornography!
Note: I completely share the common opinion that sex with minors is bad and
that there are only very few edge cases to be found where it isn't (e.g. a
sexually active couple, both 17 years old, one turns 18 and is now a
peadophile? surely not). I just think that, like everything else in the world,
if we're civilized, we'll allow the discussion.
~~~
raganwald
Well actually, I haven’t expressed an opinion about whether his words are
acceptable or whether he’s a bad person, whatever that means. I have heard
more than a few people taking me to task for wishing him good health on
account of his words, and one of the reasons I posted this was to hear from
people like you.
~~~
skrebbel
Genuinely curious, because I don't think I understood this: what do you mean
with "people like me"?
~~~
raganwald
HN readers, especially those who might contruute another perspective. e.g.
reg: Stallman is an important voice.
detractor: He’s also advocating pedo.
reg: He’s still an important voice.
HN reader: Actually, he isn’t advocating pedo. <\- new perspective
~~~
skrebbel
ah right! thanks for elaborating. in fact, i'm flattered! :-)
also, my compliments for not turning this into a flamewar. in retrospect, it
would seem that i was about to.
------
etfb
"Stallman, conocido por sus excentricidades..."
The wonderful thing about having a smattering of French and Latin is that I
can recognise "damned with faint praise" even in a language I don't know.
(Hint for the mono-lingual:
[http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|Stallman%2C%20conocido%...](http://translate.google.com/#auto|en|Stallman%2C%20conocido%20por%20sus%20excentricidades))
------
ginko
I'm really beginning to worry about rms's health. I recently saw a tv
interview of him on russia today where he seemed to have put on a lot of
weight.
I hope he doesn't overexert himself.
------
giis
Get well soon,RMS.
------
chj
i don't like all he's promoting, but hope he will get well soon. Bless!
------
benihana
This presents an interesting situation. Is Stallman okay with being hooked up
to medical computers even though they may not be running free software? What
about the privacy issues involved in being checked into a hospital?
~~~
redthrowaway
I'm not rms, and I don't speak for him, but his opposition to non-free
software is predicated upon the claim that it harms the user. As death is
arguably a greater harm than any non-free software could inflict, I suspect he
would say that it is not wrong to use non-free software to save a life if no
free alternative is readily available.
You can ask him yourself, if you want: [email protected]
He replies to almost all emails within a couple of days.
EDIT: He actually answered a very similar question in his reddit AMA [1]:
22\. two_front_teeth: Suppose your doctor told you that you needed a medical
procedure to survive but that the procedure would require inserting a device
inside of your body which ran proprietary software. Would you be willing to
have the procedure done to save your life?
RMS: The only way I could justify this is if I began developing a free
replacement for that very program. It is ok to use a nonfree program for the
purpose of developing its free replacement.
[1] <http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html>
~~~
lumberjack
To continue with the above comment, I'd like to point out that RMS has valid
concerns regarding non-free software running inside your body.
You don't want to have a buggy pacemaker with unencrypted unprotected wireless
access.
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/27/buggy_pacemaker_code...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/27/buggy_pacemaker_code/)
[https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2010/transparent-m...](https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2010/transparent-
medical-devices.html)
Moreover I don't feel comfortable using a technology that is owned, developed
and maintained exclusively by one company.
~~~
rimantas
As if free software cannot be buggy and with lousy security. I am so tired of
this "open and free makes everything perfect by magic" thinking.
~~~
VeejayRampay
It's not about it being more secure. It's that at least when it's suffering
from malfunction, you got shitloads of eyeballs on the thing to make it work
and work well. Why do you think all the OpenBSD tools are so ubiquitous?
~~~
w0utert
Keeping this in the context of devices like a pacemaker, do you really believe
that an open-source development model would be safer for the people who depend
on it than a closed-source model? Do you expect them to flash custom ROMs to
the pacemaker that keeps them alive if it turns out there may be a problem
with them, instead of going to the hospital to get the thing replaced?
~~~
jerf
One of the things I've learned in life is that We're All Just Folk. There's no
magical divinely-inspired programmer out there creating firmware for your
pacemaker. The difference between him and me is process, and little else. If
I'm given access to the same testing processes they use as part of the open
source package, I see no reason to believe my code is going to be worse than
anybody else's. Sure, I'd think twice before installing it, but in some sense
that's irrational; I should think twice before anything like that because
We're All Just Folk, and it's just some guys writing all the firmware we all
depend on.
In some ways, it's best not to think too hard about this.
------
jsavimbi
> Richard Stallman: "Rajoy nos quiere matar a todos"
RMS: "Rajoy (Spain's president) wants to kill us all."
Well there you go, Richard.
~~~
adrianb
President? I think you mean prime minister.
~~~
jsavimbi
No, I did not mean prime minister.
In Spain, the head of state is the monarch and the head of the elected
government is known as the "Presidente del Gobierno", or president of the
government. Although a counterpart can be found in other parliamentarian
systems such as the prime minister in the UK, the Spanish president of
government is not primus inter pares but the undisputed head of the
government.
------
recoiledsnake
Wikipedia had him as expired briefly, had to do a double take.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Stallman&#...</a>
------
robwgibbons
"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"
------
ch0wda
TIL: Richard Stallman has a heart.
------
ceejayoz
Maybe Microsoft tried the "Surprise! You were actually using Vista!" trick on
him.
------
mandreko
Did he choke on the toenail this time?
------
tobiasbischoff
i will not make a parrot joke here. i will not make a parrot joke here. i will
not make a parrot joke here. ..
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Microsoft pays $100K bounty to hacker - Maven911
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/10/10/microsoft-corp-hacking-bounty/?__lsa=d344-d1e8
======
maxjus
Here's a story you guys might appreciate.
I found a cross site scripting vulnerability in Bing.com that was kind of
hilarious. Searching for:
</script><script>arbitrary js</script>
in the main search box would execute the code on the results page. I mean,
holy shit. I could not believe it. I emailed their whitehat service and they
fixed it but I never received a bounty.
------
tptacek
That is not actually the origin of the term "zero day"; "zero day" is a
tongue-in-cheek #hack expropriation of #warez jargon, where "zero days" refers
to the number of days from the official release date of a piece of pirated
software.
~~~
jonchang
The article isn't trying to explain the origin of "zero day". The article is
defining it in the context that it's used for the benefit of their readers.
> That vulnerability in Internet Explorer was known as a “zero-day” because
> Microsoft, the targeted software maker, had zero days notice to fix the hole
> when the initial attacks exploiting the bug were discovered.
~~~
tptacek
That's not why the vulnerability was known as "zero-day".
~~~
jonchang
So is that the point you were originally trying to make instead of discussing
etymology? While we're quibbling prescriptively about terminology, I'd argue
that the IE exploit patched earlier this week was in fact a zero day since it
was not public knowledge.
> The vulnerability underlying CVE-2013-3897 was found internally at Microsoft
> and would have been fixed in MS13-080. However, in the last two weeks,
> attacks against the same vulnerability became public, but since the fix was
> in the code already, it enabled Microsoft to address the vulnerability,
> CVE-2013-3897, in record time.
[https://community.qualys.com/blogs/laws-of-
vulnerabilities/2...](https://community.qualys.com/blogs/laws-of-
vulnerabilities/2013/10/08/patch-tuesday-october-2013) (unnecessary text
omitted)
------
Moral_
This is a huge payout. It's my assumption for such a big payout this security
researcher was able to develop or extend upon some of the advanced
exploitation techniques we see today.
I think, for such a huge payout, and for what they said they would pay this
amount for is a _new_ tactic to defeat Microsoft's DEP[0] ASLR[1] and ROP[2].
All of these defence mechanisms have been broken before, but as I mentioned
Mr. Forshaw has probably developed a novel new technique to defeat these
checks.
Lastly, and probably least likely, I know academia and MS Research have been
working on ways to sandbox applications. It's possible he has developed a way
to break out of the sandboxes.
All of this is speculation, I hope soon we will have access to what he was
able to accomplish.
[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX)
[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASLR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASLR) [2]
[http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/enhanced-mitigation-
experienc...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/enhanced-mitigation-experience-
toolkit/)
~~~
j_s
_a new “exploitation technique” in Windows, which will allow it to develop
defenses against an entire class of attacks_
\- the OP
_new mitigation bypass technique_
\- [http://www.contextis.co.uk/news/congratulations-james-
forsha...](http://www.contextis.co.uk/news/congratulations-james-forshaw/)
\-
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/bluehat/archive/2013/10/08/congra...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/bluehat/archive/2013/10/08/congratulations-
to-james-forshaw-recipient-of-our-first-100-000-bounty-for-new-mitigation-
bypass-techniques.aspx)
------
kilovoltaire
"Internet Explorer, ... the world’s most popular browser"
That's no longer true, right?
~~~
jamesaguilar
The browser formerly known as the world's most popular browser.
[http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp](http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)
[http://gs.statcounter.com/](http://gs.statcounter.com/)
I'm honestly quite amazed. When Chrome first came out, I remember asking my
teammates why we were wasting money on developing a browser, thinking it would
never be more than a niche product. Another reason why I'm not Google's CEO,
apparently.
~~~
rogerbinns
Think strategically. It doesn't really matter what the user base of Chrome or
Android are. What they do is raise the bar. Competitors and alternatives need
to be at least that good.
Javascript performance was pretty dismal until Chrome came around, and then
everyone had to up their game. Until Android, mobile platforms were tightly
controlled walled gardens (although Windows Mobile was amongst the least
worse). Now everyone wants Google Mail, Maps and Search on their mobile
devices.
Google ultimately makes money through usage and the platform + apps/browser
don't matter that much financially. Without Chrome and Android, there is a
strong possibility of being cut out completely.
~~~
mgkimsal
" It doesn't really matter what the user base of Chrome or Android are. What
they do is raise the bar. Competitors and alternatives need to be at least
that good."
Yes it does matter, at least some. No one even knows what the bar _is_ if no
one is using it.
Someone could put together a wickedly fast browser with fantastic privacy
controls, release it tomorrow, but if no one used it, it wouldn't have any
effect on major browser makers.
JS performance went up in other browsers due to Chrome only because Chrome was
gaining users (even if the base was small at first), mostly because they were
able to push Chrome from Google.com itself.
------
philliphaydon
Good on MS for paying out such a large bounty.
~~~
kamjam
It will also hopefully help more people to responsibly disclose
vulnerabilities, rather than selling them on the black market. A pat on the
back is nice, but nothing says thank you like cold, hard cash!
~~~
rmc
That's one of the points of bug bounty programmes, isn't it?
~~~
kamjam
Sure. But when the amount is small/trivial, you simply give credit to to the
finder or you send them a t-shirt, you may then be tempted to find
alternatives to get a cash incentive.
~~~
rmc
Yep, that's exactly my point. Bug Bounties are supposed to be realistic
alternatives to the black market.
------
lutusp
The title of this submission: "Microsoft pays $100K bounty to hacker"
The title of the article: "Microsoft Corp pays US$100K bounty to hacking
expert who uncovered Windows bug that could have been used to launch remote
attacks"
To me, this level of editorializing approaches arbitrarily close to lying.
~~~
zheng
How exactly is it lying? Microsoft _did_ pay a $100k bounty to a hacker. The
HN headline just leaves out extra details (what the bounty was for), but
doesn't change the meaning at all. Am I missing something?
~~~
sergiotapia
How's this:
Guy predicts the higgs boson particle.
World renowned physicist Foo Bar, accurantly models existance of boson particle.
\---
See the difference? The title is BS. I expected a guy from Pakistan or
somewhere third world finding the bug.
~~~
xerophtye
Isn't that rather racist? You assume that if the person isn't being called an
"expert" then he's from Pakistan? Are you trying to imply that security
researchers in Pakistan are third rate?
PS: A security researcher from Pakistan has been bagging a lot of Bug Bounties
recently. Look up news on Rafay Baloch
~~~
aunty_helen
Well no, it's not racist, being that Pakistan is a country and not a race...
it sure does make your comment emotive though.
~~~
xerophtye
Unjust Discrimination either way.
------
rowofpixels
You could buy a lot of microsoft t-shirts with that much money.
------
walshemj
I think you meant paid his company if your employed as a security researcher
his employer will own any rights.
------
briandear
How about MS just open sourcing the browser? Is their browser tech really that
trade-secret-filled?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Secret Coach - stevenboudreau
http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/21/technology/reingold_coach.fortune/index.htm
======
stevenboudreau
Is there a role/need for a "Bill Campbell" type in a startup? Perhaps as an
early employee/team member?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Rietveld -I have resigned as the WordPress accessibility team lead. Here is why - sodosopa
https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team/
======
andybak
Why is "React" capitalized every single time?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Opinion piece on GHC back ends - allenleein
https://andreaspk.github.io/posts/2019-08-25-Opinion%20piece%20on%20GHC%20backends.html
======
Mathnerd314
When I looked into LLVM for my own little language, my general impression was
that LLVM was great if you are writing a C-like language or something close,
since you can use the whole compilation pipeline (even clang for the FFI). If
you have interesting high-level features like threads, exceptions, etc. with
semantics different from C/C++, you run into translation issues and have to
re-implement some LLVM intrinsics, which is a fair amount of work but doable.
But with lazy semantics like GHC, LLVM's whole idea of "calling" is barely
usable and you can't use most of the inlining or cross-method optimizations.
So LLVM ends up being an assembler producing machine code.
As an assembler, LLVM is not particularly fast or convenient. It has a huge
API, and lots of optimization passes that have to be tweaked to get reasonable
output. The posts I read that got that far generally recommended ditching LLVM
and forking a JIT engine like LuaJIT, libjit, etc.
tl;dr I agree with the author that maintaining NCG is the way to go. The
difference is, I expect LLVM to implode long-term rather than expand.
~~~
chrisseaton
There are several projects that have tried to use LLVM as a direct backend for
higher-level languages, and not many have gone well.
\- Rubinius - Ruby JIT on LLVM, often slower than the standard interpreter
(!!)
\- Pyston - Python JIT by Dropbox, abandoned because it wasn't going anywhere
\- FTL - JavaScript backend by Mozilla, they're now doing their own thing with
BBB and abandoned LLVM because it wasn't working out
The only ones that have worked well, like Falcon (Java backend by Azul), have
major IR and passes in front of them and use LLVM like a portable assembler,
but as you say that's not ideal anyway.
You can't just dump your language into LLVM and expect it to work miracles,
but people keep trying again and again and again.
~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
* Crystal
* R
* Julia
* MATLAB
* Mathematica
* Swift
Use LLVM as their backend.
~~~
chrisseaton
These are just more examples of exactly what I mean!
\- Crystal is Ruby simplified in order to make it amenable to compilation by
LLVM. They couldn't move LLVM to the language, so they had to move the
language to LLVM.
\- R's performance is very limited.
\- Julia was specifically designed to be easy to compile.
\- Swift has SIL - they don't just output LLVM. See what they say about LLVM!
[https://llvm.org/devmtg/2015-10/slides/GroffLattner-
SILHighL...](https://llvm.org/devmtg/2015-10/slides/GroffLattner-
SILHighLevelIR.pdf) 'Wide abstraction gap between source and LLVM IR', 'IR
isn't suitable for source-level analysis', etc. And they have these problems
even with the best LLVM experts on their team!
I don't know much about MATLAB or Mathematica, sorry.
~~~
comex
Even Clang would greatly benefit from an intermediate IR between the C/C++ AST
and LLVM IR; the presentation you linked starts off by going over that (and I
can confirm that it’s still a problem). That doesn’t mean that LLVM or its IR
is bad, or that C or C++ are not suited to being compiled to it. It just means
that some analyses and optimizations are best done at a higher level.
~~~
chrisseaton
> It just means that some analyses and optimizations are best done at a higher
> level.
Yes that’s my point - you can’t just emit LLVM and cross your fingers. But
people keep on trying.
------
carterschonwald
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with and sometimes collaborating with
Andreas over the past year or two. He’s one of my favorite newer ghc
contributors. And he’s done some fantastic work improving the code gen for
ghc.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Breakout List, 2017 - clbrook
https://breakoutlist.com/
======
laddng
"As a side note, if joining Amazon, go to AWS. If joining Facebook, go to the
AI lab or Oculus. If joining Alphabet, go to DeepMind."
I wonder who their target audience is - CS PhD from a top 5 school?
------
sage76
I'm wondering if people here disagree with any of the names on the list, and
if so, why.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
FCC's deregulation of business data lines could mean a price hike - clumsysmurf
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3190015/internet/fccs-deregulation-of-business-data-lines-could-mean-a-price-hike.html
======
downrightmike
I wonder how much money Ajit Pai is making on the backend.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tumblr the Day After - feross
https://ma.tt/2019/08/tumblr-the-day-after/
======
pixelmonkey
"Automattic is still a startup — I’m sure there are deep-pocketed private
equity firms that could have outbid us, but the most likely outcome then would
have been an “asset” getting chopped up and sold for parts. [...] Instead,
Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond."
I think Matt is right to point out the real story here. Automattic is simply
the right home for Tumblr. Perhaps similarly to how SmugMug is the right home
for Flickr.
Automattic is a company with a commitment to the open web and to effortless
digital publishing. That was Tumblr's original vision, too, before it got lost
in in the Yahoo/Oath/Verizon behemoth.
Automattic is a company with a long-term vision for what the open web means
and how to monetize it so that valuable services can simplify lives for site
operators, at scale. Just think of how many blogs and sites (and businesses)
Automattic has enabled via WordPress.com, WooCommerce, etc. They can apply
that same know-how to Tumblr's community, no matter how neglected it might
have been in the Verizon era.
Verizon probably had no clue what to do with Tumblr as an asset, and I am sure
they considered doing an orderly wind-down to focus on their core. This was a
much classier alternative.
As Matt mentioned, Verizon does $130B in annual revenue. Tumblr was probably a
strange distraction for them and had no chance of moving their KPIs as a
business.
Automattic's acquisition of it was probably the best possible outcome, for
Tumblr's technical & management team, for Tumblr's community, and, most
importantly, for its future potential impact on site operators and independent
web publishers everywhere.
~~~
munchbunny
100% agree that of the list of realistic outcomes, Tumblr going to Automattic
is one of the best possible outcomes.
That said, and I know this is said a lot, but I really wish our industry would
stop trying to label everything a "startup". Automattic was founded in 2005
and has 1000 employees. It's not a startup, it's a mature medium size tech
company. Its problems are not startup problems, they're mature medium size
tech company problems. Automattic isn't even a clear underdog considering the
dominance of WordPress.
To be clear, that's not a pejorative: Automattic kicked ass, and Automattic
deserves its current success. But the phrasing is a sticking point for me in
how people talk about tech companies because it ends up feeding into how we
perceive working at these companies. When I was job searching, I saw job
postings regularly where "startup" or "like a startup" are used to invoke a
cultural image for companies that are already post-growth-stage.
~~~
samnwa
This is really just shorthand for saying "our employees don't hate working at
our company as much as the typical large company because we try to limit
bureaucracy and politicking and we value / recognize good ideas and actual
execution"
~~~
munchbunny
Yeah... I'd agree more if that were actually true. In my experience it
actually says "we like to think that we limit bureaucracy and politicking."
Whether they actually do, you won't be able to tell.
This aspect of language is all signalling but very little actual signal. It's
unfortunate.
------
simonebrunozzi
> First, they chose to find a new home for Tumblr instead of shutting it down.
> Second, they considered not just how much cash they would get on day one,
> but also — and especially — what would happen to the team afterward, and how
> the product and the team would be invested in going forward. Third, they
> thought about the sort of steward of the community the new owner would be.
> They didn’t have to do any of that, and I commend them for making all three
> points a priority.
As nice as it sounds, the realist in me finds a hard time to believe that this
is exactly what has happened on Verizon's side.
I have never seen a publicly traded company do these things. Heck, you can be
sued by shareholders if you actually do these things.
My interpretation (feel free to correct me, I am just a normal guy on the
internet) is that Tumblr was difficult to value, hence PE firms didn't have a
clear idea of how much to offer, and Automattic came in with a quick decent
offer, and the final price (which I think was not disclosed) was so small for
Verizon that they decided to go the easy route, perhaps leaving a few $$ on
the table.
------
elliekelly
My only real interaction with WordPress was when I purchased, and then
promptly cancelled, a premium subscription. But the process was so
unexpectedly easy and the employee was so unexpectedly nice and helpful. She
really bent over backwards to help me even though I was leaving.
It might be silly, but that one interaction coupled with Matt's consistently
well spoken/written/thought out public comments lead me to believe he & his
company are pretty trustworthy. (The fun little smiley faces & haikus they
hide all over the site don't hurt either.)
I hope they got a great deal on Tumblr. It's a really special site and I don't
think there are many companies that would have the resources _and_ the
motivation to build it back up again. It seems Automattic has both.
~~~
chiefalchemist
Words? Yes. Actions? That's another story. He's spoken about the open web and
such things and then willfully jumps into bed with Google and Facebook, etc.
His "Learn JavaScript deeply" might as well been "Hold onto your ass kids, the
rich are about to get richer." That is, WP is no longer a tool of the common
people but it's going to be elitist (because that makes my investors happy).
Don't get me wrong. No one is perfect. I simply want to make sure people get
to see more of the picture, because there is more to see.
~~~
chiefalchemist
Down-voted for what? Honesty? Truth? Or wasting time stating the obvious? God
bless you HN.
~~~
tdb7893
I downvoted because it sounded like an unproductive rant.
------
high_derivative
"Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond"
So, Matt commented in the other thread that NSFW content is not coming back
due to the difficulties around hosting and processing adult content (payment
processing, advertising, everything).
Where does Tumblr fit in 2020 between Twitter, Medium, and Instagram? What's
its medium?
~~~
SolaceQuantum
For me tumblr does best in that you have chains of responses (reblogs) in
images/gifs and text form, that then are reposted on one's own blog for their
own followers to experience broadly in a singular dashboard whose ordering
isn't really manipulated (like twitter and instagram are, to my extreme
vexation).
Also, because tumblr makes it easy to create side-blogs, you can follow a
favorite person for their specific stuff. For example, if my artist friend has
an "inspiration" blog I can follow that blog instead of their "personal/vent"
blog. Similarly if I'm looking for some kind of tea-specific blog I can follow
a stranger's side blog without needing to also be exposed to the stranger
ranting about a political opinion I am uncomfortable with.
Furthermore, it's one of the large social media sites for which there is a
significant and semi-permanent resource and groupings for a variety of
LGBTQ/diversity/political/fandom interests in a way that is more flexible than
a subreddit or an interest forum. You can follow the individual blogs that
you're interested in instead of needing to follow a whole community. So if you
don't want to be exposed to some aspect of a community it's relatively trivial
to just not follow the people involved.
Twitter has a lot of this, but the lack of easy threading posts and out-of-
order feed really ruin it for me. Several of my favorite artists left tumblr
for twitter and I've had very little success following them from there.
~~~
tangue
Twitter is the key. Twitter has failed to deliver a sane way to read threads.
after all these years I still don't know how to read a conversation. And the
whole platform is about conversation ! If Tumblr can get it it right with WP,
I won't miss Twitter.
~~~
notatoad
i'm not a huge fan of the way twitter presents threads and conversations, but
the few times i've tried to follow a conversation on tumblr i've only found it
to be even worse than twitter. i'm not sure tumblr is the saviour we're
looking for here.
~~~
tangue
You're right, but that these millions dollars startups aren't able to do
better than phpBB from an UX point of view is dazzling.
------
chiefalchemist
"Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond"
I feel like the same thing was said about Napster at some point as well. It's
going to take __a lot__ of resources for Tumblr to overcome its status as yet
another formerly-hot-but-now-a-has-been (e.g., Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, etc.)
Trumblr had its moment. It had its time. It had its audience. They are all in
the past. The odds of it making any sort of comeback - in a Van's sneakers
sorta way - are slim (read: close to zero). The cool kids of today just aren't
as interested in a brand like Tumblr.
Tumblr will wallow around for bit and then Automattic will merge it into
WP.com, or at least the WP platform with a (name) rebranding of some sort. I
suppose that falls under MM's "redefine" but somehow I don't think so.
~~~
joshspankit
There is still no platform which gives space to those who called (the old)
Tumblr home.
~~~
Spivak
As a current/former Tumblr user this is all too real. Like The Tumblr userbase
has been scattered across IG, Twitter, Mastodon, Patreon, Reddit but the
sentiment is still that we're still homeless right now.
Nowhere on the internet had/has a community like Tumblr: aggressively queer,
feminist, full of stupid memes, amazing independent art, obsessive nerdy fans,
and this general mood of sillyness and innocence and joy and positivity.
And the porn really was weirdly a reflection of that and part of more people's
Tumblr experiences than people are seemingly willing to admit: it catered to
niche interests, slanted heavily to by-and-for women, super LGBT friendly,
funny and over the top, generally tasteful and artsy, and respectful.
------
thedz
Interesting to also compare and contrast to his post on the initial
acquisition by Yahoo:
[https://ma.tt/2013/05/yahooblr/](https://ma.tt/2013/05/yahooblr/)
------
TelmoMenezes
It's a shame they won't revert the idiotic decision to ban adult content. The
sense of freedom of expression and unrestrained creativity gave Tumblr its
edge. Without it, it's just another boring blog engine, and this is just a
matter of postponing its demise.
~~~
excalibur
Matt said they're not going to, but I wouldn't count on that being the final
word on the subject. He's supportive of adult content in principle, his
reasons for maintaining the ban are business reasons. If the community
persists in demanding that it be lifted, I wouldn't be surprised to see a
business solution present itself in the future.
------
jppope
This is actually a beautiful commentary... kudos to Matt for writing this.
------
vinhboy
The internet comment section: But what about my pron!!!
I didn't see a single positive comment like this post yesterday. It's
refreshing to read a different perspective.
------
giannidunk
I recently switched from Medium to a static site, but for anyone else looking
to switch from medium - this may now be an option again?
~~~
dewey
I think the real alternative to Medium is Ghost as a hosted or self-hosted
version. Depending on your needs and the amount of time you want to spend on
it.
[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)
~~~
jseliger
Ghost starts at $29/month, it seems, and Medium starts at $0/month, so I don't
see them as comparable.
~~~
dewey
With Medium you don't really have your own site / brand though. You can't use
your own domain [1], your users get a paywall pop up when they read your
content and the discovery feature that convinced a lot of people at the
beginning because they got so much traffic is also not so useful any more.
[1] [https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115003053487-Custo...](https://help.medium.com/hc/en-
us/articles/115003053487-Custom-Domains-service-deprecation)
------
onefuncman
Tumblr has the nicest Feed API out of all the social networks, compared to
Twitter Firehose, Facebook Public Feed, and Instagram (we built our own ghetto
feed for Instagram by scraping with tons of api tokens).
It would be pretty amazing to have a streaming API of the wp.com universe.
~~~
photomatt
We have one!
[https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/firehose/](https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/firehose/)
------
rchaud
It's been a few years since I had logged into my account. Does Tumblr offer a
chronologically ordered feed? I'd consider giving it another go if it works in
a way that eschews what's annoying about FB and IG.
~~~
baumandm
It has a "Best Stuff First" option but you can disable it (and it stays
disabled)
------
jasonhansel
If, as the post suggests, Tumblr becomes OSS (and especially if it becomes
distributed/decentralized), I will gladly start using it. It would--
immediately--become the best available free-as-in-speech social network.
------
luckylion
I suppose that means Gutenberg is coming to tumblr?
------
throwanem
Yahoo bought Tumblr for over a billion. Verizon sold Tumblr for under $20
million. Guess all that NSFW content they banned was worth more than they
thought it was...
~~~
ses1984
And/or maybe it was never worth over a billion in the first place.
~~~
scrollaway
<$3 mill is the latest number. I agree it was never worth a billion dollars,
but tumblr definitely lost a huge amount of value during its stay at Yahoo.
You don't _just_ overvalue an asset by 99.8%.
Do you? I have to believe you don't.
~~~
josephwegner
Don't most VCs overvalue most startups by ~100%? This doesn't seem that crazy
to me.
~~~
luckylion
It wouldn't be 99.8%, it had a 99.8% loss, so it was almost a hundred _times_
overvalued, if nothing else caused the drop (which isn't plausible, but
still).
------
reilly3000
Does this put Automattic into the ad business? Or were they already there?
~~~
gibrown
We (Automattic) already run our own ads business:
[https://wordads.co/](https://wordads.co/)
~~~
reilly3000
Cool good to know. Likes like a nice bidder stack. Will that be what runs on
Tumblr? That is pretty good inventory IMHO if ad units are available.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Which vegan milk is best for the environment? - camtarn
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46654042
======
cheezymoogle
Almond milk is my bugbear.
Comparing the land and water use of cows versus almonds is ridiculous for many
_many_ reasons.
If you've been to a cattle ranch (not a CAFO) and to an almond farm, you'll
know exactly what I mean. Almond land use is land _use_ : it's barren of all
life besides almond trees. Ranch land in comparison is typically semi-arable,
has living things other than cows on it, and while cows sequester water (like
all other living animals), the notion that they use more water because
rainfall _catchment_ on ranch land isn't _absolute_ is a collossal error in
thinking.
Also note that _calories_ per 200ml aren't shown, which is really where the
math breaks down. Whole milk has 160 calories per 8oz glass.
Unsweetened almond milk has _40_ per 8oz glass.
Soy milk, the most calorie dense of out all of them, which is totally reliant
upon monoculture, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers only has _80_.
So, you know, multiply the vegan options, or divide the cow milk
appropriately.
There are fantastic naturally vegan foods (including _whole almonds_ and
_whole soybeans_ ). Investigate _those_ before indulging in ersatz
environmental sleights-of-hand.
There are also tenable reasons to be vegan (or at the very least to reduce
animal product consumption). Arguing that lifestyle identity products are
sustainable isn't one of them.
Final positive note: oats and oatmilk are _fantastic_. You can make it
yourself, then cook the sludge for porridge. Oats grow on marginal semi-arable
soil and their husks are useful. Eat more oats.
~~~
bargl
I really don't like arguments that lose nuance. I appreciate you bringing and
pointing out some here.
The study most people quote has a huge variation in CO2 based on farming
practices. It also doesn't compare eating seasonally appropriate foods vs out
of season foods. I think it's an over simplification of a problem to push an
agenda.
Edit: I was trying to hold it in, but I couldn't so here's the rant.
For that matter, we really need to pull out our CO2 calculators and add up
kids, dogs, cars, insulation, houses, etc. Let's see what your CO2 budget can
be.
I get that we need to work toward reducing CO2 footprint, but how many of us
are willing to tell others they should cut the way WE want them to cut rather
than giving them options. The Vegan agenda is 2 fold. If you eat meat, your
bad for eating animals and now for not believing in global warming enough.
No, I believe in global warming, I just prefer to take a bus and try to eat
humanely grown meat that has a lower impact. But that's me, and if you go
vegan and decide you don't want to ride the bus, that's ok. Do what you can.
~~~
uxcolumbo
What is your definition of humanely grown meat?
And secondly how do you ensure it meets your criteria and where do you get it?
~~~
bargl
Good question.
[http://lostinecattlecompany.com/lostine-beef/our-
philosophy/](http://lostinecattlecompany.com/lostine-beef/our-philosophy/)
Find a bunch of people and get a half cow. No not all my meat comes from here,
but this is what I look for when I can.
~~~
uxcolumbo
Thanks - had a look at their page.
I find it a bit strange that they use the word 'harvested'. They mention it's
stress free.
Why not just use the actual words, like killing and slaughtering. Are they
afraid it's going to turn people off?
Animals can feel when they are about to die and this alone creates stress - so
this whole process is certainly not stress free.
I don't think you can kill a living being (e.g. cows or pigs) that doesn't
want to be killed - in a humane way.
We have to face the fact that our demand for meat creates animal suffering and
when it comes to factory farming also environmental destruction and poor
working conditions for other humans. We then have to ask ourselves why are we
eating meat - for survival or for pleasure?
In modern socities it's mostly for pleasure - which then becomes a moral
question, i.e. does my demand for meat justify all the things mentioned above?
Also, when you look up the definition of 'humane' it includes the words
'compassion' and 'act of kindness'. Mixing those words with killing and
slaughtering (when it's not necessary for ones survival) somehow doesn't go
well together.
But making an effort to only purchase meat from those farms you mentioned is
still better than purchasing meat that comes from factory farms.
------
the_gastropod
It's weird oat milk is only recently becoming popular. It tastes great, it
blends well in coffee or tea, it's easy to make, oatmeal is dirt cheap, and it
froths up nicely for lattes or cappuccinos or what have you. I'm glad it's
catching on!
~~~
andrewmcwatters
Is it comparable to almond milk or the other... milks? For lack of a better
term. I'd be interested in trying it.
~~~
apendleton
I think it tastes better, though that's subjective obviously. Works better in
hot drinks (foams better and seems to be more heat-tolerant; almond milk seems
to scorch pretty easily and end up tasting burnt). Plus it tastes vaguely
sweet on its own, maybe because some of the starches naturally break down in
production, whereas with almond and other plant milks you either end up with
something cloying or something overly "healthy" tasting, depending which side
of the sweetened/unsweetened dichotomy you end up on.
Nutrient wise, it's definitely lower in protein than dairy milk, but that's
true of most plant milks, so it's no worse than almond there (though probably
worse than soy, or than some of the newfangled ones made from legumes like
Ripple, which is made of yellow split peas). Worth checking the label though
if there are other macronutrients you care about.
------
jkmcf
Pea milk isn't represented, possibly because it is fairly new. I've been
drinking Ripple Vanilla and it's like a healthy version of the Carnation
Instant Breakfast shake. It has a thick consistency, unlike almond milk and
friends. It might be too sweet for some.
Ripple appears to be a bad choice of names, though, as a senior lady prompted
me to investigate what ripple meant in the 70s: "A slang term for cheap or
low-quality alcohol, usually wine. Has a negative connotation", courtesy of
urban dictionary.
------
mklarmann
I am pretty much impressed by the January spike / trend. This is kind of
mirroring the growth potential behind these products. Just by a rise in
awareness. Somewhat something I believe is slowly developing globally - that
people become more and more aware of the stark issues of climate change and
the already high quality of the solutions.
I love this news!
So, I think water should also be measured in amount of scarce water. There is
no issue when there is enough fresh water supply.
------
pledg
How do other factors like transportation from country of origin and other
processing affect the impact? Dairy likely still by far the worst but if you
take into account moving all the almonds to the UK etc
------
Simulacra
Should it be sugar free or low in sugar? Cow Milk is so much sugar.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
AFrameJS Tutorial - A Response to "Backbone.js Tutorial - By noob for noobs" - stomlinson
http://www.shanetomlinson.com/2011/aframejs-tutorial-for-noobs/
======
stomlinson
If anybody has any suggestions, comments, ideas, bug fixes, please tell me, I
want to make AFrameJS the strongest Javascript MVC library out!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
An Automat is a fast food restaurant where foods and drink are served by vending machines. - pius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat
======
RobGR
I have always wondered why these died out. I have never seen one myself, but
they seem the most efficient and streamlined way to run a restaurant. It would
possible to provide high-quality food for fast food prices via the this
system.
I would make the dining area wrap around the kitchen, and have big windows
allowing the diners to see the kitchen, and be assured the food was prepared
cleanly.
~~~
kingkongrevenge
There was an article in the NY Times sometime this year about the last one in
the US closing down in NYC. You could contact the owner.
------
tptacek
... and?
~~~
davidw
A recollection: my wife and I were touring Alhambra (La Alhambra is what the
spanish called it, but 'Al' is apparently the article in Arabic, so La
Alhambra is a bit redundant) in Spain, and after walking around the whole
thing were a bit tired. We walked out past some vending machines to the
benches, and glanced at what was on offer: not only candy bars and fizzy
drinks, but sandwiches, which we laughed at... who would eat a sandwich that
had been sitting around under the Spanish sun all day; either it was chock
full of potent chemicals, or it was already growing a disgusting range of
nasties. Relaxing on the bench a few minutes later, we noticed a guy walk
past, waving a few of the sandwiches, and exclaiming to his wife in a proud
tone that he'd found something to eat. I guess the British deserve their
reputation for not being picky eaters?
------
Flemlord
They have these everywhere in Europe. And yes, they're as gross as they sound.
Apparently Europeans love tasteless sandwiches made up of mostly bread, with a
single slice of meat or cheese between the slices. They serve them everywhere,
in restaurants, on trains, and in the automats.
------
sown
The idea of an automated fast food place sometimes wants to come back.
<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030801/1345236_F.shtml>
------
twopoint718
Reminds me of the "ticket" restaurants in Japan.
------
speek
Why yes, yes it is.
Has anybody seen Dark City? There's a great example of one in there. Its where
the guy loses his wallet.
~~~
brandnewlow
That's EXACTLY what I thought of when I saw this post. Great movie.
------
josefresco
The peak of humanities's "do everything from the car" mentality.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Which Project Management/Issue Tracking for distributed teams? - codenerdz
Our team is distributed over several timezones, but this should apply to any people that work remotely.<p>As an experiment we tried to rely on GitHub issues as a project/task management/time tracking tool as well as issue tracking per se and so far its been a fairly dissatisfying experience. Mostly due to the fact that our needs eclipsed what GH issues supported fairly quickly.<p>Access Control: Generally speaking we have a 'Client' and 'Management' and 'Staff'. I want to only allow Client to assign issues to Management, which then decides if this Issue is a bug or a feature and reassigns it to the right Staff. I dont want Clients to be able to bother Staff directly. Neither Pivotal nor GitHub do this well. Redmine may be able to help.<p>Time Tracking: I want to be able to track how much time particular task is taking so that we are able to estimate further tasks better. Pivotal Tracker does this well, alas I dont think they provide a good reporting tool.<p>Bugs/Issues: Github doesnt allow assignment of an issue/bug to multiple people or the concept of watchers. Sometimes multiple people need to be notified of existence of a bug. Both Lighthouse and Redmine support this better<p>It looks like one choice is Pivotal in combination with Lighthouse but access control I think is lacking. Another one is Redmine which is not as nice as Pivotal, but allows for finer access control.<p>What do you guys use and recommend?
======
christefano
Redmine is what we're using now. It's had a very positive effect on our team's
productivity and I wish we'd switched sooner. We've had problems with a few
third-party plug-ins but Redmine itself has been very stable.
It's been a long road getting to where we are now. In the past we've used
hosted tools on a per-project basis (Assembla, Unfuddle, Basecamp, etc.) and
even built our own. Coming to Redmine, hosting it on our own server (which is
necessary due to the kind of data we're working with) and customizing it for
our projects has been delightful.
Not everything has been dandy, though. For one, getting it installed on Debian
was rather difficult. It was actually easier to update Lenny to Squeeze and
then install Redmine than it was to get Redmine running on Lenny.
More importantly, the quality of some third-party plug-ins we're using are
highly varied when it comes to code quality, usability and / or documentation.
The developer community is very active around Redmine, but unfortunately the
plug-ins directory and forums are not equally as active.
------
rudasn
I'm in the process of building a PM tool for my self and many on the pain
points you mentioned are covered. The tool will be simple - any simpler and it
would be excel + email.
If you are interested we can talk some more and maybe we can help each other.
~~~
benblodgett
I am also headed down this same road, we should chat.
~~~
rudasn
Drop me a line, I have my contact info on my profile.
------
ianpurton
CodeBase - <http://www.codebasehq.com/>
Git repository, issue with watchers, time tracking and more.
I've been using it for about 2 years. It's very feature rich and has a great
workflow.
------
drKarl
I am quite happy with Projecturf, and I like it because it is simple, but it
might be too simple for your needs. You might as well give it a try!
~~~
codenerdz
Can you describe if and how ProjectTurf solves the issues I outlined in my
post?
~~~
benblodgett
Do you think it is better to have a simple/flexible project management tool?
Or are certain processes (like web development) too unique and demanding to
fit under this umbrella?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Breaking down the legal case against @BPGlobalPR Twitter feed - grellas
http://legalblogwatch.typepad.com/legal_blog_watch/2010/06/breaking-down-the-legal-case-against-bpglobalpr.html
======
rriepe
This tweet was clever, but I couldn't help but cringe when I saw it going
around Twitter, giving everyone a healthy dose of misinformation.
BP said fairly early on in the account's popularity (~20k followers is when I
read about it) that they wouldn't take action against it. They even said it
was a way for people to vent their anger. So it's not just a case of them not
taking action; they've acknowledged it openly.
Any PR team worth anything would do the same in this situation. Bad PR teams
might take it to Twitter (the account is clearly in violation of Twitter's
terms). Only the stupidest, head-up-their-asses teams would let it go to
court.
You could win this case easily in the court of law... but you'd lose hard in
the court of public opinion.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Becoming a Python Master. - shire
I want to get into Web Applications using Python and also Master Python. Has anyone used http://python.org/ to learn the language completely? and how hard is it? I have knowledge with Java and PHP can any recommend the Python documentation for learning Python?.<p>If you know a book that teaches Python fully and also Web development with the language that would be great thanks.
======
mjhea0
I'm the co-founder of Real Python @
[http://www.realpython.com](http://www.realpython.com)
We teach Python programming and web development from the bottom up: Start with
the syntax, move on the web fundamentals, then on into the frameworks - flask,
web2py, and django.
Along the way, you'll build a number of applications, including a framework
for building out your own MVP.
I can't guarantee you'll become a Python Master, but you will be well on your
way. Good luck! There's a lot of great resources out there. Feel free to reach
out to me if you have any questions - michael @ gmail.com
------
ronreiter
Disclaimer: I am the creator of
[http://www.learnpython.org](http://www.learnpython.org)
I suggest you start with
[http://www.learnpython.org](http://www.learnpython.org)
I would also suggest looking at the Flask framework.
Good luck :)
~~~
yanivf
awesome website. I also recommend
[http://www.learnpython.org](http://www.learnpython.org)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Pasteboard - HTML5 Web App for Quick & Easy Image Sharing (Open Source) - JoelBesada
http://pasteboard.co/
======
raquo
Nice design.
Bug report: I've copy-pasted an image file from my desktop and that's what a
got: <http://pasteboard.co/1345297649815178.png> (that's an OSX default
thumbnail image, not my image file). Chrome 20 @ OSX 10.6.8
~~~
JoelBesada
Copying actual image files in OSX (instead of image data) gives that
thumbnail. You're actually not supposed to be able to copy and paste _files_
at all, since I don't think there is any way for me to access the data in the
file through the clipboard. I believe OSX is alone in putting thumbnails in
the clipboard when copying files.
This might be a bit confusing, I'm going to have to figure out how to make
this more clear to the user.
------
EwanG
Not sure the following is part of your usecase, but you may want to consider
it.
First off, you might want to add something that indicates what kind of images
are "valid". For example, I would love a site like yours where I could post my
RAW CR2 files. While those are rarely good exactly like they are, they can be
useful to show someone as an example of unretouched work, or as a guide to
where I'm starting for someone to indicate "yes, but I really wanted you to
get an angle looking from the south".
Second, I would love to have your service or some other one where I can pay a
semi-ridiculous fee, and know the same image will still be available in 10
years. Right now I have about 1TB of images, and I wonder if anyone would
bother to even look through them before just deleting the directory if I
weren't around. It would be nice to know they are still somewhere. My current
"workaround" is to post images to one of my blogs that I know Archive.Org
backs up.
~~~
btown
Your first use case seems perfect for Dropbox... just share a link to the
specific files in question.
The second use case, I'm unaware of anything that legally provides that
guarantee (i.e. with an SLA), but if you trust that Amazon will be around for
10 years, you could just sign up for an AWS account and put the images on S3
yourself. I'd put more stock (literally and figuratively) in Amazon than
Archive.org for data reliability.
------
koopajah
I like the UI and it seems pretty nice. But under Firefox the image does not
upload at first (stays a 00%). I first have to cancel and reclick Upload for
it to work.
When I'm on a website and right-click -> copy Image, its says nothing is in my
clipboard, I first have to paste it in Paint and copy it again for it to work
on the site, is it a bug or am I misunderstanding how the clipboard works (I'm
under Win7)?
When you generate the URL, it would be great if it was clickable or at least a
button to go to the image. I understand the goal is for the user to have a URL
to share so copying may be more important that clicking.
Do you plan to add the ability to delete a picture? I don't see a button
anywhere to do so, and no info on how long you keep the data. Will you apply a
policy like pastebin for text?
Anyway it's really an easy way to share a picture with someone, hope you'll
add features!
~~~
JoelBesada
Does this upload bug happen every time? There are still some weird bugs that I
haven't figured out how to solve yet since they are hard to recreate. I'll
keep working on that though.
About the copying images from a website: See my answer to arkitaip.
I'm considering adding a clickable link as well under the generated URL, that
might actually be useful.
If I were to implement the ability to delete a picture, I would have to add
some kind of user authentication which I'm not planning on doing at this
moment. It might be possible to put some kind of secret client ID in the users
localStorage to allow them to delete their own images, but I would have to
make sure it can't be exploited so that other people can delete your images.
Feel free to leave suggestions on how you could do this without requiring user
accounts.
I would like to be able to store the images forever, but if the costs of doing
so becomes to much for me to handle, I'm going to have to reconsider that.
I'm definitely planning on adding more features to the app, but one of the
strong points of it is that it's very clean and simple at what it tries to do,
so it's important that I don't try to add too much to it.
~~~
koopajah
Strangely the bug does not seem to appear anymore sorry I cannot give you more
info on this now.
A clickable link or maybe a button with an image representing "Go to" action!
Storing images forever seems really hard and costly wouldn't it? Especially if
you don't limit the original image size or resize it on your server.
For deletion of the image a solution could be to do like doodle.com. You
provide one "administration link" where the uploading user can
resize/crop/change the image, and a "publishing link" that he can provide to
over people to see ?
A quick share through twitter/FB/G+ etc of the image uploaded could be nice
too and help spread the word!
~~~
JoelBesada
I currently limit the image size to 10MB, but even with that I guess storage
space could quickly become a problem. A 30 day expiration time might be needed
to keep the costs down.
Giving an additional administration link is a possibility, but I'll have to
put some more thought into what the best way to handle image deletion /
editing would be.
Adding sharing options is on my to-do list!
------
arkitaip
Gorgeous UI!
This is an interesting case because I've always wondered how users interact
with drag and drop ui in the browsers. Are users accustomed to the concept or
does it confuse them because traditionally browsers haven't supported drag and
drop? I bet there a risk for a conflict in the user's mental models!
I wonder how drag and drop would compare to the traditional approach to upload
images:
1\. click the Browse Image button
2\. Locate images
3\. Select Images
4\. OK image selection
Like I said, would love to see some stats on browser drag and drop.
EDIT: Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to
Pasteboard and it didn't work. Kinda obvious since it's a clipboard object but
it would be really cool if it worked (not sure why you would like to host an
image that's already on the web but it's the idea that counts, I reckon).
~~~
ferongr
>Using Chrome, I tried to drag and drop an image on a web site to Pasteboard
and it didn't work.
This action has been working for quite some time on Google Images [1] (drag
and drop an image from a different tab to the search bar) so it's probably a
design oversight.
Regardless, I personally find drag and drop between different windows I
haven't prepared in advance a real bother. I'd rather have the OS filepicker
pop-up on click, navigate to my images, switch to icon previews and select the
image there.
[1]
[https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi](https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi)
------
thenomad
Pretty damn cool. On Firefox, though, I can't drag and drop an image straight
from another webpage, or choose "Copy Image" in FF then paste - in both cases
it says either "not an image file" (if I drag an image) or "Your clipboard has
no image" (if I CTRL+V after copying an image), and doesn't work.
~~~
JoelBesada
Please see my other answers about this - images that are already hosted
somewhere else won't work at this moment.
------
m_ke
Looks great. Did you consider having it automatically upload on the drop?
Having the upload button seems like an unnecessary extra step.
Anyways, I bookmarked it and will be using it.
~~~
JoelBesada
It actually starts preuploading the image to the server as soon as you insert
it, clicking the upload button just confirms that you want to upload the
image. When you click the button the server starts uploading the image to the
cloud and generates the link for it.
The extra step is also there to let you crop the image, if you wish.
------
OliverM
Does it work in Safari in the Mac? I tested it there but no joy (Safari 6 on
10.8) I've been struggling with Safari myself - it only allows you to catch
paste events if the user is pasting into a text box - unlike Chrome which lets
you catch paste events no matter what HTML element type catches them. I think
google docs works around this by having an invisible text box capture & re-
direct interaction events.
~~~
JoelBesada
Pasting in Safari doesn't quite work, like you said the paste event requires a
text box to trigger, and while it seems to have the same clipboard API as
Chrome, images don't seem to show up there.
In Firefox a contenteditable div is used to catch pasted content, when images
are pasted an img tag with base64 encoded image data is inserted, which is
easy to just grab and display. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in Safari.
Because Safari seems to support all the needed APIs, it's hard to detect and
inform the user that copy and paste doesn't work. I'd rather not do any
browser sniffing.
------
nikic
I think the app looks very nice :)
One thing that I'm missing here are the Terms Of Service. Uploading stuff on
other people's servers is always a legally problematic business. It should be
made clear that the uploader retains all rights on the images.
~~~
JoelBesada
You're right, I just have no idea how to write those things. Are there any
"open source" Terms of Services that I would be able to use here?
~~~
beshrkayali
I suggest you take a look at <http://www.docracy.com/>.
Really good work by the way :)
~~~
JoelBesada
Thanks!
------
deepGem
So where do the images go - sorry to ask a dumb question but if I want to
delete the uploaded snap, is it possible ?
If you can enable batch upload that'll be fantastic.
Kudos to keeping the app really simple and beautiful. +1
~~~
JoelBesada
There's no way to delete the images at the moment. I'm considering different
methods of handling this, since that seems to be something that many want.
------
prezjordan
I love it, quick question - under the websocket connection, I see that you're
generating an ID with a pretty interesting algorithm, is there any purpose of
it, or is it simply random characters? The format is very interesting.
~~~
JoelBesada
I searched for a quick way to generate UUIDs in Javascript, which lead me to
this Stackoverflow answer <http://stackoverflow.com/a/2117523>.
I haven't looked into how that works, so don't ask me about that :)
------
leejw00t354
The interface is beautiful, good job.
It would be brilliant if you could now extend the simple interface to some
additional features like cropping, rotating, maybe even some photo filters.
I'd definitely use it.
~~~
JoelBesada
Cropping is already there :)
------
kmfrk
Works like a charm: <http://pbrd.co/MDU1fG>.
And that UI is amazing. I might have to take a peak at your source to learn a
thing or two.
------
ctide
I built this too, but with sweet user accounts: <http://imageshar.es/>
I, however, did not spend much time on the UI. :)
------
js4all
Nice webapp. It is dead simple to use and works very well. Being able to crop
the image before uploading is a great plus.
------
tmchow
Super slick, love the design. Uploading a few test images was painless and the
workflow was straightforward. Great work!
------
alexobenauer
This is nicely done! The interface is dead-simple, and well-built. Good work.
------
elb0w
I would add a check if pasted text is a url to an image and load that in
~~~
JoelBesada
Yes, I'm considering that. However, the main point of the app is to let the
user upload images to the web that aren't already hosted somewhere else.
------
fidz
Simply what we want. And you open source it. Thanks! Really great work!
------
fudged71
This is truly a beautiful web app. Very nice work.
------
kellysutton
Nifty. Reminds of Corkboard.me from awhile back.
------
Chirag
Very neat interface. App just works.
------
recroad
Show the raw URL immediately after upload. Nobody wants a link where you get
to see stuff other than the image just uploaded.
------
haberdasher
Flawless. Well done!
------
vital
Pretty lame for me and the rest of us who don't drag or drop
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Pycon 2008 Disappointment - nickb
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/2b6cb0e7245347be#
======
thorax
I was at Pycon this week. While I'd like to see no highlighted sponsor talks
in the lightning talks (I was bumped partially due to them eating up available
time), I didn't feel like the rest of the con was particularly bad. The talks
from White Oaks and Google were good keynotes and not at all marketingesque.
Will attend again next year. Some brilliant minds running around at that
conference. Absolutely no press, which is odd given how many clever things are
being discussed.
~~~
thorax
test
------
kirubakaran
Seems to be the opposite of Startup School, which is not only free but so
content rich.
------
kashif
Well, I dont think they need the money - why then, why?
~~~
llimllib
Aahz says later on in the thread that they did it to keep attendance cost
down.
------
polar
Oh dear.
~~~
mechanical_fish
My sentiments exactly.
As a Python outsider (Ruby won the coin flip, so I still haven't learned much
Python) can I ask for a translation from the Python wizards in the audience?
Is this a Zed-Shaw-style rant with 80% fewer swear words? i.e. "I'm annoyed
because marketing departments have discovered my favorite tool and now my
breakfast cereal is full of tchotchkes?" Or is this a symptom of an actual
problem in the Python core community?
One of the annoying side effects of developing a reputation for success is
that corporate IT wants very badly to talk to you. I'm watching the Drupal
community go through this now, I've seen the Ruby folks trying to cope with
Rails mania, and this looks like it might be the same thing. It's annoying,
like a headache, but in the immortal words of PG, headaches can be a sign of
good things -- for example, you might be recovering consciousness after a blow
on the head.
In this case, we might be seeing a sign that Python is developing a popular
reputation for success! And that's good... although it may mean that people
need to start holding smaller, less formal meetings in odd corners if they
want to actually discuss anything.
~~~
cstejerean
This is definitely not a symptom of problems in the Python community. Certain
people will always be disappointed no matter what happens, and some of them
can write well and make it seem like it's really a wide spread problem.
Personally I'm glad to see more companies become interested in Python and I'm
looking forward to how PyCon evolves going forward. The thing to keep in mind
is that PyCon is really a volunteer run conference. If you don't like
something, volunteer to make it better. Don't like the talks this year? Join
the selection committee for next year and help pick better talks.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Pomera: Pocket Typewriter with E Ink - sohkamyung
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2132003782/pomera-pocket-typewriter-with-e-ink
======
PyroLagus
Cool idea, but pretty expensive. Might be worth the price if you could run
linux on it, but I suppose that would drain the battery pretty quickly; I'm
not sure how well the Linux TTY is optimized for e-ink. Either way, only being
able to type on Qwerty and Japanese Kana input is pretty limiting considering
that the main feature is being able to type stuff.
------
c22
Too bad it doesn't seem to have any kind of encryption option.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Statistical Analysis of All Hacker News Submissions - minimaxir
http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/
======
pg
There was a point when we figured out how to stop spam submissions almost
completely. That was probably what happened at the end of 2011. That would
have been about the right time.
~~~
d23
I don't suppose there's an explanation we could have? :)
~~~
pg
Unfortunately like most of our anti-abuse measures it's surprisingly simple
and would be easy to circumvent.
~~~
wslh
Sorry to hijack the thread but now that you will have more time in your
hands... can we have an option to download our data from HN? I mean my
submissions, saved articles, and comments. Thanks!
~~~
minimaxir
You can use the API to download your submissions and comments extremely
easily, too.
~~~
wslh
Which official API? And... the saved articles are not public. If you are
referring to the new hn.algolia.com this is far (rate limit?) from being a
data liberation initiative. Even Google and Facebook are much better.
~~~
minimaxir
With the Algolia API, you can request 1000 stories or 1000 comments per
request. I don't think you'll hit the rate limit. :P
Here are your 1000 out of your 1248 comments:
[https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,au...](https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_wslh&hitsPerPage=1000)
And here are 1000 out of your 1548 submitted stories:
[https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,auth...](https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=story,author_wslh&hitsPerPage=1000)
You can pagenate each endpoint on the created_at_i parameter to get the rest.
I can write up a data liberation script if you want.
~~~
wslh
Thanks! I also need to web scrape HN to retrieve my saved articles. It will be
useful to use users credentials with the API.
------
mturmon
You have a green heat map of
#submissions(time)
where time is 1-hour slots across 7 days. You also have a red heat map of
#successful_submissions(time)
where successful is > 100 points. I think what you want is a third map which
is the ratio,
#successful_submissions / #submissions
which would be the empirical probability of a submission being successful,
given the submission time. The raw counts don't tell you this.
(If you have a zero in the #submissions bin at some time, this will give 0/0,
so you might want to put in a "Laplace correction" which is to add 1 count to
each #submissions bin. There are other adjustments you can use, but this would
be good enough for the purpose of the plot.)
~~~
karpathy
I did a similar analysis to the one posted here and computed a similar heat
map to the one you describe, but I marked a submission as successful when it
went from new -> front page, not when it hit 100 points. The result is in
~middle of the post and it seems that weekends are best for chances of a story
making it to the front.
[http://karpathy.ca/myblog/2013/11/27/quantifying-hacker-
news...](http://karpathy.ca/myblog/2013/11/27/quantifying-hacker-news-
with-50-days-of-data/)
and the raw ipython notebook with too many details:
[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/hn_analysis.html)
~~~
mturmon
Thanks very much. And on a log scale too!
As you noticed, not only do weekends offer a significantly improved chance of
making it to the front page, but also: the mid-morning weekday peak seems to
cause enough competition that submissions have a hard time making it.
This is in contradiction to an assertion made in the OP: "Your odds are
slightly better when submitting at peak activity (weekdays at 12 PM EST / 9 AM
PST)." The problem being, they did not calculate the odds.
------
gmisra
Obligatory repost - "Hacking Hacker News Headlines" from May 2011, examining
the significance of language in story headlines:
[http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news-
headlines/](http://metamarkets.com/2011/hacking-hacker-news-headlines/)
------
davidw
Interesting - I'd love to see the number of stories on the front page about
politics over time. Is it really growing, or does it just seem that way?
~~~
x0054
You have to keep in mind that the biggest tech story from last year was also
the biggest political story of last year. So, the numbers would be skewed
towards rise in political stories, but it could be simply due to the overlap.
~~~
davidw
Presumably you could do stats with and without that one.
------
Fomite
Almost lost me with the word clouds, but I'm glad I soldiered on. An
interesting look at the patterns behind HN.
------
karangoeluw
> …so Lisp and Erlang are well-liked on HN.
Umm... Maybe not? What if a post is titled "I don't like Lisp. Go Python!",
and it hit the front page? How exactly do you infer the language being talked
about?
~~~
minimaxir
Here's the data set of all submissions containing Lisp or Erlang in their
title:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnYpawKHOg7K1eKMaERw...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tnYpawKHOg7K1eKMaERwHrT7yXbHNP0GMNM6RS7Cu80/edit?usp=sharing)
There are a few negative mentions, but they're in the minority.
------
Houshalter
[http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-points-hist.png](http://minimaxir.com/img/hn-
points-hist.png)
The wealth distribution of HN is awful. The rich get richer, by getting closer
to the front page and getting exponentially more points, for every point they
get.
~~~
DanBC
It does make me wonder what great links I'm missing because they only got a
few upvotes.
Up voting articles on New only goes so far. Other people have to stop upvoting
fluff.
Not sure what a solution would be.
~~~
Houshalter
A solution has been proposed here:
[http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...](http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_randomized_algorithms.html)
Basically move some new articles closer to the front page to get them more
exposure in order to find the ones that are actually best. More exploration
and less exploitation, and finding the optimal tradeoff between the two.
------
thanatropism
This is not statistical analysis, this is "descriptive statistics" at best.
This:
> One of the infamous memes about Hacker News is programming language elitism,
> with favoritism for languages such as Lisp and Erlang.
> Lisp and Erlang are indeed obscure, which might discredit the meme.
is the exact opposite of analysis. If it was found that 40% of HNers were
left-handed, HN would be noted as a particularly left-handed website, since
the base rate in the population is a fraction of that.
------
plg
should include "posts about analyzing HN posts" as a category
how meta
------
pdevr
Nicely done.
1\. What did you use to generate the graphs?
2\. While analyzing JavaScript, were submissions of posts related to Angular,
Bootstrap, Require, etc classified as JavaScript?
~~~
minimaxir
1\. Plots were made using R and ggplot2. (additionally, charts were rendered
on a Mac; rendering Line Charts on Windows doesn't work very well)
2\. To maintain an apple-to-apples comparison, I only checked for the presence
of a language, and not any frameworks.
~~~
pdevr
1\. Thanks for the answer and the tip about rendering the charts.
2\. I guess that is a practical approach - otherwise, it would have gotten too
complex with all the frameworks, tools and technologies.
------
gtirloni
So now our bosses have a pretty chart to show we don't work.
Weekends being dead don't help, folks!
------
aaronsnoswell
With the NSA graph it's worth noting that HN posts with 'NSA' or 'Snowden' in
the title are known to be down-graded by the site's ranking algorithm. Can't
remember where the source for this is right now.
~~~
csandreasen
NSA is, but Snowden is not (or, at least, wasn't noted as being in the
writeup).
See here: [http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)
------
JacobAldridge
It would be interesting to see the distribution of Erlang posts over time -
specifically, what portion of the 1,189 submissions came on Erlang Day (and
its 1-2 sequels)?
------
AznHisoka
What software did you use for those pretty charts?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Obama "delays" promised elimination of capital gains taxes on start-ups till 2014 - miked
http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/03/talk_and_walk.php
======
panda88
Tax the rich, change carried interest capital gains rules and now leaving
startups out in the cold.
Can Obama find any more ways to take the incentive to succeed away from
Americans?
He is killing the American dream and trying to implement Karl Marx's dream.
Good night America, so sad to see you go.
------
miked
It's not just the lost profits to the founders that will hurt. The bigger
damage might be that angels and VCs will now have less incentive to invest.
That means more startups won't make it.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Grey Apocalypse - kernel_sanders
http://nick.geek.nz/greyapocalypse/
======
kernel_sanders
infinite { repeat(10){ = while(<128){+}++ >=^ = while(<128){+}++ v } v }
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
You advocate a [blank] approach to calendar reform - apsec112
http://qntm.org/calendar
======
brownbat
( ) having months of different lengths is irritating
( ) having months which vary in length from year to year is maddening
People toy with calendar reform exactly because so many boxes are already
ticked in our current system, and other boxes are questionable:
( ) having one or two days per year with no day of the week is asinine
Meanwhile, happy day that only happens once every four years.
I always see it as a half serious pursuit, but it's fun to try because our
current system is an irrational historical accident that predates almost
everything we've learned about math, astronomy, sociology, and usability.
------
emergentcypher
The only time I could ever see us adopting new calendar systems is when (if)
we eventually migrate off-planet into space colonies or onto other bodies in
the solar system. Why? Because only then will each colony have a completely
different notion of what a solar year is, and different (or even entirely
artificial) notions of solar days. In these colonies a standardized calendar
system may arise. Or a chaotic web of independent calendar systems.
~~~
JoeAltmaier
Perhaps just a count of seconds from some zero point. Mark intervals in
kilosecs and megasecs. Then the computer time-counter register will be the
only clock anybody needs. Never mind 'Wednesday'. "See you in a megasec!"
which is about 11.6 of our 'days'.
~~~
tekromancr
The problem there is that seconds are relative to movement. If you are
traveling faster than earth, your clock is going to lose sync.
~~~
JoeAltmaier
That is a problem that cannot be solved!
------
david-given
I like that this comes preticked:
> the history of calendar reform is insanely complicated and no amount of
> further calendar reform can make it simpler
------
shpx
I agree that calendar reform is futile, it's more useful to have a universal
standard than trying to get everyone to agree on a marginally better one. But
it's fun to think about how you could design the calendar from scratch, or how
we should do it on Mars.
Besides social inertia, I have not heard a good argument for lunar months. I
convert months to day numbers (feb 29 becomes day 60) in my head, which makes
reasoning about longer time scales a little easier.
------
spacehome
The majority of these complaints also apply to our current system.
------
jheriko
this even works if your approach is to not change anything! :)
------
chillaxtian
my favorite line:
( ) the length of the solar day is ultimately unbounded
------
m6w6
That made me laugh out loud, causing some suspicious glances:
( ) years which count down instead of up are not very funny
------
AstroJetson
()The past will always exist, and they'll never adopt your new calendar. FTW!
------
aurizon
global Metric time...;)
~~~
Sanddancer
Which would require reprinting every science book, re-deriving every
mathematical equation, replacing every road sign, ruler, measuring cup, scale,
etc. Because metric time would involve altering the second, you would need to
alter pretty much every other constant to match.
~~~
nsns
Right, but note that almost anywhere outside the (christian) west uses (at
least) two concurrent systems without much trouble (e.g. India: Western/Shaka
calendar, Israel: Western/Jewish Lunar calendar, etc.).
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Definitions, Definitions, Do We Need Them? - profquail
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/definitions-definitions-do-we-need-them/
======
nzmsv
Definitions are useful for experts in a field. It is much faster to just refer
to a concept by its name rather than explaining it every time.
Unfortunately, definitions are a terrible thing for students. Even more
unfortunately, most books are written in the following style:
1\. Here's a paragraph-long definition that makes no sense to you at this
point.
2\. Here's a proof of this thing you don't yet understand.
3\. Oh, you want to practice? Here's an example problem and a solution. When
you see a problem like this one, plug numbers into this formula in the bold
box.
4\. A bunch more problems to try plugging numbers into yourself.
5\. The discussion on what this thing is actually useful for is outside the
scope of this book. Read about that somewhere else.
The best teachers actually explain how the thing they are teaching works. They
start with a limited concept the student can understand, and then refine it to
make it more formal. Good textbooks do this too. The bad ones start with the
definition in a box.
The problem is that by the time a professor writes a textbook, this stuff is
second nature to them. The prof is an expert. So he/she starts with the
definition, since that is how the professor commonly communicates this
concept. The book then ends up looking like the author is trying to make
him/herself look smart at the expense of the reader. Writing an accessible
book is a rare talent.
Wow this turned into a long rant :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Shocking Truth About CSS - _pius
http://blog.twoalex.com/2010/02/26/a-shocking-truth-about-css/
======
Jim72
Please, using more CSS selectors than DOMs isn't going to kill a site. In
fact, it isn't even close to being a bottleneck. We are talking milliseconds.
If you want speed gains, properly compress your images!
~~~
jrockway
Wait, are you saying that a computer capable of executing millions of
instructions per second doesn't take very long to do a few comparisons on a
dozen or so elements? It takes me a long time to do by hand, so I figured the
computer would be really slow too!
~~~
Tuna-Fish
> a computer capable of executing millions of instructions per second
Billions, not millions.
~~~
btilly
Billions of cycles per second. But executing an instruction frequently takes
20 cycles or so. That reduces instructions to hundreds of millions.
~~~
kscaldef
Except that pipelining, multiple cores, and hyperthreading then bring it back
up. So, let's not get overly pedantic here.
------
goodside
Scroll to the botom, and:
11:44:33 AM Alex K: that makes it sound like it may not be worth huge
optimization?
11:44:46 AM Alex M: no, not really
~~~
jbox
Steve's final conclusion:
“For most web sites, the possible performance gains from optimizing CSS
selectors will be small, and are not worth the costs. ”
[http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/03/10/performance-
impa...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/03/10/performance-impact-of-
css-selectors/)
~~~
rimantas
Exactly. I have an obsession with "optimized" markup, that means avoiding
unnecessary elements, ids and classes. Let's not forget that all this stuff
sits in markup and gets downloaded on each request. Even if that does not add
up to much, I still want to have my code "clean". There is one particular site
that inspires me: <http://camendesign.com/> — take a look, not a single id or
class.
~~~
jqueryin
He did this, however, at the expense of convoluted selectors, pseudo-elements,
and pattern matching. Personally, I don't find his implementation to be very
clean. I guess it's better to have the mess in your closet than wide out in
the open, though.
------
stanleydrew
Google describes this and a bunch of other great stuff about how to optimize
page rendering: [http://code.google.com/speed/page-
speed/docs/rendering.html#...](http://code.google.com/speed/page-
speed/docs/rendering.html#UseEfficientCSSSelectors)
------
bwill
Can anyone point to where this is required by the css specification? Or is
this an implementation detail? The reality may be that all the browsers do it
this way, but why couldn't someone add some more smarts to choose selectors
based on selectivity, just as a SQL query planner would?
~~~
robin_reala
It’s quicker to walk up a DOM tree than it is to walk down - that’s the root
reason why browsers have all implemented it this way.
~~~
neilk
Yeah, but if we do something like this:
#alert > p { background: yellow }
Surely the intelligent thing for the CSS engine is to look for the one-and-
only #alert, rather than work backwards from all the <p>'s? (I am assuming
that nodes with ids have their own fast index.)
~~~
gizmo
It's a little trickier when you do it left to right.
Suppose you have a DOM tree like this:
div #alert - p, p, p
- div #alert - p [lots of children]
- p - div #alert [lots of children]
[right to left]
In order to find all Ps with an #alert parent, you first get a set of all
paragraph elements. Most likely a list of all paragraphs is kept in memory, so
it can be enumerated quickly. Since DOM trees are generally well balanced the
number of parents of any one paragraph is going to be roughly O(
2log(|DOMSIZE|) ) and it can be enumerated in C, so this is basically nothing
(compared to how grossly inefficient javascript is). Total complexity: O( |P
NODES| * 2log( |DOMSIZE| ) ). Memory complexity: 1 linked list of size of
result set.
[left to right]
If we were to look at it from left to right, it gets trickier. You have to
find all #alert nodes (easy & fast), but then you have to take all children of
all #alert nodes. Every sub-tree of the DOM can be a significant fraction of
the entire DOM tree, or perhaps the _entire_ dom tree. Not only that, but you
CANNOT filter for all "p" children, because then you'd need to have lookup
tables for every level in the tree (hugely inefficient). So you're left with
one solution, that is to enumerate all children (and a DOM node can have a few
thousand child nodes easily). But, wait, one #alert contains another #alert.
We're already looking at O( |DOMSIZE| * |DOMSIZE| ), and now we have to
consider uniqueness as well. We cannot alloc a hash map to keep track of
uniqueness, because that would completely fragement your memory space; you'd
end up allocating&deallocating hashmaps for every selector call. So you end up
having to traverse the result set linked list for every node you add, to see
if it isn't already in there. This, needless to say, is another O(N^2) detour.
Total worst case complexity for M selectors:
O( M * |DOMSIZE|^2 + M * |RESULTSET|^2 ).
Memory complexity: M + 1 linked list.
Difference becomes more profound as complexity increases:
#uniq p p span b
(R2L) find all "b" nodes, append those with matching parents to linked list.
Return linked list
(L2R) find all #uniq nodes, enumerate all "p" children. Make sure all "p"
children are unique. Take all children of these "p" nodes, filter for "p"
children, make sure result set is unique. Take all children of these "p"
nodes, filter for "span", make sure.... and so it goes.
So that's why.
~~~
qjz
Your examples aren't valid HTML, so that approach is fine for quirks mode. But
what about valid pages that declare a DOCTYPE? Shouldn't those be parsed from
left to right, so the first matching ID that is encountered wins (with any
other matching IDs considered errors and disregarded)?
OT, this was one of the problems XHTML was supposed to solve, since it was
originally assumed by many that pages that weren't well-formed XML would not
be rendered at all, forcing the developers to fix the code. This didn't
happen, and developers are still at the mercy of how individual browsers
implementat quirks mode.
~~~
gizmo
You have to write R2L parsing logic anyway, because it's what you want most of
the time (e.g. "div span a.quote"). Yes, in the special case where #uniq
identifiers are used _and_ you know the page to be valid (X)HTML _and_ you
know that you get a substantial speedup by filtering on the #uniq node first
L2R parsing is preferable. But how realistic is that, really?
Isn't it just easier to teach web developers to write their DOM selectors in a
specific way? The R2L approach is (a) easy to understand (b) has predictable
(and stable) performance (c) doesn't malloc (d) is easy to implement. I see
this as a simple case of "good enough".
------
ableal
(from the header:)
_The Two Alexs
Alexes? Alex's? Alexi? Alexim?_
In hackanonical form, Alexen. As in oxen, vaxen, boxen.
~~~
riffraff
IIRC oxen is a vestigial dual (not plural) form, so quite appropriate.
~~~
bdr
According to <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ox> \-- "Oxen is the
only true survival in Mod.Eng. of the O.E. weak plural."
From what I can tell, it looks like OE nouns could have either "strong" or
"weak" declensions, and this is different from the dual form. Someone on
another forum claims that "brethren" is another example.
~~~
riffraff
may well be true, my source is an old State of the Onion talk from Larry Wall,
which although a linguist is probably not the most qualified in the world :)
------
CoryMathews
micro optimization... blah.
Why do I really doubt Alex's yoga site needs to worry about this.
------
ihumanable
John Resig (of jQuery fame) talks about why this approach was taken in the
design of the sizzle engine that powers jQuery. Its towards the end of this
talk (which is quite good by the way), I would find the exact time but my work
internet thinks its inappropriate content and won't let me watch the video :(
~~~
todd3834
could you post a link to it?
------
eneveu
Reminds me of how you may optimize your javascript DOM/style manipulations to
avoid re-calculating the styles too often. It was mentioned in this Google I/O
session on GWT performance:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9hhENmVTWg#t=32m38s> (slides located here:
[http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MeasureMillis...](http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MeasureMillisecondsPerformanceTipsWebToolkit.html)
)
This is where Speed Tracer comes in handy (
<http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/> )
------
kellegous
If you want to know how much CSS selector matching (sometimes called Style
Recalculation) is affecting your site you can try Speed Tracer:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ognampngfcbddbfe...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ognampngfcbddbfemdapefohjiobgbdl)
It's Chrome-only but you can sometimes get cross-browser insights. It's also a
lot easier to conduct a cursory investigation using this tool than it is to
start changing your selectors.
------
smackfu
I do not like their blog gimmick.
~~~
arsduo
FWIW, the post is a slightly cleaned up version of an actual conversation I
had with my husband. (I'm K, he's M.) It's not a format I'm likely to reuse
(or have used before), but it fit the occasion and captured very well our
feelings of surprise at learning how CSS parses selectors.
Plus, it's always fun to try out new formats, even -- or maybe especially --
if they don't stick.
------
jamesr
The definitive guide to this was written by then-Mozilla dev Dave Hyatt:
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Writing_Efficient_CSS>
That's from April 21st, 2000 - almost a decade ago.
------
scotty79
11:44:33 AM Alex K: that makes it sound like it may not be worth huge
optimization? 11:44:46 AM Alex M: no, not really 11:44:56 AM Alex M: I’m a
purist though 11:45:18 AM Alex M: so this makes my world
Last two lines scares the hell out of me.
------
aw3c2
I don't want to read several pages of badly spoken chat english to find the
conclusion. Could someone be so kind and explain what the ___shocking truth_
__is?
~~~
gscott
That tables really are the best, CSS is good for changing fonts all at once
though. I read it all for you so don't worry about double checking.
~~~
aw3c2
Thanks!
------
FluidDjango
The "Two Alexes" are just discovering (Feb 2010) what Steve Souders explained
in detail at [http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/06/18/simplifying-
css-...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/06/18/simplifying-css-
selectors/) [which is probably the site you want to visit on "How CSS
strategies affect site performance"] (June 2009).
~~~
tjic
Being "scooped" by a mere 6 months, on a 10 year old technology doesn't really
make their realization dated.
It's new to me, and I bet it's new to most news.yc-ers.
~~~
jrockway
/me mumbles something about Reading The Fine Source. Then you don't have to
guess what your browser is doing.
~~~
smackfu
Trying to figure out HTML from reading the Firefox source is kind of insane.
~~~
jrockway
Yeah, OK. So just be ignorant instead.
~~~
etherealG
do you read the source of the linux kernel to understand how to use bash? how
about the source of a wifi driver before connecting to a network?
your premise is rediculous.
~~~
jrockway
I don't do those things, but that's not because it's a bad method, but because
I don't care. If there was some bug in some system call, or if I needed to
investigate why hardware is misbehaving, of course I'd read the Linux source.
That's one of the great things about open source software; you don't have to
treat it like a black box. You can just look at the internals and see how they
work.
(And I have proof that I do actually do this; I had a misbehaving joystick,
and the linux fork in my github contains the fix.)
Anyway, in conclusion, if you want to know what algorithm Firefox uses to
process CSS selectors, just read the Firefox source code. If you don't give a
damn, then don't do that instead. But if you care and you do nothing, that's
just silly.
------
scotty79
Don't think about how fast it is unless you have solid evidence that it is
slow.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Solve this riddle and win 0.1 Bitcoin - angelortega
http://triptico.com/notes/btc_riddle.html
======
ColinWright
The experiment is over.
Thanks to everyone who participated.
Well, that was interesting.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is it possible to create an AI with HTML? - saifs
======
anayar
HTML is a markup language, not really a programming language. So I'm going to
say no but I'm sure there are those smarter than me who can be more
definitive.
~~~
anayar
Actually make that not really* a straight up _NOT_
~~~
hanniabu
Agreed
------
speedplane
Kind of like asking is it possible to make an AI from twine.
------
pota
No, you also need CSS.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ticketmaster will admit you to events using audio data transmitted from phone - amrshafik
https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/04/ticketmaster-will-soon-admit-you-to-events-using-audio-data-transmitted-from-your-smartphone/
======
rosariotech
Sounds cool.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I'll build your MVP in a few months and support it for the year - curiously
http://appsonify.com
======
dang
This is not a Show HN. Please read the rules:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).
------
zubairq
Which country are you based in?
~~~
curiously
Canada.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Quantum Air buys Bye's electric airplanes - prostoalex
http://aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/august/22/quantum-air-to-buy-24-bye-aerospace-eflyers
======
cagenut
I went down an electric-flight youtube rabbit hole a couple months ago and was
genuinely shocked at how far things have already developed. If anyone else is
curious, check out this set of presentations from the 2018 "sustainable
aviation foundation" symposium:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHtqxcrPbJkSwI-
ozYr1AiQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHtqxcrPbJkSwI-
ozYr1AiQ/videos)
The 2019 symposium is coming up in october:
[https://www.sasymposium.com/](https://www.sasymposium.com/)
Also Uber just had its "elevate summit" on its flight plans (all electric):
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmVTG4mAK7nyJ7pu7pTd_...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmVTG4mAK7nyJ7pu7pTd_7q29YUHvPZEt)
Basically, any question you have, someone has devoted the last few years of
their career to and given a 45 minute presentation on.
~~~
cagenut
Some more e-flight youtubes:
This is the specific plane mentioned in the article:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REdh3Q4cPuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REdh3Q4cPuE)
That guy did a great roundup video of electric flight a few months ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIM3pgxHVIM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIM3pgxHVIM)
He also did a tour of the Pipestrel plan a month ago where you get to see some
"under the hood" stuff:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfjCXDf9rhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfjCXDf9rhk)
------
leoedin
I wonder what the life of the aircraft needs to be before the higher cost of
the aircraft amortises into lower overall costs. I'd imagine that the running
cost of a mainly solid state aircraft is significantly lower than a gasoline
one, but the initial battery cost will be very significant. It would be nice
if the rise of electric general aviation has the effect of reducing the cost
of flying.
However, I suspect then you'll run into other issues. I can't imagine LA can
have too many air taxis flying around before they become a nightmare to
manage. If the hourly cost of an air taxi is low enough that everyone can take
one, the sky will become saturated. There's obviously a lot of space, but our
systems for managing air traffic right now are designed around there being
tens to hundreds of aircraft in the same area, not thousands. We'd need to
introduce fully automated aircraft routing to have a hope of dealing with air
taxis over dense cities if they became remotely popular.
~~~
radicalbyte
I can't see how they compete when electricity is taxed whilst aviation fuel is
untaxed.
~~~
sokoloff
_Airline_ fuel is largely untaxed, but most other aviation fuel is taxed.
General aviation 100LL ("avgas") fuel is taxed federally at $0.191/gallon (or
$0.335/gallon for certain ownership structures).
General aviation jet fuel is taxed at $0.219 (to as much as $0.244) per
gallon.
Highway fuel is taxed federally at $0.184/gallon (slightly _less_ than avgas).
Electric aircraft are not poised to disrupt the jet-fuel burning sector of
aviation. The aircraft in this article will be competing against aircraft
using taxed fuel (100LL).
~~~
iancmceachern
Why is airline fuel untaxed?
~~~
sokoloff
I assume because the feds calculated that they can collect more revenue by
taxing elements of the tickets rather than the fuel, but I really don't know.
(Note that some states do tax airline jet fuel and some airports assess a
flowage fee per gallon [which is for practical purposes equivalent to a sales
tax].)
~~~
benj111
Airline jet fuel duty is covered by international agreements I think,
presumably to facilitate trade.
I don't know if that also applies to purely domestic use though. Maybe that's
how states can impose a tax?
------
benj111
I cant help but feel they could have found a more fun headline.
Anyway, lithium sulphur is mentioned
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_batte...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery)
Could anyone add more background? Is this something we're likely to be seeing
in EVs any time soon?
~~~
pattisapu
"Quantum Buy Bye in Electric Tech Urban Air Dare"
~~~
benj111
I was toying with
"Quantum says good buy, and Bye says hello."
I think it's a bit too high brow for a head line though.
------
quickthrower2
That was a hard headline to parse. First “Quantum air” when there is already
Qantas. And then “buys Bye’s”. Eek!
------
FabHK
They claim 4 hours endurance, which would give it nearly 400 NM range. Not
bad, if it works. The 4 seater can carry 800 lbs. Wonder how long charging
takes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_Sun_Flyer_4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_Aerospace_Sun_Flyer_4)
~~~
dmitrygr
For carrying scheduled air passengers, you need to fly IFR. You need to have
fuel to fly to destination airport, then to reserve airport, and then 45
minutes. No sane pilot flies with that little reserve. Most airlines have
enough for destination, reserve, and 90-120 minutes. With that safety margin,
this thing has a "useful" range of maybe 150 nautical miles
~~~
FabHK
This is not scheduled, but Air Taxi, which I believe is a different part of
the FAR. And, yes, for small planes, there are plenty of alternate airports.
I'd say 200 NM or more are realistic.
------
garethgriffiths
Electric planes have very few parts and are easy to maintain. The main cost of
flying is fuel. Electric will make it a lot cheaper.
The battery as with all electric vehicles is still an issue, but for short air
taxi distances it will be fine. Switch out the batteries on arrival and go
again.
~~~
Reason077
It's unlikely that switchable/swappable batteries will be a thing in aviation.
Even in the smallest aircraft, the batteries weigh hundreds - or thousands -
of kilograms, comprise the bulk of the aircraft's dry weight, and are likely
to be tightly integrated with the rest of the airframe for structural and
safety reasons.
Most aircraft spend enough time on the ground between flights to make fast DC
charging quite practical, and certainly much more so than swapping out huge
batteries.
------
PunksATawnyFill
Very cool. Now if we can keep corrupt local politicians from destroying our
airports and turning the land over to developers (this means you, SANTA
MONICA)... transportation might continue to advance.
~~~
jillesvangurp
Yes, you are right. Politicians have not realized yet that things are going to
change. The main reason people don't like airports is pollution and noise. If
you take that away, living close to an airport is actually quite nice since
that means you can get in and out quickly.
Santa Monica and similar airports are going to be ground zero for this because
they have lots of rich people living near by that might opt for an electrical
plane. Sounds like an awesome way to get around LA, which has quite a few nice
small airports.
Basically Bye and Eviation are launching products that are sort of hitting the
sweet spot for general aviation. They have enough range that you can go
somewhere at a small portion of the cost of a typical 100$ hamburger.
Probably in about a decade, there will be enough of these things flying that
regulation and politics will adapt. Many airports currently have landing
limitations because of noise. I could see some exceptions being made for
electrical planes or even some airports being limited to only electrical
planes. I could even see how building new airports could become popular again;
especially close to cities and especially for VTOL planes (need a lot less
runway).
~~~
cagenut
Most of the things you mention in your last paragraph are addressed in this
talk, you'll probably enjoy it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGUrXCBB1OI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGUrXCBB1OI)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Cognitect, please stop adding alpha to your namespaces - zirak
https://tonsky.me/blog/alpha/
======
ruuda
I think the deeper insight here is not limited to Cognitect or Clojure: it is
that once software gains traction, it is no longer up to the author to
determine alpha/beta/stable status. If something is widely depended upon, it
will be difficult to change, and it is de facto stable, regardless of the
label that the author put on it.
------
navjack27
Stop adding yellow to your website. My eyes burn!
~~~
navjack27
Wtf I hit the switch and it literally turns the lights off.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
KLM is celebrating Comic Sans day today (NL only) - dutchbrit
http://www.klm.com/travel/nl_nl/index.htm
======
LinaLauneBaer
It seems to be "organized" by a radio station. This radio station is
organizing a Comic Sans day and KLM joined the Comic Sans day. In addition to
using Comnic Sans KLM is also giving away tickets to Paris and back to the NL
for people whose name is C. Sans. Neat idea...
[http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&h...](http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.klm.com/travel/nl_nl/index.htm%26biw%3D934%26bih%3D730&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=nl&u=http://nieuws.klm.com/ook-
comicsansdag-bij-klm/&usg=ALkJrhg1EX3-sCG5-1Eonuu_PAwZe-L0Ug)
~~~
y0ast
This is the radio station: [http://www.3fm.nl/](http://www.3fm.nl/) and their
website is also fully in Comic Sans
------
netrus
Love it. It's what every big company can learn from Google's doodle: A little
bit of non-conformity/strangeness makes the biggest giant appear humane.
~~~
Osmium
Honestly, as awful as Comic Sans is, it really does make their homepage look
more friendly. Considering how complicated some airline bookings can be, I
don't think that's a bad thing.
------
bartkappenburg
I'm really curious how this will affect their conversion. I'm betting that the
traffic from people who want to take a look (because of this comic sans day)
isn't that good and people who didn't hear about it will maybe convert worse.
~~~
danieldk
On the other hand, if you are not Dutch (or perhaps West-European), you may
not have heard of KLM before. And now you do.
Of course, with your username the probability is near one that you already
knew them ;).
------
mfwoods
They're also giving away free tickets to Paris for anyone who can prove
they're named C. Sans. I don't think that's a very popular surname in The
Netherlands.
~~~
pdw
In 2007, there were 43 people named "Sans".
[http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfb/detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaam=s...](http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nfb/detail_naam.php?gba_lcnaam=sans&gba_naam=Sans&nfd_naam=Sans&operator=eq&taal=)
~~~
mfwoods
I wonder how many of them have a first name starting with a C _and_ saw this
contest.
I'm guessing none.
------
sp8
This is OT but Ghostery blocked _20_ different tracking scripts on that page.
I've never seen such a huge list from one site!
~~~
zorbo
Strange. I see only one blocked, and I've got everything blocked and auto-
update turned on. I think your ghostery may be malfuctioning, because a
cursory glance at the resources doesn't reveal much out of the ordinary.
------
marklit
This might be a feature rather than a drawback of the iPad but the Comic Sans
font isn't rendering in Chrome.
------
ronjouch
Mandatory link to the epic _" I’m Comic Sans, Asshole."_ published on
McSweeney's: [http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-
asshole](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-comic-sans-asshole)
A fine day for Comic Sans to say " _Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get
hammered with Papyrus._ " Happy Comic Sans Day everybody!
~~~
jermy
Also mandatory link to 'So you need a typeface' flowchart:
[http://julianhansen.com/](http://julianhansen.com/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 (1992) [pdf] - nkurz
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/2010winter/dunlap_jr.pdf
======
dforrestwilson1
[http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-crosses-
pot...](http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/12/general-mattis-crosses-
potomac-100000-troops-president-senate-flee-city/)
Former Marine here. I thought this article was funny when it recirculated just
prior to the recent election. But I also sort of thought to myself "Yeah I
would vote for him over HRC or Trump."
Now I worry. A few thoughts:
1\. If the military remains the most-trusted branch of government that's a bad
thing. We need to take steps to reduce its power now.
2\. If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and
spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to
expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive
conflict in the Middle East.
3\. It is critical that Congress finds ways to reverse the rise in income
disparity or we're going to have an even more dissatisfied and formerly
middle-class voter base next cycle.
4\. If Congress remains gridlocked by partisanship we are surely heading down
the Road to Serfdom, and voters will either cede more power to Trump, or
perhaps worse, be dissatisfied and demand an even stronger strong man.
~~~
ocschwar
"2\. If the Freedom Caucus is really committed to reducing the powers (and
spending) of government they should be fervently resisting budget plans to
expand the armed forces and pull us back from pointless non-productive
conflict in the Middle East."
Unfortunately, there's the slight matter of the Carter Doctrine, the idea that
the US has a vital interest in the continued uninterrupted flow of oil from
the Persian Gulf.
The US can't just withdraw from the Middle East until Middle America
withdraws.
There's a large portion of our population that has arranged their lives in
such a way that they literally cannot leave their homes and return with a jug
of milk, without getting in their cars and driving a long drive.
And so if the flow of oil from the Gulf is interrupted, the ramifications
stateside would have them screaming bloody murder.
Ironically, these people are unable to see that it's their choices that lead
to this: you choose where you live, you choose where you work, and you choose
how you get there.
And until there's a sober discussion of the problem, there will be a US
presence in the Middle East.
~~~
openasocket
I think you're over-estimating the impact of Middle East oil in the US. Only
about 12% of US oil consumption is from oil from the Middle East, half of that
from Saudi Arabia. Losing that would be damaging but wouldn't be as bad as the
gas rationing under Carter. Middle Eastern policy now has a lot more to do
with terrorism, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
~~~
faceyspacey
Yes it's all about oil price stabilization. It's also a plan put in motion
almost 30 years ago when we first attacked Iraq. So yes as solar and other
developments change the landscape we are still foolishly following an old plan
to insure the Middle East are willing client states able to be controlled by
the global monetary system rather than erratic despotic wrenches in the
system.
Terrorism and 9/11 likely is a false flag for ulterior motives. The motives
can't be made so clear or nobody would believe the false flags and the media.
We aren't to know just how important oil price stabilization is to the ruling
elite's master plan.
Do you really think all the lives and money lost in the past 16 years has been
the appropriate cost for just 3000 dead? We need to speak up and completely
pull out of the Middle East immediately. The plan might have overall been good
for the world but they were wrong and their dishonesty has destroyed people's
faith in government and has made an entire region far more "terrifying" than
they ever were. We are following an outdated strategy by outdated people that
don't know better. That is to say they were never evil, but just impatient
operating on a small big picture. I'm referring to the Bush Family, members of
the Bilderberg group, the Rockefeller's, what remains of Standard Oil in
obscured new company names such as Exxon and Mobil, and the tip top banking
institutions that have been so arrogantly proud of the fact that money can be
used to control the world and maintain peace rather than war as in past
generations--for if everything can be controlled by money rather than might,
we have the makings of a more peaceful world. So they thought...
~~~
fdupoo
Oil price stabilization? War in the area seems to have caused the opposite
effect for the better part of the last 2 decades.
~~~
jwatte
There you go again, trying to apply facts to a global political power game
much bigger than you'd ever be allowed to even know about.
------
mabbo
One piece of this was poorly predicted: rising violent crime.
In the late 80s and early 90s, there were lots and lots of predictions that in
another decade, violent crime would be at crisis levels. It was steadily
increasing year over year and there was lots of disagreement as to the cause.
Then we reached 1994 or so, and everything started going down[0]. Lots of
possible reasons, popularly that Wade vs Roe had been 21 years prior but lots
of other competing theories may explain it, or be part of it.
I'm not saying that the future predicted by this story isn't alarming in some
of its predictions but that this particular prediction was made by a lot of
people and it turned out to be pretty clearly incorrect.
By 2012, America was probably as safe as it had ever been and continues to
become safer despite popular belief to the contrary.
[0][https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro...](https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/ldah6rdp6ukvngoyqi1fcg.gif)
~~~
brilliantcode
Freakonomics talked about the decline of crime in the 90s as being directly
attributed to rise of abortion.
Basically, offsprings from poverty or low socio economic statuses tend to grow
up without education and exposed to violence and dysfunctional families with
parents who are likely uneducated and addicted to substances.
Growing up without fathers, young men adopt gang culture as a surrogate for
the lack of positive role models.
It makes perfect sense that in the 90s there were lot less would be criminals
(not by choice but genetic, environmental and socioeconomic factors) being
born.
The financial burden on divorced men with children is far too skewed in
benefiting divorced women in North America. My fear is children being born
from this generation of turbulent and unstable familial organization as the
middle class slowly erodes and job security disappears due to automation.
~~~
chiph
One of the theories (which I think has a lot of merit) is the elimination of
leaded gasoline, and the subsequent reductions in environmental lead
contamination.
~~~
tjalfi
[http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-
exposure...](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-
gasoline-crime-increase-children-health) is an interesting article about this
topic.
------
djrogers
This broke down right away:
"After the President died he somehow “persuaded” the Vice President not to
take the oath of of ce. Did we then have a President or not? A real
“Constitutional Conundrum” the papers called it. Brutus created just enough
ambiguity to convince everyone that as the senior military of cer, he
could—and should— declare himself Commander- in-Chief of the United Armed
Forces"
Taking these two items in reverse order - Article 2 of the constitution is
clear - the President is the CIC - full stop, period, no alternatives.
As far as the VP not taking the oath, that would pretty clearly make him/her
fall in to the 'Inability' side of the Resignation or Inability statement,
triggering Presidential Succession Act [2], which opens with the following
language:
"If, by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or
failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to
discharge the powers and duties of the office of President"
Refusal to take the oath of office would fall under 'failure to qualify' and
'inability', as taking the oath is required by Article 2 (section 1, clause
8)[1] before executing the office of President.
There's more, such as the 25th amendment, but that doesn't contradict anything
here...
All of that is completely setting aside the deeply ingrained establishment of
civilian control of the military in all modern liberal democracies - as
established largely by the US constitution.
[1] [https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-
constitution/arti...](https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-
constitution/articles/article-ii) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act)
~~~
mikeash
One thing we're rapidly learning in recent weeks is that the Constitution and
the laws don't matter unless there are people able and willing to enforce
them. Nothing is automatic, and if nobody with power will stand up to Brutus,
then it can work even if it's supposedly not allowed.
I think that "deeply ingrained establishment of civilian control" you mention
is the real problem with this scenario.
~~~
killjoywashere
I'm honestly shocked a warrior monk like Mattis took the SECDEF job. I am
sincerely concerned that upon meeting Trump, he decided to take the job simply
to keep it away from real crony.
~~~
mikeash
My thoughts exactly. I'm further convinced that Trump picked him solely
because of the "Mad Dog" nickname.
------
NoGravitas
One bit I found funny was that the narrator argues that being forced into
police work has made soldiers too restrained to function as warriors, when in
our timeline, the opposite has happened -- police have become too aggressive
to function as peace officers.
~~~
unit91
I actually think both have happened: the military has increasingly adopted
traditional police tactics and mindset [1], while law enforcement has become
more paramilitary it its equipment, tactics, and mindset.
[1] Personal experience. I was shocked to receive so much instruction from
LEOs instead of infantrymen prior to my own deployment to Afgh. While there,
we did a lot more arresting, and not nearly as much killing, as I think the
situations I encountered warranted. ETA: not saying there _wasn 't_
instruction from the Army, but there was a _lot_ from beat cops contracted to
train us.
~~~
Jtsummers
Depending on when you were going through training, a lot of that had to do
with the early (in Iraq and Afghanistan) issues of the military having no real
concept of policing (the thing they were tasked with after the initial
invasions) and going on to do things like abuse prisoners. The training was
essential because our early actions or lack of restraint was a losing strategy
(it directly led to insurgent numbers growing and propaganda against the US
and US military, completely counter to the intended purpose of the missions).
------
splitrocket
There has already been an attempted American military coup:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot)
~~~
InitialLastName
"Attempted" seems like a strong word to use... even the Wiki article you
linked, in the introduction, seems to put it somewhere between a hoax and a
few people contemplating a coup (far from "attempting").
------
doktrin
I'm surprised this was written back in 1992, at a time when I personally
hadn't noticed the rising tide of military adoration that the country
experienced post 9/11.
~~~
Jtsummers
It was on the increase then, a backlash against some of the vehement (or at
least widely spread and popularized) anti-military rhetoric of the 60s and 70s
(Vietnam-era). But not quite to the fetishization that happened post-9/11
where saying anything against the military (even straight up facts) could get
you labeled anti-American.
------
cmurf
The author won a competition with this paper, Colin Powell honored the author
at the awards ceremony. I was an undergrad in polisci when this paper came
out, and we took it semi-seriously. I'm pretty sure the class was about South
American military juntas.
------
JosephOsako
The biggest problem I see with this is that is assumes something not in
evidence - that the concept of 'freedom' actually means anything, ever meant
anything, or could possibly ever mean anything. But then, that is true of
nearly everything people believe in; self-deception is, IMAO, the primary
nature of the human brain.
~~~
Infernal
I would argue that far from the concept of 'freedom' not meaning anything, it
means many things - it's heavily overloaded. For example - I have the freedom
to reply to your comment if I choose. The concept of freely choosing to take
or not take an action is surely meaningful.
I'll assume that you're not making the statement literally, that 'freedom....
could [not] possibly ever mean anything', and instead ask /which/ meaning of
the word 'freedom' do you believe to be an eternally-meaningless self-
deception?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Legal implications with torrent scraping site? - throwaway989
I recently had an idea for a weekend project to build a simple web app that scrapes popular torrent sites (like thepiratebay.org) and displays the newest movies, albums, etc in a clean user interface with thumbnails and torrent 'health'.<p>Obviously torrenting music and movies is illegal, but what legal implications would be involved with this if the thumbnails are merely links to the original source?
======
jacquesm
Massive lawsuits and jailtime not enough as legal implications to scare you
off?
------
Zev
TPB is unique in that it hosts it's own tracker. A much larger majority of
(public) sites do not do this and only serve to index the same data and show
ads to people who click on a link from google. And they still have trouble
from the RIAA and the ilk.
I suspect that you realize that you'll have trouble and are posting this from
an anon account as such.
------
ewams
Heard of torrent-finder.com ? Same thing and DoJ is after them:
[http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-
sea...](http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-seizes-bittorrent-search-
engine-domain-and-more-101126)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
CSS's "transparent" isn't all that transparent - arpohahau
http://coderwall.com/p/tpmsta
======
repsilat
No dark grey line in Konqueror 4.8.4 or Chromium 20 here, but Firefox 13.0.1
does mess it up like he says. (EDIT: browser versions added, OS is 64-bit Arch
Linux)
From a practical standpoint I guess you should be careful around `transparent`
if you're a designer, but the moral responsibility clearly falls on browser
vendors here. It's not meaningful to talk about the "colour" of transparent
objects, and using those values when doing anti-aliasing (however technically
appealing) is wrong.
I think the problem is that they're doing the anti-aliasing "too early".
They're not blending the colours you see, they're blending the colours they're
painting as they paint them.
~~~
overgard
I don't see this as the browsers fault (as a person that does graphics outside
of the web space). If you're blending something it's important to be clear
/what/ you're blending to, and the RGB matter just as much as the A.
"transparent" might be a part of the spec, but its tragically imprecise.
Its kind of like saying math is hard, so its up to the browser to fix it for
you. Math is hard, but there's always a right answer. If you're blending
things, there's a right answer too, and it's up to you to come up with it
instead of asking the browser to fix things for you. That's just how computing
is. Just because IE and chrome are clever enough to fix your own problems for
you doesn't mean you should feel entitled to expect that. If you're saying
"blend to (0,0,0,0)" you're literally saying "blend to black and transparent
equally". There is no ambiguity there. It's what has been asked for, even if
it's unintended. In a sense, I would say firefox is the only browser that has
gotten this right.
~~~
codeka
I would buy your argument if we were talking about a gradient. But this isn't
a gradient, it's an anti-aliased line.
The CSS describes a step transition from #eee to transparent, but because it's
on a diagonal, the browser is anti-aliasing the line.
Note that the reason it looks right in Chrome is because Chrome doesn't anti-
alias the line.
------
dphnx
This jsfiddle demonstrates it a bit more clearly.
<http://jsfiddle.net/liamnewmarch/GgUV2/>
The top gradient is from transparent to red, the bottom is from rgba(255, 0,
0, 0) to red.
Notice how the top gradient fades through grey - this is because 'transparent'
is a synonym for rgba(0, 0, 0, 0).
What the parent article picks up on, is how this is visible via Firefox's
antialiasing.
------
ferongr
I see no link to a relevant bug report linked in the article and without one,
that bug is never going to get fixed.
A bug report with a minimal testcase would take 50% the time it took to write
the article itself but actually have greater impact.
~~~
Hopka
But you'd have to figure out how to use Mozilla's bug tracker first. And that
has prevented me from reporting Bugs in Firefox every single time so far. And
I guess I'm not the only one.
~~~
ferongr
I'm not a professional in the field but I filed my first bug in Bugzilla some
years ago effortlessly. I'd expect a web author to be even better at using
technical tools.
Bugzilla is a wonderful tool for Mozilla. Unlike other projects that use
mailing lists or internal tools, Mozilla coordinates its projects mainly using
Bugzilla. Developers discuss patch approaches there, post WIPs and do code
reviews there. Considering Mozilla is comprised of many contributors all
around the globe such software is a necessity. Bugzilla may look complicated
and cumbersome but it's actually a powerful tool.
By comparison, the issue tracker used by the Chromium project is just a
public-facing ad-hoc thing. The project's workings are mostly opaque,
coordinated by Google's employees. The whole project works more like typical
closed-source software.
------
chengiz
I see a light grey triangle on firefox 13.0.1 in both examples. Have no idea
what they're talking about.
------
Dylan16807
> As it stands, many, _many_ things use transparent black when they shouldn't.
Transparent is transparent. Some code might be lazy and calculate colors based
on only three of four color channels but that is a bug and will be fixed.
------
dguaraglia
Firefox 14.01 on OS X Snow Leopard: works the same as in latest Chrome.
------
ck2
I see dark grey line between the triangles on Firefox 15 beta3 Windows XP Home
32bit
Maybe this is hardware dependent? I do not have any hardware acceleration that
I am aware of - integrated i3 graphics.
~~~
ThisIsADogHello
Looks to be hardware dependant. On 32bit Firefox 14.0.1 under win7 64bit, I
only see the thin line if I disable hardware acceleration in my settings.
------
nrkn
Firefox 14.0.1, Windows 7 x64. Grey line is visible for a split second as page
loads then disappears. EDIT: well now this is bizarre - it disappears and
reappears as I scroll.
~~~
steve-howard
I'm on Firefox 15, Windows 8 preview x64. Gray line stays visible. Odd.
~~~
nrkn
<http://imgur.com/dFXFa>
There is a grey line in frames 1 and 3 but not in 2.
------
kevingadd
Premultiplied alpha exists to solve this and similar problems.
~~~
mistercow
Premultiplied alpha exists to solve one problem: multiplying by the alpha
channel is common to almost all of the Porter-Duff compositing operations, and
computers used to be slow, so premul came about as a way of speeding up
drawing operations. Instead of multiplying each time, you simply multiplied
the alpha channels in advance.
Unfortunately, this causes a _ton_ of problems when you're doing anything with
transparent images outside the realm of Porter-Duff, since the process is not
fully reversible. In addition, it has tainted the way that developers think
about alpha channels, so that they erroneously act like there is only One True
Clear Color, which is how we ended up with issues like the one described in
TFA in the first place.
Premul is not the solution. Premul is the original problem.
~~~
ziedaniel1
I'm no graphics expert, but I'm pretty sure premul is not just an optimization
technique -- it's a fundamentally different approach at alpha blending, and it
makes some new things possible and some behavior more correct. See
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/11/06/premulti...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/11/06/premultiplied-
alpha.aspx) . Sure, if you don't need the extra features premul provides (like
the built-in ability for additive blending), then you can do some clever
computations like IE apparently does to get the same result, but it's much
simpler just to do things with premul.
------
forgottenpaswrd
I don't see a problem with the triangles on any of my browsers. I had tested
in 3 of them on my mac and 3 different in Linux, just for curiosity.
~~~
pstadler
No problem with FF 14.0.1 on OSX for me as well.
------
wbobeirne
Articles about CSS quirks in certain browsers really bug me when the author
does not also include a screenshot of the issue they're pointing out.
------
gddr
RGBA can be unintuitive. Opera implemented transitions by interpolating them
(I think it's solved now), which turns out not to work very well:
<http://bugs.hawn.be/opera/transitions/color/>
------
grayrest
I'm on Aurora (16.0a2 (2012-07-23)) on OS X 10.7 and the two examples look
identical.
~~~
city41
I'm on OSX 10.8 and Firefox 13.0.1 and I can't reproduce the problem. Both
examples also look identical for me.
~~~
mark_story
Same for me on Firefox 14 on 10.8, both examples look the same.
------
jay_kyburz
so stick with rgba() colours then?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Youporn.com is now a 100% Redis Site - potomak
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/redis-db/d4QcWV0p-YM
======
antirez
That's porn for database geeks: 100 million pageviews per day, 300k requests
per second against Redis.
The way they use MySQL is also interesting IMHO: they populate a relational
database in order to be able to build new indexes in the Redis side, using the
relational DB for the stuff it is best at, generating new "views" of the data
easily.
(Relational DBs are also good to do a zillion more things of course.)
~~~
badboy
You know your software is successful when it's used by porn sites :D
~~~
pud
I remember in the 90's having a conversation with my friend. We were
discussing Linux vs Windows for web hosting. My friend said "tell me if you
can find a single porn site that's hosted on Windows." He was right, I
couldn't find any.
~~~
traskjd
They do exist. I run a .NET developer tools company and had a customer
purchase our data access products to use with several of their porn sites.
Never did manage to see the final product though!
~~~
mahmud
You prude!
------
RandallBrown
For some reason I always imagine porn sites to be run by guys in cheap suits
and lots of hair gel. Then I realize that in order to run a site with the kind
of traffic that some of them have, you really need to have some decent
engineers on staff.
~~~
rplnt
Some time ago I've read an IAmA on reddit with staff member of some big porn
portal. It was quite interesting but I don't remember what porn site it was
and don't want to blindly trying to google it as I'm at work. Writing this in
case anyone knows and would post it here :)
~~~
Mikushi
I did this IAmA couple month back :
[http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_...](http://en.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kf4be/nsfw_iama_former_lead_developer_of_pornhub_amaa/)
And i am happy that my months of lobbying for Redis at the office paid :D
------
mvzink
You know what this means? Salvatore Sanfilippo could be executed if he visits
Iran.
~~~
Iroiso
Absolutely... Sucks right..
------
SafdarIqbal
"After the switchover we had to add some additional Redis nodes but not
because Redis was overworked but because the network cards couldn't keep up
with Redis."
Wow!
~~~
EmielMols
That doesn't seem very special or unique to me though. In almost all settings
where some in-memory data is pushed on the network stack, you can expect stuff
to be network bound.
------
eapen
Great way to advertise the website to one of your target groups. ;) But
seriously, I am quite surprised by the number of visits the site gets.
------
ksajadi
problem is you can't tell your boss: "well youporn uses it" when he looks
dubious about using redis for his trading system.
~~~
awj
That depends entirely on your boss.
Mine would probably hear the reasoning out ... then ask for a less "unsavory"
example he can use when talking with everyone else.
------
hercynium
I'm currently looking into redis for similar needs. I'd be using it from perl
and wondered how will it would scale... (IIRC (from people I know who have
worked there) youporn/pornhub runs on Catalyst, an MVC-based web framework
written in perl.)
~~~
draegtun
Their certainly regarded as probably being one of the _busiest_ Catalyst sites
and they were employing Perl/Catalyst developers back in 2009:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565152>
NB: The HN article link hits an expired job post. Here is original job ad via
WayBackMachine:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090418113245/http://jobs.perl.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090418113245/http://jobs.perl.org/job/10462)
------
ypcx
Probably a better question for the Redis group, but I'll throw it here anyway.
Can someone explain why there's no Ordered Map in Redis? Basically to achieve
and ordered index, one has to use Sorted Set and a classic Hash Map, and pair
these two when ordered data are needed, which is an extra level of indirection
and wasted space. Am I missing something?
------
scorpion032
Porn industry is generally among the first to adopt new technologies and
promising architectures.
Among other things, this indicates Redis' impending adoption as a standard
infrastructure component across the industry in general and as a replacement
to standard databases in some of those places.
------
Jayasimhan
Damn society, why can't you let these guys have a company blog where they can
blog about this.
------
nilsbunger
The perfect alibi for watching porn at work: investigating redis.
------
exim
How are you getting the actual content?
~~~
glogla
I would guess lot of nginxes (nginxii?) on top of SAN / really big NAS. But
I'm curious about that too.
Unless you ask how they get porn, that is.
~~~
maw
It'd surely be nginces (for n. and a., anyway).
------
joering2
does anyone know anything about their $ #s?? revenue model,
revenue/profits/costs #s ??
------
nvk
And you thought people were spending time on Facebook eh....
------
keithvan
When will they unleash the Python?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
All the Problems with WeWork’s Tyrannical New “No Meat” Policy - shimms
https://slate.com/business/2018/07/all-the-problems-with-weworks-no-meat-policy.html
======
talltimtom
People who eat meat (me included) do not need to eat meat at every single
meal. So what if the company events will be vegetarian and you expenses
dinners will have to as well? You can still eat meat whenever you want. They
just won’t be paying for it. Our cantina has vegitarian days and no-one hardly
even notices. Though if you have a meat addiction and absolutely need 200g at
every meat, you can just bring your own lunch.
I feel people are far to religious about this. Bring back the outrage when any
of their employees starved to death.
There are companies who don’t have company events at all and who don’t let
employees expense any meals at all. Shouldn’t they be the real “tyrants”?
~~~
tomjen3
There are carnists who only eat meat (Jordan Petersen is one) but like any
minority they have to deal with more friction than the rest of us.
Vegetarians are also a minority, why cater specifically to them?
~~~
geoalchimista
> Vegetarians are also a minority, why cater specifically to them?
Second you on this. You may be interested in this article (which answers the
_why_ ):
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
[https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-
dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-
of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)
------
easytiger
> WeWork’s 6,000 employees around the globe have now been told that they will
> no longer be able to expense meals including meat,
Genuinely would not give wework any business on hearing this. Utterly
disgraceful.
> it’s also banning meat (but not fish) from all corporate events on the
> grounds
Is anyone comfortable with a property holding company telling you what you
can't eat on the property you pay them to use?
~~~
ethiclub
Excusing the potential hypocrisy of the policy re: fish vs meat (given general
movement in recent years as to the complexity of fish nervous systems) - As
well as the fact that 'fish' is not a useful term in biology...
It seems extreme to say "Utterly disgraceful."... Let's assume the principle
of charity here, and say that the move was about stopping net negative emotion
in conscious entities.
They aren't stopping you from doing it. They just aren't funding it themselves
any more. Your reply appears very knee-jerk considering that the principle of
charity essentially makes this news into: "Wework cannot morally pay expenses
for things that were used in the forced behaviour, or at worst negative
emotion of, animals in modern industrialised farming. However, you can still
eat meat on our property"
>Is anyone comfortable with a property holding company telling you what you
can't eat on the property you pay them to use? You can. They just won't pay
you for it. And this isn't about clients, it's about employees (As an aside,
this is possibly a statement that was worth due diligence checks being done,
before assuming and posting).
I also note that many people are doing back of the envelope calculations on
environmental impact of eggs vs flights etc. Can this not simply be "We
[wework] don't want to pay for what we see as murder"?
~~~
easytiger
> They aren't stopping you from doing it.
The article states that it applies to any onsite event with catering a
customer might hold. Perhaps I misunderstand. Given most events hosted there
are done in cooperation with or illustrating a relationship between wework
with no commercial payment from the third party, i dunno where the lines are.
> "We [wework] don't want to pay for what we see as murder"?
The questionable predicate for doing so is the environmental impact. Where do
you get that from? They absolutely would not win any fans imposing moral
absolutism on the eating habits of the majority of people.
~~~
bootlooped
> They absolutely would not win any fans imposing moral absolutism on the
> eating habits of the majority of people.
I don't think they're imposing anything, it seems like they're just saying
they're no longer going to pay for it. From what I can tell, clients,
employees and tenants would be free to eat their own meat-containing meals by
simply paying for them.
------
b34r
This is pretty obviously just the cofounder’s values being forced on the
company. It’s one thing to promote a vegetarian lifestyle, another to ram it
down throats and create awkward situations across the entire company.
------
lukeinator42
Haha I think I’m going to have to try making those bacon wrapped figs, they
look delicious
------
mabynogy
Probably illegal as it's not good for health.
~~~
GuB-42
\- (pesco)vegetarian diet is not bad for health. Vegan diet can be bad for
health but only if you are not careful (ex: make sure you get enough vitamin
B12). In fact, veg* tend to be healthier, though I think it is just a
byproduct of simply caring about diet rather than the details of it.
\- They don't ban meat, they just refuse to pay for meals that include meat.
\- They can make exceptions for health and religious reasons.
~~~
mabynogy
It's a controversial subject. I also think it's a political subject in western
countries (not in India).
About the "if" (you are not careful), we can also say that for McDonald.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
14 Year Old Call of Duty Hacker Hired by Microsoft - mjurek
http://www.tekgoblin.com/2011/05/27/14-year-old-call-of-duty-hacker-hired-by-microsoft/
======
patio11
A friend of mine from high school bragged that he achieved some measure of
infamy in middle school by hacking Diablo in such a manner that it was
possible to duplicate items. He then claimed Blizzard offered him an
internship -- again, in high school -- for showing them how he did it. I knew
about the incident (oh, the wages of a misspent youth -- Diablo, not hacking),
but always figured he was embellishing most of it.
Some years later, sure enough, guess who was in the Diablo II credits.
------
citricsquid
Maybe it's a double bluff thing, like when Valve caught the Half Life leaker:
[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-21-the-boy-who-
sto...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-21-the-boy-who-stole-half-
life-2-article)
~~~
yurisagalov
I actually thought this article was significantly better than the parent
article, and is definitely worth a read.
------
estel
I don't see anything in that statement equivalent to "hired". Is there another
source that indicates this?
~~~
Gunther
I agree, it sounds as though they are "reeducating" him into a white hat and
not necessarily hiring him on as a employee. It would surprise me if they
actually hired him right now because he had set up a phishing scam. It is good
though that they are working with him vs throwing the book at him especially
for one so young.
------
iam
Hired a phisher? Thought they were hiring someone who was making wallhacks or
aimbots or anything like that. That would've made much more sense. Put a guy
like that into security!
------
jackolas
I'm not surprised this has happened but I wouldn't expect this from Microsoft
nor with a person who has defrauded others after hacking a system.
------
rzitex
Huh, I should be happy for Microsoft hiring a practiced phisher. Sounds like a
good advancement for them.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Webrf: refresh that browser on your other screen - rynop
http://rynop.com/web-devs-refresh-that-browser-on-your-other-s
======
rynop
Looking for someone to help implement the mac port of this as I don't have a
mac. I have a start but its probably not the best way.
Direct link to github: <https://github.com/rynop/webrf>
~~~
latchkey
<http://livereload.com/>
~~~
rynop
<http://incident57.com/codekit/> is another mac only alternative
------
vijaykiran
If you are using QuickSilver, install Chrome plugin and create a hotkey to
reload the tab under Current Web Page.
<http://cl.ly/3h2o0v1e1v3O371y3G3b>
Edit: On Mac OS X
------
squeee
The Browser Refresh plugin for Sublime Text does a very similar thing, looks
like it is only for Chrome, but works of a Mac.
Thank you for the post though, helped me find this other plugin.
------
mvitorino
Very useful idea. For some reason couldn't get it to work with Compiz so I'm
using it with an Emacs command. Thanks.
------
themstheones
That's cool.
------
Toshio
I just tried the tool and find it useful. It can be made more powerful by
coupling it with the Linux utility wmctrl.
~~~
rynop
I should mention, my implementation does not cause you to lose focus of the
window (IDE most likely) that you are currently working in.
I'll check out wmctrl
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Nuclear Technology Abandoned Decades Ago Might Give Us Safer, Smaller Reactors - eaguyhn
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/02/26/molten-salt-nuclear-reactors/
======
flatfilefan
The article totally ignores the progress in the rest of the world. For example
Russia, that also developed world first nuclear plant ever, is about to build
a closed fuel cycle reactor: “The launch of the experimental BREST-OD-300
reactor in Seversk (Tomsk Region), which will operate on the new mixed nitride
uranium-plutonium fuel, will be held in 2026.”
[http://mbir.org/the-unique-nuclear-reactor-in-seversk-
will-s...](http://mbir.org/the-unique-nuclear-reactor-in-seversk-will-start-
working-in-2026/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Adevinta acquires eBay Classified Groups for 9.2B$ - Darkstryder
https://www.adevinta.com/news/adevinta-signs-agreement-to-acquire-ebay-classifieds-group/
======
AznHisoka
They acquired the classified business not the entire company. Might want to
make that clear in the title.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
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