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Andrew Ng – What is the most important problem the AI community should work on? - lukeplato
https://blog.deeplearning.ai/blog/the-batch-apples-ai-strategy-retail-surveillance-clothes-that-fight-face-recognition-suboptimal-optimizers
======
rvz
> Explainable and ethical AI
This IS the most important problem in AI and is a precursor to "Healthcare
including Covid-19" and "Combating misinformation". It is also a precursor
into achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
However, Most of what we see about AI is the hype and capabilities it will
bring and glossing over the actual issues; especially with GPT-3 which hasn't
been extensively scrutinised yet by the experts. It's still a black box which
doesn't explain why it has generated the text based on its input. I can
definately see GPT-3 being applied into legal text, but only if it can improve
its explainability.
Until then, we must keep writing detectors for these models.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Legal Support for Substack Writers - sethbannon
https://on.substack.com/p/legal-support-for-substack-writers
======
kylestewart
Good for Substack! Drawing a line in the sand like this makes me want to
support their cause.
I get excited when I read stories about companies or groups standing up
against patent trolls. Reading this made me feel a similar sort of excitement.
Of course, it will be challenging for Substack to determine which actions are
"bad-faith" and which are justified. It's probably too much to expect for them
to stand up for all points of view on their platform that meet their terms of
use.
[edit: adding a question]
Can anyone recommend good writing on Substack to follow?
~~~
toomuchtodo
> Can anyone recommend good writing on Substack to follow?
[https://nathantankus.substack.com/](https://nathantankus.substack.com/)
[https://oversharing.substack.com/](https://oversharing.substack.com/)
[https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)
[https://sirota.substack.com/](https://sirota.substack.com/)
[https://gwern.substack.com/](https://gwern.substack.com/)
------
fmajid
That's actually quite impressive, unlike the exploitative dumpster fire that
is Medium.
------
peoplenotbots
This is very interesting. A decentralized media platform company.
~~~
input_sh
What's decentralised about it? You can't even use your own domain yet.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Show HN: Coachella live stream + chat using Meteor - stephenhandley
http://coachella.hello10.com/
======
kappaknight
This is just <http://www.youtube.com/coachella> ?
~~~
stephenhandley
yeah its their player. i was originally hoping to have better access to the
individual channels/stages over the gdata api.. but there aren't individual
streams so ended up being restricted in what i could do with the app.. pretty
bummed about that, but there was no way to know until streaming started
yesterday. just wanted to see what meteor was like and this seemed like a good
candidate
------
mirsadm
We also made a schedule/planner for Coachella here: <http://t.co/6wr61E3e>
It shows recommendations and you can print/share your schedule. Much more
useful than what the guys on the forums are doing (sharing Excel sheets!)
~~~
stephenhandley
rad... there's a bunch of bands on their i wish they had streaming live .. you
have any idea why some bands aren't on the live stream?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Malawi legalises the growing, selling and export of cannabis - edward
https://africafeeds.com/2020/02/27/malawi-legalises-the-growing-selling-and-export-of-cannabis/
======
cies
Finally. I've got the impression that many drugs were politically criminalized
in order make sure non-western countries would not get wealthy by them. (Yet
publicly different reasons were used)
And no this is not like oil. Mining (for oil or gold among others) is a very
different business than farming (for weed or coca or opium among others),
leading to a different wealth distribution. All that western "free trade"
promotion BS while being so so careful with importing agricultural products to
"protect local farmers" whom in turn became a small % yet heavily amplified in
output by their diesel machines: this clearly made winners and losers in the
global "free" trade game.
Nuf ranting: this news shows some movement towards common sense policy.
~~~
econcon
We all know about the opium wars
~~~
cies
I kinda feel this was left our of my history lessons. I have to explain this a
lot to people: your royal families were imperial drug lords.
------
dingribanda
In some parts of Africa, growing khat is more lucrative than growing food.
This causes acute food shortages. I am not sure how this is going to affect
growing food, if cannabis is more lucrative than growing food.
~~~
MisterTea
Hemp seeds can be eaten and provide nutrients. Though I am not sure of the
yield per hectare vs a staple crop like rice or wheat.
~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Presumably, the way they'd be growing, seeds aren't a desirable byproduct. The
yield per acre for hemp seeds is around 700 pounds.[0] In comparison, rice can
yield an order of magnitude more at 7471 pounds.[1]
Note that these numbers aren't for Malawi's climate but the difference is
definitely still going to be there.
[0] [https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-
products/fiber/industrial-...](https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-
products/fiber/industrial-hemp) [1]
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/190479/rice-yield-per-
ha...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/190479/rice-yield-per-harvested-
acre-in-the-us-from-2000/)
~~~
dumbfoundded
I'm unsure of the long term potential of hemp seeds. I don't think the
genetics have been optimized for growing seeds yet. Most people breed for CBD,
THC, and specific terpene profiles. The higher volume, lower margin goods like
seed and fiber have been relatively unexplored by the market.
~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Good point - I can only imagine that there is a lot of optimization possible
for seeds if cannabis becomes used as a food source.
I'd argue that the genetics of cannabis/hemp for use as fiber have been
relatively more explored than seeds by selective breeding of Cannabis Sativa
during the milleniums in some cultures when hemp fiber was the fiber of
choice.[0]
[0] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-teenage-
mind/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-teenage-
mind/201105/history-cannabis-in-ancient-china)
~~~
dumbfoundded
I believe fiber and seeds were the original uses of the plant. Psychoactive
properties weren't discovered until much later.
As for genetics, the tools we have now are so much better for breeding than
even 25 years ago. For example, cannabis in the 90s was ~5% THC. Now it's easy
to find strains over 30%. Similarly, CBD flower and CBG flower didn't exist
even 5 years ago and now we have 20% CBD flower strains.
I'm sure people are working on genetics similarly for seed production and
fiber but the money isn't there yet. Entire supply chains have to be built to
support the industry. It's not just the farmers and genetics. There's
processing equipment on multiple levels required as well as consumer markets
that have to be established.
~~~
thatcat
What tools are you talking about? I thought that was due to many iterations of
selection for specific traits.
~~~
dumbfoundded
Certain types of large manufacturing equipment must be built in a crop-
specific way or at least benefit significantly by being designed for a
particular crop.
For example, all cannabis flower (non-extracted) is harvested by hand and then
trimmed by hand. Recently machines were made to trim large amounts of cannabis
efficiently with high quality. It used to take one person at least an hour to
trim a pound of weed. Now a machine can do 10lbs a minute.
Throughout the supply-chain, there are machines that must be built to support
the physical scale. This isn't unique to cannabis, vaping had the same
problem. The cartridges used to all be filled by hand until someone invested
in the machinery. That what causes standards and grades to be created. None of
that really exists in cannabis/hemp right now.
------
bilekas
Wait a min..
> legalised the growing, selling and export of cannabis.
> But the country still restricts the legalization of cannabis for personal
> use
So you can grow it and even sell it.. But if you dare consume it you're a
criminal ? Or the person you sell it to, if they consume it they're breaking
the ?
This sounds very odd!
EDIT: My mistake, its for hemp and oil production. That makes way more sense.
~~~
Scoundreller
Then there’s Canada, where you can grow it or buy it (from legal
distributors), but import/export is verboten without a license that’s
impossible to get for personal use.
~~~
retrac
Where would Canada be exporting it to? Until now, the only other country
besides Canada with fully legal cannabis was Uruguay. As I understand it,
those clauses were in the Cannabis Act to assuage the concerns of other
nations that Canada might get involved in what they would see as international
drug trafficking.
~~~
loeg
Also, many countries (186) are nominally still party to the 1961 Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which puts marijuana in "Schedule IV:" "The drug
… is particularly liable to abuse and to produce ill effects, and such
liability is not offset by substantial therapeutic advantages." So even above-
board international trade in cannabis may be problematic.
> The Commentary notes that "Whether the prohibition of drugs in Schedule IV
> (cannabis and cannabis resin, desomorphine, heroin, ketobemidone) should be
> mandatory or only recommended was a controversial question at the
> Plenipotentiary Conference." The provision adopted represents "a compromise
> which leaves prohibition to the judgement, though theoretically not to the
> discretion, of each Party." The Parties are required to act in good faith in
> making this decision, or else they will be in violation of the treaty.
(Wikipedia)
~~~
Scoundreller
Meh, what's the UN going to do if you break their policy, send you a strongly
worded letter?
------
michaelrubin
In college, my economics professor put a question on the final about how we
might solve the economic issues around the corn blight in Malawi. At the time,
I wouldn't have dared raise this as the answer.
~~~
lavezzi
They are shifting focus from growing tobacco to growing weed. This really
doesn't solve anything aside from replacing the economic output from a rapidly
declining industry.
------
brianbreslin
I heard lesotho has a huge business of selling medical marijuana to Europe.
[1] I met a guy in this business, the scale is huge.
1\. [https://time.com/5752765/lesotho-africa-cannibabis-
exports/](https://time.com/5752765/lesotho-africa-cannibabis-exports/)
~~~
dumbfoundded
The European cannabis market is early and developing. Many companies have been
bitten by building out capacity before demand. All of the Canadian cannabis
companies way over produce for the Canadian market so they planned to sell to
Europe and possibly the US. Other countries like Columbia are also aiming to
get this international export market.
~~~
52-6F-62
From what I understand the overproduction isn't because of lack of demand, but
provinces' slow rollout of sale and distribution.
For instance, here in Ontario the government had a plan that would have had 40
physical stores across the province by October 2018 with plans for more. The
incoming government killed that. The province saw fewer than 20 stores by the
following April, largely concentrated in Toronto.
Everything _did_ look primed for a great market and it was essentially
kneecapped out of political spite.
~~~
dumbfoundded
IIRC, the value of the combined public Canadian cannabis companies was >$10B
(before the 2019 q2/q3 collapse). The size of the Canadian cannabis market is
<$5B. I believe analysts priced in the export market opportunity, particularly
to Europe and the United States.
I do believe problems with the implementation in the Canadian market hurt
cashflows and accelerated the expected timeline of investors to find other
markets. These rollout problems certainly hurt but everyone knew Canada isn't
a huge market.
------
bitxbitxbitcoin
But personal consumption isn't allowed. This is a classic example of a
government getting in on legalization for the money and not for the betterment
of its citizens.
~~~
dkural
I am not sure how full legalization contributes to the betterment of citizens,
especially young citizens.
~~~
bregma
When cannabis was legalized in Canada consumption rates did not go up. In
fact, they didn't change much at all: they stayed fairly high (no pun,
honest). This is evidence that making possession of cannabis illegal has far
less to do "think of the children" and more to do with either mindless
political dogma or else preservation of personal privilege of some elites
somewhere (and those two options are not mutually exclusive).
~~~
klingonopera
Yeah, there are many political reasons for criminalizing it.
What I found pretty eye-opening in the sense of "Oh wow, that's so obvious, I
actually _didn 't_ think about _that_ " was that one of the reasons was the
American Prohibition in the 30s, and after it was abolished, a bunch of people
were about to lose their jobs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0)
------
dzonga
malawi already has a reputation in southern african countries of producing
some potent weed. I guess, this is a good move for them. hopefully, in SA n
zim they will able to access Malawi weed easily now
------
CurtBurbinger
How big of a deal is this for North American growers?
~~~
loeg
Probably not a big deal? The fed still thinks weed is illegal and if customs
is doing their job, above-board imports won't be permitted. The existing
smuggling industry is probably already cornered by cartels and don't pay much
for their supply anyway.
~~~
CurtBurbinger
Canada has legal grow operations though
------
carredondo
I read that as "growling"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Ask HN: How do you handle billing by the day? - rquantz
Several prominent members of the HN community advocate billing <i>at least</i> by the day for freelancers/consultants. This is extremely appealing to me, and I've begun discussing changing to this billing structure with some of my existing clients.<p>That being said, I'm still not totally sure how this works. I believe I recall tpacek saying that any client who has any problems or bats an eye at this type of arrangement is pathological and should be avoided. I will acknowledge this is the case, but some of my apparently pathological clients have questions that I don't have really good answers for yet:<p><pre><code> Will you charge me for a day if I have a ten minute phone call/question for you?
What about 1 hour?
How will you handle emergencies if you're scheduled to work for someone else that day?
etc...
</code></pre>
It seems that when a client pays by the day they have a reasonable expectation that you can guarantee that they have your complete attention for the entire day. Earlier this week I actually had my first "by the day" billing engagement on a new project for an existing client. They were scheduled for Monday, and on Monday morning I sat down at my desk to start work for them, only to find a frantic email from a client whose webserver had apparently been hacked. I spent the morning cleaning up that mess, and it was close to noon by the time I got to start working on my supposedly only task for the day. Should I have charged my emergency client for a day's work (assuming I had negotiated that with them, which I hadn't yet) and then charge the client I had scheduled that day for a day's work as well? Or should I have called it a day when I had finished the cleanup, and told the originally scheduled client I would work on their stuff when I had another day free -- in this case, probably not until the new year?<p>Billing by the day sounds great, but there are a lot of edge cases that I'm not sure how to handle yet. Most of my clients at this point are pretty reasonable to work with, but they are small businesses with non-unlimited budgets.
======
1123581321
Good question. I'm new at it as well. My policy, which I am admittedly
experimenting with, is to count a 4+ hour day as one day. I also add up
partials and count them as a day when they hit four hours. So:
Monday: 2 hours.
Tuesday: 15 minutes.
Wednesday: 9 hours.
Thursday: 5 hours.
Friday: 3 hours.
adds up to three days plus 1.25 hours accruing. It still has issues like:
should this be explained to a client because it's confusing? What do I do
about accruals that never reach four? Does it encourage me to work close to
four hours per day, which is not the point of it?
Another method I've thought of, which I read on some company's blog, is to
assign people to ongoing projects who bill daily, and to also have a sweeper
who bills hourly on questions, emergencies and miscellany. I'm not sure if
clients would accept such a person's hourly exceeding the daily rate without
setting that expectation upfront.
It's hard to fit because the daily method is best for a developer who works to
a spec, turns the site over to someone else when done, and always leaves gaps
between projects to avoid any overlap due to deployment issues and other
problems like that.
And meanwhile, some freelancers I know are saying that weekly is all the
rage...
~~~
dylanhassinger
the 4+hour model is awesome. thanks for sharing
------
ishbits
Maybe not all types of contracting work for per day billing.
For me I think it works as I'm paid to deliver a functioning product prototype
that then goes to QA. Getting pulled into something urgent that required
immediate attention is rare, very rare. So I can pretty easily predict how
many hours I can devote a month out.
But in your case, do you have to declare which days you allocate to a
customer? I suppose if its sysadmin type stuff you may have a queue that the
customer expects you to get to on or by a certain day.
------
dylanhassinger
I have a friend who bills by the day, because it gives _more_ flexibility and
not less. His explanation: sometimes you have days where you only put in 2
hours, other times you have days where you put in 12. He chops a project up
into how many "days" he thinks it will take and runs with it.
Really the "days" becomes an arbitrary unit of measurement at that point,
which is really what "hours" are too but it's hard to sell that to clients
sometimes.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Mail carriers accuse USPS of faking Amazon delivery records - molecule
http://www.cbs46.com/story/36856477/mail-carriers-usps-warns-amazon-customers-will-get-free-stuff-if-mail-is-delivered-late
======
wskinner
It feels good to be vindicated about this. As a San Francisco and Berkeley
resident, this has happened to me more times than I can count. Seemingly every
item carried by USPS was marked delivered prematurely. This was a factor in
cancelling my amazon prime membership.
Every time I reported the problem to amazon, they offered a credit or
replacement, but the effort of contacting customer support so often was too
much of a time sink.
------
burntrelish1273
USPS employees, in my experience, tend to be low-energy, lazy and
inconsistent. I pay for a PO Box and they can't be bothered to leave packages
in a self-service lock box and the key in my box, that is available, more than
15% of the time. Instead they waste time filling out a package available for
pickup card, leave that and waste an hour or more of my time with another
trip.
I'm tempted to go back to UPS Store, but they also don't do self-service
packages. Amazon Lockers could work for small packages, but they're always
full... and don't work for eBay, AliBaba, etc. Another issue is that PO Boxes
are treated as second-class citizens because some carriers, many items and
many sellers refuse to deliver to anything but a physical address.
The ideal carrier and drop-off/pickup point integration would do self-service
sending and receiving of nearly any reasonably-sized package and amount of
letters with a real street address, open 24x7. And if necessary or for a small
fee, bring it to you wherever you were: basically, like a carrier/post-office
with an integrated courier capability.
------
matchmike1313
I would agree with this. Typically when UPS drops off an Amazon package I get
an alert with away on my Amazon app. The other day I had a USPS one, picked it
up at the mailbox, and didn't get the alert till hours later.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Cool progress bars - zacinbusiness
So there's the new hotness in webdesign that seems to be crafting cool looking progress bars. I think, though, that the new hotness should instead be crafting websites that don't require progress bars. Because, you know, it's not 1999.
======
leoplct
In 1999 there wasn't Turbolinks.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
$6,000+ of app design ebook sales today - rob41
http://nathanbarry.com/learned-selling-6000-ebook-today/
======
bdunn
Nathan - congrats buddy!
There are a few key takeaways _anyone_ who has a product, or wants to create a
product, should take note of.
* Email lists are very, very important. I was also able to market my freelancing book to 2,000+ freelancers on my Planscope list. Like Nathan with his weekly list, I had a huge head start.
* Additionally, the theory that you can't sell to the HN audience is bunk. When I wrote a post similar to Nathan's about how I netted $2k in presales, I made another $1k that day alone off HN traffic. And I'm absolutely certain that Nathan is making sales right now from HN. Something to keep in mind: HN doesn't like being sent to marketing sites. HN wants immediate and direct value. So instead of just showing off your latest product, put together a post about what technical or promotional hurdles you went through putting together your product - i.e., sell through education. __Look at my submissions to see this in action for both my products. __
* Increase customer LTV wherever possible. You could pay Nathan $29 for the book, which triggers as an OK price to pay for most of us. Now that you're interested, for $30 more you can get some videos and PSDs. These people came for one thing and left with another, the same underlying theory supermarkets use to upsell you at the checkout line.
* Nathan now has a mailing list of people who have _already taken out their credit cards for him_ in the past. This is pure gold.
~~~
petercooper
_Email lists are very, very important. I was also able to market my
freelancing book to 2,000+ freelancers on my Planscope list._
I'll second this (along with the scores of people I've discussed this topic
with) because I accidentally turned this into my full-time business!
I started my Ruby Weekly newsletter merely with the goal of promoting books
and screencasts I wanted to make but it has gone a bit _too_ well and now I
have 75k subscribers to speak with. Sadly still no books.. but the training
and screencasts have gone well.
~~~
bdunn
And because you're dishing out a weekly email, you're keeping the list healthy
and motivated.
I've made the mistake (and I know a lot of other's have too) of: build email
list, silence, silence, silence, SELL SELL SELL. ...And then Mailchimp
contacts you about your unsubscribe rate being too high :-)
------
nathanbarry
Update: I am now at $11,536.90 in less than 24 hours of sales. I guess I can
cross "Make $10,000 in one day" off my bucket list!
~~~
ryangilbert
Awesome! Congrats!
------
OWaz
I just bought the book and the preview chapter is what convinced me that the
book was worth owning. The content was new to me and it was obvious you've put
in a lot of effort. I'm just at the beginning stages of iOS development and I
thought reading your book now will be a good start to get me thinking
differently about app development.
------
rob41
I contributed to that $6k with a book purchase today. Nicely done Nathan!
~~~
nathanbarry
Thanks Rob! I always appreciate the support.
------
philipalexander
How much of this marketing for an ebook do you think applies for a
conventional book launch through a publisher? I guess that question also
applies to any other tangible product for that matter?
~~~
nathanbarry
Since I haven't done traditional publishing, I don't really know. But I do
know that in a traditional format it would take a lot more work for
considerably less revenue.
I really think for technical books/guides like this digital publishing is the
way to go.
------
keiferski
I have a question, for you Nathan, or even anyone who has published an ebook.
Do you think a large portion of your success is due to the commercial nature
of the book? (You help people make better apps, which makes them money) Or, is
it just one among many factors?
I ask because I am contemplating writing an ebook, but it's more of a self-
help-style book. Nothing cheesy, I promise. But the premise is more of "I'll
help you accomplish X" rather than "I'll help you build beautiful apps/achieve
Y technical feature."
Thanks a ton, and good luck.
~~~
nathanbarry
Really it comes down to proving value. The price and content doesn't matter
(very much) if the value is there. People like Chris Guillebeau
(<http://chrisguillebeau>) sell digital guides on all kinds of subjects and do
well.
Though generally something that helps people make money will be easier to
justify. Send me an email ([email protected]) with more info and I'd be
happy to give more detailed feedback.
~~~
keiferski
Great answer, I really appreciate it.
------
melling
Nathan, I almost completely missed this. I woke up to it on HN. Yes, I did get
your email yesterday around 8:30am but when I read it on my iPhone, I skimmed
right to the center section, with the 4 icons, which is now my routine after
getting it for months. Your book has been coming for a while so didn't
actually notice that it shipped.
Anyway, I'd suggest a more prominent headline in your next newsletter, or even
include the different versions. Heck, why not just dedicate half an issue to
discussing it?
~~~
nathanbarry
I didn't want to seem like I was spamming my list by focusing on it too much.
Though I will continue to mention it in the coming weeks.
Thanks for subscribing to the newsletter!
------
npguy
During the gold rush the people who made money were the ones who sold the
tools. Same logic applies here. (nothing against that btw it is just how it
works)
~~~
nathanbarry
I've made money on both sides. $40k on selling apps, now $7k selling the book
(the tool in your analogy). I think it is good to do both.
~~~
npguy
That's great Nathan and Thanks for sharing as well.
Truly inspiring for all the folks sitting on Xcode day in an day out
------
connorski
Awesome article.
Question about Gumroad - it looks like you are able to make purchases directly
from your site <http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/> and not have to
be directed to <https://gumroad.com/l/AppDesign>. Is this the norm for Gumroad
or did you have to add anything custom to the process?
~~~
nathanbarry
That is standard with Gumroad using their modal feature. It was really easy to
setup!
------
jcampbell1
This is a fantastic article, I learned a ton.
Unfortunately when I went to buy the product, it dead locks chrome at 100%
process usage, and it breaks scrolling in a bad way.
I also don't like the pricing: \- give me an obvious choice like the
Economist. At the bottom there should be a launch day offer for $80 that gives
me the full package for being a pre-review adopter. I need your product, but
as it stands there was no clear package to choose.
~~~
bdunn
I like having the tiered pricing, but I would probably minimize the 50 user
license package.
You should absolutely test this assumption, but I might try:
$49 -> book
$249 -> book + Photoshop originals + X hours of premium tutorial videos +
Obj-C PDF + sample project
You'll get +$10 for the baseline purchase, and I think a lot of people who are
willing to drop $50 might be _very_ persuaded to almost 5x their price for the
value you're putting in the fully loaded package. You're solving a real pain,
and people who do this for a living drop money on pain killers.
------
propercoil
I'm always happy when a geek makes money, way to go!
~~~
nathanbarry
Me too. I love these success stories, so I make sure to share my own revenue
numbers.
~~~
ideamonk
Congrats! I love it when money making geeks share revenue numbers.
------
nobleach
I emailed you this morning, read your blog entries and bought the book about
20 minutes later.... very good stuff.
------
noirman
Awesome stuff.
Two things I thought would significantly boost your sales:
1) Try book reviews by bloggers 2) Run deals on AppSumo, etc?
~~~
nathanbarry
If I had my launch planned better I would have had book reviews go live today.
But unfortunately I got overwhelmed and didn't get that done. Maybe next time!
------
antidaily
No money to be made in the App store, much to be made teaching people how to
build apps. Kudos.
~~~
patio11
Teaching people commercially relevant skills which bill out at $150 an hour is
a great thing for everyone involved. (And in that light this is possibly
_severely underpriced_. I love the packaging options available, but I think
there is probably also a packaging option for selling the same benefit to
customers at 10X the prices on this page right now.)
~~~
nathanbarry
I knew at some point you would tell me it was underpriced! :)
Patrick, thanks for all your encouragement and reminders to charge based on
value. Without that I would have picked a much lower price and probably made
half the money.
------
ryangilbert
Love that you used Gumroad for the sales. :)
~~~
nathanbarry
Me too. They are fantastic! I plan to post a detailed review later on.
------
locusm
Great post Nathan. What tools did you use to author the ebook and are you
looking beyond pdf format?
~~~
chinmoy
Yes! I would like to know a bit more about the tools used to create the ebook
too.
------
aymeric
Congratulations Nathan. Great article, great landing page for your book too.
------
volcom
I just bought a copy. Looking forward to great designed apps.
~~~
2muchcoffeeman
How long did it take to get the confirmation email? I've been waiting over 3
hours now.
------
overdeliver
You've probably heard the following parable:
Little Bull: "Let's run down the hill and make sweet love to a couple of
cows."
Big Bull: "I got a better idea, let's walk down and make sweet love to them
all."
When you have content of a transient nature, you got to get the going while
the going is good. An ebook launch like this will get the job done.
However, if you write a book that will blow people's minds and change a
culture or an industry forever, you don't need the big launch. The name of
your book will be whispered into the ears of others for a long time. You will
get your sales.
The latter is a lot harder to do, but I'm hoping I can do just that.
Watch this space.
~~~
nathanbarry
I agree that you want the book to truly influence people, but I think you'd be
surprised how important a strong launch is. Don't underestimate the importance
of making a big splash right away.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How to write if you cannot concentrate - aycangulez
http://www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/4078
======
dublinclontarf
Down, cached version here
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bltq7_q...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bltq7_qcBCEJ:www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/4078+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Conundrum of Lucien Freud's Portraits - apollinaire
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/12/the-lives-of-lucian-freud-explores-a-theory-of-portraiture/601471/
======
voldacar
After reading this, I'm still not exactly certain what the "conundrum" is.
To me the conundrum is how one can write so many words about a topic that
could actually make for an interesting article, while saying so little
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What is the difference between a junior and senior developer? - nchuhoai
I'm about to graduate from college and have been contemplating about this question a lot lately, especially in regards to specific languages/frameworks (ruby/rails in my case)<p>I know that I'm not that most raw-engineering talented, but I believe I have dabbled a lot with web development (full-stack and again, Rails) that should give me a significant competitive advantage, so i was curious:<p>How do you specify/categorize junior/senior developers? Is it production-experience, language/framework knowledge, knowing best-practices or just raw engineering talent?
======
hapless
Most of the important skills have nothing to do with technology
\- Requirements gathering
\- Customer interaction
\- "Managing upwards" (dealing with PMs, product people, designers)
\- Estimation and planning
\- Becoming a team player (Most college students only do a few, short-term
group projects. This does not adequately prepare graduates for tight-knit
teams in a professional setting.)
Anyone with a little bit of coding background can learn rails in a few days.
The hard-won assets are all "soft skills:" professionalism, teamwork,
planning. As far as I know, there's no substitute for real industry
experience. (It would be awful nice if there were!)
~~~
letharion
I want to add self-awareness to the list.
When I was reasonably new, but had a project or two behind me, I thought I
knew everything that was worth knowing. Slowly, as projects, responsibility
and, most importantly, failures, all grew in size, it dawned on me that there
was _a lot_ one could know about development.
Today, I know vastly more than I did a few years ago, yet now I feel like I
know very little, because I understand how much else there is still to learn.
Now that I've done some technical interviewing for my employer, I see the same
thing in others. Some of the best people are those that are humble enough to
say that they don't know everything.
And on the flip side I've interviewed someone who rated themself 9/10 with
git. I asked for an explanation of the term rebase, and got "huh?" as a
response. I also see it in some vendors I cooperate with, young business' with
young developers who think they can solve everything simply because they lack
experience with failure.
So in short, knowing something of ones own limitations is important. Relevant
comic: [http://old.onefte.com/2010/06/19/i-am-
legend/](http://old.onefte.com/2010/06/19/i-am-legend/)
~~~
StavrosK
On the technical side, I will add "experience with systems as a whole, and
knowing what's likely to fail in the future and how to design extensible and
maintainable systems". I see junior developers who make things that work, but
then are not easily extensible, cleanly abstracted, etc.
Senior developers know what to plan ahead of time, what to leave until later,
what questions to ask, etc. It doesn't have much to do with the language
itself as with the design of the system as a whole.
------
jraines
Here's the best take I've read on the subject, by John Allspaw of Etsy:
[http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-
engi...](http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/)
Choice quote: "I expect a “senior” engineer to be a mature engineer."
He elaborates at length about what that means in the post.
~~~
angersock
That is an utterly fantastic article.
One thing I'd like to add is that a senior engineer works to build a culture
and team where anyone--especially themselves--is replaceable. If you document
your high-level thinking, if you break projects into lots of small manageable
chunks, and make sure that at least one or two other people know everything
you know, you will find that progress is a lot faster and that lots of
bottlenecks magically disappear.
And ironically, for working to make yourself replaceable, you will probably
find that you are treated better.
~~~
analog31
At times in my career, I've hesitated to do exactly this due to fear of being
replaceable. Yet every time I've given up a cool responsibility, I've been
rewarded with something even cooler. So I've learned to never fear making
myself obsolete.
~~~
angersock
So, the way I look at it (paradoxical as it sounds):
If somebody is not replaceable (and hence a potential bottleneck), they are by
definition a risk. Therefore, it is in everyone's best interest to replace
them and the system that enabled them, in order to harden everything against
bad luck.
The cowboy coder who wrote most of the MVP in PHP in a month, for example,
should be replaced forthwith if she can't document her work and get the rest
of the team up to speed--if for no other reason than that she is a liability
as the team grows and more things depend on her not failing.
It's kind of a counter-intuitive way of looking at it, but it makes sense.
------
jgable
In terms of getting a title of "Senior Engineer" at most companies, it is
mostly a function of experience. It is highly unlikely you will be hired as a
Senior Engineer straight out of college.
Don't focus on getting the title. Instead, focus on what you can control, and
the titles and career advancement will take care of themselves.
There's a well-known, well-written essay on the qualities that a Senior
Engineer possesses: [http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-
engi...](http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/)
Technical maturity comes from working on and finishing large projects. As with
anything else, you can work for years and have lots of "experience", but if
you are not critically thinking and learning during the journey, you won't get
anywhere. Learn the pros and cons of high-level, architectural decisions so
that you can be prepared to make those decisions someday in the face of
uncertainty.
Personal maturity means working effectively on your own and especially with
others. Pay attention to the highly respected engineers in your organization,
and observe how they work with others.
Good luck!
~~~
Consultant32452
You guys all seem so altruistic. I never focus on titles. I focus on
maximizing my income to effort ratio with a side of trying to do work that
interests me. If someone wants to pay me more and call me a junior developer
with no responsibility? That'd be just fine by me.
------
joeevans
Let's be honest.
The qualifications for being a Junior developer are (1) familiarity with new
frameworks (2) nimbleness with polyglot approaches (3) ability to code
considerably more than sit in meetings (4) an approach towards getting things
done, rather than spend time considering getting things done.
Not every developer has the chops to be a Junior developer, but if a Senior
developer has the interest and is willing to work hard at it, they can make
it.
~~~
eropple
This is silly. Few places seriously expect a junior developer to be familiar
with new frameworks. They expect to get a Java kid fresh out of school. And
the fixation on _getting things done_ rather than careful consideration can--
and does, I did it as a junior, it's part of becoming not-a-junior--leads to
_getting the wrong thing done_. Spending a week moving mostly sideways is no
different than spending a couple days thinking and discussing and a couple
days moving mostly forward, except you might make more progress depending on
exactly how far the cowboy missed the mark in their haste to _just write code,
bruv_. (And the cowboy will miss. Everyone does, even if you're a genius. Not
that groups of developers can't miss, too--but after a while you start to
realize that they usually miss much closer.)
The role of junior engineers is that they are _teachable_ and can generate
value while they are being taught; the role of senior engineers is that they
are _teachers_ while both generating value of their own. There is no rarity to
junior developers, there's potential plus inexperience. And that's it.
~~~
joeevans
Nice dream.
The new crop of developers can push up a full stack app in 3 days, play with
it, and iterate the whole process in the following day.
It's a whole new world.
------
ryanobjc
To answer your question directly ... a senior engineer MUST absolutely have
had the responsibility of taking several systems to production and maintaining
it there for some period of time.
Ultimately there is just a whole area of experience that you cannot short
circuit. While we laud genius programmers who brought something to the world
(eg: Bram Cohen of bittorrent fame), there is a lot of luck involved, and
ultimately no one is an island, there is a lot of supporting work to make
something truly successful and widely adopted.
Good luck in your job hunt, but my best advice is to have patience, be humble
and realize that your experience is a starting point, and you have much to
learn.
------
rjd
I haven't seen the term "pragmatism" in this thread. Thats a major difference
I've noticed over the years. Something that used to drive me nuts when I was a
junior dev, and something I get torture my underlings with these days.
I've found most junior debs I've worked with over the years (and have memories
of my own behavior) of being too cock sure of approaches, to keen on new
techniques etc...
Over engineering is a major problem I see from younger people, often leading
to fragility and bugs, blowing out support in 6-12 months. The other issue is
using frameworks for everything, which I've found on questioning reveals
fundamental lacks of knowledge about the domain they are experts with (being
instead framework experts). Using massive library packages for access to one
util class is very very common.
Sometimes I deliberately ask for nonessential 3rd party framework changes, or
the utility class to return it slightly different just to make sure that
juniors have to look into the framework and understand the domain they are
working with. Quite entertaining at times, even if you have to throw out there
code and rewrite for them :)
------
mrpoptart
You are now an expert in College. What do you know now that a freshman does
not? Not just the schooling, but the ability to use the school more
efficiently. The people you know, the places with which you're familiar, and
the little nuances of college life are all part of your achievement. Similar
processes happen in the software world. With time, your toolset grows, your
professional capability grows, and your ability to produce higher quality with
less effort grows.
------
tsenkov
One of my first mentors once said to me - the junior developer solves easy
problems with complex solutions. The regular (simply) developer solves complex
problems with complex solutions. And the senior developer makes problems
disappear.
------
puppetmaster3
I am CTO and 20+ years: Difference is just the role assigned, sometimes 10K
hours of hands on, mostly not. Jr. dev is sometimes there just to fasttrack to
manager roles.
A Sr. Dev. role is the one that people go to when an issue is not resolved for
a period, one example is a month long intermittent bug. _They are Sr. because
Jr. ask for this bug to be assigned to Sr._. Sometimes Sr. do the real
training new people.(I'll show you how it should work, go to X to show you how
it works).
And here is the effect: If Sr. dev. has the tile to go w/ role, has to train
and fix strange bugs, they use their position to KISS. Sadly, in most orgs,
Sr. dev. is a role, not a title, it's just as common that Jr. dev. has a
higher org. rank.
A role test: so lets say you want to add another 3rd party library. Who'll fix
the bugs? Now you know who the Sr's are.
These roles are not new, this is very old: "Fools ignore complexity; experts
avoid it; geniuses remove it."
------
analog31
When I was a manager, I had a stack of job descriptions for different "levels"
of engineers as I prepared a case for promoting a couple of my people. To
generalize from what I saw: The formal levels are based on things like
autonomy, authority, and interaction. A senior engineer is expected to do
things like choosing best practices rather than simply following them. Making
presentations to non-engineers, including customers. And so forth.
Granted, making out this rule in an actual workforce might be a challenge,
because job titles are affected by a number of practical factors such as the
lack of other options for retaining people. A business can become top-heavy
with senior titles, but people will seldom be demoted to reflect disparities
between their job descriptions and their work. A hot candidate will be hired
into a senior level, to put them into a more favorable salary range.
------
implicit
It's useful to consider developer maturity in terms of the maximum project
complexity they can handle:
A junior developer can effectively build a software solution to something,
given some advice about the interfaces and algorithms to be used.
A senior developer just needs a high level description of the desired
technical solution. They can be trusted to instrument, refactor, collaborate,
rewrite, invent, and get the problem solved.
A lead developer can be given bigger problems and organize an entire team of
developers to tackle it.
This line of reasoning still works if you keep going:
A product manager can be given a metric to improve or a customer to satisfy.
No further direction is required. They can be relied upon to do research, come
up with a plan, hire staff (technical and nontechnical) and organize it all.
All CEOs have the same problem to solve: "Grow the business."
------
robert_tweed
It's a bit of both, but it's mainly about experience rather than knowledge.
A senior is expected to be able to handle anything that comes up during the
course of a project (including when things are on fire), to be able to
delegate, to be able to mentor juniors and quality-control their work.
Juniors are expected to be learning as they go (to a greater extent) and
likely to make mistakes or need help now and then.
In particular, a senior will know when they have something wrong or it's not
good enough. A junior is reliant on others to tell them what's expected in a
given situation.
If you are a recent graduate you are, by definition, a junior. After a few
years you might have the experience necessary to become a senior, if you have
earned the trust of your peers, especially those in charge of that decision.
------
nchuhoai
FIrst of all, thanks everyone for chipping in, great insights here.
It seems to me that the majority of people here have defined "seniority" with
professionalism and a large repository of social skills acquired over the
years.
I guess independent from that issue, the reason why I originally asked the
question is when it comes to job postings. When companies advertise positions
marked as senior, do they then actually mean it in the above definition?
Call me naive and unexperienced, but I'm somewhat surprised by the heavy
emphasis on experience over knowledge. Is someone with more domain-knowledge
but less experience more junior than someone with little to zero domain-
knowledge but more experience?
~~~
grayrest
When they advertise for a senior position it mostly means they want to have
someone able to get things done on their own without creating problems down
the road. Experience is generally a better indicator of this than domain
knowledge[1]. There's very little reason not to apply for a job you think you
can do regardless of the requirements. Just don't be surprised if you're
filtered by HR for not having the correct buzzwords.
The best way to actually get a job is to go out and meet people. Meetups, user
groups, conferences are all good. Talking to other developers directly
generally gives you a more accurate picture of what it's like to work
somewhere and what's actually required. As a bonus if they like you and pass
on your resume you avoid getting HR filtered.
[1] Software design and maintenance are language/domain portable and are
difficult to teach without direct/repeated exposure to examples, which comes
over time. Unless the domain is about specialized knowledge (e.g. security)
it's generally faster to teach someone the quirks of your business than it is
to teach them how to design software and deal with them making mistakes.
------
jmspring
Ability to understand not just the language and project you are working on,
but the system and how to adapt or troubleshoot when met with challenges you
don't understand. The ability to convey concepts and mentor people when they
are in a bind. Knowing when to take a step back, look at the problem a new or
ask for help.
Some of that comes through experience, but I've met people with time put in
that can't get their head around more than their niche. (I'm talking general
programming here, not deep specialization)
------
danjaouen
To me, the most important distinction between a "junior" and a "senior"
developer is that a senior developer isn't afraid to work with and maintain
legacy code.
When I first started out, I was obsessed with only using the latest and
greatest technologies, but I've come to realize over the course of my career
that this is simply infeasible for many organizations.
~~~
SamReidHughes
To you. When I first started, I wasn't afraid of maintaining legacy code at
all. It's an entirely different set of things that made me go from "junior" to
"less junior".
------
peterhi
For us a junior is someone who is starting, possibly a graduate or even just
out of school. This is someone who is still learning the craft of programming
(gathering real world experience) rather than the text book skills.
After a year they should no longer be junior. They are just a plain old
developer, if not then perhaps programming is not for them.
Senior developers are simple those people who have a say in planning the
direction that the company will take with their software. Strategic thinking
in relation to the business needs of the company.
Developers tend to have a very flat hierarchy so senior is just as likely a
management position rather than a recognition of outstanding skills.
In our company at present we have no juniors as everyone has been there more
than a year, but we also have no seniors. To be honest I think that senior
developers only appear when the head count gets into double figures and
management cannot hold meetings with everyone over every little thing. Hence
senior as a management position / title.
------
jasallen
Junior Dev: Needs more help / guidance
"Dev 2": Mostly works independently, knows when to ask for help
Senior Dev: Provides more help / guidance
------
memracom
A major difference is that a senior developer does not limit themselves to
just software development. They learn something about ops, they learn about
tuning a database (whether SQL or noSQL), they learn about business problems
and so on. The most important difference is that a senior software developer
is evolving into being an engineer who understands the total solution space,
not just the software. By choice, some people stick with software development
rather than moving into software engineering or devops, but a senior person
makes that as a choice, not because they are ignorant of engineering and
devops.
What is the difference between a software developer and many other
professions? A software developer is constantly learning new techniques, new
languages, new technologies. Therefore a senior software developer knows a lot
more than a junior one and has more hands on experience with more aspects of
the trade.
------
lutusp
> How do you specify/categorize junior/senior developers?
Experience. A very skilled young programmer with "raw engineering talent"
won't automatically be described as a senior developer on that basis alone.
Also, keep in mind, in a very ageist profession like programming, being called
a senior developer can be taken as an insult.
------
d0m
As a senior developer, you've got some war stories under your belt and
hopefully learnt from those. When people use senior developer, I suppose they
only mean dev with some years of experience. I.e. There's a big difference
between the theory in school and working on a real project with various
stakeholders.
------
phantom_oracle
Just to add my 2 cents worth:
Sometimes companies consider a 'junior' to be someone with "at least x years
experience".
I've seen this situation play out at least 3-5 times now. I'm not exactly sure
where someone who is a 'junior' is meant to get experience for a year (real
work) and then apply for a 'junior' position that has shitty pay just so that
you can add up more exp.
I've also seen a lot of intern positions saying "work for us, slog your guts
out for 3 months with no pay, you will compete with at least 5 others and at
the end we will use any valuable code/work you've done, not hire you all and
give the guy with the most hours/productivity the job and the rest of you can
fuck off".
This industry is fucked... For a skill like programming I'd expect even a
junior with no exp. to earn at least $5-$10 dollars per hour.
------
MortenK
Different companies have different definitions for junior, senior etc. Like
other comments mention, it's mainly length of professional experience.
Many places defines senior developers as having +5 years of professional
experience (i.e. excluding college). But it varies a lot from company to
company.
------
IvyMike
At my previous company, I liked their ranking system. Basically, you moved up
as you became responsible for larger and larger systems.
A brand new junior employee is responsible for very little--most of what they
do is going to be reviewed by more experienced engineers.
A senior engineer might be able to be tech lead a small month long project, a
principal engineer might be responsible for a large subsystem, an architect
would be responsible for an entire product.
Finally a distinguished engineer (essentially a VP-level position, but on the
tech side of things rather than the management side) would be responsible for
the technical direction of the entire company and be a strong input to the
overall design of brand new products.
~~~
cheez
> A senior engineer might be able to be tech lead a small month long project,
Hmm. While I really like your definitions, I'm surprised that a senior
engineer can only be considered responsible enough for a small, month long
project.
I say this because I've only ever seen the first two titles _ever_.
New career goal: be a distinguished engineer. What company was your previous
company?
------
lipanski
If I were to be cynical, I'd say age and wage (and the _feeling_ of knowing it
all).
However, contrary to some of my previous experiences, a senior is that person
that has an answer to most of your questions (and the disposition to answer
them). It's that person in the office that can pull a project or a team on his
own on the long term, without major fuck-ups and with a clever solution for
all unexpected problems.
And if you're interested in the more superficial description: human resources
would call a _senior_ someone who's been mastering his domain for at least 3
years.
------
Jach
I think it depends on the particular individuals and the company. Sometimes
the only difference may be salary. There's already a bunch of different
responses here on what the difference could be. My own rough heuristic is that
a person in a senior position should have a clear sense of the influence on
business value that they and their decisions make. A junior developer is
engrossed with solving a problem, a senior developer is engrossed with the
business improving on some metric by means of solving a problem.
------
pekk
The difference is how much they want to pay you, and how much scope and
accountability you get.
The same person could be reasonably senior at one place, and reasonably junior
at a different place.
------
jason_wang
To me, the differences between a Jr. and a Sr. Dev are the experiences gained
from getting burnt by bugs, quick estimates, production issues, etc.
Essentially the number of battle scars.
------
michaelwww
A senior developer has the sense of carrying the responsibility of the project
forward, a junior developer does not and relies on the senior to carry that
load.
------
bowlofpetunias
I can tell you what the difference _isn 't_. It's neither about age nor
experience. And I'm saying this as an old fart who has been doing this for 25+
years.
Sure, time helps, if you learn from your mistakes, both in engineering and
life itself.
But I've seen 40 year old developers who I would consider juniors in every way
that matters, and 20-somethings who I would trust to take the role of _lead_
developer.
~~~
ryanobjc
One problem is sometimes people who have 10 years of experience really have 1
year of experience repeated 10 times.
Also communication ability. Most coders cant.
------
sabinazafar
I think the simple answer is being able to make decisions and think more
critically about the problem and the business implications. Junior developers
usually require very specific and structured directions to achieve something (
even though they may be incredibly smart), senior developers on the other hand
can work with fewer requirements and fill in the gaps when requirements are
not clearly define.
------
techtalsky
I definitely don't think it's just raw engineering talent. I agree that
there's most certainly a social aspect to it. I think it has to do with
professionalism, architecture chops and experience, a sense of good workflow
and process, a sense of accountability, and a proven record of getting
projects done and done right.
------
trhtrhth
Dabbling a lot does not make you a Senior Dev. It's the part where you create
and debug complex systems, such as you don't see while doing your small school
projects. That, plus hopefully a little more wisdom when deciding which
frameworks or design patterns to use and how slavishly to adhere to them.
------
joshcrews
You can tell a senior engineer what needs to happen, and the engineer can
manage the rest.
A jr. engineer, not yet.
------
QuantumChaos
A senior developer has to be able to lead a team of engineers in the creation
of a product (or maintenance of an existing one).
What this requires depends on the job, but it is a mix of technical
virtuosity, social skills, and ability to navigate the corporate environment.
------
burntroots
The real difference between a junior and senior developer? A senior developer
was able to convince a manager to give him the title and pay raise. It's more
of a political distinction than anything else.
------
yoyo1999
Ideally, a senior developer should be somebody whom "been there, done that".
However, most "senior" developers were made by political fight.
------
bradb3030
I'll share my coaching criteria as a manager:
an acceptable Junior Software Engineer... uses tools to make properly
formatted code
produces readable code, mostly self-documenting
becomes a 'goto person' on code after spending 2 total weeks in it.
rarely goes 3 days without obvious progress or output to the sprint team
is comfortable making estimates about new work
is comfortable re-using existing patterns for new work, even in unfamiliar
code
can explain the 'why' of processes and rules, and be able to see situations
where they may not apply
understands agile development and participates effectively
\----------------
a Senior Software Engineer... is also a Software Engineer with everything that
comes with it
is a team representative of code, projects, and end-users
has a running list of 5 things the team or the team's code is weak in, and
could be doing better
considers edge cases well, writes bulletproof code
understands integration points with other teams and projects
reliably resolves tickets in team's estimated timeframe.
does code reviews and design reviews that are kind and instructive
is able to refactor code to improve maintainability without being too
aggressive and causing additional problems
is able to help any other dev with problems in any of the team's code
is capable of teaching a new employee about all of the team's code, projects,
and end-users
brings innovative ideas back to the team from reading, experimentation, and
conversations in addition to normal work
is a student of agile development and can effectively coach and mentor others
in agile development
maintains good relationships among cross-functional team members
can boldly estimate very low or very high for new work, keen prediction for
the very easy and very hard
can sense CPU, memory, and computation time problems in code invents new
patterns and solutions rather than always using existing patterns
sees the give and take in processes and rules, uses them as a tool for
guidance not to be followed rigidly 100% if not best for the company
understands feelings and history about codebases and projects, not just the
immediately apparent facts
is not just extremely knowledgeable, but also with passion and proper
application and improvisation of concepts
------
ecolner
There is only one thing that makes you a senior developer: years in the
industry. That's it. Ask your manager the minimum amount of time on the job
for promotion. They'll use a formula to figure out if you're ready for more
responsibility, but the gating factor is years on the job.
------
bjeanes
Competency at negotiating.
------
bakhy
experience. and price :) (which, IMO, is 90% of the reason why older devs have
trouble finding jobs, and not so much the supposed difference in ability.
young = cheap.)
also, to me it seems that it's more about your position in a company, than
skill. i.e. being a senior does not mean being better, it means having more
responsibility. being a senior is a position, not a level of skill. although,
they would normally correlate.
you certainly won't be a senior as soon as you get out of college.
------
kosso
Experience. Time-served in a startup/dev environment.
Ability to communicate (hopefully) without offence.
Skin thickness.
/* amusing, yet inspiring and educational comments */
~~~
stefan_kendall3
I delete your amusing, yet inspiring and educational comments because they are
at best useless and in the way and at worst a potential way to lose a lot of
money.
I've seen this one cause an actual, measurable financial loss:
//customer type X cannot purchase product type Y.
The code said another story, but someone trusted the comment. I only trust
code.
------
enterx
a senior knows why.
------
Eleutheria
> What is the difference between a junior and senior developer?
10 years.
------
TYPE_FASTER
Two things I expect a senior developer to understand: threading and some
details of networking. Examples: effectively making some operation run
concurrently in another thread without adding too much or not enough locking.
Understanding how HTTP keep alive works. Being able to troubleshoot TCP
connection issues using WireShark. Even if you're a Rails developer and never
see the details of the HTTP implementation, they can be valuable to know and
can save you a ton of time when troubleshooting production issues.
~~~
aidos
I don't. That's very specific and not really indicative of ability to manage a
software project. It does give a measure of how deep a developer might have
gone, in that domain.
Someone else might care about pointer arithmetic, for example, I bet your
clients don't, though.
~~~
AnimalMuppet
But your clients care about not having the bugs that the junior dev wrote
because he/she didn't really understand pointer arithmetic...
Senior devs know a lot more about how to avoid causing problems in the code
they write.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
X# - XML Oriented programming language - axod
http://www.xsharp.org/samples/
======
codeglide
My name is Mark Giuliani and I am one of the developers behind X#.
I do agree that the language is verbose at the moment, originally it was
designed to be programmed visually but we kept extending it to the level where
it is now. In less than 3 months we are releasing a new version of X# that
will include a C-like or Java-like syntax. So in addition to doing > you would
do if( expr ) { ... }.
For those who think X# is a joke, please take a look at
<http://www.snapcrm.com> which is a CRM and Collaboration Suite far superior
to all open source CRMs and it was coded entirely using X# in 4 months. Also,
take a look at Fusion (<http://fusion.codeglide.com>) which is a Data
Integration Platform superior to anything available in the market today --
coded in 5 months.
Try doing this in other languages!
~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm sorry, Mark, but there's a ton of open-source CRM software written over
the weekend and published in a matter of days.
As a matter of fact, if you'll go through the backlogs here at Hacker News
you'll see a large number of "Game/Site/Tool/Language Written, Released in 3
days!" stories by members of this very community... in languages from C# to
Lisp to Java to C and even ASM.
~~~
codeglide
I agree, but they don't have the number of features that we have.
~~~
jamongkad
Really now? and how hard would that be for anyone who is proficient in their
own language to implement those so called features you boast about? Feature
set alone is a pretty weak argument imho.
------
gojomo
Reminds me of my idea for an XML image format:
<image>
<pixel x="0" y="0" red="255" green="255" blue="0" alpha="0"/>
<!-- etc -->
<pixel x="1023" y="767" red="0" green="0" blue="0" alpha="0"/>
</image>
I think it would gzip pretty well.
~~~
oconnor0
Not bad, but I think you forgot to include document unique identifiers on each
important tag. Also, where are the namespaces? You need to be able to embed
this image in a document without having tag name collisions.
~~~
gojomo
Good point on the namespaces. But I'm an idea guy -- the standards committee
can work out the details.
------
daleharvey
It is somewhat disheartening to see the reaction the release of this has had.
It isnt lisp or erlang or anything "cool", from a glance at the code its a
souped up xslt or templating language. The code is obviously supposed to be
tool generated (how many graphically driven lisp generators are there?), yes
they could use s-exps, but if you dont need the power of s-exps, whats the
point? Java has a nice xml parser in built.
But the main point is that there demo looks pretty comprehensive, if it was
written in 4 months then cool, it sounds like it done the job they needed it
to do pretty well.
Can any of the detractors point to as comprehensive web application written in
lisp / erlang etc?, it's obvious they arent worried about algorithmic
complexity and "hacker cred", and more about the integration tools and free
extras that come with having xml as an intermediary language, and shock
horror, getting things done.
They didn't need to release this, seems like they just put out an internal
tool that was useful to them so that others could benefit, and they end up
getting treated like the star wars kid.
~~~
jamongkad
Normally I would be inclined to agree with you. But judging from the OP's
comments on proggit and here. You can see a smack of arrogance around his
posts.
~~~
daleharvey
true, but I think I would be getting defensive after a witch hunt like this
------
sqs
This is hilarious. Maybe it's an improvement over their previous product, a
CSV-oriented programming language.
------
arockwell
I pray this is someone's cruel joke. You just wouldn't write code is poetry at
the bottom of every page for an xml programming language unless this was a
joke.
Also, it runs on the JVM, but is called X#. I mean... I'm honestly speechless.
~~~
jeroen
Doesn't Java have its own "cool" symbol? Anything -# or Iron- implies a
relation to .NET, and I see little value in creating confusion around that.
~~~
cabalamat
Maybe they should call it JXML. Though this name is a bit bland and could be
spiced up with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks: J!XML!
When Microsoft bring out their implementation it will be called "Visual Studio
Active Team System IronXML# Server Pro Ultimate".
------
geuis
Oh lord, my company is a java shop. Some asshat is going to hear about this
and want to implement it right away. God help us all....
------
cschep
This reminds me a lot of ColdFusion. It seems like the purpose is to make it
easier for non-programmers to embed code into a web page. The syntax is just
mind numbing though.
It made easy problems manageable for a noob, and hard problems impossible (to
stand working on) for anyone that enjoys programming.
This doesn't seem like a good evolution.
~~~
perezd
I agree, its like ColdFusion...only it validates.
------
haasted
Reminds me of a panel-discussion I was in the audience of once. When panel-
participant Steve Vinoski was asked which trends he saw for software
development 10 years in the future, his only response was _"I just hope we're
not all programming in XML"._
Having done my share of XSLT, I could not agree more. :)
------
felideon
_A fully working e-mail auto-responder using only two statements..._
and 28 lines of code.
------
darthtrevino
XML is like violence; If it doesn’t solve all your problems, you’re not using
enough of it
~~~
TweedHeads
Haven't heard of Don Box in a looong time. What's he cooking now?
~~~
darthtrevino
So that's where it came from! My co-worker had it posted on his cube and I
thought it was great
------
sidsavara
Not for me, but still voting it up because I was curious enough to click the
link =P
It is exactly as sharp and pointy as I had feared - but then again, XML was
never meant to be looked at by humans right? Isn't the point that it's easy to
traverse and build tools around?
An XML based language would definitely aid in creating more visual IDEs. I
suspect the example they give could be done easily in Yahoo pipes, and is
likewise stored in a similar XML document.
~~~
michaelneale
>but then again, XML was never meant to be looked at by humans right?
Actually I think it was, in as far as it is a text _markup_ language. The only
case when I have enjoyed looking at it, and editing is docbook - where its
mostly text, just with limited docbook XML markup (and having the redundant
closing tags does help you navigate).
~~~
newt0311
I personally prefer docbook SGML. Its much more forgiving when it comes to end
tags which can be inferred. Also, sometimes the case insensitivity is nice.
------
pavelludiq
<!-- SQUARE function -->
<xsp:variable name="square" type="node">
<xsp:processing-instruction>
<xsp:text value="{node() * node()}"/>
</xsp:processing-instruction>
</xsp:variable>
This is a one-liner in python and you can guess what it does without knowing
python.
~~~
eru
And in Forth: : square dup * ;
------
silvajoao
<Why> God </Why>
------
russell
Lord no! Think of the children!
I am all for DSL's because you can do some very neat things with them, but
don't make it XML based. Use a reasonable language like Python (replace with
your favorite language). XML is pretty hard to read. A good programming
language should be concise. You can type only so many symbols per hour; make
the most of it. I worked with VoiceXML a decade back. It was not a pleasant
experience.
The seductive attraction of an XML based language is that the heavy lifting of
writing a parser is done for you. That's just an illusion. There is most
certainly a grammar for any language that you like. With a little bit of
hacking you are in business. I've done it. It's a piece of cake, more fun than
banging away at a DOM tree.
------
zaius
Wow.. There's a lot of hate going on here. If you don't like it, don't use it.
I would have thought that the HN community would appreciate this solely for
the novelty factor.
------
burke
I love the footer: "Code is Poetry". Eugh.
~~~
justindz
As a poet and programmer, my first response was to be offended. But, then I
remembered all the poetry I read on Facebook earlier today and kind of thought
"eh, yeah, I can see that now."
------
dennmart
This would've been damn cool - If we were still in the year 2000 or so, when
XML was all the rage.
I'm sure people will find lots of uses for this, though.
~~~
kschrader
No, it would have sucked then too.
------
geuis
My roommate is saying this is a prank that's been going on for a few years.
Not sure if this is for real or not.
------
whalesalad
Obsurd. With an O.
------
IsaacSchlueter
First of all, a lot of the comments here, imo, are not so great, for they miss
the meat of the matter. It's easy to poopoo a language because it's different,
or verbose. Hacker News hates XML, worships s-expressions, and has some mixed
fondness for maps and json, so the anti-XML snark is expected, I suppose. But
let's put that aside talk about _why_ X# is actually distasteful. That might
even be helpful to the developers and incite more than defensiveness on their
part.
Disclaimer: I'm not an X# expert. I've just read the pages linked to from the
sidebar on <http://xsharp.org>. This review may well be a failure of marketing
more than anything else.
When I saw the title, I was expecting something a bit like lisp, but with
about 10x as many characters. Granted, xml done right is not just sexprs, so I
was curious about how attributes might be used to add additional expressive
power. _Maybe_ , I thought, _you could do something as "pure" as lisp, albeit
with a much uglier syntax. It probably wouldn't be my thing, but it might be
neat nonetheless._
Oh, if only.
The problem with X# is that it uses enough XML to be ugly, and yet not enough
to be pure. If you were to use it, you still need to be thinking in a very
ruby-like block syntax with stuff like processing-instruction and append-child
and for-each and so on. (Nested _with_ blocks? Srsly??)
The XML feels out of place, tacked on. Rather than use a consistent expression
language to define programming language fundamentals, it seems like a sloppy
addition to a kludgey language.
The examples seem to use some powerful built-ins, without telling me how I
would actually apply the concepts to new ideas. What is the xml "schema" for
an HTTP POST? For a CouchDB document? For a curl request to the Twitter API,
or the results of it?
In other languages, it's generally very clear how a given bit of XML is turned
into an object. However, it's not so clear here how a given bit of JSON (or
other data) would be turned into XML, or vice versa. Compared with the
facilities in ruby or php for handling any kind of data encoding syntax, I
wouldn't even consider this. How do I dump out the data? What are the rules
for converting non-XML to something that's XPath-able?
Take this example, for instance _(comments added)_
<!-- start in curly-brace land, using builtin for-each and document functions,
passing xpath query on the imap "document", which is not natively XML -->
for-each document('imaps://[email protected]&pass=secret')/folder[@name='INBOX']/mail[@seen = 'false'] {
append-child document('smtp://smtp.gmail.com') {
<!-- switch to XML to define the message.
Where do I look up the XML syntax for a message? I would not
have guessed that this would be the way to do it. -->
<!-- Function call in the subject attribute? That's weird.
What if I wanted to email someone about curly braces and
concatenation functions? Would I have to escape the curly
braces that are escaping the function nested in my xml nested
in my code? I think the "fail" stack just overflowed. -->
<mail subject="{concat('RE: ', @subject)}" from="[email protected]" to="{addresses/from/@address}">
<!-- So, we're back to c-ish syntax now? That is so strange.
Also, text must be quoted inside of XML? I always thought
the primary (only) benefit of XML over sexprs or JSON is that
plain text doesn't have to be quoted or escaped. -->
"Hi text ";
select addresses/from/@name;
",\n\nI've received your message titled '";
text @subject;
"' and\nI will reply to it shortly.\n\n--James\n";
</mail>
}
}
Letting data and code mingle closely is an attractive premise, to be sure. XML
is not the only data definition language, and many would argue that it's far
from the best, but it's certainly a contestable point. In my view, it is not
XML that turns me off from X#, but rather the overall lack of consistency and
transparency in the language.
Also, about the footer and some general site tips… The mascot has <?X#?> on
his chest, but the language doesn't use <? as far as I can tell. (Or does it?
Jesus, please say it doesn't.) This code is not poetry. (The tumbleweeds in
the forums and on the blog also do not inspire confidence.)
It would be better to start with the most elegant syntax possible, and work
backwards from there to an implementation. As it is, with the market for
programming languages and frameworks so full of robust and elegant solutions,
I would not even consider using X# for anything whatsoever.
~~~
codeglide
Thank you for your comments. My replies follow,
\- The syntax we have at xsharp.org is an alternative C-like syntax (which we
are still working on BTW). The full XML way of coding X# can be seen at
<http://wiki.codeglide.com/X_Sharp/Examples>.
\- Rules to convert non-XML structures to XML are defined by the connectors.
We've chosen an intuitive XML structure to represent non-XML data on these
connectors. Of course you can't guess what is the structure an XML that
represents an e-mail has to have, but this is the same in other programming
languages, you need documentation or an IDE with inline help to find out how
to do stuff. The most powerful feature of X# is that you can combine data from
unlimited and different sources using XPath and that instead of using multiple
functions all actions are abstracted behind common operations such as append,
remove, select and update.
\- Yes, <?xpath ?> is used on the XML syntax to select nodes.
Originally X# was going to be a language to create applications visually and
we chose an XML syntax because each tag is represented by a visual element on
screen. Since we are still working on the visual X# editor, we offer an
alternate C-like syntax (which is not definitive).
Although X# is Turing complete, we are not proposing it as a general purpose
programming language -- we know it has limitations, having this level of
abstraction has trade offs. Of course if we need to write a 3D Adventure Game
or a Web Server we will use another language, but for writing the web based
applications we wrote it has proven to be extremely fast and useful.
\--mark at X#
------
moonpolysoft
Why is their logo an M&M?
~~~
arjungmenon
Because M&M is a tasty chocolate that is especially popular with children, the
creators of X# want to send the message that their language is delicious toy
suited for tots.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Sales engagement startup Apollo says its massive contacts database was stolen - iamben
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/01/apollo-contacts-data-breach/
======
gk1
The article talks about notifications and risks to _customers_ of Apollo, but
it's not the _customers '_ data that was stolen... It was that of 200 MILLION
people who probably never opted into having their contact information packaged
and sold to third parties.
~~~
r00fus
Waiting for GDPR. The information provided while not PII is still pretty
useful for say, social engineering.
One wonders how much the dataset would go for in the black market.
~~~
ironchef
Name and email are usually considered PII in most of the compliance world, no?
~~~
gumby
Does it apply if they are business contacts (business address/phone number)?
After all your company-issued phone isn't personal to you -- it identifies a
role ("the purchasing manager for foobartronix") and if you leave that number
will reach someone else.
I don't know how the "compliance world" treats, that but I bet it's a loophole
many many people are trying to squeeze through.
(I do actually consider it personal to you. And I am a fan of what GDPR is
trying to accomplish, in principle, but it's clear the law doesn't really work
yet).
~~~
kristianc
GDPR has a broader definition of PII than is used in the US, and includes any
data that can potentially be used to identify an individual (even IP address),
so it’s almost certain that it is within scope.
~~~
gumby
Here is the actual text of GDPR (there are many sites, hosted at .eu domains,
that claim to tell you what the legislation says, but why not read the
published law? (I chose English as HN is an English-language site):
[https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...](https://eur-
lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32016R0679) )
My read is that the text of the law doesn't apply to people acting on behalf
of a corporation, in their corporate persona (but this is why I linked to the
text itself and not someone else's interpretation. It's not that long).
The law talks about identifying a person in their personal sphere (doesn't
apply to being in your home; talks about ties to fundamental human rights,
genetic and health info, etc) or things like credit approval, and many many
many exceptions for "national security" an "legal" uses. It clearly _does_
apply to what your employer knows about you!
Normally I hate these kind of hair-splitting "gotcha" cases I write up below,
so I feel weird typing them. But the economic value is so high and frankly
some of the the use, and abuse, cases so clear, I wonder. It's still early
days for GDPR so these questions are, at the moment, rhetorical.
Here's an example: part (26) says, "The principles of data protection should
apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural
person." But if I call a company the telephone receptionist will answer and I
will know I can reach them by calling that number. If they have three I know I
can reach the one I want to by calling repeatedly. Yet you don't want to
prevent publication of company phone numbers (and what about suppressing them
until the receptionist leaves -- that leaks personal info too). (the section
is actually about pseudonymisation BTW).
Likewise per your example of IP addresses (in 30) If a company uses NAT then
the company's IP address does not identify any single person, though it could
be presumed to identify a particular subset. (adding IP address to other info
could ID one person, and that is covered in 30)
------
avitzurel
This smells like someone leaving a DB open to the world (remember the old
MongoDB open by default?)
I think stealing a whole database raises very serious questions as to how
technically this was done and how would you prevent this at your company.
Unfortunately "transparency first" aside, companies don't usually release this
information which leaves us all wondering how we can better protect our users
(outside of having sane defaults, closed by default, no ssh, private networks
etc...).
~~~
thefounder
You would be surprised to find out how many large companies(i.e top 500) lost
theier databases, banks included. Many can be googled but most never made it
public or didn't even know what happened to them. Chances are that your
contact data has been leaked by several parties already. My conclusion is that
you can't secure data unless you make a goal of that and even then it's not a
sure thing. All your private networks have multiple public entery points and
possibly a coordinator(i.e kubernetes admin). Most ecommerce companies and
even payment processing companies think of security as an accessory to their
business not a primary concern. If they are too focused on security they loose
market share(i.e the vetting takes too much time) The only solution is to
consider all unencrypted data public and use encryption at the client
level(i.e mobile device).
~~~
fogetti
That's why the EU introduced GDPR. So you are legally responsible (and the
fines can be pretty steep) if you 'forget' to make the breach public.
------
blantonl
So is this must be the database that hundreds of relentless SAAS Sales Reps
use to send me emails like " _Hi there, wanted to bubble this up in your inbox
and see if you 'd be interested in a convo about your site and how we can
increase xxx% revenue with our yyyy solution_"
~~~
JunkDNA
Oh you just wait! If you haven't gotten one of these yet, the latest version
of this is that they actually send a calendar invitation (through a 3rd party
service) for a meeting out of the blue. Gmail will helpfully pencil that time
in on your calendar automatically until you go in and delete the event. This
prevents legit meetings from being scheduled since people are afraid you have
some important sales call. If you're absent minded and click "No" to your
RSVP, they know you saw it! Blech!
~~~
browsercoin
ah the "we are drowning in product market fit, so don't pass up this
opportunity we are giving you"
------
i_am_nomad
These articles are always a little frustrating, especially to those of us who
aren't familiar with data management on that scale. For example, how was the
breach carried out? How did the company know it occurred? Was there something
the company should have done, but didn't?
I understand why those details don't make it into the media, but it's hard not
to be curious about it.
~~~
user111233
It's probably kept secret because if we knew how easy it was to steal their
data that would be bad for their image. Most companies have little to no
security other than "no one will think to request this url". Could be a past
or present employee who knows all the unprotected systems and wanted to make
some extra money selling the data.
------
koolba
> Apollo’s database contains publicly available data, including names, job
> titles, employers, social media handles, phone numbers and _email
> addresses_. It doesn’t include Social Security numbers, financial data or
> _email addresses_ and passwords, Apollo said.
Eh? So are email addresses included or not? They’re listed in both categories.
~~~
wutbrodo
Based on the grammatical structure of the second sentence, it sounds like
they're [email,password] pairs weren't lost, while emails alone may have been.
~~~
farnsworth
That's a weird way to say it, it almost seems to imply that a list of
passwords was lost, but the passwords aren't associated with emails.
~~~
wutbrodo
Yea agreed, very poorly phrased.
------
frereubu
Can someone with more experience of these things tell me how these breaches
are discovered, and how they know what information was taken? I presume it's
not an exact science.
~~~
adanto6840
Not overly experienced with this, but years ago we used to add honeypot email
addresses to our databases for a super simple & cheap way to at least get an
idea of whether data had been exfiltrated. If you add a new email once a month
you can get some 'timing' info, and then could start comparing against logs.
~~~
GaryNumanVevo
that's actually pretty clever!
------
ajsharp
"The email said that company said the breach was discovered weeks after system
upgrades in July."
Wow. They emailed customers but made no public announcement that people's
email addresses and personal info had been stolen and now available on the
black market.
This is absolutely atrocious incident management and disclosure. I smell a
lawsuit, possibly from the state or federal government.
------
yoaviram
If you want to do something about this (and other) negligible organizations,
head over to [https://opt-out.eu](https://opt-out.eu), search for Apollo, and
the site will generate a GDPR erasure request that you can send. Disclaimer:
I'm one of the site's creators.
~~~
coaxial
Thank you, that was useful.
------
adjkant
> Apollo’s database contains publicly available data, including names, job
> titles, employers, social media handles, phone numbers and email addresses.
> It doesn’t include Social Security numbers, financial data or email
> addresses and passwords, Apollo said.
So I guess email addresses are a nullable field?
~~~
isalmon
My theory is (I work in this space): \- Contact database was stolen \- User
database with emails+passwords was not
Basically it's about the emails that they were scraping / guessing, not their
users' emails.
------
tonyquart
I have just read an article that might be useful for everyone who has received
multiple calls from legit businesses at
[http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-
telemarkete...](http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-
telemarketer/). It's quite difficult, but I think if we could win against
those telemarketers, it will feel really good.
------
backspace_
I am curious how the database was stolen. Did the person(s) who accessed the
db delete the database afterwards or did they simply make a copy?
~~~
munk-a
Ideally yes? It'd be nice to know the people who were so irresponsible with
PII data ended up losing it...
------
aphroz
Isn't that data freely available already on their website ? It looks like you
can get full name, company, position just by creating a free account. Maybe
they just scrapped it.
------
andrewstuart
How? I want to know so I can try to avoid doing something similar.
------
anigbrowl
How much does data like this trade for on the black market, and do vendors
tend to partition it or just pursue quick turnover?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Inference GUIs for 12 SoTA ML models - aliabd
http://gradiohub.com
======
indit
It's great OP. Maybe you can expand into other SoTAs like in
[https://paperswithcode.com/sota](https://paperswithcode.com/sota)
------
aliabd
Some of the models we put up have thousands of stars on GitHub and yet still
no interface. You’d have to set up dependencies/etc and sometimes even write
your own code, just for _inference_. Never understood why people who release
state-of-the-art pretrained models don’t release a way to use or try them on a
new input.
------
gverrilla
this is very cool! I have been reading about ml for a couple of years but have
never played with it before. Really appreciate it! Shared with friends and
family too :)
(I'm not a scientist/programmer)
~~~
aliabd
So awesome to hear! If you have any feedback on how to make your experience
better, would love to hear it. :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
A Trusted Web Activity for Android - twapi
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/02/introducing-trusted-web-activity-for.html
======
ajvs
What I don't get is why they are making Chrome mandatory. What happened to web
standards? It's not like other Chromium-based browsers or Firefox can't
already use Chrome Custom Tabs and run Progressive Web Apps.
It seems like Google learnt from the Electron project and decided to mandate
Chrome on their mobile platform so they can suck up as much data as possible.
With PWAs getting closer functionality to native apps now, I can see a future
where most mobile apps are being powered by Chrome. I'm surprised they managed
to top the privacy intrusion Google Play Services already does.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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Ask HN: Where do you freelancers find your clients/work? - shahed
I know a lot of freelancers find their clients in different ways. I want to see what advice you have for someone looking to land their first few clients (ex. referral, specific websites, etc.)<p>I'm a UI/UX Designer, mobile designer, front-end developer, I can also do some backend in Rails, etc.<p>Thanks! =)
======
bdunn
I had a lot of luck frequenting events where small business owners are (i.e.
people with problems and money.) Networking events, mixers, business lectures,
and so on.
I also spent a LOT of time cultivating my past clients list and encouraging a
steady stream of referrals.
When I was running my consultancy (before jumping ship to products), I had to
maintain $100k+ revenue a month in client projects. Let's just say I got
pretty good at the whole "getting work" thing :-)
~~~
icey
To drill down a bit: How did you find these events?
~~~
bdunn
Chamber of Commerce, any technology partnership groups, meetup.com, there are
a _million_ of these sort of events in any decently sized area.
------
t_j_m
One thing that can be a bit silly but really works to a degree. Is to dress
and act a little bit geeky, do not be shy to walk around with a t-shirt or a
hoodie with the python,ruby or some linux logo on it. Talk about software and
computing with people you meet. Market your self as a guy that know a lot
about software and the word will come around.
I have met several people for example in the gym that have offered me a job or
some consulting work because they have seen me with a linux t-shirt on. Of
course they did not threw me a job because of the t-shirt but it led to a
small chit-chat and then it escalated from there.
------
timjahn
While you're specifically asking about finding your first few clients, this
previous thread has some great overall advice for finding clients in general
as a freelancer: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585435>
Also, we recently launched the beta of matchist (<http://matchist.com>) to
help freelance developers like yourself find quality clients and get paid on
time, every time.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Amazon to resurrect kozmo.com's idea with 1-hr delivery in NYC - redgrange
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/08/us-amazon-com-delivery-idUSKBN0JM2EU20141208
======
redgrange
Here's the eDreams documentary on kozmo on youtube if you're interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY8WoDKUKP8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY8WoDKUKP8)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: I made a site that highlights makers who build with Django - rasulkireev
https://builtwithdjango.com
======
tataD
I do really like your idea to make a Django base, it may be very useful for
someone who just started to work with this platform, and I’ve found it’s
really pretty how you’ve designed the page, because it looks simple, clear and
organized.
------
aldoushuxley001
Great stuff, looks very nice and good addition to the django community.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: the lightest simplest browser? - mohsen
I feel it's these types of questions that get us closer to an eternal September here, but forgive me I must ask.<p>I have a pretty simple question, what is the lightest, fastest browser i could use.<p>my request is that<p>1) it allows for tabs<p>2) it has a decent set of keyboard shortcuts<p>Thanks in advance
======
fractallyte
Also have a look at links2 (<http://links.twibright.com/>)
Runs in text or graphical mode - the latter is excellent if you want to avoid
javascript (unfortunately, CSS too), but still see the page with gfx.
Great keyboard navigation, a decent download manager, and blazingly fast.
You can open new browsing windows, and while there's no tabbed browsing, some
users delegate this to their (Linux) window manager, such as Fluxbox, which
features tabbed windows.
------
motvbi
Assuming you have ruled out Chrome and Opera, what exactly do you mean by
"lightest"?
~~~
mohsen
well to be honest i didn't give opera a chance.
by light, i really meant fast, guess a bad choice of words on my part, i
really just want something really fast, not even chrome seems fast enough to
me.
~~~
GHFigs
Give Opera a chance. It's feels light/fast enough that I use it happily every
day on a laptop almost a decade old and the keyboard shortcuts are fully
configurable.
------
waleed
Text based browsers: _<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m>
_<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELinks>
~~~
mohsen
not sure if w3m is what i wanted, but i'm really really enjoying it right now.
thank you.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Anita Sarkeesian, 'gaming's feminist advocate,' makes the Time 100 - evo_9
http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/16/8428461/anita-sarkeesian-time-100
======
angersock
According to the article, the people previously celebrated in the industry
would be folks like Notch, Jens Bergensten, and Miyamoto. People that created
_Minecraft_ and the early IP of Nintendo.
Anita, by contrast, is more notable for the buzz and backlash she generated
than any of her actual work.
And so, Times celebrates the victim instead of the maker.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Advanced R programming - iamtechaddict
http://adv-r.had.co.nz
======
danso
> _Although R has its quirks, I truly believe that at its heart it is an
> elegant and beautiful language. While R is a fairly mature language, we are
> still learning how to craft elegant R code: much code seen in the wild is
> written in haste to solve a pressing problem, and has not been rewritten to
> aid understanding._
First of all, what a great endeavor by Hadley...if "all" he had done was
produce ggplot2 (and write a great book about it), that's enough to cement his
elite status. However, what I don't get is... _why R?_ After a few days of
hacking, I was able to produce some nice graphics with ggplot2, but I have to
say that it was by far the hardest high-level language I've had to learn as a
programmer...I haven't used it enough to _love_ , so I'm not at the stage that
I am with JavaScript. That is, I know of JavaScript's problems but know of the
strengths that sometimes derive from its weirdness...and of course, JS is too
ubiquitous to just ignore. However, with R, it just seems some of its quirks
are just _bad_.
I guess my question is aimed more at the angle of: _how does R do the things
it does so well?_ ggplot2 is great enough to learn R for it alone. And some of
the data munging methods, such as `melt`, don't seem to have a well-supported
port in all the other popular languages. I know that Python's pandas has
one...Ruby does not. Is there something about R the language that makes it
especially good at its data and statistical methods (in the way Matlab is
geared toward matrix manipulation)? Or is it just that R was so heavily
adopted by the stats community that, if they had picked another language, that
language would have just as great as functionality as R does.
Note: I suffer from selection bias, though...a lot of the people I chat with
are data scientists, where R is so ubiquitous. It may be that Python pandas is
_just as good_ as the R libraries, but I just know more R-users than Python-
users.
~~~
jzwinck
Python's NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, SciKits, and StatsModels are very
formidable, and have most of the good stuff R has, plus Python itself has a
lot more good stuff (from Boost Python to really basic stuff like argparse),
minus some horrible stuff that R has (such as the affinity for global
functions like `rm()` which seem to be named like Unix tools but which do
other things, or the `c()` function which is impossible to Google for, or the
abysmal default error reporting, or the use of dots in variable names).
But R has some things going for it. There are some algorithms and tools which
exist in R but nowhere in Python (this set seems to both shrink and grow over
time as both languages add more stuff). R's overly-terse syntax for some
things is annoying for maintainers of R code, but R hackers enjoy it because
they tend to be all about banging out piles of stuff quickly.
R also comes with a lot of stuff included that in the Python world would fall
under many different umbrellas (see the several names I mentioned at the
beginning--those are just some of the basics). Whether it's true or not, R
users perceive Python as being relatively balkanized, with that long list of
packages just to get started, and with the Python 2 vs. 3 divide which has
plagued it for years and will continue for a while still.
~~~
tfigment
My experience with R is about 2 years old but your comments are spot on. I
selected R initially because it had the only good autoregressive-moving-
average (ARMA) calculation that was good and also fast that was requested by
my users to do some data extrapolation. I could see its promise but I'll be
damned if it wasn't the most annoying language to use for general things like
accessing a database to get the data. I eventually got it everything to work
but it was not easy to automate and deploy.
Ultimately the ARMA calc didn't do what they wanted mostly because ARMA was
the wrong thing to use on the dataset in the first place, IMNSHO. This could
my general lack of experience with R but I've been programming for 15+ years
and it was one of the rougher languages to work with.
Anyway I ported the code to python, numpy, scipy, scikits (and most
significantly the time series stuff) and it was much easier to pull in the
data an apply smoothing filters and do some general data clean up work but the
ARMA was nowhere to be seen and I settled for simple linear and quadratic fits
and think it did a better job of forecasting. I really liked some things that
R did automatically like when trending data it added confidence intervals on
the forecasts. I was actually tempted to port the ARMA libraries to python
over this but didn't want to dedicate the time to debug and validate it. R was
really good for interactive manipulation but python was better for actual
deployment.
~~~
hadley
Connecting to databases in R is way harder than it should be. It's something I
want to work on in the future.
------
bedatadriven
Wow! Terrific. We've needed a resource like this for a long time in the R
community, and Hadley is the one to write it!
------
Wonnk13
This is a tremendous resource on the level of John Chambers's book Software
for Data Analysis.
------
CharlesMerriam1
I always look at a language's error handling. First piece I see is 'There are
three ways that a function can fail' followed by a six item list.
No one expects the exception.
~~~
hadley
That chapter (like the entire book) is still a work in progress and I'll
hopefully fix the most egregious errors before publication ;)
------
joelthelion
Is the whole book available in one page somewhere?
~~~
hadley
No, because it will be for sale eventually, and that's the deal I struck with
my publisher. But if you dig around in
[https://github.com/hadley/adv-r](https://github.com/hadley/adv-r) you can
find a script to make a single pdf...
------
leondutoit
This is a great contribution to the community, thanks so much. I'm sure it
will make writing R code even more enjoyable.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers - bconway
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/us-huffington-lawsuit-idUSTRE73B5JT20110412
======
johngalt
"The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG
was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance
company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of
millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules." -A. Huffington
Also see: <http://mattbors.com/archives/726.html>
------
FiddlerClamp
I believe in being paid for writing, but if they volunteered to write for
free, how can they turn around and ask for money now?
------
edw
To call this lawsuit quixotic would be too generous. (And I forget, did Don
Quixote ever come off as so whiny?)
------
mcav
Second time's the charm!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program>
------
johnconroy
It always made me sick that Huffington was making so much coin from unpaid
bloggers.
~~~
edw
Do you feel the same way about any profitable company that runs Apache or
FreeBSD? I don't understand your sentiment, which seems quite common. These
unpaid bloggers on HuffPo have in aggregate contributed almost nothing of
durable value to civilization (and I think I'm being generous, as someone
whose politics are not incompatible with your typical HuffPo reader or
contributor, in assuming the net contribution has been positive) while the
contributions of these developers have been enormous and transformative to our
society.
Unpaid bloggers of the world, stop writing! You have nothing to lose but the
time you've wasted adding noise to a vapid cacophony.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How can a teenager get a programming job over the summer? - codeforfood
I am a high school senior who is very talented at programming (at least if I say so myself). In my junior year I was a USACO finalist, so I know my way around algorithms. I know how to program in Java, Python, C++. I have successfully wrote a website in Django in the past. I am now looking for a job for the summer. I have looked at Rent A Coder but it seems inefficient: most of the time is spent on hunting down a manageable project and discussing the problem with the bidder, who usually don't even understand the problem! Does anyone have any tips on how to find a job? I am not looking for high pay, but it should be interesting.
======
randy
If for some reason it isn't immediately obvious to you yet, the answer to your
question is "Post this question on Hacker News."
------
tjr
_I have looked at Rent A Coder but it seems inefficient: most of the time is
spent on hunting down a manageable project and discussing the problem with the
bidder, who usually don't even understand the problem!_
Hmm, actually, being able to turn the vague requirements of an uninformed
customer into a usable end product that meets their needs is a great skill to
have. But I agree that Rent-a-Coder might not be the best way to spend your
time.
------
sharpshoot
Intern at a YC startup this summer: sumon [at] snaptalent [dot] com
<http://snaptalent.com/ads/218/>
------
technoguyrob
You mentioned Rent A Coder.
I used Rent A Coder for a bit, but their system is terrible. I now use eLance
to freelance and it's MUCH better. I've already made $10k on the side with
this, with a cumulative coding time of less than 100 hours. However, the
searching might've taken 10 hours, as it's hard to find projects that are
worth it (but once you hit one, it's jackpot).
Not to mention, I always do projects which involve some new framework/language
I've never used or some task I've never tried, so I can learn as well as make
money! It's so great. Some might call it irresponsible, but I do my homework
before even starting the project, and we all know it doesn't matter what tools
a great programmer is given.
P.S. I'm 17, but no one has to know that. ;-)
------
ecuzzillo
1\. Make cool stuff. Examples of truly cool stuff include
<http://www.anybots.com> and <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~adamwb/> (although stuff
vastly less cool that that still counts as cool for purposes of finding a job)
2\. Post it on your website in such a way that it is obvious that a) it is
cool, and b) you are therefore the shit.
3\. Cold-email (as opposed to cold-call) people you want to work for. If you
have done 1 and 2 correctly, and the people you want to work for are in fact
good people to work for, they will hire you.
It worked for me, and the stuff I made was hardly cool, and it was hardly
well-posted on my website. I now have basically exactly the work situation I
would define given complete freedom.
------
pavelludiq
I live in a small town and the main industry here is coffee shops and that's
the default summer job for the area. So my summers are usually boring. Its too
hot to go outside(curs you SUV's), to boring to work and smoking pot isn't as
cool as it was when i was 16 so im bored as hell. So i was thinking about
starting a project on my own. The drawback is that there is no money in it,
and being a bartender or a dish washer pays decently for the local standards.
All of my friends are going to be studying(most of my friends are ambitious),
or working this summer so i have only my pc and a few ideas.
------
mdakin
Rent A Coder is a waste of time if you're in a part of the USA with some local
high-tech companies you can work at in person.
I got my first UNIX system programing job back in HS in the days when there
were lots of little local companies reselling T1 and then later T3 connections
using modem pools.
I emailed the CEO and asked for a job. He asked me to write him some perl
scripts as a test. I did. He then asked me to come in and talk. I did and
after some talking I was hired on the spot.
Find a local, small tech company, contact them and be ready for questions and
an in-person interview. If you know your stuff and come across as sane in an
interview you'll likely get a job as they know they'll be able pay you in Dew
and chocolate covered espresso beans and you'll be happy. (I actually made
great money for a HS student and you likely will too.)
Good luck!!!
------
JMiao
<http://www.thesixtyone.com/static/jobs/>
we're very open to internship opps if there's a good fit (we've got one under
our belt).
concerning open source (a great opportunity), you should consider contributing
to the multiple database support project. not particularly sexy, but it's
going to be a key element and a great learning opp as django spreads and
matures.
------
tlrobinson
In high school I was always able to find people who needed basic websites
coded up. Of course most of it will probably be boring static HTML and CSS
type stuff.
------
DenisM
Apply for internship at companies.
e.g.: <http://www.microsoft.com/college/ip_overview.mspx>
Entry bar for interns is lower than FTE, and if you do well it's a lot easier
to get hired later on.
------
kobs
It might be too late to get an internship at a large company, but there are
probably startups and other small companies that would love to have interns.
It doesn't hurt to find companies you're interested in an shoot them an e-mail
inquiring about a summer position.
This worked for me when I e-mailed a couple of startups, one of which was
Justin.tv. Even though they weren't specifically targeting interns, I e-mailed
them anyway, with a solution to their pre-interview programming problem.
Now I'm in San Francisco =).
~~~
goofygrin
This is what I was going to recommend, so +1
I got my first "programming" job as an intern at Cessna (in 1996). The job
sucked (Fortran on a mainframe), but it was _awesome_ resume fodder for the
next few years.
Plus I can say that I worked in Fortran ;)
------
initself
I'll hire you if you know Perl and love it.
------
jfornear
"...it seems inefficient: most of the time is spent on hunting down a
manageable project and discussing the problem with the bidder, who usually
don't even understand the problem!"
That is how freelance usually works unfortunately. Building a successful
freelance business really depends more on how well you can build and maintain
relationships with clients than on how talented a programmer you are. You have
to learn to educate the client and communicate well.
If I were you, I would try and find a simple project that will allow you to
ease your way into the business side of things. Maybe talk with your parents'
friends who run small businesses to see if they would like a website?
Managing and educating clients was one thing I wish I would have understood
better when I was a senior in high school. I thought I could just get an
assignment and code away and get it back to them when I was done, and some of
the clients were fine with that because they didn't know any better either.
Also try to be humble. I was cocky then mainly because I was making more money
than all my friends. It's hard to learn in that mindset, and
business/communication skills can really only be learned with experience.
~~~
davidw
I don't think he wants to be doing freelancing at that age, or even building
simple web sites for small businesses. Learning is what he ought to aim for,
and that means something like an internship at a small, cool company.
------
unalone
Internships.
I go an intern job over at Aviary for this summer, and I'm thrilled. Though I
doubt it's a coding job, to be sure... I'm much more an end-user person.
Still. I'm sure that if you're a programmer then being an intern is the way to
go.
------
DaniFong
One good way for teenagers to break into a job is to start contributing to an
open source project. Many in the community are old hands in a variety of
different companies and organizations. They can open doors for you.
Also, try tapping into the resources around USACO. Rob and the others have
many links, and many USACO alums have become quite prominent. Some really like
to help young people out.
Rent A Coder and TopCoder design and development, eLance, and others, are all
pretty much a waste of time. They are a market for lemons. You can learn far
more in different environments.
The ideal situation? You're given a project with an enormous jump in
responsibility, you get to work on something interesting and challenging, you
get to work with people you can really learn from, and you get to see a
project you're proud of through to completion.
If you'd like to, feel free to contact me -- details are in my user profile.
~~~
codeforfood
"Rob and the others have many links, and many USACO alums have become quite
prominent. Some really like to help young people out.Rob and the others have
many links, and many USACO alums have become quite prominent. Some really like
to help young people out."
You seem to know quite a bit about USACO. Are you a USACO alum yourself?
~~~
DaniFong
No, but I've been an observer in a few of the competitions, and played through
much of the training set when I used to play TopCoder.
------
rguzman
where are you located?
~~~
codeforfood
New York state
------
humanlever
I shot an email to the CEO of a search engine marketing company in NYC I'm
acquainted with last night letting him know about you, he said he'd be
interested in learning more (his company is in the top 200 of the Inc. 5000).
If you're still looking, drop me a line at richard [dot] kenney [at] sun [dot]
com.
------
jdale27
"I am not looking for high pay, but it should be interesting."
Do you live near a university? If so, check out their job listings, or just
contact some professors (email is okay, but dropping in on their office hours
or otherwise visiting them in person might work better). They don't have to be
CS professors; the interesting programming jobs might actually be in other
departments.
~~~
ibgeek
Agreed. I volunteered to build a simple web site for a biology professor. That
was in 2005, and I've worked in the department every year since building
bioinformatics and biological database applications. I'm currently working on
a project to build a database cataloging short motifs in proteins and their
functions. It's honestly been the best experience I could have ever hoped for.
------
tptacek
Are you in Chicago? We'd pick you up as a paid intern. There are lots of other
companies like us in other cities.
~~~
codeforfood
Wow, matasano! I read your blog and I had no idea you were on HN!
Unfortunately I live in New York.
~~~
tptacek
Our HQ is in Manhattan. =)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
It's Real Hard Making an Indie Game in Cuba - dragonbonheur
http://kotaku.com/its-real-hard-making-an-indie-game-in-cuba-1788713142
======
The_suffocated
Looks cool. The hand-drawn graphics give the game a unique style which I find
very attractive.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
NYU terrorism class asks students to plot terrorist attack - joshfraser
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nyu_homework_plot_terror_attack_71g6BRG0GVqJfBCgVHXWIL
======
joshfraser
I think about physical security the same way I think about virtual security.
The way to find holes in your system is to put yourself in the attackers
shoes. I get why people are upset about this, but I also see how it's valuable
training for our own counterterrorism agents.
------
zeteo
I'd see an issue if we were talking about a CIA exercise made public. But
these are complete amateurs writing a term paper. Surely anything dangerous
they could think of is also likely to occur to a few dedicated terrorists who
may spend years thinking about it?!
------
zmjones
This is hardly unique to NYU. This is not uncommon in undergraduate courses on
terrorism.
------
drivebyacct2
The notion that we should just ignore the defensive mechanism of penetration
testing is born from the same stupidity that has given us the TSA security
theatre and the notion of security through obscurity.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
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How I lost access to my Google account today - ehsanakhgari
http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-14/how-i-lost-access-my-google-account-today
======
overgard
Somewhat of a sidenote, but this is why I refuse to use google+: my gmail
account is too important to me to risk of linking it to another google
service. Especially considering the stories of people's entire google accounts
getting shutdown randomly because of an "algorithm" or whatever.
I like the products google makes, but their complete refusal to have any sort
of customer service makes me hesitant to rely on them for anything beyond what
I trust them with now.
~~~
ajross
"The stories" are sort of an exaggeration. My memory is that Google did that
(disabling a gmail account while freezing a google+ account) once, apparently
by mistake, and corrected it within something like 48 hours. Are there other
examples I've forgotten?
~~~
bitcrunch
It is not an exaggeration.
It has happened to me - I lost everything, calendar, email, g+ (which I had
not ever updated and had no ToS violations on), absolutely everything.
In the next two days I googled (yes, I did) for answers while receiving
automated messages that seemed to indicate I was never getting my accounts
back (submitted the form they asked me to, but nothing came of it).
I lost my appointments, contacts, and had business people doubt my veracity,
as I'd just given my gmail to several new contacts and their initial emails
all bounced.
If I hadn't had multiple friends inside of google I might never have gotten my
accounts back, and I heard they weren't even sure what exactly happened other
than a confluence of events. I then learned how very very common it is to lose
a google account and never know why, and never be able get back anything on
them (family pictures, phone numbers stored in contact lists...)
I'm now mostly divested from google and the things I still have there I now
have backups and redundancies for.
~~~
GFischer
My mother had her account hacked.. she never got it back, despite trying
repeatedly.
And she had all of her digital life in there.
She made for herself another Gmail account which she has safeguarded a lot
more, but it's still chilling to know that you have no recourse.
Gmail is so convenient, that it's hard not to use it, but I'd pay for customer
service.
~~~
maratd
> but I'd pay for customer service.
So pay for it? I'm not saying that it's right for Google to do this, but they
do offer that option. With a Google Apps subscription, you get support.
~~~
ubernostrum
Many, many times we've heard these stories from even _paying customers of
Google_.
Generally, if it can't be implemented by an algorithm, Google's not going to
do it, ever.
~~~
aperrien
With paying customers? That will continue until they face their first
lawsuit...
~~~
ubernostrum
Lawsuit for what? Google's terms are set up such that "we algorithmically
decide to provide you with nothing whatsoever in exchange for your money" is
perfectly within their rights.
~~~
mattmanser
Not in many countries, there are consumer protection laws.
------
fauigerzigerk
What I don't get is why the very first step in Google's automated process is
to lock down the entire account. The debate is around the scalability of
support, but that doesn't explain why the automated first response is so
radical and so radically stupid.
The anger and rage Google provokes by not letting people log in and access
their own data is totally unnecessary. They could just as well let people log
in, view their data and receive email but prevent them from sending mail,
publishing content, uploading more stuff, etc.
This is not simply about automation or no automation. It's about smarter
automation and an intelligently staged response to any suspected issues. If
algorithms are to be accepted as decision makers, they have to be gentle and
not treat everyone like a criminal as soon as there is some suspicion.
~~~
shabble
I suspect it's for the same reason as they never reveal any details about
their search ranking techniques or why some SEO or suspected fraud got your
AS/AW account banned - it's an information leak which people will abuse.
The downside to running such a heavily automated ship is that without
countermeasures, a sophisticated attacker could map out the thresholds of your
fraud/misuse detection system, and then keep just below triggering point.
On top of that, there are actually situations in which you might want your
account to be suspending quickly - ideally before an intruder can cause too
much damage or access any valuable information.
Some sort of graduated response is clearly necessary, but the real issue is
the complete lack of timely dispute investigation/resolution. And it's
probably a hard enough problem to resist automation for quite a while yet.
Edit: This obviously only applies to situations where they might reasonably
expect you to be malicious, or someone else to be in control of your account.
Immediate irrevocable suspension over some tiny ToS violation is pure madness
~~~
fauigerzigerk
So we have two cases:
1) A suspected TOS violation by the legitimate owner of the account.
Trying to prevent this via obscurity is crazy and counter-productive as people
cannot learn from honest mistakes. It also antagonizes people who become
victims of bad algorithms. There is no reason why the kind of staged response
I outlined couldn't work in this case.
2) A suspected security breach that puts ownership in doubt.
This should be handled by resetting the password and contacting the legitimate
owner using contact information on file before the breach. It's really simple.
~~~
andreasvc
I imagine it goes like this:
1) attacker guesses your password or obtains it via phising.
2) attacker changes password, starts sending spam
3) google locks account
When you have arrived at 2), you have already lost the account for good, and
3) is only for damage control.
You should know that Google has no way to verify whether your account has been
hacked, or whether you yourself are a spammer; therefore the best thing for
them to do is just to lock the account.
~~~
fauigerzigerk
That's not the best thing to do, that's the most unimaginative thing to do.
I would do it this way:
1) Make sure that only the legitimate owner has access to the account by using
previously entered contact data to ask him/her change the password.
2) Check if the suspicious behavior stops, which it will in most cases.
3) If it doesn't stop, put the account in read-only mode. If the kind of
behavior may be an honest mistake, explain to the user what happened. Just
take that risk, it's going to be worth it.
4) If it's a statistically active user with lots of regular looking data, let
a human sort things out.
5) If the issue remains unclear, tell the user to download any data he wants
to keep and notify him/her that the account will be closed.
~~~
andreasvc
Yes, that would be better for the user, but this is a free service, and Google
has not much too gain from making the process more complicated (imaginative)
and thus more error-prone. As a user you have the responsibility of keeping
your password absolutely safe, if you do that (and better yet use 2-factor
auth), nothing should go wrong.
Your option 1) boils down to adding more "passwords" by which the user can
authenticate itself, so it's not a fundamentally better protection as they can
be guessed by an attacker as well. Requiring a text message confirmation for
password changes might be a better idea.
~~~
fauigerzigerk
All steps on my list are either fully automated or optional, so it doesn't
cost them more.
Google has a lot to gain from people entrusting them with their data, that's
why they provide a free email service in the first place.
It would be a mistake to think that trust is linear. You can't just treat a
few people very badly without risking a major backlash against your business
model.
------
credo
OP says >> _We've all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of
owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you're
being provided a free service, you're the product, not the customer. But I
honestly never understood how deep this problem is, and how severe the
consequences can be ("surely this cannot happen to me", right?!)._
Excellent point.
Btw one easy way to maintain a local copy of all your gmail-emails is to use a
mail client (like Outlook or Apple Mail) with gmail. With Outlook, for
example, you can easily download and move emails into a PST/OST file on your
PC.
~~~
wvenable
Backing up is fine, but the problem is you still don't own your identity. If
your email address is [email protected] you've lost that forever and that could be
a big problem.
~~~
drucken
Set up your own domain name for $5/year or less and use the free email
aliasing that comes with it,
e.g. [email protected] would be aliased to [email protected] at your DNS
provider.
Then you only ever pass around wvenable.me addresses. If you get a good
provider, they will give you unlimited free aliasing (though they may not
allow catch-all address for free, which redirect anything@ to some default
address, due to spam potential).
Combined with monthly backups via IMAP or export from your actual email
providers, you will never be dependent in either identity, contacts or content
with any single provider.
Needless to say, all of the above is trivial to setup for a typical HN'er.
------
jrockway
Just out of curiosity, did you use two factor authentication on the account? I
understand that a common reason for accounts becoming disabled is because
someone guessed the password, logged in, and then sent a bunch of spam (or
something similarly evil). Two-step authentication makes this attack
significantly more difficult. (But, of course, it makes your email harder to
use. And malware can still steal your "remember this computer for 30 days"
cookie.)
~~~
ehsanakhgari
No, I was not using the two factor authentication feature. I still don't know
what caused this, but yeah, my account might have been hacked.
------
motti_s
This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account.
To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another
service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea),
you never really have full control.
Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out):
1\. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use
[email protected], but [email protected].
2\. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all
emails to it.
If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that
forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need
to get locked out again...).
Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to
point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server.
It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails
you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google
services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your
account back.
~~~
ajross
Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own
for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I
favor at the time). It works great.
~~~
runako
1) Spam filtering. The Google spam filters are likely going to be orders of
magnitude better than anything you run in-house.
2) You value your time. Some people don't, it's not really worth arguing this
point. But it is a reason running a mail server is a bad idea for most people.
~~~
ajross
Orders of magnitude is an exaggeration. My account is very visible and very
old, and gets 6-700 spam deliveries a day. Plain vanilla spamassassin catches
93% of those, and a little perl filter I wrote gets me to 98-99%. I get a
handful of unwanted messages each day. That's just one order of magnitude from
perfect; and I know for a fact gmail isn't perfect.
And #2 is just wrong, sorry. I spend minutes a week doing anything at all
related to maintenance on that box (I use it far more regularly for productive
purposes, though). If you can handle running a linux box from a console, you
can learn to do it too. Or don't, it's up to you. But telling me I don't value
my time is just out of line.
~~~
runako
Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your
post:
>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on
whatever linux distro I favor at the time).
For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot
(and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least
some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to
go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to
realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do
well.
Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started
running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is
different now.
Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness,
a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my
Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're
running.
------
macspoofing
I had my google account suspended for a few hours a few months back. Why?
Because, I was sending myself a set of icons, and I carelessly dragged the
folder in, which caused each one to upload separately (30 altogether). I
noticed it quickly enough, and closed the tab. When I went back in, my account
was suspended. No recourse. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to complain to.
Honestly, I'd rather just pay a monthly fee for the damn thing if it meant a
unilateral action such as an account suspension wouldn't happen without prior
warning. I'm serious Google. It's a good service. Take my money.
~~~
crazygringo
Forgive my ignorance, what would uploading 30 icons have to do with being
suspended?
~~~
ajross
Ditto. I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick
succession would trigger an IDS. People do that sort of thing all the time
(try playing with "git send-email" sometime).
My guess is that it was more like 300, and cc'd to a bunch of external
addresses such that it looked like spam.
So macspoofing: what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?
~~~
macspoofing
>I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick succession
would trigger an IDS.
Believe it. It happened.
>what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?
Waited a few hours, and it was reenabled automagically.
------
RexRollman
This is one of the things that makes me worry about using Google for email.
When it works, which is almost all of the time, it works great, but when there
are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.
~~~
thezilch
Shouldn't this worry you about ANY email service; even those that you are 100%
in control? Backup important data to separate services; have separate services
to read this data; do it often, including the read -- make sure your backups
work.
~~~
machrider
Yes, but the specific problem with Google is they have practically zero
customer support. There is no one you can call to get help, and they
apparently feel no obligation to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
~~~
Drbble
If a 100K people, an insanely huge number, experienced crippling Gmail
failure, that is roughly a 0.1% chance that it would affect you on your
lifetime. Avoiding Gmail for this is like avoiding planes and cars and houses
because you saw on the news that one blew up somewhere.
------
nextstep
For a post titled "How I Lost Access to my Google Account today" this article
does a terrible job explaining _how_ he lost access to his account. Was it
just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory
about what he might of done?
~~~
ehsanakhgari
This is the main thing which sucks about all this. I still don't have any clue
on why this happened. The "how" is exactly how I explained it: I woke up this
morning, and my account was disabled.
~~~
jedc
Here's a link that might be helpful:
[http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...](http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770)
------
troymc
Some thoughts:
\- If you pay $50/year for Google Apps, you can use your own domain name, so
you can change your mail server without changing your email address, and you
also get access to customer service from Google. I have Google Apps and the
one time I contacted them, they got back to me right away.
\- Just like it's a good idea to backup your local computer, it's a good idea
to backup the data in your cloud services. There are numerous options.
Backupify, CloudPull, and ThinkUp (thinkupapp.com) are some which come to
mind.
~~~
Tichy
You don't even have to pay to use gmail with your own domain. I find it
difficult to find the relevant links, though.
~~~
fauigerzigerk
It's here: <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html>
I use Apple Mail for backup. The only issue is the TTL setting for the DNS MX
record. Some domain hosts set this to 24 hours, which means it may take up to
48 hours for all mails to get through after you switch to a different mail
server.
------
kappaknight
You never said "how" you lost your account...
On a side note, it's sh*t like this that make law makers create crazy laws
that would stop poor support like this.
I for one would almost want government intervention to make sure when cloud
services cut you off, they don't take hostage of your data and history too. I
recognize it's a terrible/horrible solution, but if the companies themselves
can't do the right thing, government mandate would have to be next. Cause in
this case, it's not like we can vote with our wallets to make it go away when
the stuff is free.
Also, imagine the number of jobs Google could create if they hired and trained
a support staff for all their products? There's a lot of stuff that would
still benefit from a human touch.
~~~
mjwalshe
Yes that's the danger for Google all it takes for one case to go very high
profile and they will be living with the court/government sanctioned remedy -
that is why banks and other organizations have independent ombudsman - they
want to avoid the government stepping in.
------
kzrdude
> I have been a Gmail user probably since 2004, and I have tens of thousands
> of work-related and personal emails stored in my account, some of which
> being extremely important to me.
We tell people they need backups. With a TOS like "we can shut you down at any
time for any reason", you definitely need backups for Gmail too if it's
important.
------
frankydp
<https://www.backupify.com/>
GApps backup 36 bucks a user a year.
------
teknover
Isn't the question of why the account was locked just as pertinent as how?
What would be racing through my mind was my account hacked, as if so maybe
other services I use be hacked.
Or did I possibly break the terms of service? If so, what may have been the
justified reasons for me doing so, or Google's reason for preventing me so?
That's where full communication with Google would be so essential to remove
the ambiguity and resolve what may be a bigger question at hand.
------
cnbeuiwx
Im glad this happened, because while painful, it makes people think about
their total dependence on a corporation being nice to them.
You can take back your power by using smaller corporations for essential
services such as email, making sure they are NOT located in the USA (should be
obvious, but I feel I should reinforce that you cant get privacy in the USA).
Then again, if you use Google, perhaps you dont care about privacy in the
first place.
------
bbwharris
This is a little scary, a lot of people rely on Gmail. Im sensing a
fundamental shift from "Free" to "Pay for it" for exactly this reason. When
you are a free customer, no one has to care about you. When you are a paying
customer, you suddenly have a voice.
And no, having ads does not mean that you are paying. Someone else is paying
for those ads, if anything they are sponsoring your ability to enjoy a free
service devoid of customer support.
~~~
seles
Except he was paying, and still got no voice.
------
michaelfeathers
I wonder why gmail can't suspend people by giving them readonly access. It
could be time bounded, say 30 days, to allow people to migrate data off.
------
Shank
For the record, if you just read this and you can't/won't switch off, make
sure you have recovery options set to recover your account. You can setup: \-
An alternate email \- A phone number \- Alternate email addresses \- A
recovery question
Note, however, that the latter will only work if your account hasn't been
accessed in 24 hours. If you have 2factor enabled, make sure you have backup
codes printed as well.
------
jbrayton414
Cloud-based services are great, but I think it is wise to store a local backup
of your data. I wrote an app called CloudPull
(<http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/>) to do exactly that for your Google
account. Whether you use my app or an alternative, you need local backups.
------
kevinchen
The site went down. Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...</a>
------
tferris
That sucks. Reading your tragedy I am about to set up a new main identity with
local mail storage:
\- getting a dedicated domain
\- getting either google apps or another web mailer
\- setting up new email address for 50+ services
\- finding some local client, doing backups and what ever
mail account migration is a lot of work ...
------
suyash
Thanks for such an eye opener!!
Good luck gettings yours back, I'm going to back up mine this weekend!
------
lucian1900
I mean no disrespect, but if you have no backups for something it's your fault
when it's gone.
Google's support sucks and they desperately need to improve it. But people
also need to back things up, dammit.
------
sl4yerr
Google's lack of customer service never ceases to amaze.
------
read_wharf
Don't put your stuff in there, because they are not going to treat it with the
same importance that you do.
------
lifeformed
Are there any good alternatives to gmail that include tools for migrating an
existing gmail account?
------
nickm12
I avoid using Google services, but for the ones I do use, I have a separate
account for each.
------
nextparadigms
So is there anything he did that caused this? Or did it just happen completely
random?
~~~
zxy
Considering the post is titled "How I lost access to my Google account today,"
there is a lack of how.
It's well known that your data should be redundant, this is one of those 'I
didn't make a backup' posts.
------
rollypolly
User since 2004. Wow. Is there a way to export tens of thousands of emails
from Gmail?
~~~
uptown
This guide show you how: <http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-
from-gmail/>
~~~
DarkShikari
I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of
emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't
been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this
really scare me.
~~~
cfinke
Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail
backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11
(archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup),
and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and
gave up after 45 minutes.)
~~~
aDemoUzer
good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash.
Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11.
Working good so far.
------
telemekus
is there not a business opportunity here? to make something as reliable as
Gmail, but with better care and attention to Users, that a person could roll
their own mail service from it?
------
sunyc
if things are important, set up a google apps for domain, people.
------
robmay
www.backupify.com lets you backup your gmail to another location
------
loverobots
Congrats on making it to page one, your account will be restored within hours.
Many have their adsense and Adwords linked to suspended Gmail accounts too. It
can cripple their business.
~~~
rooshdi
Yea, unfortunately not everybody has the good fortune of making it to the top
of HN. I had a personal Gmail account wrongfully disabled over a year ago, and
after filling out every form I could find and not receiving any helpful
feedback for a year, I just gave up and decided to cut my losses. However,
after reading this article I checked to see if it was still disabled and, lo
and behold, I was _logged in_! I still don't know whether to be happy or
pissed, but at least it works for now.
------
loverobots
My advice for those that have other Google services tied to an email account:
do not use that account to send email. You minimize the odds of getting banned
and frozen out of a lot of things
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is he a record-setting marathon runner, or a cheater? - ilamont
https://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-marathon-cheating-allegations-frank-meza-20190621-story.html
======
nradov
100% cheater
[https://www.marathoninvestigation.com/2019/06/frank-meza-
add...](https://www.marathoninvestigation.com/2019/06/frank-meza-additional-
evidence-la-marathon-course-cutting.html)
------
human20190310
I wonder if the neurotransmitter "kick" one gets out of pulling off a
successful cheat is equal to or greater than that of legitimately winning.
~~~
rdiddly
The only way we could know would be to ask someone who had done both. But of
course it's very unlikely there's any such person. If you can win, you
probably wouldn't cheat, and if you have to cheat, it's probably because you
can't win.
~~~
braythwayt
Back when I played contract bridge semi-seriously, there were lots and lots of
known cheats, all of whom were already world-class players when playing under
stringent conditions to prevent cheating.
But the moment those conditions were relaxed, they cheated.
I don't know why this is even a mystery: These people want to win, and they
will do everything, including get as legitimately good as they can, AND cheat
if they can get away with it.
We see this is lots of other fields: Black hat hackers who clearly are
talented enough to make money legitimately, politicians who rig elections
(cough--votes suppression--cough) who are probably going to win in their
strongholds anyways, unicorns that raise hundred of millions of dollars in
funds but still break all sorts of ethical and legal rules...
What about "deflate-gate?" Did the New England Patriots need to play fast and
loose with footballs to win? Or did the just want to win so badly that they
did everything legal, questionable, and illegal to win?
Lots of big-name athletes have doped and dope today. Do they need to dope to
win? Is it a red-queen's race against other dopers? Or are some of them so
focused on winning that they see dope as just part of winning along with the
best equipment and the right training and winning the VO2 Max lottery?
Some people just want to win, and they want to win so badly they are prepared
to get good AND cheat. They think that cheating is part of winning, just as
being good is part of winning.
I do not think that the only people who cheat are people who couldn't win
without cheating.
~~~
braythwayt
p.s. For maximum fun, look into accusations that professional cyclists--
including some very big names--are using hidden motors!
~~~
nradov
Race officials scan for hidden motors at all the major races now so it's
impossible for high profile pro riders to get away with that any more.
~~~
braythwayt
It's true that they scan, and perhaps its true that the current generation of
scanners cannot be defeated, but I think we're in violent agreement that some
world-class athletes are thought to cheat despite being world-class.
------
ghshephard
Zero need for an observer here - just allocate the person a GPS watch with a
tamper tag on it. Indeed, anyone who wants to post record times should
probably be required to have one.
~~~
Bedon292
All the serious runners I know have their own GPS watches already, and chest
straps to monitor heart rate. I only know a couple though, so it could be a
biased sample. Or perhaps it is an age group difference, but I would think a
doctor who is serious about his training would be a prime candidate for buying
one though.
~~~
nradov
Most serious amateur athletes now use GPS trackers but many elite pro
marathoners still compete with nothing or just a simple digital wristwatch.
------
ksherlock
If you found that interesting, the story of Kip Litton (name dropped in the
article) is a good read.
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/marathon-
man](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/marathon-man)
------
swimfar
Similar story about a Canadian triathlete:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/sports/julie-miller-
ironma...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/sports/julie-miller-ironman-
triathlon-cheat.html)
HN Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11459976)
------
neonate
[http://archive.is/8KuiD](http://archive.is/8KuiD)
------
JetezLeLogin
_" I took up running for fun. What I can tell you is that I did not cut. My
last few marathons I have had to step off the course, looking for a place to
pee. I didn’t know this was against the rules, I was not aware of that. I’ve
done this several times. I’ve realized my problem is that I don’t hydrate
properly. I have never cut the distance but I have stepped off of the
course."_
Just analyzing the man's statements for basic "tells" of non-candor and non-
forthrightness, like they do in law enforcement:
1) "What I can tell you is..." \- That's a distancing, qualifying phrase - we
might call it an abstraction layer. It's like there's an AnswerTheQuestion()
method that instead of just returning an answer, has to first call the
GetAThingToTellThem() method. Hmm interesting. Great separation of concerns if
you're a computer program, but totally unnecessary if you're being concise and
direct.
2) "What I can tell you is that I did not cut." \- It's a non-denial denial.
He doesn't actually say he didn't cut. He says he can tell you that he didn't
cut. (OK go ahead and tell me then, whenever you're ready.) He can also tell
me that he's a purple elephant that farts rainbows.
3) "...I did not cut" \- Resorting to a formality by eschewing the contraction
- using "did not" vs. "didn't." And I wouldn't make the usual allowance for
Latin heritage, because he's a doctor and has been in the US for a long time,
plus he uses contractions freely elsewhere (didn't, I've).
4) After starting two sentences with "I've", notice in the last sentence (the
second it comes time for another direct denial), it goes back to formal
language: "I have."
5) "I didn't know this was against the rules..." Getting defensive, trying to
portray himself as a victim being persecuted unjustly (totally outside the
normal purview of the usual rules which he thought he knew) and therefore
deserving of sympathy. Also subtly attacking the interviewer for asking the
question. Aggression is a big tell.
6) Overall does it seem to be just impartially reporting/presenting
information or does it seem to be making a case or argument by "dressing up"
the facts to favor himself? Notice the overall wordiness of the thing and the
volunteering of superfluous information. I do this for fun. I don't hydrate
properly (WTF does that mean, you tryin to say you drank too much water dawg?)
None of these on their own would be inherently suspicious, and might have
other explanations, but occurring all together like this, they're a billboard
telling you "Take a closer look."
Edit: Reply comments are starting to object along the lines that this doesn't
prove anything. That is correct. The goal isn't to prove guilt; only evidence
proves guilt. The goal is only to direct the course of the investigation.
You're only looking for "warmer or colder." Keep going this direction or look
somewhere else? That's why I conclude with "Take a closer look" and not
"Please convict this person of a crime immediately." It's akin to a polygraph
reading - fairly unscientific, generally inadmissible, but valuable in
deciding what to do next in the investigation.
~~~
bardworx
That’s quite an analysis but means nothing as words can be mixed or he can use
non conjugated words to make sure there is no distortion.
Also, I’m not a cop, but I grew up around a lot of cops. I spent many nights
serving cops after their shift and listening to their stories. As such, I can
say that your whole “this is how cops do it” is bullshit because it’s not
admissible in court. What cops do is ask the same question a thousand
different ways until you tell them the truth, hence the long sessions.
------
hartator
> officials lacked evidence to take action but requested he run with an
> observer the following year. Meza agreed but ended up skipping L.A. in 2016,
> entering the Oakland Marathon instead.
I suppose that says it all.
~~~
inopinatus
Inferentially speaking, this remark says more about you than the data point
does about the accused.
~~~
hsitz
How so? If you know anything about running, you know that it would be quite
simple for the guy to go out and run another race to confirm the level of his
fitness. He might be a few minutes off, but it's quite easy for a marathoner
to go out an run another (observed) race five or ten minutes slower than a
recent PR. Five or ten minutes slower would be fine, would confirm his level
of fitness is close to what he claims. Very suspicious that this has not
happened.
The truth is probably that his actual fitness is half-an-hour or an hour or
more slower, and that he's a cheat. Yes, this assertion could be wrong. But
given that it would be so easy for the guy to disprove it (and confirm his
previous race) it's very suspicious that he hasn't done it.
~~~
inopinatus
Irrespective of the other evidence, it’s the unwillingness to entertain
alternative explanations and just label an absence of self-defence as “very
suspicious” that I find to be the hallmark of a braying lynch mob. It’s a
rejection of critical thinking.
Which is why I specifically called that out and nothing more.
~~~
jmull
If you want to pursue critical thinking, what are the explanations for the
various discrepancies in his races?
I see on the marathoninvestigation site the Dr. has been given opportunities
to explain these suspicious discrepancies and either hasn’t or provided
explanations that are contradicted by hard facts.
~~~
hitekker
The GP saw a chance to denigrate someone, took it, and when others questioned
the motivations behind the denigration, he or she retreated to some kind of
weird psuedo-objectivity.
>Inferentially speaking, this remark says more about you than the data point
does about the accused
Shortly after:
>It's why I specifically called that out and nothing more
Self-righteousness is a weird thing.
~~~
inopinatus
Nope. Happy to stand by the original claim that the specific data point quoted
was meaningless and everything that flows from that about the quality of
judgment for those believing it was, in contrast, definitive of guilt.
“Nothing more” refers to consideration of any other evidence.
As for “retreating into objectivity” I’d say I was far from it when
subsequently upping the emotional ante with the descriptor of a “braying lynch
mob”, which is how I really feel about the peanut gallery.
Luke 6:37 applies recursively to all of us.
------
mruts
Why does anyone care? I don’t run matherons or exercise at all but why do
people feel so strongly about this? No one is making money on running
marathons and if people want to cheat, more power to them I suppose.
~~~
Bedon292
Because it affect others. There are trophies and prizes, even if they aren't
large. He isn't just coming in in the middle of the pack he is winning his age
group. And you have to qualify for larger races, which have limited numbers of
runners. If he cheats to qualify then he is taking a place that someone else
should have gotten.
~~~
runnr_az
Yeah... I think this is the key thing. For "normal" runners, if someone wants
to cheat - no big deal, whatever. It's all supposed to be fun and there's no
reason to be too anal about auditing results. It's lame if they cheat or
whatever, but they're really only cheating themselves.
For the age group record, it matters! It should be, like, a real thing... the
people who get those records work really, really friggin' hard, so they
deserve to be treated fairly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apple allows analytics data collection, but not for Google - danh
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/08/apple-modifies-ios-developer-terms-to-allow-limited-analytics-data-collection/
======
ryandvm
I'm not sure how Apple gets a free pass for this kind of stuff. Sure, they get
a blog post or two written about them, but it never sticks. People grumble a
bit, but in the end everyone gets back in line for the next iGewgaw.
Some nasty things Apple has done:
* Blocks all non-licensed integration with their products (notably iTunes).
* Banned Flash from iOS
* Banned iOS devs from using cross-compilers
* Blocked apps from the App Store that compete with Apple products/services
Apple has far surpassed Microsoft as abusers of the"lock-in" strategy to grow
their business.
I await the day that Google decides they've had enough of this bullshit and
drops support for all Apple products. I'm not sure how compelling the iPhone
would be without Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, etc. The cherry on top
would be for Adobe to do the same with their creative suite.
I suppose that's just a savage fantasy. The reality is that Google will simply
continue to improve Android and, like a slow motion replay of the 90s, Apple
will watch the iOS lineup pushed back into the luxury niche that the Mac has
enjoyed for all these years.
~~~
proee
"The reality is that Google will simply continue to improve Android and, like
a slow motion replay of the 90s, Apple will watch the iOS lineup pushed back
into the luxury niche that the Mac has enjoyed for all these years."
I've thought about this a lot, and I think that Android is gaining ground
right now because it's across so many carriers. As soon as Apple breaks it
marriage with AT&T and gets it phones into Verizon, Sprint, and all the other
major carriers I think the Android growth with slow.
FWIW, I just bought an HTC EVO because I refuse to sign an AT&T contract.
~~~
tomjen3
I am not so sure: in Denmark Apple has an agreement with a reasonably good
carrier but I still see a lot of Android phones around.
~~~
frio
Anecdotally, here in my office in New Zealand, we have 4 HTC Magics, 2
iPhones, and then a raft of SE/Nokia devices for lesser peons such as myself
;). This is despite the fact that Android devices aren't available for retail
through a large Telco (Vodafone/Telecom) and need to be parallel imported.
Corporates are scared of iPhones, because the level of control that's handed
to Apple is reasonably unacceptable.
------
Osiris
Apple used to be the underdog fighting against "the man" Microsoft, but these
tactics are reminiscent of Microsoft's heavy-handedness that landed it in so
much hot water. It's hard not to see these things are start seeing Apple as
the bad guy.
~~~
Tamerlin
Apple has always behaved this way. The only reasons that they got away with it
was a combination of cultist loyalty and being the underdog. Apple has always
been considerably more evil than Microsoft.
~~~
orangecat
_Apple has always behaved this way._
Not before the iPhone. There were never any restrictions on what developers
could do with Macs, and OS X is very hacker-friendly.
~~~
jrockway
PT_DENY_ATTACH.
~~~
orangecat
Good point. That was to placate the RIAA with iTunes, so I'd say that they
started to go downhill with the focus on closed devices; first iPods, then
iPhones to a much greater extent.
------
dminor
Given the Justice Department's inquiry into Apple, Google should just go ahead
and press the issue by collecting the data anyway.
~~~
briansmith
I would rather have nobody collect the data.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
US bullying dozens of countries into following the DMCA model - gasull
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/05/1925230&from=rss
======
gamble
The US propaganda has been particularly obnoxious here in Canada. There have
been several attempts to enact a DMCA-style intellectual property law, but all
of them have failed to pass before the end of parliamentary sessions.
Nevertheless, US-based pressure groups ratchet up the complaints every year
like clockwork.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
From Sentiment Analysis to Emotion Recognition: A NLP Story - apotatopot
https://medium.com/neuronio/from-sentiment-analysis-to-emotion-recognition-a-nlp-story-bcc9d6ff61ae
======
unhappy_taste
The expectations that we had 15 years ago, about the leaps and bounds in
research and progress in this area, has not happened, maybe it's a good
thing...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Bad news: KeyWe Smart Lock is easily bypassed and can't be fixed - based2
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/11/f_secure_keywe/
======
rasz
"device [MAC] address. It's from this address the common key is generated."
[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot15/woot15...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot15/woot15-paper-
lorente.pdf)
"With no exceptions, all WPA2 default key generating algorithms that were
recovered during our experiments use either the router’s MAC address or serial
number, or both, as input."
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
“Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in” (2017) - peter_d_sherman
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/coreos_kubernetes_v_world/
======
cwyers
I have worked with database code that was meant to only work with the database
it was running on, and database code that was meant to be agnostic to what
database you used. I always thought that the costs of the second were
underappreciated relative to their benefits. And unless you're actively
maintaining running on more than one database (as in, shipping a product where
your users have more than one database) you tend to miss all the implicit ways
you come to depend on the implementation you're on -- yes, the syntax may be
the same across databases, but performance impacts are different, and so you
tend to optimize based on the performance of the database you're on.
I suspect the same is true for cloud. Real portability has real costs, and if
you aren't incurring all of them up front and validating that you're doing the
right things to make it work, then incurring part of them up front is probably
just a form of premature optimization. At the end of the day, all else being
equal, it's easier to port a smaller codebase to new dependencies than a
larger one, and attempting to be platform-agnostic tends to result in more
code as you have to write a lot of code that your platform would otherwise
provide you.
~~~
jasonkester
It’s not just portability that’s an issue with lambda. It’s also churn.
Running on Lambda, one day you’ll get an email saying that we’re deprecating
node version x.x so be sure to upgrade your app by June 27th when we pull the
plug. Now you have to pull the team back together and make a bunch of changes
to an old, working, app just to meet some 3rd party’s arbitrary timeframe.
If you’re running node x.x on your own backend, you can choose to simply keep
doing so for as long as you want, regardless of what version the cool kids are
using these days.
That’s the issue I find myself up against more often when relying on Other
People’s Infrastructure.
~~~
nerdbeere
It's not about using what the cool kids use these days. I can't stress enough
that unmaintained software should _not_ run in production.
This way you have a good argument towards management and if you do it
regularly or even plan it in ahead of time it's usually not much work.
During a product planning meeting: "Dear manager, for the next weeks/sprint
the team needs X days to upgrade the software to version x.x.x otherwise it
will stop working"
~~~
jasonkester
I guess we have different philosophies then. My take is that software in
production should not require _maintenance_ to remain in production.
Imagine a world where you didn't need to spend a whole week every year, per
project, just keeping your existing software alive. Imagine not having to put
off development of the stuff you want to build to accommodate technical debt
introduced by 3rd parties.
That's the reality in Windows-land, at least. And I seem to remember it being
like that in the past on the Unix side too.
~~~
patrec
Your vision is only workable for software for which there are no security
concerns. This might improve to the extent industry slowly moves away from
utterly irresponsible technologies like memory-unsafe languages and brain
damaged parsing and templating approaches and more or less the whole web
stack. I wouldn't hold my breath though. And even software that's not
cavalierly insecure will have security flaws, albeit at a lower rate.
~~~
jasonkester
Keep in mind that you're arguing against an existence disproof. The Microsoft
stack, for example, is a pretty big target for attack, and has seen its share
of security issues over the years.
But developers don't need to make any code changes or redeploy anything to
mitigate those security issues. It all happens through patches on the server,
99% of which happen automatically via windows update.
~~~
avodonosov
Yes, Microsoft is good at backward compatibility.
So many open source hackers do not know the basic tecniques for backwards
compatibility (e.g. don't reaname a function, just intoduce a new one, leaving
the old available).
I'm spending very significant efforts maintaining an OpenSSL wrapper because
OpenSSL constantly remove / rename functions. I hoped to branch based on
version number, but they even changed the name of the function which returns
version number.
And that's only one example, lot of people do such mistakes costing huge
efforts from users.
And this popular semantic version myth, that you just need to update major
version number when you chane the API incompatibly to save your clients from
trouble.
~~~
ben0x539
> So many open source hackers do not know the basic tecniques for backwards
> compatibility (e.g. don't reaname a function, just intoduce a new one,
> leaving the old available).
I'd dispute this, or at least I think this doesn't capture the whole picture.
Microsoft makes money with backwards compatibility and can afford to spend
significant effort on to the ever-growing burden of remaining backwards-
compatible indefinitely. Open source volunteers are working with much more
limited resources and I think that it comes down much more to intentional
tradeoffs between ease of maintenance and maintaining backwards compatibility.
If you have a low single-digit number of long-term contributors, maybe the
biggest priority to keep your project moving at all is to avoid scaring off
new contributors or burning out old contributors, and that might require
making frequent breaking changes to get rid of unnecessary complexity asap.
Characterizing that as "they don't know that you can just introduce a new
function" doesn't seem like it yields instructive insights.
~~~
avodonosov
Yes, this is exactly the wrong reply I often hear when complaining about
backwards compatibility.
The mistake here is that in 99% of cases backwards compatibility costs noting
- no efforts, no complexity.
Of two equally costing choices the people breaking backwards compatibility
just make a wrong choice.
> maybe the biggest priority to keep your project moving at all
When you rename function SSLeay to OpenSSL_version_num, where are you moving?
What does it give to your project?
Ok, if you like the new name so much, what prevents you from keeping the old
symbol available?
unsigned long (*SSLeay)(void) = OpenSSL_version_num
(Sorry for naming OpenSSL here, it's just one of many examples)
When developers do such things, they break other open source libraries, which
in turn break other. It's a huge destructive effect on the ecosystem. It will
take many man-days of work for the dependent systems to recover. And it may
take years for the maintainers to find those free days to spend on recovery,
and some projects will never recover (e.g. no active maintainer).
With a lift of a finger you can save humanity from significant pain and
efforts. If you decided to spend your efforts on open source, keeping
backwards compatibility by making the right choice in a trivial situation will
make you contribution an order of magnitude bigger, efficient.
So, I believe people don't know what they are doing when they introduce
breaking changes.
~~~
avodonosov
I saw developers introducing breaking changes, then finding projects depending
on them and submitting patches. So they really have good intentions and spend
more their volunteer open source energy than necessary. And when the other
project can not review and merge their patch (no maintainers) they get
disappointed.
So please, just keep the old function name. It will be cheaper for you and for
everyone.
~~~
pnutjam
An unmaintained duplicate way of doing things is a mistake waiting to happen.
~~~
jammygit
I was just thinking this, but I guess were really just talking API changes.
Everything under the api can still get rewritten, no?
------
scarface74
This is not true.
For example:
Using this template.
[https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-
express](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express)
I’ve been able to deploy the same code as a regular Node/Express app and a
lambda with no code changes just by changing my CI/CD Pipeline slightly.
You can do the same with any supported language.
With all of the AWS services we depend on, our APIs are the easiest to
transition.
And despite the dreams of techies more than likely after awhile, you aren’t
going to change your underlying infrastructure.
You are always locked into your infrastructure choices.
~~~
dickeytk
You're only thinking about the _input_. Technically, yes, I can host an
express app on lambda just like I could by other means, but the problem is
that it can't really _do_ anything. Unless you're performing a larger job or
something you probably need to read/write data from somewhere and connecting
to a normal database is too slow for most use-cases.
Connecting to AWS managed services (s3, kinesis, dynamodb, sns) don't have
this overhead so you can actually perform some task that involves
reading/writing data.
Lambda is basically just glue code to connect AWS services together. It's not
a general purpose platform. Think "IFTTT for AWS"
~~~
staticassertion
OK. So you connect to Postgres on RDS - cloud agnostic.
You connect to S3, and:
a) You can build an abstraction service if you care about vendor lock-in so
much
b) It has an API that plenty of open source projects are compatible with (I
believe Google's storage is compatible as well)
Maybe you use something like SQS or SNS. Bummer, those are gonna "lock you
in". But I've personally migrated between queueing solutions before and it
shouldn't be a big deal to do so.
It's really easy to avoid lockin, lambda really doesn't make it any harder
than EC2 at all.
~~~
scarface74
Have you ever asked the business folks or your investors did they care about
your “levels of abstraction”? What looks better on your review? I created a
facade over our messaging system or I implemented this feature that brought in
revenue/increased customer retention/got us closer to the upper right quadrant
of Gartner’s magic square?
~~~
wisswazz
Why should they care, or even be in the loop for such a decision? You don’t
ask your real estate agent on advice for fixing you electrical system I guess?
~~~
scarface74
Of course your business folks care whether you are spending time adding
business value and helping them make money.
I’ve had to explain to a CTO before why I had my team spending time on a CI/CD
pipeline. Even now that I have a CTO whose idea of “writing requirements” is
throwing together a Python proof of concept script and playing with Athena
(writing Sql against a large CSV file stored in S3), I still better be able to
articulate business value for any technological tangents I am going on.
~~~
wisswazz
Sure. Agree totally, maybe I misread your previous comment a bit. What I meant
is that run-of-the-mill business folks do not necessarily know how business
value is created in terms of code and architecture.
------
dr01d
In most cases, very few companies have products that need to scale to extreme
load day 1 or even year 1. IMO, instead of reaching for the latest shiny cloud
product, try building initially with traditional databases, load balancing,
and caching first. You can actually go very far on unsexy old stuff. Overall,
this approach will make migration easier in the cloud and you can always
evolve parts of your stack based on your actual needs later. Justify switching
out to proprietary products like lambdas, etc once your system actually
requires it and then weigh your options carefully. Everyone jumping on the
bandwagon these days needs to realize: a LOT of huge systems are still rocking
PHP and MySQL and chasing new cloud products is a never ending process.
~~~
com2kid
Serverless is also easier to develop for.
With Google Firebase Functions I was able to start writing REST APIs in
minutes.
Compare that to setting up a VM somewhere, getting a domain name + certs +
express setup + deployment scripts, and then handling login credentials for
all of the above.
I had never done any of that (eventually I grew until I had to), so serverless
let me get up and running really quickly.
Now I prefer my own express instance, since deployment is much faster and
debugging is much easier. But even for the debugging scenario, expecting
everyone who wants to Just Write Code to get the horrid mess of JS stuff up
and running in order to debug, ugh.
(If it wasn't for HTTPS, Firebase's function emulator would be fine for
debugging, as it is, a few nice solutions exist anyway.)
But, to be clear, on day 1 the option for me to write a JS rest endpoint was:
1\. Follow a 5-10 minute tutorials on setting up Firebase Functions.
OR
1\. Pick a VM host (Digital Ocean rocks) and setup an account
2\. Learn how to provision a VM
3\. Get a domain
4\. Get domain over to my host
5\. SSH into machine as root, setup non-root accounts with needed permissions
6\. Setup certbot
7\. Learn how to setup an Express server
8\. Setup an nginx reverse proxy to get HTTPS working on my Express server
9\. Write deployment scripts (ok SCP) to copy my working code over to my
machine
10\. Setup PM2 to watch for script changes
11\. Start writing code!
(12. Keep track, in a secure fashion, of all the credentials I just created
for the above steps!)
I am experienced in a lot of things, and thankfully I had some experience
messing around with VMs and setting up my own servers before, but despite what
everyone on HN may think, not every dev in the world also wants to run a bunch
of VMs and manage their setup/configuration just to write a few REST
endpoints!
So yeah, instead I can type 'firebase deploy' in a folder that has some JS
functions exported in an index.js file and a minute later out pops some HTTPS
URLs.
~~~
fyfy18
If you don't want to learn DevOps why not use a PaaS like Heroku? That way
when you want to learn DevOps, you can move your application without rewriting
large swathes of it.
It's funny but when I learned to code basically all ISPs provided you with
free hosting and a database, and you just needed to drag and drop a PHP file
to make it live. It's like we have gone backwards not just in terms of
openness but also in terms of complexity.
~~~
com2kid
The last time I had done server side dev, yeah, it was all PHP and FTP drag
and drop a file over.
I was a bit shocked at how asinine things had gotten.
------
seniorsassycat
Of all the AWS features to criticism for lock-in, Lambda seems like the
weakest choice.
You don't have to write much code to implement a lambda handler's boilerplate,
and that boilerplate is at the uppermost or outermost layer of your code. You
could turn most libraries or applications into lambda functions by writing one
class or one method.
A lambda's zip distribution is not proprietary and is easy to implement in any
build tool.
~~~
Karunamon
I'd include the triggers as part of that analysis, like being able to invoke a
function every time something is pushed to an S3 bucket for example. Just
being able to run arbitrary functions without caring about the OS is the core
product, but the true value is that you can tie that into innumerable other
services that are so helpfully provided.
Basically, AWS has so much damn stuff under their belt now, and it all
integrates so nicely, every time they add a new feature it lifts up all the
other features as a matter of course.
------
QuinnyPig
"I'm scared of vendor lock-in, so I'm going to build something that's
completely provider agnostic" means you're buying optionality, and paying for
it with feature velocity.
There are business reasons to go multi-cloud for a few workloads, but
understand that you're going to lose time to market as a result. My best
practice advice is to pick a vendor (I don't care which one) and go all-in.
And you'll forgive my skepticism around "go multi-cloud!" coming from a vendor
who'll have precious little to sell me if I don't.
~~~
andrewstuart2
Pick a vendor and go all in.
That sounds like the perspective of someone who's picked open source vendors
most of the time, or has been spoiled by the ease of migrating Java, Node, or
Go projects to other systems and architectures. Having worked at large
enterprises and banks who went all in with, say, IBM, I have seen just how
expensive true vendor lock-in can get.
Don't expect a vendor to always stay competitively priced, especially once
they realize a) their old model is failing, and b) everybody on their old
model is quite stuck.
~~~
dijit
I am incredulous that people wouldn't be worried about vendor lock-in when the
valley already has a 900lb gorilla in the room (Oracle).
Ask anybody about Oracle features, they'll tell you for days about how their
feature velocity and set is great. But then ask them how much their company
has been absolutely rinsed over time and how the costs increase annually.
Oracle succeed by being only slightly cheaper than migrating your entire
codebase. To offset this practice, keep your transition costs low.
\--
Personal note: I'm currently experiencing this with microsoft; all cloud
providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their
VMs, but obviously Azure is priced very well (in an attempt to entice you to
their platform). Our software has been built over a long period of time by
people who have been forced to run Windows at work -- so they built it on
Windows.
Now we have a 30% operational overhead charged from microsoft through our
cloud provider. But hey.. at least our cloud provider honours fsync().
~~~
james_s_tayler
I think perhaps not all vendor lock-in is created equal. I too shudder at the
thought of walking into another Oracle like trap, but it's also an error in
cognition to make the assumption that all vendors will lock you in to the same
degree and in the same way.
I guess the part of us that is cautioning ourselves and others are aware of
the pitfalls, but others also have valid points around going all in.
There is a matrix of different scenarios let's say.
You can go all in on a vendor and get Oracled.
You can go all in on an abstraction that lets you be vendor agnostic and lose some velocity while gaining flexibility.
You can go for a vendor and perhaps it turns out that no terrible outcome results because of that.
You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the death of the company.
You can go all in on vendor agnostic and have that be the reason the company was able to dodge death.
Nobody can read the future and even "best practices" have a possibility of
resulting in the worst outcomes. The only thing for it is to do your homework,
decide what risks are acceptable to you, make your decision, take
responsibility for it.
~~~
dr01d
Vendors have 2 core requirements to continue operating: get new customers and
keep the existing ones. Getting new customers requires constant innovation,
marketing spend, providing value, etc. Keeping existing customers only
requires making the pain of leaving greater than the pain of staying.
~~~
james_s_tayler
Sure. And from even from that you still can't infer what outcome will
materialize. If you made the technically correct decision and your business
went under because of it, that is still gonna hurt no matter which way you
look at it. Hence the advice is do your homework, figure out which risks are
acceptable to you, make your choice and take the responsibility. There is no
magic bullet to picking the right option. Only picking the option you can live
with because that's what you're going to have to do regardless of the outcome.
You might know all the theory on aviation and be a really experienced pilot
and one day a sudden wind shear might still fuck you.
------
lbacaj
At the expense of losing what little reputation I have on HN I will say this:
As many others on here seem to be correctly saying, i think this article
amounts to fear mongering of vendor lock in. The modern public cloud is very
different from the Oracle/IBM mainframes of yester-year.
The whole point of the public cloud is to leverage managed services to their
fullest extent so you can move incredibly fast. As a startup, you’ll run laps
around your competitors doing all of this from scratch simply to preserve
their non vendor lock in.
The notion that removing that glue code that glues your code to AWS or Azure
managed services amounts to vendor lock in, that is no more true than any
other code running on any VM that talks to those same managed services. Except
the main difference here is that your not wasting time writing the glue code.
Additionally Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, or even Functions on Kubernetes,
which are meant to be the smallest unit of work when used correctly (similar
to a MicroService) and should contain only your application logic are “vendor
lock-in” is absolutely rediculous to me. If anything when you do decide to
move vendors this will be the easiest code in the world to migrate, inputs and
outputs.
I will concede that it is hard to see this the way I’m describing if you
haven’t actually worked on the modern public cloud and are not actively taking
advantage of managed services on there for speed of delivery.
A little self promotion: as an example of what’s actually possible with these
Serverless frameworks I recently built a cross platform app, as a side project
in just a few months nights and weekends with the entire backend as Serverless
Functions, the app can read any article to you, using some open source ML
models for text to speech, and can be found
[https://articulu.com](https://articulu.com) if you want to check it out.
------
Bucephalus355
There is a certain amount of arrogance to always being afraid of vendor lock-
in. Most companies don’t survive, even the best ones might be just around for
20-25 years. The big worry should be on building a business that won’t
immediately die.
And even with Oracle (probably the primo example of lock-in) it’s not like
there aren’t firms who’s sole speciality is pumping data out of the Oracle DB
and transforming it magically into T-SQL. It’s never the end of the world with
vendor lock-in.
NOTE: now vendor lock-out does scare me like no other ironically
~~~
travisjungroth
By lock-out do you mean the vendor shuts down, or you get banned, or something
else?
~~~
freehunter
Not the person you're responding to, but I worry about (and have experienced)
both with my tech stack, even as I've purposefully switched vendors multiple
times with minimal headaches.
Locking yourself into a single vendor is easier to voluntarily work your way
out of than your vendor shutting down or shutting you out unexpectedly. But
the good news is if you plan for one you get the other for free.
------
nilshauk
I would argue that small to medium web services don’t need Kubernetes nor
serverless. It doesn’t even need to be split into services. Build a tidy
monolith and see how far that takes you first. Have less moving parts.
Yes, serveless ties you in to platform specifics but in their nature the
functions you create should be small and easy to reimplement elsewhere.
Kubernetes on the other hand is arguably also a certain lock-in, by virtue of
being complicated. No wonder vendors love it, it’s an offering that is hard to
do right in-house. And when Kubernetes releases updates only the most seasoned
in-house teams will be able to keep up. It creates job security by being a lot
to learn and manage. Yes there are good abstractions but when something breaks
you’ll need to delve into that complexity below. (Makes me think of ORM
abstractions vs SQL.)
Yes, Kubernetes is an awesome vehicle for orchestrating a swarm of
containerized services. But when you’re not Netflix or Twitter scale it’s
ridiculous to worship this complexity.
Frankly I keep coming back to appreciate Heroku's abstractions and its twelve
factor app philosophy [https://12factor.net/](https://12factor.net/). Heroku
runs on AWS but feels like a different world than AWS to develop on. I can
actually get projects flying with a 2-3 person team me included.
~~~
sonnyblarney
" don’t need Kubernetes nor serverless."
Actually 'serverless' is where small shops might want to start.
A single Lambda can encompass a whole variety of functions, and if you're
using a datastore that scales as well, you don't need to worry about much.
Once it's set up, it should be very easy to monitor and change.
I'd rather a simple Lambda than managing a couple of EC2's with failover
scenarios and the front end networking pieces for that.
~~~
nerdbeere
Also small scale is where lambda really shines in terms of costs. If you have
some api endpoint that gets a hit 100 times per hour and does some execution
then this is actually way cheaper then even the cheapest ec2 instance in a
production setup with ELB.
------
swamp40
This is interesting:
_We 've heard from our customers, if you cross $100,000 a month on AWS,
they'll negotiate your bill down," said Polvi. "If you cross a million a
month, they'll no longer negotiate with you because they know you're so locked
that you're not going anywhere. That's the level where we're trying to provide
some relief._
~~~
bgroins
As someone who has negotiated with AWS at the $1m/month level this is
completely false.
~~~
Someone1234
I've also negotiated with AWS, and both your position and their position
strikes me as equally true.
There's certain products of theirs that they just aren't going to negotiate
on, because they know they've got you, whereas others the clouds part and
discounts rain down.
It certainly used to be this way when AWS had less competition, these days
there's an Azure/Oracle Cloud/Rackspace/Google/etc alternative to most of
their greatest hits, which gives a greater negotiating edge.
~~~
redisman
Lambda certainly has more alternatives than Dynamo for example. But I guess
the true lock-in is the integration. If you use Lambda, chances are you'll end
up choosing S3 and SQS and Dynamo and API Gateway etc.
------
fishnchips
I’m not buying that. Lambda is merely an execution environment. In most Lambda
functions I write, the Lambda-specific bit is tiny, and could be easily
replaced without affecting business logic.
On the other hand, most Lambdas I write interact with other AWS APIs, which is
where the real lock-in is. The effort to eg. move the data off Dynamo is
substantially higher than what’s required to switch that bit of code to run on
k8s and consume a Kafka topic.
~~~
TheRealPomax
Cool. What part aren't you buying, the title of this post, or the actual five
paragraphs in the article that actually give you the context of that title?
------
jdietrich
The Serverless framework is platform-agnostic and open source. You can use a
bunch of different FaaS providers, or self-host on Kubeless or Fn.
[https://serverless.com/](https://serverless.com/)
------
milesward
Unless your serverless platform is OSS...
[https://github.com/knative/](https://github.com/knative/)
~~~
BryantD
Or [https://github.com/fnproject](https://github.com/fnproject) .
I think best practice is to think of serverless deployment as a technical
operations technology, rather than as a methodology to eliminate the need for
technical operations. Don't lose track of what you're effectively outsourcing
to your serverless provider. Have a backup plan, just like in the old days you
wanted a backup plan in case your datacenter provider had issues.
------
captainbland
The problem I see with this kind of vendor lock in is you can get screwed in
several different ways if you let yourself get locked in enough.
The 'good': a competitor overtakes AWS and is able to offer vastly cheaper or
better value services than you have access to, rendering you less competitive
than people who are able to move to that platform easily.
The 'bad': Amazon starts deprecating services you rely on and you're forced to
port things anyway.
The 'ugly': Amazon decides that it's happy with its market share or its
shareholders start demanding they bring in more revenue and they realise that
those who are locked in to AWS are easy targets. It'd be easy to just jack up
the higher tiers of things like lambda, dynamo DB, API gateway, etc. and on
those who they have bespoke agreements with without even necessarily affecting
their marketshare.
It's really a risk/reward thing when going for these platform specific
serverless systems. It's like asking if you trust a big company enough that
you want to give up all of your bargaining power with them, and that you're
going to put thousands or even millions of dollars where your mouth is on
that.
~~~
scarface74
As far as I know, in the entire existence of AWS since the first services
launched in 2006, they have never abandoned a service.
------
adjkant
After using lambda and serverless myself over the past year, I really struggle
to see where this lock-in is. If you're already writing a stateless API as
most are these days, and the cloud platforms support many language options,
going between say EC2 and Lambda really isn't that much difference in code. If
that changeover time is too costly for you, that's far more likely a sign of
changing infrastructure too often.
~~~
robrtsql
In my opinion, the real lock-in is not the stateless API, but the tie-ins with
other AWS services that may end up being required to accomplish what you need.
Like, if you're trying to provide a calculator API, you can definitely run
that in Lambda and then easily move it somewhere else when AWS does something
to upset you. But, let's say you're trying to do something a little more
complicated (a common example is validating and transforming profile pictures
for some sort of app), you might end up using AWS Step Functions and SQS. Your
code is still portable but it relies on a bunch of managed services.
------
peterwwillis
> He elaborated: "It's code that tied not just to hardware – which we've seen
> before – but to a data center, you can't even get the hardware yourself. And
> that hardware is now custom fabbed for the cloud providers with dark fiber
> that runs all around the world, just for them. So literally the application
> you write will never get the performance or responsiveness or the ability to
> be ported somewhere else without having the deployment footprint of Amazon."
It's almost as if you're paying to use someone else's massive investment in
technology so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, enabling you to just get
business done quickly and at ridiculous scales. Kind of like using Windows
tech stacks, or buying a Ford F-350. Who could possibly build a business on
such terrible lock-in devices?
------
forrestbrazeal
Serious question for all on this thread: have you personally encountered a
deal-breaking issue while _actually implementing_ a significant application on
"Lambda and serverless"? Whether that's lock-in, scaling issues, cost,
performance, or whatever. Has there been something that's caused you to go
"yeah, no, this was a bad idea; should've rolled my own infra."
I'm not asking this disingenuously; I legitimately want to know.
------
jedberg
There is absolutely no lock in whatsoever with Lambda. The features provided
by Lambda are also provided by Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions.
The lock in comes from the ecosystem you use them in. If you make code that
just returns the time, you can run that anywhere. If you make code that uses a
database, your _database choice_ provides lock in, but not Lambda.
And it's the same lock in you get using any service from AWS.
But your trade off is that you can make something that's super portable, but
must cater to the lowest common denominator of features amongst all the
providers you want to be compatible with.
I'd rather have lock in than be hamstrung by the velocity of the slowest
provider.
------
time0ut
I've built a number of serverless systems over the past few years on AWS and
GCP. None were too extreme, but ranged from moderately complex SPA to silly
chat bot. Some saw light, but real, usage.
To echo what others have already said: the lock in isn't in the compute, it's
in the ecosystem, which also happens to be where all of the value is.
Like everything else in our industry, serverless is a series of trade offs.
There are a number of classes of problems where it is absolutely worth trading
the downsides of serverless for the agility and velocity the ecosystem can
provide you. As with anything, the key is knowing when it is the right tool
and how to use it properly.
------
shiado
Somebody should make a movement called 'serverful' that builds technologies
that allow you to deploy a web service on any arbitrary server in any cloud
that scales to the amount of resources the server is capable of consuming. You
could just reskin Apache and call it a day.
~~~
taneq
They need a snappy new name for it, though. "Web hosting" or something.
~~~
Aeolun
That sounds a bit outdated. “Web-scale hosting” has that little bit of extra
oomph.
------
flurdy
This is why I can see why Kubeless [1], Fission [2] and OpenFAAS [3] are
gaining traction.
But my take is always that it depends on the size of your company, your cloud
strategy and how much serverless you are using.
* If you are small company dabbling in small serverless scripts, just use Lambda.
* If you are a medium+ company but have gone all in on AWS or GCP, and serverless is still a limited small part of your stack, then also just use Lamda or Google Cloud Functions. But consider the options.
* If you are a multi-cloud company or more invested in serverless. Then they are the ones that should definitely consider OpenFAAS etc and not use Lamda etc for anything but minute parts of your stack.
* If you use Kubernetes and are fairly Cloud agnostic, then use Kubeless etc so that you have full serverless support in local and staging clusters and any cloud provided clusters you expand and migrate to as well.
[1] [https://kubeless.io](https://kubeless.io)
[2] [https://fission.io](https://fission.io)
[3] [https://www.openfaas.com](https://www.openfaas.com)
------
reilly3000
I the Serverless framework and have been able to successfully redeploy
functions from AWS to GCP (all node, this was in 2018) with only a few changes
to the Provider section off serverless.yml. We are adopting Kubernetes now and
I'm feeling out the landscape, so I'm planning on trying the same thing with
Kubeless. AFAIK it should be pretty seemless- I'm more worried about Ingress
working properly than Kubeless not being able to run my code.
FaaS has an important role to play: we often prototype things with Zapier,
then redeploy them as FaaS functions when we need to scale them or process any
PII. I can't imagine trying to make a full app with them with the current
state of the dev/testing workflow, but for internal systems, integration, and
stream processing they are pretty tough to beat.
------
CyanLite2
Lock-in concern in the cloud is an antipattern. Only way to solve it is to go
on-prem and manage everything yourself.
In the meantime I'll enjoy super cheap S3 storage rates. If AWS ever goes out
of business then I'll worry about that then.
~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
AWS won't go out of business.
You'll start seeing slowly increasing rates... and as people leave, the rates
will increase further. Eventually, you'll start seeing Snowball no longer
supported for getting your data off S3.
------
kondro
Unsurprising that when your continued existence (in this case CoreOS) relies
on something being true, that every alternative to that is false.
------
softwaredoug
There’s a whole generation of developers that didn’t come up in IBM and then
later MS days of vendor lock-in. Open source is default and it’s easy to only
see the benefits and positive side of one vendors vision. Only now it’s harder
as proprietary tech is often cloaked in “open” culture and only when you go to
rip the bandaid off do you see where the real lock-in is
------
aussieguy1234
Apache Openwhisk [https://openwhisk.apache.org](https://openwhisk.apache.org).
it's open source and can run on any cloud platform. It will run your
serverless apps. You'll maintain some infrastructure to run it on unless you
go for a hosted service like IBM provides.
I'm building the infrastructure for Libr (Tumblr replacement,
[https://librapp.com](https://librapp.com)) on a serverless platform that I
won't name which will be hidden behind a reverse proxy. There won't be any
vendor lock in. It's an express/Vue app and will run on any serverless
platform or CDN.
If the app is censored by my first cloud provider (perhaps due to pressure on
the provider from SESTA/FOSTA) I'll move to a new one. It's likely I'll build
parralel copies of the production infrastructure on different cloud providers
at some point for rapid migration capabilities.
------
nzoschke
If you want to see what the “lock-in” actually looks like check out:
[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas)
It’s a boilerplate Go, Lambda, API gateway, dynamo, SNS, x-ray etc app.
Personally I embrace the “lock-in”. This architecture faster, cheaper and more
reliable than anything I’ve seen in my 15 years of web development.
Most importantly it is less code. Most time is spent writing Go functions. A
little time goes into configuring the infra but the patterns are simple. No
time goes into building infra or a web framework.
I think Go is the antidote to true lock-in.
I have a ‘Notify’ function that uses SNS that I recently replaced with a Slack
implementation. With well defined interfaces you can swap out DynamoDB for
Mongo if you have to move.
It is also easy to turn a function into a HTTP handler. There is a smooth path
from function to container to server if the cost or performance of lambda
doesn’t work. It’s hard or impossible to go the other way.
------
johnklos
Sigh.
"Serverless" is the most ridiculous example of bullshit marketing in recent
history. It truly took me a good twenty minutes to understand what it is
supposed to represent because I kept thinking, "There HAS to be more to this
than vendor-supplied CGI."
People make many arguments for designing WITHOUT portability (and cwyers even
calls portability "premature optimization"). What they're implicitly stating
is that they can't code to abstractions, aren't effective at coding without
using edge cases, and require package specific optimizations to barely get
acceptable levels of performance. If the edge cases and package specific
optimizations weren't considered necessary, there'd be no real case for making
something non-portable.
The fact that people can even rationalize non-portability boggles the mind. It
just seems like a poor attempt at job security or something equally silly.
------
stcredzero
I am thinking of my own SaaS offer, but combined with Open Source. Basically,
you will be able to publish a certain kind of application with a little bit of
Javascript coding, and coding several lambdas in Golang. There will be an
entire miniature server cluster running as goroutines, which you will be able
to download off of github, then run locally. You will also be able to take the
same server cluster and run it on a service like AWS. (On my roadmap, I'm
going to remove all dependencies outside of the project, so you will pretty
much be able to fill out the config file, and just run the executable, and
have it scale according to the number of processors.
However, you will also be able to sign up for an account on my website, then
use a command line facility to "inject" your lambdas into my system, which
takes care of the autoscaling, database backup, and staging for you.
------
sologoub
When discussing lambda/serverless/<whatever flavor of pay per request> setup,
people don’t often seem to stop and think about the usage/access patterns, the
associated costs and performance.
I’ve seen such setups being recommended for APIs that have predictable and
fairly constant load, for which you are a lot better off having an actual
running set of processes that can be reused. For Google that could be
AppEngine, for AWS ElasticBeanstalk. It’s a question of the right tool for the
job.
One tech that I haven’t played with that’s really interesting is KNative,
where you can run an underlying infra with predictable costs/performance, but
allocate it like a lambda per request. Performance of the requests themselves
may still be less though when compared to a more traditional setup.
------
rynop
I made the OSS [https://github.com/rynop/aws-
blueprint](https://github.com/rynop/aws-blueprint) partially to address this
problem. Easily migrate from Lambda to ECS (remove lambda lock-in). It
abstracts all the difficult & time consuming to learn aws idiosyncrasies in to
a best-practice production ready harness.
You could argue that if you have lots of lambdas, this is non-trival. I would
argue that tons of lambda is a poor architecture. What you gain with isolation
you lose management, complexity, nimbleness, attack vector surface.
You could also argue my harness locks you into AWS as it is aws specific.
However I'd argue that it is the other aws services locking you in (ex:
Dynamo) or your code/architecture.
------
staticassertion
The argument makes no sense. Because it is deployed in AWS, you can't get
performance without using AWS services, therefor it is locking.
This seems like no more of a lockin than, say, choosing a DNS server that's
giving me lower latencies.
My AWS Lambdas talk to a Postgres database, S3 (which has many open source API
implementations), and SQS, which yeah, I'm "locked into".
The work to move to another service would be absolutely trivial. All of the
AWS stuff like Postgres, S3, and SQS is totally abstracted from the business
logic. I could rip it out at any time.
I just don't get what anyone means when they saw lambdas lock you in, I don't
feel locked in _at all_. I could move to GCP in, idk, two weeks probably.
------
tyingq
I would guess ecosystem as a whole is a bigger deal.
Porting lambas alone probably isn't a huge deal. But then the cloudformation
templates, sqs configs, dynamo tables, rbac configs, S3 access settings,
cloudwatch logging and alerts, etc. It all adds up.
------
byteface
Is using the features of a tool, 'lock in'? You could do the things the tool
does yourself but you choose to leverage the tool. That's why you use it.
You're aware of this. aws lambda functions can be just pure python or other
code. Anything logged there can be a metric in cloudwatch. Users are
blissfully aware of how much it's doing for them from security to monitoring.
And to be honest companies with enough money would prefer these solutions to
something you can knock-up yourself. I feel so locked in by my million free
requests a month to service that wont choke that I didn't even have to set-up.
------
jimmychangas
Yeah, absolutely, if your engineers decide to adopt serverless due to hype or
just to improve their own curriculum, you are going to spend a lot more on
infrastructure than you would by provisioning VMs or running containers. By
being selective about which workloads are eligible to become FaaS and doing a
little of optimization, however, you can cut some costs and avoiding
overprovisioning, with automatic and efficient scalability.
I believe that, in most cases, it is better to control the exit costs of your
architectural decisions than to avoid lock-in at all costs.
~~~
Coredalae
This is why the serverless framework (trying to give the possibility to deploy
to any cloud provider) is so important. Some repetitive simple tasks are
extremely well suited for lambda/functions /whatever name and some tasks are
suited for big machines with gazillion terraflops and terabytes of ram. The
job of the engineer is to know what his software needs, and what the most
optimal path for this is.
Business is ever changing. This is just another step
------
jonthepirate
I wrote a flaky test management system called
[https://www.flaptastic.com/](https://www.flaptastic.com/) on AWS Lambda... my
first AWS bill was $2.50. I love it. I also used serverless.com's wrapper to
deploy it for free. If this gets expensive and I want to raise money to have
expensive DevOps engineers setup Kubernetes for months then fine... but I
really don't need that and I can easily port this to any other platform if I
want to later.
------
jniedrauer
I use lambda to perform simple, stateless units of work like autoscaling event
post-hooks, chat bots, routine scheduled tasks, etc. They're mostly cloud-
agnostic and I could move them to a server if I had to.
I don't think anyone can really build a full scale application using
serverless. It's just not performant or predictable enough. I've seen people
try, and it always ended in frustration. A properly configured docker
scheduler is better for this type of work anyway.
~~~
sanxchit
You can definitely build a fully functional web app using just serverless. For
an example, take a look at [https://acloud.guru](https://acloud.guru) . Where
I work, we almost exclusively use serverless, and I have found it to be
incredibly reliable, and way more hands-off than a docker deployment.
------
asaddhamani
Zeit is a great alternative here in my opinion. You don't need to make any
changes to your code, it will just run on Zeit. Have used it to host a few
microservices in the past and the experience has been much more pleasurable
than Lambda (I needed to do PDF generation through a browser and had to use
Zappa and modified binaries for phantomjs)
------
Brahma111
Clear abstraction anyone? We make it mandatory to separate the Managed service
code to separate interfaces and implementation. We have the same code running
both on Azure and AWS each leveraging their respective managed services. Just
implement the interfaces for your need. It's not difficult.
------
CrankyBear
Ah.. this is an ancient story and it's really all about promoting Kubernetes
rather than dissing Lambda.
------
tracker1
Worth mentioning that CoreOS was bought out by RedHat, which makes a lot of
sense given where they were going with OpenShift. Which, in turn was bought
(is being bought) by IBM.
In the end, the tooling in use is crossing a lot of lines and becoming very
common in a lot of ways.
------
legend_sam
I think that's the exact reason why people came up with Kubeless.
[https://kubeless.io/](https://kubeless.io/)
It doesn't have to be vendor locked. You can literally host the k8 cluster in
your local
------
gigatexal
Is it lock-in? It’s just your code being packaged in a container and run on an
api invocation. I thought one could move from any of the big three’s
serverless function offerings pretty easily?
~~~
quickthrower2
On Azure it's not a docker container, or any other kind of 'standard'
container.
That said you can get a docker container with the Azure Function runtime, so
you could in theory port your functions elsewhere, but I don't think you get
the monitoring benefits that you'd have keeping it on Azure.
------
tnolet
Yes, a lock-in that can be avoided with a 20 to 30 line piece of Javascript
that just handles the messages and passes it to your cloud agnostic piece of
business code.
~~~
scarface74
More like two
\- deserialize event
\- pass object to your business logic.
------
justasitsounds
A lot of embittered Ops engineers shaking their fists in the comment thread of
that article. "Real engineers write assembly, on punchcards, blindfolded" etc.
------
acroback
So are cloud APIs which lock you in. E.g tensor flow, Aurora and all that
shiny jazz.
Hate it, it is useless once you change provider or go bare metal.
Cloud computing is Vendor lock in of 21st Century.
------
crb002
Totally disagree. It's a stock Linux container. The most transparent of all
the "serverless" runtimes out there.
------
galaxyLogic
What about hybrid cloud? Wasn't that supposed to solve the problem?
------
pantulis
And that's why Knative is going to be a thing.
------
fdsak
Well, then why not standardize them ?
------
gjmacd
article is from 2017, AWS has EKS (Kubernetes)
------
type0
from 2017
~~~
dang
Added. Thanks!
~~~
AnimalMuppet
How do you _do_ that? With all the stories in play, and all the comments being
added, how do you notice within four minutes that one of them says to add the
date to a title?
~~~
Robin_Message
I wonder if a regexp for a short comment containing a single date would work.
I expect comments matching that regex are streaming by, Matrix style, on one
of dang's many monitors¹, as he sips his morning cold-pressed flat grey². In
fact, with a bit of practice, there is probably a regexp that catches all of
them.
¹ I haven't seen dang's workstation, I'm just imagining.
² Sorry, doing it again.
------
JohnFen
Why is it called "serverless" when it is not, in fact, serverless? It's petty,
but that nomenclature drives me nuts.
~~~
dragonwriter
> Why is it called "serverless" when it is not, in fact, serverless?
It is serverless from the perspective of an IT department that, by adopting
it, no longer has to manage servers as a distinct resource.
It's like a product sold as having “worry-free interoperation”. There's still
worry in the interoperation, you are just paying someone else to do the
worrying.
Likewise, a serverless product still has servers underneath, you are just
paying someone else to abstract them so that they aren't a concern for you.
~~~
JohnFen
But we already have a term for that: the cloud.
~~~
dragonwriter
> But we already have a term for that: the cloud.
No, the cloud is a term for dynamically provisionable resources, some of which
(IaaS, for instance) still require traditional server management.
It's true that the invention of the term, originally for Amazon's Functions-
aaS, wasn't particularly distinguishing from lots of existing cloud SaaS
categories (classical PaaS, DBaaS, etc.) which are equally free of server
management to FaaS services, but the terms has subsequently been broadened in
use (AFAICT, Google Cloud Platform was the main driver here) so that it makes
more sense than Amazon's original use did.
~~~
JohnFen
Hmm. Your reply has left me even more confused about the nomenclature. Oh
well, I guess it doesn't matter if I actually understand what these names mean
or not.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Petition Obama adminstration to require free access to publicly funded research - MikeTaylor
http://access2research.org/
======
MikeTaylor
Theres more background on this petition at [http://svpow.com/2012/05/21/help-
the-usa-into-the-21st-centu...](http://svpow.com/2012/05/21/help-the-usa-into-
the-21st-century-even-if-youre-not-american/) for those who want it. The TL;DR
is that the UK and the European Union are introducing long overdue mandates
that all publicly funded research must be publicly accessible. At the moment,
the USA has no concrete plans to do the same, but Open Access advocates have
the ear of Obama's scientific advisor and think there's a good chance this
could make it provided that we the people show it's an issue we care about. So
please sign the Whitehouse.org petition at
[https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-
fre...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-free-access-
over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-
research/wDX82FLQ?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl)
~~~
loevborg
Thanks. Does anyone have further information about the status of laws to
mandate open access in the EU?
~~~
MikeTaylor
The forthcoming EU mandate is not yet nailed down. The best information I've
seen so far is in this article in Times Higher Education:
[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=...](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419949&c=1)
------
geoffschmidt
Direct link to petition:
[https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-
fre...](https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/require-free-access-
over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-
research/wDX82FLQ)
It only takes a minute to sign :)
Most political petitions have no impact. They are just email-gathering
campaigns. This one is different: it's on the Whitehouse site and it's not for
gathering emails, it's to give Open Access advocates some political cover as
they craft their proposal.
So if you sign only one online petition this year, make it this one.
~~~
wccrawford
I'd have signed, but after signing in, the button stays grey and I can't click
it. Click on the help links brings me to an 'under construction' page.
Clearing my cache and ctrl-reloading the page didn't help.
~~~
johnmmurray
I had this problem in FF, but not in Chrome. Maybe some redirect issue? Who
knows.
~~~
wccrawford
Maybe it's an issue with signing up. I started on Chrome, but moved to Safari
and it worked on Safari.
~~~
MikeTaylor
Thank you for persisting! I hope others don't have the same awkward experience
and give up.
------
ck2
Please list any petitions that have resulted in changes in law?
Or are petitions just some way to keep people busy and feel like someone
cares?
~~~
MikeTaylor
This petition is being put together specifically in response to a meeting of
Open Access advocates with Obama's Science Advisor. This administration
understands the issue and wants to gauge the degree of public interest. In
short: while skepticism about petitions in general is warranted, this is one
that can make a real difference.
------
kghose
Any research funded by the NIH has to be made publicly available within 12
months after publication. The papers have to be deposited with PubMed.
<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>
~~~
MikeTaylor
Yes. But NIH is one of a dozen US Government departments that have research
budgets exceeding $100M per year. And so far it's the only one with a public-
access mandate.
~~~
jessriedel
The NIH has a budget of $30B, so it's not _just_ one of a dozen.
<http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm>
If I recall, it has _the_ largest research budget of any non-military US
government body by far.
------
avar
I'm not from the US and I don't have a lot of knowledge about US law, but it
seems strange to me that the executive branch of the government is hosting
petitions for what in most other countries would fall under the legislature.
Isn't it the task of Congress in the US to set policy about what requirements
are attached to the expenditure of public money, does the executive branch
really have any impact on stuff like this?
~~~
roc
You have the philosophy right, but political reality has left that behind.
While the President doesn't have any official power over the legislating
process, he can wield significant political pressure as de facto head of his
party, via shaping public opinion from the bully pulpit and with the threat of
a veto.
Presidents have, for some time now, been very active in setting/driving
legislative priorities.
------
delinquentme
Elsevier needs to burn. You want an awesome way to get a 10-20% increase in
research funds? Cut the fat.
~~~
cantankerous
I'm no Elsevier fan, but I think that number is a bit over the top. Most
Universities have site-wide access to pretty much any paper you can get your
hands on. I have a really hard time believing that 10-20% of research funding
feeds those journal databases.
~~~
crusso
It's not just about the costs to Elsevier. It's about the costs of keeping
information a secret that could have a much greater financial and societal
impact if it were unleashed.
This is the age of the individual contributor. Open Source has taught us all
about the power of appealing to and capturing the output of people working at
home, in small groups, at small startups, etc.
So this isn't so much about recapturing the piece of a fixed pie that Elsevier
takes. This is about making an incredibly larger pie by opening the
information up to a wider audience and allowing us to compound the benefits in
a much larger ecosystem.
~~~
MikeTaylor
Exactly! The real issue here is opportunity cost. Yes, we could have a much
cheaper academic publishing system if we did it without the paywalls and the
profiteering corporations. But that savings are as nothing compared with all
the new application avenues that will open up when research is freely
available.
------
orbenn
A lot of people assume that making all research that included federal grant
money free to the public would be unilaterally good. I like the idea in
general because I actually like to read scientific papers sometimes, but my
primary interest is to maximize the amount of research that happens. Or more
precisely to maximize the speed at which we acquire knowledge/technology.
Are there any existing examples of places where this has been put into
practice that we can compare to see which state of affairs is better? I'm
unsure it would be beneficial because most of the public wouldn't
read/understand the actual journal articles anyway, and I expect most of the
scientists who do work in the field already have subscriptions. I'm worried
there might be harm because government mandates of all kinds very often have
negative unintended consequences and I'm curious what those might be for this
area.
~~~
slowpoke
_> Or more precisely to maximize the speed at which we acquire
knowledge/technology._
Who do you mean by "we"? Because you certainly can not be referring to "we" as
in mankind. Locking away knowledge behind walls of bureaucracy and artificial
monopolies will certainly not speed up progress, but instead slowly grind it
to a halt.
Just look at the state of the patent wars. Everyone is suing each other, or
claiming to just collect patents to be able to counter-sue. Microsoft, Google,
Apple, and all the other big players probably each have patents on all
technologies all of them use, a good amount of those more than once and worded
as ridiculously over-general claims.
So if by "we" you are referring to the few dozen mega-corps that pretty much
control our shared heritage of knowledge, then yes, you are quite likely
correct.
If, on the other hand, you want to maximize the rate of technological
advancement for the "we" as in all of humanity, then embrace Open Access, get
rid of patents and all that other nonsense, and realize that incremental,
cooperative development will speed up progress by _magnitudes_.
------
greboun
As far as I know the EU has decided that all research resulting from its 80
billion research funding program must be published open access. The US doesn't
have this yet but there is a law in preparation to do just this for US
government funded research. A petition might speed things up
~~~
MikeTaylor
The law in question is the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act), and
it's a very fine thing: see [http://svpow.com/2012/02/10/d-day-going-on-the-
offensive-ove...](http://svpow.com/2012/02/10/d-day-going-on-the-offensive-
over-public-access/) on its importance and
<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/FRPAA2012.shtml> for more details.
The current petition is a different strategy towards the same goal,
approaching the Whitehouse directly in the hope of catalysing a presidential-
level directive that would jump-start the process. (Not a speculative hope,
either -- relevant people have the ear of Obama's scientific advisor.)
------
anamax
How many journal articles are not just tweaks on conference papers and the
like that are already available on-line?
This is a serious question. Back when I was seriously tracking a couple of
areas, I didn't care at all about journals because they were about a year
behind.
Public access to data, that would be something.
~~~
MikeTaylor
This varies a lot between fields. In palaeontology, conference "papers" are
only 200-word abstracts with no illustrations or references, and are not
considered to be science. So papers are everything. I believe it's less
straightforward in maths, for example, where conferences are much more
important.
~~~
ethanwhite
It is the same in ecology - short abstracts, not considered peer reviewed,
never cited.
------
ajays
I've signed it, but I have a general question: has there been any petition on
the WH site which has resulted in significant change (like a new law being
submitted to Congress by the WH, or a new directive being issued) ?
~~~
rhino42
Closest we got, imho, was Obama speaking in support of gay rights. They made a
pretty big deal of it in the petitions.
As far as I know, laws? nada
~~~
smsm42
Causal relationship between those petitions and Obama speaking in favor of gay
marriage is highly doubtful. Obama knew where the cards lie on this issue long
ago, and was waiting for an expedient moment to revert to the position he held
before he run for President. Now he decided such moment has arrived. I do not
think it has anything to do with any online petitions.
~~~
rhino42
Probably correct, I'm afraid to say :-(
------
dkroy
I signed it, that only makes sense If the public is going to fund it, then
they should be able to see the research. To be honest, I didn't even know that
publicly funded research wasn't all public.
------
dkelly
Should this be extended to books that are based on publicly funded research?
~~~
brodney
Just having the research available isn't the full investment in a book that
uses it. If the government further funds the book based on the research, maybe
that would be appropriate. If, however, I invest time and money into writing a
book that incorporates research, I'd want a return on that investment.
~~~
MikeTaylor
"I invest time and money into writing a book that incorporates research, I'd
want a return on that investment."
If you're an academic, you won't get it. The way academic publishing works is
that you do the research, write it up, prepare the illustrations, then sign
over copyright of the whole lot to a publisher such as Elsevier. They will
then publish the book, make a tidy profit, and pay you: nothing. Nothing at
all.
------
febeling
I couldn't really find anything on the site on this, so the question: are non-
US citizens allowed to sign? If so, are they encouraged to sign?
~~~
MikeTaylor
Sorry for the slow response. Yes, non-US citizens absolutely are invited to
sign -- please do! (I did, and I am British.)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
From Microsoft to Apple, and Back Again - allenleein
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/11/21/from-microsoft-to-apple-and-back-again
======
scarface74
The state of the Mac is just sad right now.
Laptops - the Air is overpriced with horrible specs - a 1400x900 screen is
something you expect to see on a bargain basement Dell being sold on Black
Friday, the MacBook only has one port, and you're in dongle hell buying the
MacBook Pros
-Mac Mini - hasn't been updated since 2014 and it was a down grade in a lot of ways.
-Mac Pro - hasn't been updated since 2013 and won't be until 2019 according to Apple.
That leaves just the iMac. It's the only line that is actually good from the
low end to the high end iMac Pro. But I can understand why that isn't for some
people.
------
sneak
I recently gave it that second chance the author suggests; Windows still sucks
_real_ bad. Even Win10 is still a nightmare of disabling a boatload of shit
nobody ever wants.
The “no OS X team at Apple” rumor is false.
OS X does suck more these days than it did, but I don’t think things will stay
that way in the future.
~~~
collyw
What exactly do you find so bad about Windows 10? I am on Linux pretty much
full time, but when I have looked at Windows 10 it seemed OK.
~~~
Rebelgecko
For me, there's a lot of minor annoyances that add up. Some have been fixed
(start menu), and others have only gotten worse (searching for a file is
totally broken. I can be looking at a file in explorer.exe, type its name into
the search bar, and be told that no files were found).
There's also a lot of antiprivacy things that bother me (Cortana, push to sign
in to a Microsoft account, weird spammy notifications, etc)
~~~
0x6c6f6c
Search has been an incredibly finnicky experience. I had to use PowerShell
commands to correctly search the contents of files in a folder, checking the
options in Explorer did nothing to accomplish this. "No results found", yet I
run the script and oh look 25 project files contain this string.
The Start Menu has constantly been slow for me, and often times I can't search
and/or click anything. This is incredibly frustrating.
Having to disable so many features out of the box is annoying, and the amount
of effort to disable telemetry without some helping script is absurd. I'm not
sure I even got everything the first time since it seemed like more registry
values needing modification were being discovered continuously.
Any large update takes a substantial chunk of time and multiple reboots. I sat
in front of my computer as it updated for at least two hours with 4 reboots. I
didn't even get to use it. This was last week. On top of that it restarted
while I was grabbing a snack. I didn't get to use it again before bed. This is
hardly acceptable when I may actually NEED to use it.
Still have gotten blue screens of :) death on multiple computers, work and
personal. They're happy now at least, but doesn't change the fact I lost some
work.
Inconsistency between Windows programs is also frustrating. There's at least 3
different design styles, maybe more, than go into the default Windows
programs. Difference in font, spacing, window design, icon design, alerts,
etc. that really show fragmentation even still after 8, 8.1, and still on 10
trying to modernize their OS.
These are a few things that I've still found wrong with Windows 10. Just about
all of these in the last week, I'm not trying to look much farther back.
------
Sarki
So, another ad-financed blog post, right?
Also the following is ridiculous: "It's also obvious why it makes no sense to
ask "Why don't you ditch Windows and install Linux on it?". Because no Linux
distro has Pen support, whatsoever. The performance base also has a physical
key that you need to press in order for the hinge to release the display."
Wacom has been developing Kernel modules FOR YEARS. I've personally been using
a Samsung XE700T1C for 4 years with full pen support without any problem.
I've even been surprised to see Ubuntu 17.10 supporting automated screen
rotation, on-screen keyboard pop-up out of the box.
~~~
jfim
Can you elaborate on what "full pen support" means in this case?
Does it support pressure/angle in drawing applications (eg. gimp)? Is there
support for handwriting recognition as a text input method? Is there a good
note taking app for Linux (like One Note or Nebo)?
------
nailer
> Rumor says that Apple doesn't even have a dedicated team for the desktop OS
> anymore.
Yep. The MacOS team was disbanded in 2016.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-
apple...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-
alienated-mac-loyalists)
~~~
sempron64
Possibly in imitation, there actually is no more Windows "team" at Microsoft
either: [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-
terry...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-
myerson-out-as-microsoft-reorganizes-windows-division/)
So we're in for a rocky few years in commercial operating systems.
~~~
widowlark
Windows software division has been turned into a services group. Windows is
going from Software for sale to software as a service.
------
nadioca
You are creating a case to justify your overpriced windows laptop.
Linux <3
~~~
nailer
I love Linux, have worked for the two largest Linux companeis for a few years
of my life, and happily purchased laptops with entirely OSS drivers for Linux
support.
And still spent a bunch of time fucking around with my laptop to make stuff
work instead of getting things done.
Since all I want is a terminal and a web browser, Windows works fine, with the
added benefit of occasionally being able to fire up some good quality desktop
software like Tower 2 or Excel.
~~~
chopin
I am not sure if I understand, but if you only need a terminal and browsing,
what's the problem with Linux?
I switched recently from Win7 to Linux Mint and it has been a smooth
experience (granted, Libreoffice is sufficient for my use-cases). Even my
relatives have little complaints and mostly stuff just works (which I can't
say from my prior Win7 experience).
~~~
nailer
> I am not sure if I understand, but if you only need a terminal and browsing,
> what's the problem with Linux?
In the case of my last Linux laptop it was compositing not working when using
an external monitor on the low end Intel graphics card I'd picked because it
had OSS drivers and was regarded as having excellent Linux support.
------
ngrilly
If Apple has not team working on macOS, then who developed stuff like APFS
(Apple File System) or Metal2 that were introduced in High Sierra?...
~~~
kridsdale1
Those were introduced in iOS first. And the kernel is shared.
~~~
ngrilly
I stand corrected. At least, it proves that merging the macOS and iOS is not
totally pointless ;-)
------
legitster
I'm the rare creative professional who never really made the move to Mac.
Windows in general has always done everything I need at a better price
(Ultrabooks aside). The benefits to getting a MacBook seem very superficial
and easily fixed in Windows - definitely not enough to lock myself down to
their ecosystem.
> There is nothing like Garageband if you're a hobbyist musician.
Also, a point of correction. If you are looking for Garageband on Windows,
Mixcraft is an excellent option.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What are some good online tech communities for non-hackers? - futuretro
For a non-hacker (no computer science degree) who is interested in tech, and learning simple coding (starting off with html, css), what community or forum would you recommend I join? I'm looking to find a place where I can learn, ask questions and contribute.<p>So far, I'm looking at hackernews, indie hackers forum, subreddit<p>Any suggestions would be appreciated. I’d like to focus my time on one community if possible.
======
federicoponzi
Probably freecodecamp is your best option AFAIK
~~~
futuretro
thanks!
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Inside the Weird and Wild Crusade for Clean Pot - scrumper
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/meet-crusaders-clean-pot-w517264
======
scrumper
Slightly annoying title but this is actually interesting, about an unlikely
alliance of outlaw and MBA type to set up a guaranteed-clean marijuana
distributor business in CA.
More worryingly, it talks in some depth about various incredibly unpleasant
pesticides that coat almost all weed found in the USA.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
yGuard – An open-source Java obfuscation tool - Tomatenquark
https://github.com/yWorks/yGuard
======
Tomatenquark
Recently here at yWorks we have refactored yGuard to be distributed under MIT
licensed. As a goodie for new year, we'll share it with you!
~~~
marios
Not going to use yGuard anywhere, but thanks for opensourcing it. On the other
hand, I stumbled upon yEd some time ago and it has been my go-to tool for
diagrams ever since. Thanks to all the folks at yWorks that work on yEd !
------
kyberias
What is the modern use case for byte code obfuscation? It cannot provide any
strong protection against reverse engineering, so what's the point?
~~~
als0
Perhaps it's being open sourced because there's no longer a market for this
sort of thing.
~~~
ygra
It's been free before. It's not that we made money with it.
------
half-kh-hacker
As someone also working in the Java obfuscation space, it's cool to see old
obfuscators becoming open-source.
yGuard seems to only provide shrinking and remapping at this moment in time,
however. Heavier-duty obfuscators will also incorporate various other
transforms (like concealing string constants) to make the code harder to read.
~~~
jdc
Does it affect performance?
~~~
half-kh-hacker
A little, but you can balance the obfuscation's complexity so that the HotSpot
JIT is able to inline the transform.
Of course, this comes with a trade-off that custom deobfuscation transformers
will also be able to inline these, but that's theoretically possible for every
transform, anyway, since you can try some symbolic execution until you get the
string values back out.
------
BossingAround
It's kind of ironic that code used for proprietary purposes is open-sourced.
Thank you for open-sourcing it.
However, I hope I will never use this (or any such similar) piece of code.
------
AzzieElbab
I thought people use spring for that :)
------
s_Hogg
It's not obvious to me, unfortunately - what exactly is being obfuscated here,
the source code?
~~~
Tomatenquark
The java byte code residing inside your JAR(s). It will be disassembled using
ASM7, then obfuscated and reassembled.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What makes you loose credibility on a web resource? - WolfOliver
What makes you close a site immediately (like a GitHub project, a landing page, a HN posts, a blog post)?
======
sandov
Modal window asking me to subscribe.
Low contrast between text and background, bonus points if the font is really
thin.
Highlighting text does anything other than highlighting text (e.g. opening a
menu to share quote on twitter)
Scrollbar highjacking
Clicking on background takes you away from the article (TechCrunch used to do
this)
Scrolling down takes you to another article (some news sites do this)
~~~
WolfOliver
Thank You, That's quite helpful to have in mind building my landing pages :)
------
PaulHoule
(1) The article is on medium
(2) Pop-over windows (e.g. sign up to our email newsletter)
(3) Ads out of control; not "ads cover content" but "ads cover ads". Many
sites like anandtech are designed now so that the pages jitter on mobile in
such a way that you try to scroll and somehow an ad gets positioned under your
finger and KA-CHING!
(4) Taboolah, Outbrain, anything like that.
(5) "Hiring is Broken", "Does your API need a content marketing strategy?" and
other fake memes that are promoted on a pay-for-play basis by Triplebyte,
Mulesoft and other information polluters.
------
epc
Full page takeover popup asking me to sign up for a newsletter. Closed with
fist pounding emphasis if I just clicked through on a link from the very
newsletter the site wants me to sign up for.
~~~
epc
Dishonorable mentions: asking me to accept notifications from the site, or the
full page "YOU SEEM TO BE BLOCKING ADVERTISING" from getadmiral.com (I don't
block ads, I don't have an ad blocker, I do block tracking cookies/scripts).
------
brodouevencode
Sites with community moderation and community driven content but advertise as
open and free, in which the content and moderation is clearly swayed
ideologically.
------
mtmail
Asking for payment, e.g. $3/month for a small service, but hiding company
details. E.g. in which country the website is operating. Online (e.g. Stripe)
payments are simple but I need to know whom I create a contract with.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft - admp
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/archive/2010/10/21/40-hour-work-week-at-microsoft.aspx
======
droz
I'm surprised by the number of people in msdn comments rejecting the author's
proposal. I agree with the author, you can't produce a better project by
trying to cram more work that has to be done than the time that is available.
Even in our environment, people need to understand that you are in a marathon
and not a sprint. Trying to sustain 60-80hr weeks is counter productive, and
will only burn out your employees rendering them useless.
Good ideas need time to develop, if you are constantly in work-work-work mode,
you don't get the chance to reflect, think about what you are actually doing
and make good decisions.
If you want a good product, hire people who know how to pace themselves,
people that know how to accurate estimate how long it takes to deliver a
feature and most importantly, people who have a consistent vision of what the
product needs to be.
Otherwise, you are just blowing your money on a crapshoot.
~~~
byoung2
_if you are constantly in work-work-work mode, you don't get the chance to
reflect, think about what you are actually doing and make good decisions._
I was just having this conversation with a coworker. He was describing a
project he worked on last year where he put in 12 hour days for 6 months
working on a collaboration and reporting tool for interdepartmental knowledge
sharing. When it was done he went to present it to the department leaders, and
it turned out that another department had been building the exact same tool.
I think if you are always so busy writing code and meeting deadlines, you
don't have time to sit down, scope out requirements, and most importantly do
some research to see if you can get the result with less effort. Just like
when you're lost, the best thing to do is stop and ask for directions before
driving around in circles.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The world of threats to the US is an illusion - adventured
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/04/11/have-seen-enemies-and-they-weak/Cho9J5Bf9jxIkHKIZvnVTJ/story.html
======
mark_l_watson
I wish that everyone in my country (the USA) would read this article.
War is big business and throughout history war has been the means for the rich
to get richer.
Even if we have some economic malaise when the dollar becomes less relevant as
the world's reserve currency, we have a lot going for us: geographic isolation
and natural resources.
------
neonhomer
This article makes a small case about the military profit complex, but it's
also ironic that according to the AP the "Chinese" have hacked their way into
all federal employee's information: [http://news.yahoo.com/union-hackers-
personnel-data-every-us-...](http://news.yahoo.com/union-hackers-personnel-
data-every-us-govt-employee-195701976.html).
So there are some real threats.
~~~
erikpukinskis
How is someone in China reading about some Americans a "real" threat? When I
think of a real threat, I think of a person with an intent to harm a U.S.
resident or citizen, a plan to do it, and the means to launch a plausibly
realistic attempt.
~~~
classicsnoot
...so your personal data being compromised by persons unknown is not something
you would deem a problem?
~~~
facetube
It is a problem, but the United States NSA is currently the biggest offender
in that department. Let's start out by not doing it to ourselves.
~~~
classicsnoot
The US passively spying on 300,000,000 > China actively spying on [and
suppressing] 1,300,000,000. What a wacky world.
~~~
facetube
I was referring to China's efforts to compromise systems in the US, not their
(dismal) domestic human-rights record. The point: we shouldn't be collecting
and concentrating the private communications of American citizens in a giant
data center – it's provided no proven protective value, and is a huge glowing
target for foreign espionage (corporate and/or governmental).
------
vinceguidry
> Future peace requires taking [Russia's] security concerns seriously rather
> than treating the country as an enemy that is always seeking to best us.
The problem with this is that Russia's security 'concerns' cannot be separated
from their nefarious geopolitical ambitions. We can't win with Russia, give
them an inch and they take a Crimea.
~~~
tonypace
But this article is straightforward isolationism, a very old current in
American political thought. The implied answer to your question is, 'So what?
America is safe, that's all that matters'.
------
r0naa
I think that this reasoning is completely flawed.
Reading this article, I understand that the author's definition of threat is
quite extreme. A threat is not something that "has the potential to
annihilate" but is rather "a thing that has the potential to inflict damages".
Dismissing any threats that has not a fully destructive potential as "not
important" is sloppy, dangerous thinking.
There is two extremes to this spectrum, you will notice that both have a
characteristic in common, they fail to differentiate and nuance threats.
From this fallacy, we can classify the two end of the spectrum as:
\- The "paranoid", who genuinely end-up thinking that "the end justify the
means" and propagate their hysteria to the rest of the group, effectively
becoming the biggest threat to what they were trying protect.
\- The "naive", who dismiss anything that has no fully destructive power as
"trivial", effectively allowing threats to turn into actual damages, grow to
become "fully destructive" (at which point it is too late) or cause a chain of
events leading to destruction of what they were effectively trying to protect
as well.
Let's not be fooled for a second by the "alliances" and "historical
relationships" between the US and its allies.
Nation-States are engaged in a game for survival which is directly linked to
growth and domination. A game-theoretic analogy would be the "non-cooperative"
game, defined as "a game where players play independently and where any
cooperation must be self-reinforcing".
There is exceptions to that rule but they are such of limited scope and impact
that we can safely consider them negligible.
Since "Nation-States" lack a system of belief, they are free from the
constraints that Humans self-impose onto themselves. A Nation-State will do
anything to further its own interest, they are in essence, cold-blooded
machines.
The author of this article is forgetting about the 195 other countries in the
world who are also playing this game.
Obviously not all of them have credible chances to become big players but you
can bet on the fact that all of them will fight tooth and nail for their part
of the pie, no matter what it takes.
~~~
Zirro
"Saying that the US has no threats is forgetting about the 195 other countries
in the world who are aspiring to be as much powerful as possible."
I believe that this is exactly the way of thinking that is being criticized in
the article. Very few of those 195 nations dream of removing the US from the
position of world power, and even fewer are capable of it.
~~~
classicsnoot
So are you of the opinion that if the US made an exit from the world stage
today, there would be no power struggle?
~~~
Zirro
It is hard to tell what you mean by "making an exit", but if it means that the
US were to reduce its military spending to a tenth of its current amount for
the foreseeable future - yes, I don't think it would hurt the US very much at
all.
In fact, the money gained from such an action could be used to strengthen the
nation against economic threats which currently are far greater than any
military ones.
~~~
classicsnoot
The point i was making is that the US, for all of its abundant faults, is not
exceptional. Sitting on top of the pile does not make the pile disappear.
~~~
zanny
If the US withdrew as global police, I would hope the UN would step up the
peacekeepers to fill that role. Thats what they are supposed to do at least.
Yes, I know they suck and are incompetent. They only get away with it because
they have big brother US to back them up. If they actually had to do their job
they might get their act together. Or maybe not?
I still don't see, in the absence of grotesque military spending, anyone going
batshit insane with conquest. We still have the nuclear threat to keep people
in line. Russia, for example, almost certainly does not fear a ground
incursion from any European power or the US for aggressively annexing Ukraine
/ Georgia. Why would you waste money on that? You can economically cripple
them. If they went insane and attacked a first world power they would see the
immediate return of the nuclear threat.
And really, total annihilation and mutually assured destruction _should_ be
deterrents enough to stop anything radical, while our globalized economic
system has bound everyone so much together that you do not need the threat of
soldiers to wreck a country. Consider how China is being kept out of all these
secret trade agreements because they have "overstepped their bounds" of those
with the money and power to influence these negotiations.
That doesn't mean you don't have any military, but you don't need to spend the
GDP of Turkey or Saudi Arabia every year on it, or try spreading ideology
through imperialism, or have military bases in almost every country on Earth.
------
makeitsuckless
Isn't the same kind of thinking not just dominant in the US foreign policy,
but also the same thing that explains much of it's internal issues?
From militarized police, the massive prison population to the proliferation of
fire arms, doesn't it all lead back to seeing the world in terms of "threats"?
------
bane
This is basically correct, but it's shaped by a few historic factors (note I
don't necessarily agree with all of these, just putting them out there):
1 - The U.S. was almost constantly engaged in a domestic or near-territorial
war of some kind from its founding until quite a few years into the 20th
century. [1] During the time period the U.S. massively expanded, strengthened
itself by defining borders and internally squashing various kinds of
rebellions. Since then, the U.S. has basically been at war continuously.
America is, believe it or not, a kind of warrior culture.
2 - The U.S. usually is able to claim some kind of victory out of most of its
military endeavors. Thus military engagement is seen as a tempting, low risk,
policy tool. The historic level of military success the U.S. enjoys is almost
unprecedented in history. By selectively choosing engagements it knows it can
win, the U.S. can continue the development of this legend.
3 - Domestically, Americans tend to think of our military actions as generally
being benevolent in nature (e.g. stopping communism, fighting nazis, freeing
subjugated peoples). The outstanding economic success of many countries who's
soil we fought on and then built strong alliances with (Germany, Korea, Japan,
France, etc.) feeds into this mythos. The post-war alliances we've formed help
to "encourage us" to get involved.
4 - The modern state of the world's powers, an outcome of WWII, is one in
which the U.S. is militarily uncontested by any power on the planet. The
relatively few conflict deaths post-WW2 [2] seems to imply that U.S. military
dominance brings peace, stability and prosperity and helps drive the notion of
the _Pax Americana_ [3]
5 - The failures and generally poor outcomes in countries under other major
power's influences and policies feeds into this as well. For example, at one
point a majority of the land-mass on the planet was engaged in Communism,
under Russian control (as the U.S.S.R.) or influence. Despite access to
tremendous natural resources (and short lived modernization programs), the
Communist countries failed to produce economic successes and were often
engaged in tremendously damaging internal conflicts.
6 - Pax Americana is viewed by Americans as a "good thing". Even though
Americans don't view themselves as expansionist colonial powers, they view the
expansion of the Pax via the export of American culture and influence as a
good thing. This implies then that the current state of American dominance is
a good thing, and that anything that even looks like it might be vectoring
towards threatening that status quo (e.g. belligerent Russia, rising China,
trouble on Allied borders etc.) needs to be aggressively halted or stopped.
American policy is generally framed as #6, with 1-5 as a supporting framework.
If thought of on purely military terms, American military expenditures and
actions can't really be rationalized. If thought of on terms of #6 they make
all the sense in the world. There's a lot of self-filtering involved too.
Americans ignore the failures and negatives surrounding military action, and
the various excesses that come with pouring something like half of the
government's discretionary funding into the DoD.
But the illusion of continued threats is one that we've created in order to
continue on justifying with what we generally believe is a better world under
our influence than the one that existed before.
You can hear most of this echoed when fairly sensible ideas like "maybe
Americans should pull out of Europe and let the Europeans, who are
economically and technologically able, to deal with defense needs for
themselves" are floated. Responses (even from Europeans) are often along the
lines of "no, European countries can't be trusted to cooperate well enough" or
"remember the last time Europe was left to sort things out?" and so on.
This also ignores entire continents like Africa, where Americans just simply
can't figure out what to do at all. Our national notion towards Africa is
basically to just ignore the continent and work on Middle-East containment
instead. These days when Africa comes up at all, it's usually in terms of
growing Chinese influence.
1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States)
2 - [https://vimeo.com/128373915](https://vimeo.com/128373915)
3 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana)
~~~
vinceguidry
> This also ignores entire continents like Africa, where Americans just simply
> can't figure out what to do at all. Our national notion towards Africa is
> basically to just ignore the continent and work on Middle-East containment
> instead.
Squeaky wheel gets the kick. Africa doesn't have a history of ramming planes
into buildings.
------
dataker
The largest threat to America is America itself.
For the past decades, America appears to be moving away from principles ,
objectiveness and liberty.
More and more, we see a 'democracy' ran by delusional ideologies and even
blind nationalism.
~~~
classicsnoot
The history of the US is not that rosy. We have always been a nation of
criminals, robber barons, and capitalist mercenaries. It was only after WWII
that the idea of being a benevolent super power came into being. After that
war, the US stopped seizing territory and began to go about forming the
structures of cooperative peace.
The question, as i see it, is which is better: small, consistent conflicts
lacing the developing sections of the world, or large, sporadic conflicts
wrecking the developed sections of the world?
~~~
douche
In the nuclear age, full-out shooting wars between developed countries are a
non-starter. Hence the 45 years of small-scale proxy wars between the U.S. and
Soviet Union throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia.
~~~
classicsnoot
The idea that a large scale conflict will inevitably lead to nuclear exchange
is so silly. Most nuclear weapons are not strategic, they are tactical.
Regardless, no one would nuke the property they are trying to occupy.
The reason their have been almost no real wars since the 1940s is because
business interest has taken over control of every western government.
I know people think there is a ton of profit to be made in war, but the
damages so heavily outweigh the benefits that i have a hard time believing
that is the sole motivation for hawkish policies.
------
codecamper
Germany and Japan were able to become powerful again, post WW2 because they
were not even allowed to spend money on any sort of army.
~~~
classicsnoot
...which they could do because their territorial integrity was guaranteed by a
country that spared no expense militarily.
------
atorralb
The last time the U.S was invaded was when Pancho Villa came from Mexico to
the U.S to steal some horses from Texas. In, March 9, of 1916,Pancho Villa
entered the U.S to kill some soldier in the city of Columbus and steal some
horses, then in the next day Pancho Villa returned to Mexico to brag about it.
That was the only time the U.S was actually invaded. Since 1947 the U.S
"ministry of war" was renamed to "ministry of defense" and its "budget of war"
was renamed to "budget of defense"... the name, is still a mistery to this
day. What an irony, those countries that fear to be invaded, are actually the
only ones that invade other countries. Regards
~~~
classicsnoot
>War of 1812 was fabricated
------
classicsnoot
This article is poorly written. It provides no background or supporting
references to bolster its claim. I find it frustrating in the extreme. Threats
do not have to be overtly threatening. A person in the room that dislikes you
and has a lot of money and time can be just as threatening as a person in the
room claiming to have a gun at home and an aversion towards your
faith/gender/culture.
I come from a place where people blindly believe the US is the best[sic]
nation in the world. Anyone that disagrees is obviously some
"egghead/pinko/etc" who can't appreciate the sacrifice of others. This, the
opposite extreme, is a s frustrating as the words of the dullard who penned
this piece. I confront it constantly in an attempt to represent the middle
path. In my years of argument, discussion, and reassessment, i have come to
realize that nothing is quite what it seems. To make absolute statements, for
or against anything, is to place oneself in an inherently weak position
intellectually.
The author shrugs at Russia's expansionist aggression, pointing out their
economic weakness as a reason they are no threat to the US. The approach to
China and Venezuela is similarly misguided. Threats != weapons. Europe's
relative peace since world war 2 is largely because of the US being extremely
security minded.
...but who knows. Maybe Russia bullying its neighbors is just as symptom of it
being misunderstood. Maybe China steals technology and data because they are
just in that adolescent "acting out" phase. Maybe the world is really a nice
place and the US is ruining the party for everyone.
:|
~~~
cyphunk
It is an editorial in the opinion section. agreed references help but ive
always assumed words in the opinions section of papers can be regarded as just
that
------
zxcvcxz
I've come to the conclusion that multiple world governments --working together
and against each other-- are attempting and in some cases are able to
manipulate the narrative of conversations on the internet to further certain
political agendas.
I don't believe most of the crap I hear about teenagers leaving in droves to
join ISIS all over the world, this is the red scare all over again. I'm also
pretty sure twitter is one of the main social platforms used to manipulate the
political/social narrative of the internet. More than half the accounts are
probably fake, who knows how many fake "ISIS" accounts there are or even what
countries government is making them. I also suspect twitter is being used as
some kind of data hub for surveillance because of how fast it caught on in
Arab countries and a lot of countries that aren't quite "western", then the
western media started to push it in every news broadcast for a while as if
anyone in America actually used it.
Surprise surprise! all the terrorists always have twitter accounts. I wouldn't
be surprised if the next "home-grown" terrorist has a twitter account.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Radical Opacity - twampss
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/
======
api
OMGWTFBBQ
THIS is making headlines about Internet innovation? Is the net over?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Technology interaction and ethics - latch
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/15/technology-interaction-and-eth.html
======
serbrech
This is how I want all my tools. I had lots of ideas for better tools popping
up in my head while watching this video. The kind of paradigms that he talks
about are applicable to most of the creative processes.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Google Discover shows YouTube Ads (despite paid ad-free user) - albeec13
Recently Google updated what used to be known as Google Now / Google Feed, (now called Google Discover) on Android. For some things like recaps of sports teams I follow, it has now started playing YouTube videos in-line, instead of opening the app. I've noticed it's also started serving 6s ads from here, even though I'm a paying customer of Google Music / YouTube Red, and there doesn't appear to be a way to stop this behavior.<p>Anyone else seeing this? It's pretty annoying/unfriendly behavior considering I've been paying for years to avoid this kind of thing, and really inexcusable, since the Discover app is part of Google Search and has access to my account info.<p>I'm not sure if this is a bug or just Google being Google.
======
BorisMelnik
yes, I am also seeing this and I'm so upset about the change. I LOVE Google
now before the update, these ads just suck. I also am a paying customer
(Google Music, YouTube red, G Suite, Adwords...) and really think I "deserve"
to have an ad-free experience.
my favorite part about Google Now was the wide-range of news it would show,
all tailored to my preferences.
~~~
albeec13
Good to know it's not just me. I've reluctantly been pulled into using the
feed (as you say it has some nice features, and it's right there on my phone
when I swipe right, so hard to avoid...), but this recent change has really
put me over the top in terms of annoyance with Google's tracking behavior,
especially in light of recent changes to Chrome.
I'm hoping it's just a bug/oversight, but I wouldn't put money on it...
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Twitter working on “edit” feature for tweets - adidash
http://thedesk.matthewkeys.net/2013/12/16/exclusive-twitter-working-on-edit-feature-for-tweets/
======
byoung2
_To solve this problem, Twitter is looking at a few things, including
limitations on how many characters or words a user would be allowed to insert
or delete._
Consider "Wish you were here" vs "Wish you were her" or "Buy Apple stock" vs
"Don't buy Apple stock". It's amazing what a single letter or word can do to
change the meaning of a sentence. If you can change the meaning of a Tweet in
1 letter, how could they possibly police changes?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Feedback on SwarmIQ, a new Social RSS Reading Experience - swarmiq
Immediate access to our Invite-only Beta : http://www.swarmiq.com/register/ASKHN<p>Hi Guys,
We just released v1.0 of the new SwarmIQ Social RSS Reader. Would love to get some feedback. What's your wishlist for a great reading experience?<p>thanks,
Team@SwarmIQ
======
asisin
The ability to engage deeper on certain channels vs others is pretty powerful.
------
pravinchandru
awesome interface.....easy to subscribe to rss feed sources and share it with
friends .....first social feed sharing service.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Self-driving shuttle in Las Vegas got into an accident on first day of service - tempestn
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16626224/las-vegas-self-driving-shuttle-crash-accident-first-day?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
======
basicplus2
TLDR
Truck pulls out from side into path of self driving bus, bus stops, truck
keeps going and "grazes" bus
~~~
tempestn
Yeah, definitely a bit click-baity. Wasn't a dangerous situation or anything
like that. Does illustrate the type of edge case that needs to be solved to
get from 90% to 100 though. Also posted because I wasn't aware there were
fully autonomous vehicles carrying passengers already, outside of the Uber
tests.
------
foxyv
I think this really highlights the need for backing cameras on human operated
vehicles.
------
tempestn
I'm disappointed she didn't parachute into her back yard.
~~~
tempestn
Oops, posted in wrong thread.
~~~
King-Aaron
I'm intrigued as to what your comment was in relation to though
~~~
tempestn
This video: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16613228/uber-flying-
car-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16613228/uber-flying-car-la-nasa-
space-act)
It was posted yesterday; noticed it in 'new' when I posted this.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Do you think Mobile Web Apps is the way to go than Native Apps? - ashitvora
Some of the reasons I came up with are.
1. One app works on all devices (except some layout and css issues). Write once, run everywhere.
2. Easier to maintain.
3. Don't have to deal with App Approval process.
======
warwick
If you're looking for a boolean answer, there isn't one.
Web apps are superior for the reasons you mentioned. As a developer, it's just
_easier_ to deploy a web app. That being said, I think you ought to be
thinking about the users experience, not the developers.
App store approval processes mean that users have to wait longer for fixes.
Using a particular device API means that your app just isn't available to a
lot of users.
On the other hand, native apps tend to respond faster, be more in line with
the users expectations, and offer the developer a slick way to accept the
users money without asking them to put in all their credit card info.
You also have to look at how users expect to install apps. At least on iOS,
every web app I've seen has to include install instructions because users
don't think about installing them.
I think I can give users a better experience with a native app, and that's
what makes the choice for me.
~~~
ashitvora
makes sense.
------
aitoehigie
I agree with you. I have been playing around with some mobile frameworks
(phonegap, titanium and rhomobile) and I must say that coding a native app for
different mobile platforms isnt too attractive to me. using any of the
aforementioned frameworks, you can develop mobile apps that will run across
most major mobile OS's like iOS, blackberry and Android, although you might
not get a 100% native app, the pain of learning all the SDK's of each mobile
platform is skipped. Its just like Java's once stated goal of "write once, run
anywhere"
~~~
ashitvora
Agree with you but why even use Phonegap, Titanium or other frameworks since
they are meant to covert a web app to native app.
Developing an app is only 50%. Rest is going thru app approval process. If app
isn't approved, value of that app is ZERO.
Is it not a good idea to develop a web app and make money adopt subscription
model to make money. We can straight away bring down the cost by 30% which
goes to Apple otherwise.
What say?
~~~
aitoehigie
I also agree, but my point is this, using a framework like Phonegap or
Rhomobile etc, will give my mobile application access to some features of the
host platform like notification, file access, events, sound, video, audio etc,
if required. this is something a web app cannot do on a mobile device.
~~~
ashitvora
yea. true. Thanks :)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Flame Malware Makers Send 'Suicide' Code - ytNumbers
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18365844
======
haberman
As someone who doesn't keep up with the crypto/security communities, one thing
that has surprised me is how the cutting-edge news on this Flame story has
been coming from antivirus vendors like Kaspersky Lab and Symantec. General
sentiment seems to be that AV vendors are low-tech operations that don't have
the best people when it comes to security. Other comments even on this very
thread reflect this sentiment "timaelliott: Symantec is just jealous these
guys can remove viruses from a machine so damn efficiently." Do these guys
deserve more respect than we give them?
~~~
lawnchair_larry
Firstly, there is nothing at all special or interesting about how flame
removes itself. It deletes a list of files that the author knows they created.
Secondly, you have to remember that these companies employ many free-thinking
humans with varied jobs and abilities. Among those are some skilled analysts
who simply take apart viruses for a paycheck. A lot of AV companies have at
least a few people who are best of breed at this stuff. They post writeups and
share the work of what is interesting. Marketing is generally not involved in
the technical blog posts that you see.
~~~
iuguy
> Firstly, there is nothing at all special or interesting about how flame
> removes itself.
Actually I'd disagree. The interesting thing for me is that it overwrites
memory locations to thwart memory forensics. This isn't a common thing at all,
but is something that I covered in a talk at a DC4420 meeting a year or two
ago.
------
bobsy
Flame sounds awesome. I am always fascinated by clever bits of kit like this.
I read a piece about conficker a while ago. I thought it was super cool that
it patched the security vulnerability on infected conputers to protect itself.
Its just really clever. Now you have Flame which has done what it has done and
is now trying to kill itself to make it look like it never existed.
Obviously though it is also deeply concerning. States are investing more and
more into cyber warfare. If anything more money needs to be spent hardening
computer networks and systems to protect from exactly these kind of threats.
~~~
Pewpewarrows
Self-destruct codes and patching up the hole you came in through are both
pretty par for the course when it comes to non-trivial malware.
~~~
adgar
It's par for the course, but it's still a spectacle to see a malware so
big/important/advanced self-destruct in front of our eyes, in the news.
------
fl3tch
> The command located every Flame file sitting on a PC, removed it and then
> overwrote memory locations with gibberish to thwart forensic examination.
I'd like to know how many writes it did since this would finally settle the
issue of whether FBI / NSA can read erased data. If one write is good enough
for them, you know they can't recover anything with one write either.
~~~
tjohns
Researchers already have samples of Flame saved. Nobody needs to do forensic
analysis to try and recover deleted files here.
In all likelihood, all the Flame authors are trying to do is prevent computer
owners from casually detecting that they were infected, now that Flame is
public knowledge.
~~~
robocat
Presumably it is purging machine specific (targeted) configuration, code
updates, and spooled data too, i.e. not just the virus code.
Knowing specfically what the virus was looking for, which machines were
infected, and what data was snarfed is of critical importance to the targets.
Purging makes the targets job of forensics much much harder.
Edit: flame code is not monolithic - forensics would be very interested in
getting code for all modules: "Later, the operators can choose to upload
further modules, which expand Flame’s functionality. There are about 20
modules in total and the purpose of most of them is still being investigated."
-
[http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/05/28/flam...](http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/05/28/flame-
israels-new-contribution-to-middle-east-cyberwar/)
------
hartleybrody
Not sure I follow the logic of
"The design of this new variant required world-class cryptanalysis"
to
"The finding gives support to claims that Flame must have been built by a
nation state rather than cybercriminals."
Doesn't that assume world-class cryptographers only work for governments? Are
there are other reasons people are assuming this was state-sponsored?
~~~
ajays
It depends on what the malware is designed to do. Cui bono, as they say.
If the malware is designed to grab bank passwords or steal money, then you can
assume there's a criminal enterprise behind it.
But if the malware is specifically targeting certain "problem" countries; and
stealing documents and other things of non-monetary value, then it's very
likely that there's a government behind it. Which criminal mastermind will
say, "tomorrow, I'll steal Word documents of all Syrians" ? What will he do
with them anyways? Given the abundance of low-hanging fruit, why would a
criminal jump through all these hoops?
~~~
eigenvector
> What will he do with them anyways?
He'll sell them to a state actor. Even if something is non-monetary, if
someone with money wants it, it can be monetized.
~~~
kamjam
If you're gonna go to that amount of trouble then why not steal everything,
including CC numbers and why not target everyone, not just specific states?
------
joshuahedlund
> _Flame targeted countries such as Iran and Israel and sought to steal large
> amounts of sensitive data._
I had heard that Flame targeted Iran, which was one of the reasons people
suspected US and/or Israel. This says Israel was targeted. Am I
misinterpreting something here? If other evidence supposedly points to a
nation-state, what nation-state dislikes both Iran and Israel? Something's not
adding up.
Edit: Thanks. "Spy on friends" or "Spy on yourself to deflect attention" seem
as viable as any other theories out there, if not more.
~~~
Spooky23
"Liking" a nation does not preclude other nations from spying on them. I'm
sure the US and Israel spy on each other.
~~~
kamjam
I'm sure the US spies on pretty much everyone, friend or foe... and it's
probably the same the other way round too!
~~~
daniel_solano
Sure. It's also a great way to get around domestic wiretapping laws. Assuming
you can cooperate well enough with a foreign power, you can have a "I'll show
you yours if you show me mine." sort of situation.
~~~
Volscio
The US has some very close allies for sharing intel, and it'd be a massive
incident if it got out that such allied countries were spying on each other.
It happens to some degree, but if stuff gets out, the White House & State can
make heads roll, so you'd only see pretty routine spycraft occur between
allies (counter-intel, rumor mill, feelers).
~~~
kamjam
The trick is not to get caught... and if you do get caught, then blame it in
on the Chinese/Russians/flavour-of-the-month :D
In all seriousness, the spying may not be as hardcore or blatant(!) as say
US/China or US/Russia but they are not looking for the same kind of intel
between US/UK. I wuold be very very surprised if there was not some intel
gathering at some level.
------
eli
At first I thought, why bother. But of course you would want to try to leave
your target with no immediate way to determine which machines had been hit.
Wonder why they didn't do it sooner. Perhaps they were worried about losing
control if too many c&c servers were taken out.
------
timaelliott
Symantec is just jealous these guys can remove viruses from a machine so damn
efficiently.
~~~
philbarr
Yeah, it's much harder to fully remove, say, Norton Antivirus from your
computer.
~~~
X-Istence
I've been nuking my computers from orbit, has anyone found an alternate that
works better?
------
fibertbh
Since a nation state is supposedly behind this, wouldn't they have secured
their command & control hosts better?
~~~
ajross
Surely they're not actually maintaining those hosts themselves (imagine the
embarassment of doing a RDNS lookup and getting "flame-cc1.nsa.gov"). They are
almost certainly compromised machines owned by someone else, which makes
"securing" them in the classic sense pretty much impossible.
~~~
Splines
How far down the rabbit hole would you have to go before you find a connection
from a .gov machine?
Or do nation-state malware programmers maintain a strict no-contact policy to
keep the government's hands clean?
I suppose we'll never know the answer.
~~~
ceejayoz
I'd imagine the folks doing this have a windowless van parked outside a
Starbucks. I'm fairly certain you'd never be able to trace it back to a .gov
computer without physically finding the computers themselves.
------
ascendant
The cat can never be put back into the bag.
~~~
guelo
Obama has been careless when it comes to giving the military free rein with
new weapons without considering the consequences or legal precedent.
~~~
drivebyacct2
Well that's a whole boat-load of assumptions and accusations. And some rather
funny/naive ones at that.
~~~
guelo
How about telling me what it is you think instead of condescendingly calling
me funny and naive. Besides the use of weaponized computer viruses, which the
NY Times confirmed was done by Obama in the Stuxnet case, I am also thinking
of the massive increase in drone strike assassinations, including of American
citizens, in countries we are not at war with, namely Pakistan and Yemen. The
only assumption I made is that Flame was also done by Obama but I don't think
that is a big leap.
------
ktizo
so, is it officially the future yet?
------
jorgeleo
But... Did the first officer concurr???
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SoftBank is asking for the WeWork IPO to be put on hold - tempsy
https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-pressured-by-softbank-to-shelve-ipo-report-2019-9
======
james-mcelwain
My favorite WeWork anecdote is the company paying the CEO 6 million dollars
for the trademark "We" (which he later returned under pressure).
Say what you will, but you have to respect the grift.
~~~
mitchus
He certainly has the trademark for "I".
------
Ambele
> WeWork could cut the valuation for its IPO to under $20 billion and may even
> postpone the offering, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing
> unnamed sources. The company had been valued at $47 billion in its last
> fundraising round.
> According to the report, SoftBank is concerned that if WeWork goes public at
> a valuation much lower than its private-market valuation, it might hurt the
> firm's ability to raise its second Vision Fund, hence its choice to pressure
> the company into dropping its IPO plans.
~~~
dmfjfj
Is postponing simply delaying the inevitable write-down? I can’t see how their
financial statements will improve by postponing for another few years. Can
someone explain the rationale?
------
downrightmike
Let it ipo and crash. Really the only rational thing to do.
------
privateSFacct
I wondered if this was because they don't want to mark down their investment
and take a public loss. Yep - article seems to support that.
Makes sense though - softbank's business model seems to depend somehow on
these mega funds. Be good to get more data on their performance (I'm
skeptical).
------
InTheArena
It sure seems like Softbank is a house of cards. This seems like the most
likely place for the cards to come crashing down.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How Balanced Does Database Migrations With Zero Downtime - mahmoudimus
http://blog.balancedpayments.com/payments-infrastructure-suspending-traffic-zero-downtime-migrations
======
sigil
You mean you didn't have to "build a custom HTTP server and application
dispatching infrastructure around Python's Tornado and Redis" in order to
suspend traffic? [1]
I like the simplicity of your approach, it's literally 2 lines of code. Bravo
guys.
[1] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/how-we-built-the-
soft...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/how-we-built-the-software-
that-processes-billions-in-payments)
~~~
jtdowney
To be fair, they had to upgrade to a development release (1.5) of HAProxy to
configure it in this way. When we introduced the broxy at Braintree that
feature did not exist.
(Disclosure - I work at Braintree)
~~~
pgr0ss
The broxy also adds more functionality, such as intelligent rate limiting by
merchant (no one merchant can consume all of our backend app processes).
(Disclosure - I also work at Braintree)
~~~
msherry
We actually have much the same functionality. We can dynamically route/rate-
limit requests on a per-marketplace (or anything else, really) basis, using
Nginx's Lua integration capabilities. We may end up writing another post on
this, if there's any interest from the community.
~~~
rurounijones
I think you can safely assume that any post along the lines of
"How we handle something <TECHNICAL> at balanced"
or
"How we handled <SITUATION> using <TECHNOLOGY> at balanced"
is of interest to this community.
No need to ask, get writing, hop to it! :)
------
bokonist
This strikes me as a very risky way to do a migration. If there are bugs in
the new application code you basically cannot roll back, since the old version
of the code ran against an old database schema. The slower approach of making
the schema change backwards compatible, deploying new code, and then dropping
the old columns seems a lot safer.
~~~
msherry
You're definitely correct that bugs in the new application code would be a
showstopper. Another bit of infrastructure we plan to write about if there's
interest is our testing setup.
Basically, before any deploy (not just drastic ones like this), not only do
all existing unit tests for the new code have to pass (with a certain minimum
code coverage threshold), but also a full acceptance suite, which tests the
new code and how it connects to all of our other bits of infrastructure. We
simulate an extensive set of operations that a client might perform against a
test instance of the server, and also run a number of tests with all of our
services loaded in-memory, which allows us to mock/patch arbitrary points in
the code, to assert that what we expect to happen is actually happening. We
also run each of our various clients' test suites against the new code, to
make sure that each client sees the behavior it expects to see. This testing
suite has dramatically increased our confidence any time we have to do a
deploy, and best of all, it's all done automatically.
~~~
mahmoudimus
If HN is interested in how this is, I've demonstrated this to a few people but
it allows us to move FAST and confidently.
Since we use services internally, being able to confidently test interactions
between all our services (6+ at this point), it is a HUGE win for us.
Open up an issue here: <https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com> if
you're interested.
~~~
krichman
Are you seriously questioning that there's interest? I come here for the few
links to tech articles with high signal:noise ratios. There are perhaps one or
two a day.
Judging by what just got posted, please assume you can post anything about
your tech stack and we will love it.
------
bobf
I gave a presentation on zero downtime database migrations at a devops
conference in Boston in November 2012. Slides are here:
[http://www.completefusion.com/zero-downtime-deployments-
with...](http://www.completefusion.com/zero-downtime-deployments-with-mysql/)
I also wrote a more detailed post about it for SysAdvent 2012 -
[http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-3-zero-downtime-
my...](http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2012/12/day-3-zero-downtime-mysql-schema-
changes.html)
------
victortrac
What's the point of ELB, Nginx, and then HAProxy?
~~~
msherry
Nginx is primary for SSL termination and static assets. At the time we set up
our infrastructure, I don't believe HAProxy supported SSL termination.
According to Willy Tarreau's comment to the first answer of this question
([http://serverfault.com/questions/426919/should-i-use-an-
ssl-...](http://serverfault.com/questions/426919/should-i-use-an-ssl-
terminator-or-just-haproxy)) it was added in the same release as the patch I
mentioned, coincidentally.
~~~
victortrac
Why not let ELB handle SSL termination and load balancing (ignoring the fact
that HAproxy can delay connections by 15 seconds)?
~~~
msherry
Due to the fact that we process credit card payments and thus fall under PCI
scope, we have to adhere to the PCI DSS (data security standard). There's a
"quick" summary of it here
[https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_ssc_quick...](https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/pci_ssc_quick_guide.pdf)
, and section 4.1 in particular specifies that we have to secure cardholder
data all they way to our servers -- Amazon's ELB doesn't quite count.
~~~
stephen
I believe Amazon is PCI compliant now? Would that change things?
~~~
msherry
Amazon being PCI-compliant was a requirement for us using them in the first
place :) We could have possibly made a case for their PCI-compliance obviating
the need for us to do our own SSL termination, but that could have gone either
way, depending on our PCI audits.
Using Nginx also lets us do fun stuff with routing using Nginx's Lua
integration, which we may end up writing about in the future as well.
~~~
zwily
OK then why HAProxy? Why not just let nginx do the load balancing? (Obviously
you have a reason now if you plan to use the method in the blog post again,
but what about before?)
~~~
AaronBBrown
I use nginx + haproxy and use haproxy for the load balancing piece, too.
haproxy simply has much more visibility into the queue. I'm not aware of
anything built into nginx that is as robust as the logging and stats page from
haproxy. This makes horizontal scaling decisions infinitely easier.
~~~
zwily
I see... Do you run nginx and haproxy on the same box?
~~~
AaronBBrown
Yes.
------
gngeal
"- perform schema changes in a way that won’t break existing code (e.g.,
temporarily allowing new non-nullable columns to be NULL). \- deploy code that
works with both the old and new schema simultaneously, populating any new rows
according to the new schema. \- perform a data migration that backfills any
old data correctly, and updates all constraints properly. \- deploy code that
only expects to see the new schema."
That sounds a lot like transactional schema updates in Firebird to me. Plus
being careful about how the app handles the data. Schema updates in Firebird
are essentially instantaneous, with the row updates performed lazily (although
if you need it, a SELECT COUNT(*) will force an update of all rows
immediately).
~~~
joseph_cooney
Oracle is the same - DDL is automatically committed. I think in SQL Server DDL
can be transactional. Not sure about Postgres.
~~~
joevandyk
PostgreSQL can have almost all DDL changes inside a transaction.
------
brianr
That's a great approach for the cases where the migration takes only a few
seconds. When you start running into situations where the migration takes
hours or days, it's back to the "normal" way.
~~~
msherry
Sure, this definitely isn't the right approach for all migrations everywhere.
When we have migrations that we know will take a long time, we try to make
them non-invasive enough that we can have code that works with old and new
schemas simultaneously. That way, the migration can take as long as it needs
to, and everything Just Works™.
------
dantiberian
This was a really interesting article. I feel silly for asking this but why
didn't you set up a script which did all of the maintenance, migration and
deploy tasks automatically?
You obviously thought about this a lot but I don't see why you'd want two
humans doing it instead of a script.
~~~
msherry
Thanks! We had been practicing on test servers and so we had the commands
ready to be repeated, but you're right -- for reproducibility, a script would
have been the way to go.
~~~
hvidgaard
Not just for reproducibility, but to avoid human errors. I always just get
nervous when humans make changes to production environments. I'd much rather
have a tested script do it.
------
AaronBBrown
This isn't zero downtime. It's still 15s of downtime (which is really a
trivial amount of time for a migration). As a user, I would rather see a
maintenance page up than have my connections stall out and have me staring at
a blank page.
~~~
mahmoudimus
(Posting for msherry since he can't seem to respond at the moment)
The whole point of this was so API requests _wouldn't_ fail, they would just
take slightly longer. API requests don't get the option to see a maintenance
page -- they would just return errors to the client, which potentially means
lost business for them.
------
jstanley
This sounds incredibly rudimentary compared to
[http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-
sch...](http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/2.1/pt-online-schema-
change.html)
~~~
msherry
Hi there. I'm the author of this post.
If I'm reading this correctly, your suggestion would alter a single table
online, and at the end, I would end up with a table with a new schema
(assuming I had no foreign keys referencing the table being modified, which
seems to introduce additional complications). Presumably, this change happens
while my application was running, which means that during the migration, I
would have to use the old table format, and then cut over to the new one
instantly once the migration has completed.
Our migration at the time involved multiple table changes, many of which had
foreign keys referencing each other. It doesn't sound like this tool would
atomically switch all tables to the new schemas, which would have led to
broken data for us. Does that make sense?
EDIT: grammar
~~~
jstanley
You're right about needing to switch your application over instantly. Where
I've used it, it has mostly been to add columns to a table and thus the old
application code continues to run perfectly fine.
While you can't use pt-osc to do multi-table updates directly, you can use the
same strategy. All it does is creates a new table with the new schema, adds
triggers to the old table to duplicate row modifications to the new table, and
then copies old rows across. Then, when all the copies are done, atomically
renames the new table into place, then deletes the old table.
There is nothing to stop you from delaying the rename until all new tables are
ready, except that it is more hassle than just using pt-osc as it comes.
But, point taken: your case is more complicated than the one I was thinking
of. And thanks for your thoughtful response to my somewhat dismissive comment
:)
------
jpollock
I would have used sharding, and then normal failure handling and
resynchronisation between nodes. If you have the requirement that two adjacent
versions have to be able to resynchronise after failure upgrades (and
rollback) become equivalent to normal node failure.
As it stands, during your upgrade you've lost all of your fault tolerance and
can't meet your performance requirements - you've gone from 5 nodes able to
process the traffic to 1!
~~~
msherry
You make a good point re: fault tolerance. As it happens, I've simplified the
diagram quite a bit to make it simpler to visualise. We have more than 2 Nginx
instances, and more than one shard of our app was running the new code.
~~~
jpollock
It sounds like a shard collapsed down to a single database instance?
Otherwise, you wouldn't have had to turn off requests to the shard, you could
have quiesced one of the nodes, taken it out of service and brought it back up
with the new release?
------
perkof
It seems like the interaction required by the two engineers could have been
scripted to remove the human element. Was there a reason you chose not to do
this?
------
orofino
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why not down a segment (shard I guess),
upgrade the application and database, then fail over to that shard?
This would provide a fail back mechanism assuming you could resolve data
continuity.
I'm sure there is a reason this wasn't viable (possibly the data issue), but I
was curious.
~~~
msherry
This is basically what we did, except during the "upgrade the application and
database" step, we suspended all traffic to our app servers. The schema change
was an incompatible change (I think this is what you mean by "resolve data
continuity"?) So basically, our old code and new code could not run
simultaneously, because they were designed against incompatible schemas.
~~~
orofino
So if this was the case, why couldn't the other shards handle application
requests while you casually upgraded the application and database tier in
say... 30 seconds (or even minutes) as opposed to sub 15s?
~~~
jdunck
As stated in the post, the db migration was a large enough change that having
both codebases working on the migrating db would have been a high cost.
------
akoumjian
I've been eyeing Soundcloud's Large Hadron Migrator
(<https://github.com/soundcloud/large-hadron-migrator>). I would love to see a
Django/South specific implementation.
~~~
matclayton
We're a django shop, and pt-online-schema-change is an amazing tool. We're run
it on tables with 10-50M rows in production with minimal downtime, <1 Second.
I can't speak highly enough of it if you are a MySQL shop.
------
ultimoo
Great writeup! Loved reading it and adding this to my stash of known HA
strategies. Did you folks also chart out historical traffic and carry out this
migration when it was the most sparse? Like early morning on a weekend or
something.
~~~
msherry
Absolutely.
Being a payments-processing company, we have a variety of users
(marketplaces), each of whom has users who are widely geographically
distributed, so our usage doesn't drop off as much as some other types of
sites might on weekends. That being said, on weekends we see slightly lower
traffic than during the weekday, so we performed this migration on a Saturday
evening.
------
trungonnews
what happens if it takes more than 15 seconds to migrate the database?
~~~
msherry
Then some of our clients would have been disappointed by the timeout errors
they had started seeing, if they happened to make a request at the very start
of the migration ;)
We ran our migrations multiple times on test instances of our database,
because we were worried about this exact issue. We optimized the migration to
remove extraneous changes a few times in order to cut down the time taken.
Also, 13 seconds was actually the upper bound of what we saw -- many times we
ran it, it took closer to 9-10 seconds.
~~~
trungonnews
The time to migrate your database will only get larger over time as the data
grow. Looking toward to your follow up post. :)
------
lsh123
"Zero Downtime" migration but if the migration will take less than 15 seconds.
Honestly, this is not very interesting. The same effect could be achieved by
increasing connection timeout on the clients and the server and then just
letting the clients to wait while the DB schema changes takes place. This
works great for small tables/data sets. When you get to a bigger scale and you
migration takes longer (minutes, hours, days) then you might start to look at
more advanced tools including percona tools or custom migration code in your
app.
~~~
msherry
Are you saying it would work without code changes by increasing the timeout
limit? We had to deploy new code to work with the new schemas, since the
underlying models went through drastic changes. Having our code be compatible
with old and new schemas simultaneously, as it is during most of our
migrations, would have been extremely difficult in this specific case, which
is what prompted this solution. I don't think this is a problem that could
have been solved by simple timeout changes, but I'd love to hear your thoughts
on it.
~~~
lsh123
For, say, adding a new column or changing indexes, one can probably just run
update w/o any code changes. For more complex cases, you might need to modify
the code to work with both old/new schemas. It's all about details :)
------
ralph
Is the socat required in the Fabric bits at the end?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Vista Kicks Ass - drm237
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=275
Matt's take on Vista.
======
pg
_I haven't had to reinstall once, and with XP I typically would have 3 times
by now._
I had no idea MS OSes were so bad. Reinstalling the OS is actually a routine
thing?
~~~
rms
The MS OSes are terrible. Reinstalling the OS is actually a routine thing.
More typical computer users just buy new systems when they become unusably
slow after a couple years, which is good for Dell and the like.
What gets me to stay is tablet PC support and font rendering. Linux doesn't
have an application that comes close to Microsoft OneNote for note taking. I
wish that Apple made a touch screen Mac and I will probably switch when they
launch one.
The font rendering on Windows blows away Linux and Mac, in my opinion. There
is nothing so crisp as Windows standard font smoothing (not ClearType). Linux
and Mac look incredibly ugly without subpixel font smoothing or other heavy
anti-aliasing. I spent a while trying to figure out how to get Linux to render
fonts better and gave up when it required a kernel recompile.
Has anyone here gotten Linux to render fonts well without subpixel anti-
aliasing?
~~~
mattmaroon
I'm definitely not a fan of Mac fonts, but that might just be what I'm used
to.
~~~
rms
With Windows, you can turn font smoothing off completely and the fonts look
like pixel fonts. With Linux and Mac, things look terrible without font
smoothing.
See this post for an explanation of the fundamental difference between Mac and
Windows font smoothing: Mac tries to render as closely to the printed typeface
as possible and Windows tries to look good onscreen.
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html>
~~~
axod
Odd... Personally I see Mac as gorgeous on screen fonts, and whenever I have
to check things in IE on Windows XP the fonts look like some kid knocked them
up in paint shop pro on a lazy sunday.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I've not seen nice fonts on windows yet.
------
paulgb
I think the point of the anti-Vista stuff is not that Vista is significantly
worse than other MS OS, but that it is not enough of an improvement over XP
for people to put up with the speed hit. It seems the people who hate Vista
the most are people who use Mac OS or Linux anyway.
------
drm237
I'm still divided on Vista. I've been using it for well over 2 years starting
before the beta stage via an MSDN account. Lately, I use Vista, Ubuntu, and XP
evenly throughout the day and XP is my least favorite. Vista has been more
annoying then XP, but the added features (yes there are actually features
worth using) make it worth it still. That said, Ubuntu is great, but I have
had more issues with it on an old laptop than either XP or Vista which have
both been on the machine. I think I am more willing to accept Ubuntu's short
comings because I know it's open source, and it's what I expect.
That said, my next laptop will probably be a mac, although which OS I use most
(OSX, Vista, or Ubuntu) has yet to be determined.
~~~
mattmaroon
I always want to try OSX, but the ridiculous price and sub par hardware/build
quality keep turning me away. All of my friends have Macbook Pros, had it not
been for that I probably would have gotten one by now.
------
dfranke
Matt, here's the secret to buying from Dell: shop in their small business
section, not their home section. I'm quite pleased with my Inspiron 9400.
~~~
rms
There used to be a real build quality difference between the Latitude and
Inspiron lines but now some of the Latitudes are just black-painted Inspirons
with marginally better support.
Lenovo is the way to go.
~~~
dfranke
I'm not talking about Inspiron vs. Lattitude, I'm talking about the home line
of Inspirons versus the SB line (9300 vs. 9400, when I bought mine). I find
Lenovo's displays intolerably bad.
~~~
rms
Oh, ok. What was the difference between the 9300/9400 Inspiron when you bought
it?
~~~
dfranke
I don't recall exactly, but there were at least two components -- the video
card and wireless card IIRC -- that worked well with Linux on the 9400 but not
the 9300.
------
catfish
Vista Kicks Your Ass...
1\. Self-limiting software
2\. Vanishing functionality through invalidation
3\. Removal of media capabilities
4\. Problem-solving prohibited
5\. Limited mobility
6\. One transfer only
7\. Stealth Installs with Windows Update turned OFF...
8\. Restrictions on your rights to use MPEG-4 video 9\. Windows Update file
deletions of 3rd party software
Reference:
[http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding...](http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html)
And thats just the EULA. Once you actually install this piece of malware you
find that if you watch it with a net snffer, even while completely idle, after
several days with no interaction, it is constantly sending stuff across the
net. Try it for your self with Snort. Its spooky.
If you value your privacy, the security of your company, and give a damn about
protecting your investments, you will read the EULA for yourself before you
rush down to the beach with the rest of the lemmings.
------
jsnx
The author hints at a major issue with corporate deployments -- old machines.
It's all fine, well and good that Vista runs on machines it shipped with; but
many large shops have to turn down an upgrade to Vista just because the
performance is egregiously bad on older machines. By extension, it is unwise
for developers to assume that Vista will be there when they need it, making it
unsuitable as a platform for the near future.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Chinese government is working on a timetable to end sales of fossil-fuel cars - mikeash
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-09/china-to-ban-sale-of-fossil-fuel-cars-in-electric-vehicle-push
======
orf
A common talking point from the right during the withdrawal from the Paris
accord is that "It's just talk, China isn't actually going to do anything". I
wonder what the new talking point going to be after this news? Something
something developing country, coal power plants?
This seems like pretty good news in general though, combined with other
smaller bans (like the UK+France ban on Diesel cars). But I'm not sure how I
feel about China itself leading this green push.
~~~
microcolonel
This is _an announcement of a desire to set a target_ , not an achievement.
Automobiles are not the core of China's emissions problems, they are still
installing a large number of new coal reactors, to my knowledge.
~~~
orf
> an announcement of a desire to set a target
Isn't it an announcement of a future target? Seems more that "we will set a
target" than "we want to but these lobbyists are making it really hard"
------
brownbat
EVs in China produce two to five times the amount of smog as gas vehicles,
because the supporting energy mix is so dirty.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-coal-
powered-c...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-coal-powered-
china-electric-car-surge-fuels-fear-of-worsening-smog/)
Should be good long term, if China realizes other energy sourcing goals,
just... EVs alone don't fix everything.
~~~
ecpottinger
Yet somehow this study leaves out how much China is adding solar and wind
energy to it's supply.
Infact China is closing down it's worse coal plants.
See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China)
[http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40341833](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40341833)
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/china-
add...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/china-adds-
about-24gw-of-solar-capacity-in-first-half-official)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_China)
[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/china-and-us-lead-way-
with-w...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/13/china-and-us-lead-way-with-wind-
power-installations-says-global-energy-report.html)
~~~
brownbat
> Yet somehow this study leaves out how much China is adding solar and wind
> energy to it's supply.
Ahem...
> The good news is that China has shown a firm commit- ment to prompt
> renewable energy use, improving energy efficiency and reducing pollutant
> emissions from power plants. Great efforts have been, and will continue to
> be, made by the Chinese government to reduce the emissions of power plants,
> such as setting an aggressive target to reduce national SO2 emissions by 10%
> from 2005 to 2010 by installing FGD and closing a large number of small
> generating units.
They project out to 2030 and examine different international assumptions about
realistic future energy mixes.
But yeah, it's still an optimistic story long term. They'll also need things
like low rolling resistance tires and new braking tech to reduce pm 2.5, and
reforms in ag, industry, and home heating. But every step is part of it.
[http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/ess/7778/2012071915174608...](http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/ess/7778/20120719151746087644973/%5B18%5D%2520Huo_EST_2010.pdf)
------
amrrs
First, I don't get it, Politicians pushing Electric Vehicle for PR or really
to help locals with realistic setup in place? But this being china they can
literally get anything running in a very short time. While this is all good,
what would happen to car manufacturers, countries import and export in terms
of Crude oil. What kind of impact will this bring on China's economy?
------
_ph_
I am pretty sure that electric cars are going to take over the car market.
Tesla has shown that electric cars can be more desirable than combustion
engined ones. They are also the best way to reduce the environmental impact of
cars. Currently, the market share is limited by the higher price and more so
even by the small number of different electrical models offered. The price
does not matter if you cannot get the car model you want in the first place.
So any threats to fossil car sales is about accelerating the switch and push
car makers into quickly offering a wider variety of electric cars. As soon as
electric cars cross 50% market share, combustion engine cars probably will
become less desirable and difficult to sell. So a total ban should not matter
too much then, the trick is getting to 50%.
~~~
majewsky
> They are also the best way to reduce the environmental impact of cars.
From an individual perspective, maybe. From a city-planner perspective, the
best way to reduce the environmental impact of cars is to deploy public
transit. (And the Chinese know that:
[https://twitter.com/yicaichina/status/867494851511672832](https://twitter.com/yicaichina/status/867494851511672832)
)
------
maxxxxx
If everybody switches to electric do we have enough raw materials for
batteries like lithium to supply the whole world?
~~~
aphextron
>If everybody switches to electric do we have enough raw materials for
batteries like lithium to supply the whole world?
This is a common misconception about batteries. Lithium makes up about 2% of
the mass of a Li-Ion battery, and it is more abundant in the Earth's crust
than lead or tin.
~~~
duckfruit
And unlike oil, Lithium can be recycled indefinitely
~~~
mimsee
"As of 2017, the recycling of Li-Ion batteries generally does not extract
lithium since the many different types of Li-Ion batteries require a different
extraction process."
Source: "Battery Recycling > Lithium ion batteries"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling)
~~~
mikeash
This would change if there was a shortage. Nobody recycles it now because it's
cheaper to mine more.
------
vorticalbox
Is the world really ready to push battery power this quickly? We need to
install millions of charging ports.
What worries me is charge time. Say it takes 2 hours to charge my car I pull
over and all the charging ports are taken.
I could be waiting 2 hours to get a port and then another 2 to charge.
~~~
hammock
Yes. The Nissan Leaf has a range of 107 miles. How is most of Florida supposed
to evacuate before a hurricane if they all drive EV's? There already isn't
even enough gas down there for everyone.
~~~
tobyhinloopen
Bus or Train?
~~~
TomMarius
What about partially/fully immobile family members, larger than small physical
things, supplies, lower income households (that use their car as a storage and
live in a tent)...?
------
davesque
Whenever I see news like this, it just makes it seem like the US is going to
become irrelevant in the future global economy if it doesn't get more serious
about renewable energy.
------
guelo
Holy shit! Maybe it is better if the west cedes global leadership to China.
Western billionaires have figured out how to own our governments. China's
communist party seems to be immune to their influence so far.
~~~
manmal
Why? There are many countries that already have such a timetable.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
LuLu: An open-source macOS firewall that blocks unknown outgoing connections - mcone
https://objective-see.com/products/lulu.html
======
killjoywashere
What I want for all these services (Little Snitch, ESET, etc) is an EasyList-
like ... list. A community-aggregated and reviewed list of servers that don't
merit my connection. I'd pay a monthly subscription fee for that.
I'd also like separate lists for
* "this wifi is public, be extra cautious"
* "this wifi is public, be nice and don't torrent, do backups, etc"
* "I'm on a metered connection (e.g. LTE), don't run torrents, backups, etc"
edit: for anyone looking for a monetizable idea: this post has 41, no 42, no
43 points in about an hour. Probably a good idea...
~~~
lifty
I would pay for such a service as well. In addition to that, I would love if
this service would allow companies like Apple and Google to maintains their
own lists of IP's and update them regularly, so you can be 100% sure that an
IP belongs to them.
~~~
igravious
Is that not somehow auto-discoverable using DNS trickery?
~~~
uxp
Not entirely. From what I understand, these outbound firewalls are working at
the kernel level and interject themselves into a network connection outside of
the DNS lookup process. You could reverse-dns lookup the IP, which Little
Snitch tries, but with things like CDNs and AWS EC2, you end up with a lot of
reports of applications trying to connect to "foo.akamai.com" OR
bar.akamai.com", where foo and bar are entirely separate entities, or just
simply to ec2-0.1.2.3.aws.amazonaws.com or what-have-you. Little Snitch
appears to maintain it's own cache of DNS entries as well, so if you've got
one application that connects to some CDN's IP via it's own CNAME, many times
other applications will appear to be connecting to the first application's
CNAME when they attempt to connect to the same IP because LS has resolved that
IP to the first CNAME more times, or first, or something like that.
It's not perfect, and frequently it isn't even helpful.
------
erAck
Nowadays it's more important to control and restrict outgoing connections than
incoming connections. Who would had thought of that 25 years ago.
~~~
draugadrotten
Give it another 25, and you will have to pay a premium for things which are
stand-alone, disconnected from the net. Want a car which is not navigating
using cloud AI? Only the rich can afford that...
~~~
rubicon33
> Want a car which is not navigating using cloud AI? Only the rich can afford
> that...
Good. I sure hope only a small fraction of the population will be able to
manually drive their car in the future. It would save lives, time, and money
for everyone if the bulk of the idiots were unable to manually drive their
car.
~~~
reaperducer
> It would save lives, time, and money for everyone
I'll give you "lives" and "money," but not necessarily time.
I live in a place where self-driving vehicles can be spotted fairly regularly.
Once a week or so. You can tell by the special license plates. They are always
very ponderous, careful drivers. It's fascinating to see them gently slow to a
stop for a red light, then take off like a jackrabbit when it turns green.
Perhaps as the technology matures, they'll start to keep pace with traffic
better.
I'm actually looking forward to self-driving cars. It's all the personal time
benefits of mass transit (book reading, meditating, general mental health),
without worrying about accidentally sitting in someone else's pee.
~~~
cortesoft
I am pretty sure that is because they have to account for all the non-self-
driving cars. If all cars were self driving, they could co-ordinate and go a
lot faster.
~~~
ksenzee
They'll still have to allow for pedestrians and bikes, for the foreseeable
future.
~~~
zerokernel
We'll just outlaw that. Compare: Jaywalking, avenues.
~~~
killjoywashere
"Machine kills human because human violated traffic law" will never fly.
~~~
jackvalentine
I think it will. The above poster's reference to how 'jaywalking' became a
crime after motor vehicles associations conducted heavy PR campaigns to banish
pedestrians from what once were shared streets is instructive.
------
ComputerGuru
For those on Windows, [http://www.sphinx-
soft.com/Vista/index.html](http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/index.html) does
the same using the native firewall (so no 3rd party dependencies, services, or
bloat) (though they've ~recently added paid licenses with more features to
their basic offering).
I only wish it were cleaner and simpler. I don't think the Windows Firewall
API is too bad, I should add this to my bucket list of open source software to
write that I'll maybe get around to in the next 20 years....
~~~
hs86
When the native firewall in Windows blocks something, doesn't the connection
attempt fail immediately?
For example while the Little Snitch popup dialog is waiting for user input the
affected application just sees an unusual latency spike and it will not
complain immediately that internet access in not available. Afaik, this is not
the case with the Windows Firewall: The connection will fail for the
application while the frontend-app is still waiting for the user's decision.
~~~
hendersoon
Yes, that's correct. MacOS handles this better. But really it only comes up
when you run a _new_ program, so it's not a major problem.
~~~
tetraodonpuffer
it is because one of the major use cases for an outgoing firewall is when
installing new software, which is where you also want to be careful what the
application connects to, which does not work very well at all compared to
Little Snitch
------
reaperducer
Looks promising. I used to use Little Snitch, but last year they decided to
charge for the new version, and I uninstalled it.
Little Snitch was effective, but overly complex for the average user. I'm sure
it's great for someone who configures networks on a regular basis, but as a
Mac user, I just want to use my Mac. If I wanted to twiddle with security
settings all day long, I'd still be on Windows.
This looks like it might be a good, simple, replacement. Hopefully as it
evolves it doesn't get swamped by feature bloat.
~~~
ballenf
That comment makes me chuckle. These days, I have close to zero faith in
commercial software that is "free", assuming that the business model is
selling my data.
I happily paid for Little Snitch and was comforted by the fact that I was the
customer.
~~~
icelancer
This comment makes me chuckle. The idea that since you pay for something means
that the company won't sell your data.
~~~
coding123
[https://www.obdev.at/privacy-policy.html](https://www.obdev.at/privacy-
policy.html)
------
kozhevnikov
It's on Homebrew as a Cask
brew cask install lulu
------
pdonis
Unfortunately, this still has the key flaw that has plagued outbound firewalls
since their invention:
"Currently, LuLu only supports rules at the 'process level', meaning a process
(or application) is either allowed to connect to the network or not. As is the
case with other firewalls, this also means that if a legitimate (allowed)
process is abused by malicious code to perform network actions, this will be
allowed."
In other words, it won't stop malicious Javascript running in your browser
from making an outbound connection, which is the most common way for malware
to do that.
It does say "currently", but I'm not sure how you would get around this flaw;
at any rate, nobody has yet figured out how.
~~~
willstrafach
> In other words, it won't stop malicious Javascript running in your browser
> from making an outbound connection, which is the most common way for malware
> to do that.
This might be possible, if you start off with deny-all as the default and then
start manually adding exceptions as you browse.
~~~
flanbiscuit
I would like to see internet access treated as an OS permission that need to
be expressly granted by the user, same goes for iOS and Android. I wish this
was part of the OS and not something I need to go and install 3rd party apps
for. I like the idea of deny all by default.
~~~
pdonis
_> I would like to see internet access treated as an OS permission._
That would be nice, but it wouldn't fix the problem I've been talking about,
because you would have to give your browser the internet access permission,
and the OS has no way of knowing which of the connections your browser is
making are legitimate and which are not. Only you know that, which means you
would have to continually be interrupting your browsing to approve or
disapprove connections.
------
jle17
Unless I'm mistaken, this isn't actually open source, as it's under a non-
commercial clause.
edit: there is an open issue about it: [https://github.com/objective-
see/LuLu/issues/4](https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu/issues/4)
~~~
skue
1\. The OSI tried to get a trademark for “open source” in their early days and
failed.[1] They don’t own the term, and arguing fine distinctions like this
does nothing but promote flame wars.[2]
2\. The developer put a lot of effort into this and was generous enough to
make this available for free with the source code open. Please be gracious,
because belligerent feedback like this is what causes people to sometimes
reconsider making software free or open source.[3]
3\. You also falsely claim Patrick Wardle is aware of the issue and refuses to
change it, even though he hasn’t commented on the issue you cited, at least as
I write this.
[1] [https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-
source.p...](https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php)
[2] cf. every discussion board or mailing list where issues like this have
come up.
[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/comment/do1...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/comment/do1olag)
~~~
jle17
1\. Whether or not the OSI has a trademark doesn't seem relevant to me, they
coined a term which wasn't used before and associated it with a well known
definition. The distinction seems more significant than fine to me and causes
confusion about what kind of license I (and others, as evidenced by the open
issue on the subject) expect the software to be under. That a subject is
source of disagreement is certainly not a valid reason not to discuss it.
2\. I'm very aware of the efforts of free or open source software authors and
I'm grateful for them. In fact, I occasionally take time to thank them and
make donations to them (although I should do it more). This doesn't mean that
inaccurate statements should not be corrected and I don't see anything
`belligerent` about reporting them, as would be the case for reporting a bug.
3\. You're right on this, I wrongfully assumed one of the person answering in
the issue was the author. I changed my comment.
------
stryk
I'm not personally a mac user, but I'm still very glad to see projects like
this being developed as open source. Very cool I hope this goes on to be a
really solid piece of software.
Does anybody have any recommendations for good ways to get fine-tuned control
of Windows' default firewall?
------
333c
The install page says that `sudo configure.sh -install` is the install
command. The command is actually `sudo ./configure.sh -install`. Further, it
should probably be `sudo ./configure.sh --install` (with two hyphens), as is
convention for named (edit: long-form) options on the command line.
~~~
craftyguy
> as is convention for named options on the command line.
Gosh, I really wish that people would follow a convention for named options on
the command line. I don't even really care which one, as long as they were all
consistent in picking one.
~~~
reaperducer
I've seen /, -, --, and +. Any other ones leap to mind?
I wonder if there's a complete list somewhere.
~~~
pash
The usual convention is a single hyphen for short-form (single-letter)
options, and a double hyphen for long-form options:
> python -v
or
> python —-version
It’s good practice to offer both. It should also be possible to set multiple
options at once by appending one after another in short form following a
single hyphen:
> ls -alR
is the same as
> ls -a -l -R
Long-form options are technically a GNU thing [0] and are not mentioned in the
POSIX standard, but they’re conventional enough now that I think it’s good
practice to include them in any CLI program.
There are also a number of looser conventions about the meaning of certain
short-form options [1].
0\.
[https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLin...](https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-
Interfaces.html)
1\.
[http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html)
~~~
333c
Thanks, this is what I meant in my original comment. I said "named" when I
really meant "long-form," as you said.
------
casca
It's good to see another option for an outbound firewall, but as an industry
we still have a long way to go. As with many security solutions, there is a
conflict between flexibility and usability. I want:
1) To be able to choose the exact host/subnet/domain that an application can
access with a good UX
2) Have someone else curate a list that I subscribe to that handles most cases
3) Work on desktop and mobile
For choosing the exact host/subnet/domain on a per-application basis, the best
UX I've seen on any platform is FirewallIP[1], the unmaintained software on a
jailbroken iPhone. So many desktop solutions[2] only let you choose Allow
everything or Deny everything, Little Snitch and Windows 10 Firewall
Control[3] are exceptions, but even they are limited.
The curated list option should be easy enough to support on most platforms.
Easylist has shown how well it can work on the browser when combined with
uBlock Origin. Install it for someone who is technically naive and they'll
just see no ads with no negative experience.
The mobile platform is harder to support as under Android you need to root the
phone to get access to the underlying iptables firewall with something like
Afwall+, or you run a fake VPN back to the device and filter there which is
prone to failure (is it working? has it stopped itself for some reason) and
has less flexibility. Under unjailbroken IOS, products like Surge, Potatso2
and Shadowrocket run a local proxy that is similar to the fake VPN under
Android, but requires manually editing a text file for configuration and seem
to be designed to get around the Chinese internet restrictions rather than
privacy.
[1]
[http://r-rill.net/FirewalliP7/FiPDepiction.html](http://r-rill.net/FirewalliP7/FiPDepiction.html)
[2] Glasswire on Windows, Douane and OpenSnitch on Linux, AFwall+ on Android
[3] [http://www.sphinx-soft.com/Vista/index.html](http://www.sphinx-
soft.com/Vista/index.html)
------
Asmod4n
Breaks networking on High Sierra. No Browser works anymore. curl stops
working. git doesn't even trigger its asking window. Power usage doubles when
networking is used too.
After uninstalling it the kernel crashes.
Sad.
------
nikolay
I've been using all Objective See projects, but I have issues with:
\- stability - often their tools have memory leaks;
\- consistent UX - each tool looks and behaves differently;
\- stacking of dialogs - often by the time I click, a new popup replaces the
old one, and I approve something I don't even get a chance to see!
~~~
DavideNL
You should report the problems to the Developer, he's very responsive...
------
calebm
Very cool! So this is an open-source Little Snitch then?
~~~
devin
Certainly looks that way
------
bringtheaction
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
> International License.
Weird choice of license.
~~~
cheeze
As someone unfamiliair, what is weird about the choice?
~~~
hoistbypetard
The people who developed the creative commons licenses recommend against using
them for software. [From their FAQ]([https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-
apply-a-creative-comm...](https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-
creative-commons-license-to-software)):
> We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead,
> we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses
> which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made
> available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the
> Open Source Initiative.
~~~
torstenvl
That's because we treat software very differently from most other content
subject to copyright.
As in this case, (reading the above threads) there's confusion as to the no
commercial use clause extends to the content or the outcome of its processes.
That is to say, NoCommercialUse for a book clearly means for derivative works.
_Nobody would ever suggest you can 't read a book while in a commercial
establishment._ But in software we routinely place use restrictions on the
end-user. Kind of bizarre, when you think about it.
~~~
hoistbypetard
I completely agree with your first sentence. But I think your interpretation
of NonCommercial is a bit off. NonCommercial in the context of a book does not
refer to "using" the book or to creating derivatives. You don't need a license
to read a book. Rather, it refers to _copying_ the book. They have a separate
clause that refers to creating derivative works from the book. If you have a
CC-BY-NC book, that means you're allowed to copy the book as much as you want
as long as it's not for commercial purposes. If you have a CC-BY book, that
means you can copy it as much as you want, even if it's for commercial
purposes. If you have CC-BY-ND, that means even though you can copy the book
as much as you want, even for commercial purposes, the author is not granting
you the right to make derivatives.
Software is different because copying software is a _necessary_ part of using
it. So CC-BY-NC for software could quite reasonably be read to restrict its
use in a commercial environment because you (notionally) need a license to
make that copy from the internet to your hard drive, and from your hard drive
to system RAM so that you can use it.
~~~
torstenvl
You're distinguishing more finely than I am between exact copies and modified
copies. Fair enough. My use of "derivative" above is intended to encompass
deriving copies from an original, with or without modification.
To the extent using software inherently means creating copies - so does
reading. The image of the page is transferred to my retinas and encoded in the
volatile storage of an organic neural network.
~~~
hoistbypetard
(I'm making the same distinction between exact and modified copies that the
Creative Commons folks make...)
As to your second point... Ha! Fair enough. But IIRC case law has actually
recognized that the copies created on a computer as you install and execute a
program count as "copies" for the purpose of needing a license for an activity
that would otherwise violate copyright. That is why EULAs are, to some extent,
considered valid and enforceable. No such case has been made for your retinas
encoding the light bouncing off a page and transferring that pattern to your
neurons.
------
kristofferR
What's the CPU usage? I tried Little Snitch, but it was often consuming insane
amounts of CPU (40%+) which matters a lot on a 12' Macbook on battery, so I
uninstalled it.
~~~
killjoywashere
Long time Little Snitch user here, that seems ... high
~~~
kristofferR
Yeah, I though so too. I even tried a complete reinstall, but that didn't
improve the situation.
It's probably due to the absurd amounts of logging it does (every single
connection tracked on a world map), which I didn't find a way to disable... I
probably have an abnormal number of connections too due to torrenting (only
Linux distros obviously). The Macbook CPU isn't high performance either.
------
Abishek_Muthian
The author is not subtle in letting know that this is intended to be open
source replacement for Little Snitch (domain!).
But at-least macOS has little snitch, closest for Linux was opensnitch which
was announced on HN few months back -
[https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/](https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/)
but I'm not sure whether it's actively being developed though.
~~~
bmaupin
Douane[0] is another application firewall for Linux that's still active as far
as I can tell.
[0] [http://douaneapp.com/](http://douaneapp.com/)
~~~
Abishek_Muthian
Yes, but package managers for it for non debian based distro's are bit of a
mess.
------
kstrauser
First, this is awesome. Thank you!
Second, is the business model of Objective-See to offer open source
alternatives for Objective Development's products (LuLu instead of Little
Snitch; OverSight instead of Micro Snitch)?
------
galonk
So even open source projects are doing that thing where they immediately cover
the page you're trying to read with an annoying spam box?
~~~
reaperducer
Wasn't there a note form the Google search team not too long ago that they
were going to demote sites that use the splash divs?
How do I know if I want to sign up for your newsletter if I haven't been able
to look at your site yet?
------
doctoboggan
Does anyone know how this compares to Little Snitch?
~~~
skue
Based only on glancing through the linked product page... here are some LS
features LuLu currently lacks:
* Reporting domain names rather than just reporting destination IPs.
* Inbound monitoring & rules
* Temporary rules that auto-expire (e.g. Once, next 15 mins, etc.)
* Fine-grained control over protocol/domain/subdomain in blocking rules (at least when prompted)
* Graphical monitor of recent blocked/allowed traffic
* Profiles to easily change rule sets based on network, etc.
* Unclear whether LuLu provides special handling of connection attempts during startup, software updates, etc.
* Graphical installer, polish, support, etc.
...OTOH, LuLu does provide features I don’t recall seeing in LS:
* Icon indicating whether originating binary has been signed by system/third party/unsigned
* Button to optionally check binary hash against VirusTotal
------
viach
Are you sure it won't interfere with required system connections? Like updates
etc, all this boring stuff Mac users tied to?
------
endlessvoid94
Dumb question: is something about OS X’s built in firewall that’s
insufficient?
Always love new projects like this, just curious though.
~~~
skue
In the FAQ, bottom of page:
_> Do I need LuLu if I've turned on the built-in macOS firewall?
> Yes! Apple's built-in firewall only blocks incoming connections. LuLu is
> designed to detect and block outgoing connections, such as those generated
> by malware when the malware attempts to connect to it's command & control
> server for tasking, or exfiltrates data._
~~~
petee
Confusing, since they use the PF filter, you can absolutely block outgoing
connections, atleast by port, app or user
------
rasz
Windows WARNING:
If you plan on doing same thing in windows be aware you need to disable
Dnscache service. Its impossible in windows to screen loopback network
interface, means you cant filter which programs get DNS access while "DNS
Client" is running, its all or nothing. DNS is a very popular covert
exfiltration channel.
------
omidraha
I need something like this for Ubuntu
------
joeblau
This project looks awesome. I just looked at the code and it looks like every
line of code has a comment. It seems like a bit of overkill in Obj-C being
such a verbose language. Aside from that, I'm definitely going to check this
out.
------
tuananh
has anyone tried both Hands Off[0] and Little Snitch? How is Hands Off
compared to LS?
Also: Radio Silence[1]?
[0]:
[https://www.oneperiodic.com/products/handsoff/](https://www.oneperiodic.com/products/handsoff/)
[1]: [https://radiosilenceapp.com/](https://radiosilenceapp.com/)
------
Khaine
If you are looking to block IP addresses, you can always use pf. Its built
into macOS. It does require some command line knowledge.
------
vesche
Please remove the popup email signup.
------
chisleu
Is the author associated with CrowdStrike? I noticed he/she was using
FancyBear
~~~
chisleu
Why downvote a legit question on topic? The term FancyBear came from the
cofounder of crowdstrike: Dmitri Alperovitch.
[http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49902/the-russian-
emig...](http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49902/the-russian-emigre-
leading-the-fight-to-protect-america/)
------
nthompson
Really cool tool thanks!
One problem to maybe take care of next iteration:
$ top -o cpu LuluDaemon 29.5%
------
fishmeat
Why does macOS need this? (Asking because I'm not a mac user)
------
zipotm
sudo ./configure.sh -install
------
danjoc
False advertising. Nothing can stop an AMT process running in ring -3.
------
blocked_again
LuLu is a billion dollar hypermarket chain. I think it would be a good idea to
rename this project in the beginning if you don't want to get into any
copyright issues.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu_Hypermarket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu_Hypermarket)
~~~
a_t48
Doesn't that only apply if they are competing businesses?
~~~
guan
Many countries have a “well-known trademark” doctrine where a mark can be so
famous that any business using it could be a source of consumer confusion. For
example, if you see that Coca-Cola has released a firewall, you might well
think it has some connection to Coca-Cola, even if you know they are not
currently in the software business. Lulu supermarket may not be well known
enough to enjoy that kind of protection.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Future of Business? - Aeiper
I seems that many big companies are buying smaller companies (which are also pretty big!). With Facebook buying Instagram, Yahoo buying Tumblr, and Yahoo attempting to buy another company, it seems that the future of starting a business is going to be selling to the "big guys". Sooner or later, I believe that there will only be a couple of companies (like in Wall-E) that will dominate the others. What do you think?
======
hardwaresofton
It might be better if I respond to this in two ways:
1) If you're a libertarian: The government will hopefully keep it's hands off
and the market will adjust -- as big companies take over smaller ones and make
mistakes, new competitors will arise when they take measures that people don't
like (as in, if Yahoo does something bad enough with Tumblr, someone will make
a new, even MORE hipster Tumblr alternative)
2) If you're not a libertarian: Responsibly upheld Sherman anti-trust and
monopoly laws are in place to stop things like that, hopefully. (see Google in
just about every court appearance in the last few years)
------
michaelpinto
You should read up on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concepts of fragility and
antifragility. Taleb feels that over the long run the biggest of the big will
have fragility, and thus tend to fail.
Another thing to keep in mind is that what you're reading about in fact
represents only a small amount of what is going on in business. There are
plenty of small companies that aren't being sold to big companies, and quite a
few big companies can be doing badly at any time. In tech just take a look at
HP.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Real Story Behind Why Flappy Bird Was Deleted - friscofoodie
https://medium.com/p/637115e0813a
======
georgemcbay
Title: "The Real Story Behind Why Flappy Bird Was Deleted"
In the article text: "In what surely is one of the strangest stories in years
we are unlikely to ever really know what happened."
Well, okay then...
~~~
friscofoodie
Sorry, good catch. I meant to include the word "officially" in that sentence.
Post has been updated to correct the mistake and clarify: the most likely
reason why Flappy Bird was deleted is that he broke the rules, Apple found
out, withheld his earnings, and forced him to take the game down.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood the Test of Time - jasim
https://scholar.googleblog.com/2017/06/classic-papers-articles-that-have-stood.html
======
drfuchs
They completely missed, with 1800+ citations, the winner of the “Theory of
Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2016 _Test of Time award_ ”: “Calibrating Noise
to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry,
Kobbi Nissim, and Adam Smith. Oh, it also just won the 2017 Gödel Prize; it
really ought to be at the top of both the “Theoretical Computer Science” and
“Computer Security and Cryptography” lists.
Worse still, with ~3000 citations, Dwork’s “Differential Privacy” (ICALP (2)
2006: 1-12), should rank even higher in the Theoretical Computer Science list.
But Google Scholar has completely lost track of that foundational paper; it’s
got it all confused with a completely different paper, Dwork’s 2008
“Differential Privacy: A Survey of Results”. Note that this also means that
anybody searching for the general topic “differential privacy” on Google
Scholar will not get to see the most-cited paper about it!
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/dwork.pdf)
Disclaimer: Dwork and I have been seen together, for 24 years.
~~~
jventura
From the article: "This release of classic papers consists of articles that
were published in 2006..". Your second one could be there (I haven't looked
for it), but you're mentioning some problems with the article, maybe it's
that..
~~~
drfuchs
They were both published in 2006, so not sure what you're getting at.
Google Scholar and Sean Henderson are promulgating a false historical record,
and there seems to be no way to inform them so that they may correct
themselves, other than whining here on HN and hoping they notice. Anybody have
any other suggestions?
~~~
frankmcsherry
[https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general](https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general)
~~~
drfuchs
For the record: Re-confirmed that Google Scholar's "support" page is useless.
It simply replies with an email indicating that while you can go ahead and
complain, they're not going to bother to do anything to fix their algorithm no
matter how wrong-headed it is, so tough luck for you and the rest of the
unsuspecting, misinformed, current and future universe. Same result as from
the previous 3 tries to correct the record. And same as with recent attempts
to contact them via email and even USPS snail-mail.
They don't even seem bothered that this in turn leads to Google's own data-
miners publishing false results based on Google Scholar's error-filled data;
Sean Henderson and Anurag Acharya both have their names on the erroneous blog
entry, and still it remains uncorrected. One might think that they would't
want their names associated with false information, and messing up the true
historical record.
Anyway, congratulations on being presented with ACM SIGACT's 2017 Gödel Prize
"for the invention of Differential Privacy" in the "Calibrating Noise to
Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis" paper at last week's ACM Symposium on
Theory of Computing (STOC). Too bad Google Scholar seems intent on hiding it.
Maybe all the search-terms I've semi-awkwardly included here will help future
(re)searchers find it, as well as Dwork's "Differential Privacy" ICALP 2006.
------
nyrulez
This has left me scratching my head - why just 2006 ? Having just one year of
publications and labeling them "Classic Papers" is pretty misleading as the
term is used to indicate a wide gamut of publications over a much longer
period of time. It should be just called "Top papers or research from 2006".
Unless this expands to at least cover a decade, it shouldn't be labeled as
such.
This almost sounds like collecting my most liked pics from 2006 on Facebook
and creating an album "Best moments of my life".
Do they not have data before 2006 ?
~~~
a3n
> This has left me scratching my head - why just 2006 ?
As they said in the post, they're measuring cites 10 years after. It's 2017. I
imagine 2006 is their "inaugural year."
~~~
RhysU
Measuring citations by year Y+10 for publication year Y could be run for all
historical years pretty easily.
------
diggan
Nice list, but as many other said, seems to only be for 2006.
For more papers, there is a nice list here:
[http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html](http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html)
not limited to 2006
There is a bunch more places to get papers listed here too:
[https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-
good-...](https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love#other-good-places-
to-find-papers)
------
bokertov
Is the author JH He of the #1 paper in computational mathematics a self citing
spammer?
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/selfcitation.wordpress.com/2011...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/selfcitation.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/self-
citation-expert-ji-huan-he-and-nelson-tansu/amp/)
------
whynotqat
As one might guess, there is a lot wrong with this list even within there
stated goals. My examples are drawn from mathematics, since that's what I
know. They appear to use the journal to classify category, which doesn't work
very well since many of the best results are published in general journals.
Additionally, since citation counts vary so widely between sub-fields, there
is a strong pull towards selecting misclassified work from higher-citation
fields. For example the paper "High-dimensional centrally symmetric polytopes
with neighborliness proportional to dimension" is listed in geometry but
belongs elsewhere, and there are no probability papers in the category
"Probability and Statistics with Applications". Also, the "Pure & Applied"
category is meaningless. That list seems to be the most cited papers from five
arbitrary journals. I guess it's a reminder that these problems are hard to
automate, and that your work doesn't have to be perfect to share.
~~~
glup
Cognitive Science suffers from the same problem of misclassifications from
higher-citation fields (neuroscience).
Agreed that projects don't have to be perfect but it does have to have _some_
functionality to ship... I don't see how I could use this could help me
construct a course reading list or to improve my understanding of my academic
field, given the problems.
~~~
phreeza
There wasn't even a neuroscience category on the page, only neurology and
neurosurgery.
------
dev_tty01
Should be labeled "Top cited papers of 2006" or something similar. Calling
this collection "Classic Papers" is misleading at best.
~~~
a3n
No, it's an exactly accurate name for their feature. For which they have only
yet released the 2006 edition.
------
logicallee
Out of curiosity, does anyone have any examples of scientific books (or
papers) that are the exact opposite: influential or famous at the time but
completely and utterly destroyed by the test of time. Like, that seem silly to
us in how completely and utterly wrong they turned out to be in their every
single conclusion.
I'm thinking about research versions of Lord Kevin's favorite edict: "Heavier
than air flying machines impossible" or the patent person (examiner? head of
patent office?) who in the nineteenth century said everything that can be
invented has been invented.
~~~
Houshalter
Sure fields of research go obsolete all the time. E.g. much of the computer
vision stuff from 2006 is basically dead now. If you go further back, a lot of
early AI research was exciting at the time, but is entirely forgotten about
now.
~~~
mindcrime
_If you go further back, a lot of early AI research was exciting at the time,
but is entirely forgotten about now._
Interesting that you would use that example. I suspect, although I can't
_prove_ , that this is largely a mistake. Or maybe not so much a _mistake_ as
a choice that will wind up being revisited. That is, I think there is still a
lot of "meat on the bone" for many of the AI techniques that were being
explored in the 70's and 80's, and we will see another round of things
suddenly coming back into favor at some point. It's happened before...
remember when ANN's were completely out of vogue, and the computing power and
data availability caused a sudden resurgence in interest in those? I would not
be surprised to see similar things happening w/r/t various aspects of GOFAI.
More likely, I think we'll see additional integration / hybridization of
probabilistic / pattern matching systems (using ANN's / Deep Learning / etc.)
_and_ symbolic processing and automated reasoning.
'course, I might be totally wrong, but that's my feeling ATM.
------
glup
Methodology is not described and the resulting collections are of notably poor
quality. Given Google's privileged position in knowledge production I wish
they would be far more careful in cases like this.
------
ivan_ah
For everyone disappointed to see papers only from 2006, here is a consolation
prize. _Creating a Computer Science Canon: a Course of “Classic” Readings in
Computer Science_ :
[http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/pubs/sigcsecanon.pdf](http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/pubs/sigcsecanon.pdf)
(CS only, date range = [1806:2006])
------
kensai
This is also very interesting: the AAAI Classic Paper Award.
The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most
influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time
period considered will advance by one year.
Papers will be judged on the basis of impact, for example:
Started a new research (sub)area
Led to important applications
Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
Has been very heavily cited
[https://aaai.org/Awards/classic.php](https://aaai.org/Awards/classic.php)
------
joatmon-snoo
Noticeably missing: Gray and Lamport's "Consensus on Transaction Commit"
~~~
spatulon
That paper appears to have been published in 2004, not 2006.
~~~
joatmon-snoo
To arXiv in '04, but to ACM in '06.
------
idlewords
In the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies section, five of the ten cited
papers are about Turkey. Another is about representation of Islam in the
Australian media.
This... doesn't seem like a very representative selection of 'timeless'
papers.
------
nickpsecurity
The security examples were weak. Far more influential were the Ware or
Anderson reports, MULTICS security evaluation, anything describing Orange
Book-style systematic assurance of whole systems, at least one on capability-
security or by Butler Lampson (did access control too), something on
monitoring/logging, something on static analysis, CompCert or Coq, and so on.
Things that had a major impact on the problems they focused on which many
other papers doing something similar built on or constantly referenced. I'm
skeptical of citations in general since those who chase them usually do a high
number of quotable papers in whatever fad is popular instead of hard, deep,
and critical work. Those I listed are the latter with who knows what
citations. The collection is probably still nice for finding neat ideas or
just learning in general.
------
nadim
Classic Albums: 5 Mics in the Source
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source#The_Source.27s_Five...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source#The_Source.27s_Five-
Mic_albums)
------
Aardappel
No "programming language design and implementation" category?
~~~
seanmcdirmid
Looks like those would be under "Software systems."
~~~
Aardappel
Seems like at best 1 out of 10 in that category qualifies.. but yes, this is
just 2006, so hard to tell.
~~~
nickpsecurity
Should be easy. Just look for ALGOL, LISP, Pascal (or Wirth), BCPL/C, ML,
Haskell, Prolog, and META II. They should all be there since tons of CompSci
work and many commercial products came from these. About six also establish a
new or altered paradigm of programming, too. If it doesn't have most of them,
then the list is bullshit. If it does, then it's solid.
Note: They all came _way_ before 2006, too. Should've been easy for authors to
find. :)
------
hkon
For computer science, I find most useful papers are from before 1990. Looking
forward to that being included.
------
threepipeproblm
Ironically, you have to copy, paste and Google the titles of most of these to
find downloadable versions.
~~~
blt
sci-hub.cc can help with those that don't show a PDF in the Google results.
~~~
threepipeproblm
I hope sci-hub and libgen can stay afloat. sci-hub.ac is also up atm. "to
remove all barriers in the way of science" \-- be advised it's not necessarily
legal.
------
husamia
all the articles were only published in 2006! I tried to change the data to
2017 but it didn't work
------
teddyh
Flagged for misleading headline.
------
qrbLPHiKpiux
A lot has happened in my profession since 2006...
~~~
jldugger
But it wouldn't necessarily be a 'classic'.
The point of the exercise is to find papers that are widely considered
valuable, especially to other researchers. To do this, they're using citation
counts.
There's obviously a number of problems with citations, including self-cites,
negative citations ("Alice & Bob '06 shook the community when they found
things, but our better, larger study finds no evidence of any effect"), and
such. But it makes sense for a company built upon citation rank indexing to
rely on such methods =)
------
seasonalgrit
"a collection of highly-cited papers"
no, a collection of titles. a collection of papers would be very useful; these
are just links, e.g., to paywalled sites.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Is WPA2 security broken due to Defcon MS-CHAPv2 cracking? - alter8
http://revolutionwifi.blogspot.com/2012/07/is-wpa2-security-broken-due-to-defcon.html
======
moxie
It's also probably worth acknowledging that many organizations do use MS-
CHAPv2 for their inner authentication credentials, precisely because they want
to depend on it for mutual authentication instead of managing/deploying a PKI.
Since the Defcon talk, I've gotten a ton of emails from people thanking me for
making this available as a service, so that they can easily demonstrate why
relying on MS-CHAPv2 for WPA2 mutual authentication is a bad idea to their
organizations.
The article is correct, but the solution they outline is only "simple" in
theory. Most organizations do not have a BYOD enforcement or onboarding
process for their enterprise wireless networks, and they used to think MS-
CHAPv2 made that OK.
------
UnoriginalGuy
MS-CHAPv2 is used by VPNs and can be used by RADIUS authentication services
(to authenticate WIFI clients) but typically it won't be.
For almost all private individuals your WPA2 connection is still just as
secure as it has ever been. For most businesses it is likely secure unless
you're using a Microsoft RADIUS server for authentication (and even then as
the article says the impact is almost nil).
Which isn't to say that the MS-CHAPv2 thing isn't a big deal: because it
really is. It just doesn't have much to do with WIFI.
------
ojno
Flamebait title -- the answer at the end of the article is "No." :-P
~~~
wlesieutre
Betteridge's Law of Headlines in action!
~~~
corin_
Does this really need to be brought up every single time a submission has a
question in the title?
~~~
wlesieutre
I think it's worth pointing out when the title is a blatant attempt to get
more people to read it. If they'd just said "WPA2 Isn't Broken Due to Defcon
Hacking" then a lot less people would click through. I'll give him credit for
starting off with "Quick answer: no" though.
------
peterwwillis
As part of the new Baseline Requirements for public CAs, certificate
authorities are not able to issue certificates for internal purposes after
2015.
This means that your client will have to have the certificate installed on it
_prior to authentication_. So a random person connecting to your AP may be
subject to an untrusted certificate, or require manual installation before
connecting.
So.... in 2015, we might be fucked.
~~~
comex
Can't you get around that by just using a real domain name? There's no
requirement that the server be _accessible_ externally.
~~~
peterwwillis
There's no guarantee the CA won't revoke it if they find out you're using it
for internal purposes.
~~~
comex
That makes no sense - there is no security problem with using a legitimate
certificate for a real domain for internal purposes.
I haven't heard about these Baseline Requirements before your post, but
<http://www.cabforum.org/Baseline_Requirements_V1.pdf> mentions 2015 but only
in the context of reserved IPs and "Internal Server Names", which is defined
as "A Server Name that is not resolvable using the public DNS". That makes
more sense, because there is no way to say who owns such a domain.
Am I missing something?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mechanics of a Small Acquisition - jhchen
http://quotidianventures.com/post/28411675934/mechanics-of-a-small-acquisition
======
therealarmen
_Believing that the finish line is just yards away and finding that it is
actually miles is not going to be good for your company’s morale._
I've learned this lesson the hard way. It's easy to get caught up in
acquisition discussions, so be careful not to get ahead of youself. The cost
for the acquirer to engage is much less. They are larger and sometimes have
full-time staff devoted to M&A, while your startup's bandwidth is very
limited.
~~~
wangarific
It's also difficult to avoid getting so excited and consumed by the process
that you lose focus on what your business is actually doing. The acquirer is
sending their deal team but you won't have one working for you (even if you
get a banker/broker, it still takes up a lot of the founders' time), so
someone still needs to mind the store.
------
sovande
Interesting read, but for my part, I'm much more interested to learn _how_ to
start the process. That is, tips on how to position your company to make it a
candidate for acquisition. (Apart from a great product and name of course -
got that). Ways to flag potential suitors? And ways to make it clear that you
are looking for buyers? etc. Any pointers or text to look at would be much
appreciated.
~~~
king_magic
Ditto. I'd like to know if it is a process that really only starts once
someone has noticed you, or if it is something an owner can push for. If so,
what is the best way to do this?
Right now, my strategy is to pursue integration and use it as an avenue to
acquisition. Not sure if it's the most viable method, though.
~~~
ScottBurson
It's as with any negotiation: whoever needs the deal the worst is in the
weaker position. There is such a thing as shopping a company around looking
for an acquirer, but you're unlikely to get as good a deal as if they come to
you.
------
ActVen
This is very reflective of the acquisition process my company went through
when it was acquired(Priced at $13 million). However, one area that can't be
emphasized enough is the distraction, time, and mental capital that this
process entails. If you are not careful, it can hurt your business and its
trajectory. Luckily, we had good people running the business for the founders
while we concentrated on the acquisition process. One area not addressed very
closely in this article is the difficulty of not sharing the possible
acquisition with employees as you go through the process of gathering all of
the due diligence data and having all of the meetings. Of course, keeping the
acquisition process a secret from your employees isn't always required...but
in our case it was. That added to the stress of the due diligence process for
us.
------
maxpalm
There's little public information about small acquisitions and how they happen
-- thanks for sharing. Everyone would be better off if there more information
and transparency around these processes.
~~~
wangarific
I went through a small acquisition (single digit millions) and we're building
a membership site that would help people understand this process (from the
seller's perspective) and the potential pitfalls, what sorts of things do you
think must be addressed? Or perhaps need greater attention?
~~~
maxpalm
What are the things that drive price? What does the diligence process look
like? Managing telling employees vs secrecy?
~~~
camz
I've written an ebook about the due diligence process and I could write a post
that explains it if enough ppl are interested
~~~
ringoboo
Yes please
~~~
basilpeters
Me too. Thanks.
------
danielweber
I knew of one company that was, despite wanting to be acquired, made it as
hard as possible. Someone showed up with the "accept no other offers for 90
days" and the company freaked out that they were being pressured. All
discussion ground to a halt after that.
------
pronoiac
Has anyone collected advice for after the acquisition? I'm thinking things
like:
* Give yourself six months or so after joining before finalizing plans to sunset your original systems. It gives you time to work out the lay of the land re: political and software integration.
* If you expect more manpower in development or maintenance, get it down in writing.
Thoughts?
------
orangethirty
Off-topic:
I love the design of their page. The logo is just very attractive to me. It
has a sort of mechanical-organic look to it. Great visuals.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dunning-Kruger and other bogus memes - Illotus
https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
======
alkonaut
Opinion: a log like decrease in happiness vs income is basically consistent
with "more money doesn't make you happier". Sketching a graph that is
completely flat is misleading however. The only question is, at what point on
the log scale is the increase small enough to disregard (compared to other
life factors).
Another one from the article: I'm arguing _without empirical evidence_ of the
superiority of good type systems (Note: I try to stay away from claims about
what those are). I also think it's not possible to make controlled studies on
this area - which is why it's such a contested issue. Studies use either
students and/or toy problems, or irrelevant datasets such as bugs reported
against github repos etc. The only way top make a valid study is to have N
teams implement and maintain a product with the same spec over K years and
then compare the results and try to factor out developer skill. I say it's not
a feasible problem to solve. We'll have to stick to arguing type systems
_without_ evidence to back up the argumebts. But that is the best kind of
arguing, after all.
~~~
taneq
> Opinion: a log like decrease in happiness vs income is basically consistent
> with "more money doesn't make you happier".
I think you mean log-like _in_ crease.
Assuming so, then more money _does_ make you happier (although at a decreasing
rate per dollar per year.)
~~~
dwaltrip
The GP is saying it may be negligible at a certain point, compared to any
other conceivable factor.
------
avs733
So I write this as an academic who actually has read and cited Drs. Dunning
and Kruger's (in)famous work. This is a little off the cuff so it isn't going
to have the citations it should.
The generalized thing that the authors are talking about is information
literacy. It is the process that includes not just understanding the
information but identifying the need for information, locating it,
understanding the information, evaluating the information, and then applying
the information to some affect. Interestingly, it has found a home primarily
within the libraries because...well they are really solid place to go for how
information is organized.
“Making search easier for students can therefore be a double-edged sword:
while it enables students to get to information faster and easier, it can also
reinforce unreflective research habits that contribute little to the overall
synthesis of a research paper or academic argument.” [0]
More broadly from research I have been involved in on student information
literacy, self report data is spectacularly garbage because of underlying
misconceptions students' hold about what they did. One semi-famous
observational study showed that students strongly conflate finding a piece of
information with understanding it. That was a 'whoa' moment for me. Cognitive
conflation of access to a piece of information and deep coherent understanding
of it. Houston...well you know the rest.
I personally attribute that in large part to fundamental problems in how we as
a society think about education. This is philisophical about how we fail to
differentiate transmission of information from the development of insights and
understanding. We teach information as if it is both of those things. Science,
as much as people scream otherwise isn't facts. Facts are the result of
science. There is a lot of other work showing it is really hard to get faculty
to change teaching practices. The reality is it doesn't matter. Society, not
just teachers, need to think about information different and think about
knowledge different ly for us to break out of this loop.
[A]Dimmock, N. (2013). Hallmarks of a good paper. In N.F. Foster (Ed.),
Studying students: A second look (7-17). Chicago: ACRL.
------
SecretAg3nt
Looks like the difference between perceived and actual scores fit the popular
understanding.
The people who perform the worst have the most inflated perception of their
performance, while the people who perform the best underestimate their
performance.
I think people take Dunning-Kruger and apply it to their everyday anecdotes.
They are thinking in terms of relative differences rather than absolute, and
thus the pop-sci understanding may not be that far off from the original.
------
JSONwebtoken
Seems paradoxical that the Dunning-Kruger effect is being applied to the
Dunning-Kruger effect.
~~~
crsv
This was my first thought.
I'm sure the noble prize awarded to the Dunning and Kruger's work in
psychology was just a result of a bunch of imbeciles who didn't realize it was
a "bogus meme".
This article was absolute drivel.
~~~
dwaltrip
I just did some quick googling. It seems they received the Ig-Nobel award, not
an actual Nobel prize. This award is a bit strange, I don't fully
understand... It's some kind of parody:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize)
~~~
kthejoker2
It's simply there to highlight the wide and wooly range of things being
practiced under the umbrella of science. I find it pretty heartening - the
world needs research on slug poop and the psychology of sexbots, too.
------
mikey_p
In regards to software engineering, The Leprechauns of Software Engineering
has lots of good examples of this type of thinking.
[https://leanpub.com/leprechauns](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns)
------
notahacker
The most interesting thing about the graphs isn't the slope, but that
"perceived score" is far more tightly coupled to the individual's perception
of their overall ability than their actual score. But that could be an
artefact of how and when questions about ability were asked (conjecture: I
haven't read the original paper)
~~~
Mysterix
"Perception of their overall ability" seems to have a different scale that the
2 others, so the important point is not the actual values but the correlation
measure.
------
jasonmaydie
The money/happyness one is particularly interesting to me. If money does not
equal happyness why am I so happy when I get more? I make more than 75k so
obviously 75k isn't enough.
~~~
wazoox
The fact that you want more is irrelevant. You may be unhappy and believe that
more money will make you happier, but it could be just a false belief or a
bias.
~~~
jasonmaydie
But the question presumes that somehow you are unhappy because you don't have
enough money. What if you are already happy but more money makes you more
happy?
Money is not a cure for unhappiness seems like a more accurate phrase.
------
draw_down
Oh man, it’s the HN link I was born to read.
The way people throw around Dunning-Kruger in particular is so aggravating.
You can pretty much always tell they never got anywhere even close to reading
the research.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Weekend project - Defaults Write - rawfael
http://rawfael.com/defaults/
======
cleverjake
looks very promising. some sort of rss/atom link would be great
~~~
rawfael
thanks, I will implement feeds soon. there are some bugs I need to fix now.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Man Shoots Girlfriend’s Computer After Installing Windows Vista - dmix
http://www.funtechtalk.com/man-shoots-girlfriends-computer-after-installing-windows-vista/
======
jws
I wonder if it was true? Flurry of blog-ish posts in July 2007. No "real"
article since.
This article contains a small collection of similar shooting incidents.
[http://shekel.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-dont-condone-this-
but-i...](http://shekel.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-dont-condone-this-but-i-really-
really.html)
[[Fullish disclosure: I did crush a horrid little Gateway server with an
intermittent problem into a tiny ball of metal and debris with a rented
excavator. I can see where these people come from, I've been in the
neighborhood.]]
------
tlrobinson
I'm guessing Microsoft won't include this guy in their "I'm a PC" ad
campaign...
------
quantumhobbit
I miss TechTV. Patrick Norton in a kilt destroying a PC with a sledgehammer
was classier than a pistol.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Jakob Nielsen: Customization of UIs and Products - edw519
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/customization.html
======
patio11
One part of this deeply resonates with me: get users the "early success
experience". I have worked on it over the years, trying to provide more and
more of a glide path to people so that they successfully get something coming
out of their printer.
It pays off -- I sell to 2.5% of people who get that far, and only about .8%
among people who don't. (How do I love thee, analytics software, let me count
the ways...)
This is one of the reasons I wince when I see apps which drop people at an
empty screen, waiting to be filled by clicking the unobtrusive New Document
button in the top corner. Grab them by the collar and tell them what they need
to do next ("Click the new document button to get started!").
If what they need to do next is perfectly obvious, don't even bother with the
text. Consider taking them straight into that funnel, or providing them with a
half-built document that they can jump right into.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
“I have toyota corola” - robin_reala
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/
======
kpgraham
Back in the days of shareware, around 1985, I wrote a program called TXT2COM.
It was a simple way of turning a text file into an executable. All a user had
to do was run the converted com file and the text file appeared on the screen
with full scrolling, search and save. I had my name and phone number embedded
in the program.
My first problem was when someone converted the Constitution of the United
States into a COM file, but made some typos. I got hundreds of calls.
Then someone converted a entire library of gay porn text files which resulted
in some uncomfortable phone calls to my wife while I was at work.
I released another version without my name and phone number, but the damage
was done. I can still find my name embedded on com files in old archives.
The program was eventually bundled with an edition of "The Art of Computer
Programming" by Donald E. Knuth. He used it to wrap some of the text files on
the disk that came with the book. He paid me with a signed copy of the book
and a very nice letter.
~~~
drzaiusapelord
Knuth is such a class act. I don't think I've ever heard a negative story
about him. Contrast him to, say, the harsh laguage Linus Torvalds routinely
engages in or the many stories pointing out Steve Jobs' unfriendly side. I'm
not 100% sure if you have to be a jerk to get ahead in life and lean towards
'yes' on this but when I see guys like Knuth, I wonder if nice guys do win
sometimes.
>TXT2COM
As an 80s BBS kid, I thank you for this. I'm sure I used this many times over
and never considered the author. I think this was commonly used to package
text files for download back in the day.
~~~
ldfdr
You're confusing being a jerk with communication styles and cultural
differences. You'd never hire anyone from the American inner city, from parts
of Scotland and Ireland, parts of New York, and similar. Some very nice people
talk loudly, swear, and use politically incorrect language.
This is part of the reason some URMs can't get ahead in US corporate culture.
Yes, Linus does swear a lot, and uses aggressive language. That's part of his
style, his culture, and how he communicates.
No, he is not a jerk. The reason Linux beat the BSDs is because Linus is a
very nice guy. He created a community which, despite the harsh language, was
very welcoming, and willing to mentor new people. The BSDs created elitist,
closed-off communities, which were unwelcoming to newcomers.
If you made a mistake, the BSD communities would write you off. The Linux
community would tell you what you did wrong, and how to fix it, even if they
used harsh language to do so.
The Linux culture is also quite meritocratic. It doesn't matter how you
communicate, or how incompetent you were a year ago. If you're doing good
technical work today, you're welcome. More than other cultures, arguments are
taken at technical face value, not by who makes them.
~~~
peterwwillis
Your argument is shit. (Another Linus quote) And here's why.
_" I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think
otherwise. Yet they do.
People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving
bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it
just results in what I consider to be a better system.
And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I
don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it._"
\-- Linus Torvalds, 09/06/2000, LKML
_" I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be
offended."_
\-- Linus, 2012.
Linus Torvalds on why he isn't nice: _" I don't care about you."_
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/linus-torvalds-on-
wh...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/linus-torvalds-on-why-he-isnt-
nice-i-dont-care-about-you/)
~~~
drzaiusapelord
There's this bizarre thing going on on HN, reddit, and other tech sites. We
saw it with Linus and we see it again with Trump. Suddenly, all these people
are making excuses for terrible behaviors and outrageous claims. Usually
following a "he didn't really mean that" playbook of justifications like
"productivity" or "politics" like either excuses acting like a child.
Why are we afraid to call people out on the shit they say? Is this some new
level of political correctness? Or do we just see these people as something to
project onto and dismiss anything counter to that?
No idea, but it seems we live in strange times where a man's own words are
ignored for feel-good conclusions that have no merit or basis in reality.
~~~
abraae
If you want to join the marines, you'll be screamed at, verbally abused, and
generally pushed to your limits. It has to be that way, they are training 18
year olds to run to the sound of gunfire and perform under fire and the threat
of death. You must put up with it or you do not belong in that group.
At the other extreme, if you want to join your local flying club, you can
expect to be treated courteously. If anyone treats you like an asshole, the
problem is with them rather than you. It can be that way, because the group is
not trying to achieve anything extreme, its just for enjoyment and largely
social.
If you want to join in the white hot stream of activity surrounding one of the
world's most important pieces of software, its not going to be like your
flying club.
Its not quite the marines either, but it is a place where very complex stuff
has to get done, urgently, absolutely correctly, in the face of hundreds or
thousands of interjections and "what about" from more or less well-meaning
contributors who just don't have or get the big picture in the same way the
core of the group does. (Talking about Linus here, not Trump :)
Sometimes, such an environment functions better with a culture of abruptness
and "take no shit" is built.
Its very unfortunate for anyone who aspires to join such a group that they
have to put up with that. But sometimes we have to acknowledge that that
"terrible behaviour" is part of what makes the group work. Not all clubs are
suitable for all people.
~~~
peterwwillis
It's software. Software. Programming. There is no tough mentality required to
write good software. You do not have to be a dick to write good software.
Ever.
~~~
n20
I disagree. Some software projects require a tremendous amount of
communication to accomplish any task of any measurable importance. If there
are three reasonable people involved in this communication, being a dick is
probably not required. If there are tens of thousands of individuals involved,
you will either be forced to be less than polite to some of them or you will
not accomplish anything.
Politely saying no takes time and effort, especially if communication isn't
your strong point. If I'm walking down the street, I'll probably be pretty
polite to the first homeless guy that asks me for a dollar. By the time the
hundredth flags me down before I'm even halfway to my destination, I'll have
boiled that initial polite response down to "Fuck off."
~~~
omegaham
I agree with this, especially since a lot of people will interpret politeness
as being a sign that your decision is negotiable.
That polite "No, because of X, Y, and Z" rapidly turns into "I have made up my
mind, no" and then into "This is not a fucking debate, so no, and fuck you."
very quickly, especially if you're dealing with a constant deluge of stupid
requests.
I'm not going to judge Linus for his outbursts, as obviously his method seems
to work pretty well.
------
Tomte
Reminds me of the SQLite developers who got overwhelmed:
[https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d4018042c70a4db...](https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d4018042c70a4db733dd38f96896cd825f/src/os.h#L52)
~~~
pc86
If it's possible for me to wake up a developer with only a phone call, I think
your support system is broken.
~~~
pjc50
Developers have phone numbers like anyone else. And when people aren't paying
for support, because this is open source, there isn't exactly going to be a
24/7 support helpline.
~~~
problems
Why do people have a publicly listed personal phone number though?
~~~
ghaff
When I was writing some shareware and other PC software, there were basically
two ways to reach me: write me a snail mail letter or call me. So it was
pretty normal to publish your personal phone number (and address). I wouldn't
do it today, but those were pretty much the only ways to contact people.
~~~
problems
Even if you want to publish a phone number, you can get a voip number for
under $1/mo from many providers these days and redirect it as needed, block
numbers, send to voicemail, etc. Complete control over it and complete
separation. It may have made sense at one point but today it seems crazy.
~~~
kelnos
You're being downvoted because the parent clearly isn't talking about present
day, but is talking about writing shareware probably in the 80s or 90s. Not
much useful/cheap VoIP going on back then.
------
forgettableuser
As somebody who has written to companies about bugs in their products (and
almost always ignored), I would really appreciate a response even if it was
some form letter thing to the effect of "I just make a small component that
happens to be used in your car, kind of like the people who make the screws in
your car. Please contact your car manufacturer directly."
I personally just like knowing somebody read my letter instead of going into a
black hole. And I kind of expect these things to go into black holes, so it's
actually kind of heart warming when I receive any kind of response.
And this response would at least tell me to try a different contact. (I know
in this case who Daniel Stenberg is and know what curl is so I wouldn't make
this specific mistake, but sometimes hunting for support contact information
returns things that are vague.)
If the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine because it just means
they don't understand, which means they are just getting angrier at the car
company. The car company deserves that since they made it so hard to contact
them.
~~~
jaspervdmeer
Yeah you would, but you're on Hacker News and not stupid, like 99.999999999%
of users are.
To them a reply and it doesn't matter what's in the reply as they're not
reading it anyway, means they have somebody to vent to. And if Daniel doesn't
solve it. T-mobile is a bad company. DO NOT ever understimate the stupidity of
people. No reply is best reply in cases like this!
~~~
ghaff
No. 99.999999999% of users are not "stupid." They are just not educated or
interested in technical arcana like you possibly are. I could say more but
that's probably sufficient. Grow up.
~~~
exolymph
Have you ever worked support? Of course the percentage is an exaggeration, but
seriously, many people are idiots and won't take no or "that's not our
product" for an answer.
------
riskable
I have had a similar problem for about two decades now in regards to eCards
(virtual greeting cards). I own youknowwhat.com and one of my email addresses
is youknowwho@youknowwhat...
Turns out that thousands of people every year think they are being super
clever by putting my email address in the "From" field. So of course I get
zillions of "receipts" for these eCards.
"Sister, I hope you feel better soon"
...is the most popular by far.
I stopped looking at them years ago but there's often some very personal
information included and if I were an evil supervillain it would be trivial
for me to use a lot of these eCards to blackmail people!
Fortunately for these people there's a highly ethical person at the helm of
that email address that filters them all right into the trash.
~~~
freehunter
I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so
I managed to get <firstname><lastname>@<emailservice>.com. Pretty neat, pretty
simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that
if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I
get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that
make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service. The other day
I got an appointment reminder to take my Vauxhall into the shop for service (I
live in the US, we don't have Vauxhall here).
Email is hard and confusing for a lot of people. It's easy for us to forget
that.
~~~
elFarto
I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have
<firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail
meant for someone else. <firstletter><lastname>@gmail.com however, is
basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first,
but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it
later and I'm glad I have the former.
~~~
shkkmo
Sort of off topic, but did you know that the '.' gets ignored in gmail
addresses, you can remove it or add extras and you will still get the email.
~~~
ptmcc
This is true in general, but some of the very early Gmail addresses do
differentiate based on the '.'
For instance, my very early-adopter Gmail address has a '.' in the address but
it is an entirely different account from the one without. If you send mail to
the one without the '.' I do not receive it.
~~~
fowl2
God I love edge cases / grandfathering
------
ergot
I usually break E-mail addresses into the following categories:
Monolithic. That one email address you put on business cards, hand out at
conferences, post in public forums. Basically a catch-all that quickly becomes
a firehose for spam and bacn[1] but every now and then you get an actual
_reachout_ as described in this post. They are infact gems when you get them,
and always remind me how precious E-mail, as a loose social network, is.
Registrations. For creating throwaway accounts on various online social
outlets. Got an IMGUR.com meme you must send to a friend over IM? No problem,
your trusty registrations e-mail account, or account(s) have you covered.
Commerce. Super secure email address which is on a trusted provider, and is
rarely, if ever, given out publicly. You change your password frequently on
this, and make sure not to contaminate it with other identities. Typically
tied to several accounts where money moves in them. Accounts with credit
cards, PayPal, etc.
Others? I am interested to hear other people's single-duty uses for email? I
know I could write about other categories, but those three cover a large
portion of what I use E-mail for.
[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn)
~~~
kalleboo
I use a catch-all domain, and every site/business gets its own
<businessname>@example.com. For business cards and friends I use something
like myname@ or contact@
When one businesses address starts getting spam I blackhole it.
Similar to the + suffix trick but works on any site.
~~~
theallan
What software do you use to manage that?
~~~
vsakos
You can do that with Fastmail easily.
~~~
greenshackle2
+1, I use fastmail, if you use the domain only for e-mail, you can use
fastmail's nameservers, DNS setup takes 2 minutes.
------
PaulHoule
Back when I was a grad student at Cornell I wrote a random number generator
for Javascript (back before there was an RNG function for Javascript.)
It got used all over the web, including the home page of Peoplesoft, which set
me up to receive a lot of spam, and then when the "Love Letter" virus and it's
competitors came, I was getting something like a million viruses an hour. As
of 2005 I was the biggest email recipient at Cornell.
~~~
JdeBP
Enjoy [http://jdebp.eu./deluge-of-microsoft-
worms.html](http://jdebp.eu./deluge-of-microsoft-worms.html)
------
MicroBerto
So we run a price comparison engine, and I occasionally get support emails
from visitors who bought a product from one of our retail stores listed, and
request help from me (ie want tracking or something)
Nobody has ever NOT understood the situation when I tell them that we're just
a deals site and to contact the store instead.
On occasion I've had to intervene on their behalf with a store and get things
expedited. Stores always oblige because I'm the traffic source.
I of course have a brand to promote, and curl doesn't really need to do that.
But when someone's in dire straights looking for _anyone_ to help, I help at
all costs. Because I've been on the other end of that support email and it
sucks when you can't get a hold of any human.
------
mrbill
Along similar lines (someone grabbing on to an email address and blaming the
recipient for their problems), from a few years back: the city of Tuttle, OK
vs. CentOS
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_centos/)
[http://www.jaduncan.com/2006/03/centos-vs-city-of-
tuttle.htm...](http://www.jaduncan.com/2006/03/centos-vs-city-of-tuttle.html)
~~~
DanBC
> I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and
> operation.
good grief. that poor cent os person.
~~~
vollmond
Taylor's followup (according to wiki) is icing on the cake:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuttle,_Oklahoma#Controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuttle,_Oklahoma#Controversy)
~~~
nommm-nommm
Wow, what an asshole... "Taylor stated that those commenting about him online
were "a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do ...
[CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you
how much time he’s got on his hands.""
------
Peroni
I used to run a tech job board in the UK called Hacker Jobs. I used to get two
or three emails a week from folk (almost always outside of the UK) asking me
to hack into Facebook and gmail accounts.
The best thing was that the job board was very obviously a normal tech job
board yet these people had to dig pretty deep into the site to find my contact
email.
~~~
coldpie
The development IRC channel for the Wine project is #winehackers, and we
pretty regularly get morons asking what kind of hacking tools we develop, or
if we can help them crack some software's DRM.
~~~
startling
Can you blame them? Wine and hacking does sound like fun.
------
tn13
I have a similar story. I made an Android app which was getting like 2K
installs a day. The app was meant for non-english speakers in India.
I started getting hundreds of emails on by developer email with empty body and
empty subject text. I wrote back asking why they did it and never got a reply.
The friction to find and email a developer is pretty high in playstore. Then
when I actually travelled to India and started low bandwidth networks I
realized what was happening. There was some scrolling issue on playstore where
people actually attempted to click on a related app but ended up touching
developer email. Not knowing how to close the gmail's compose screen they
instead pressed on send. (Many of these users dont know how to use email).
------
verbify
Looks like Daniel's website is under a bit of load. Here's a cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBl...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBljOwjoJ:https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-
toyota-corola/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)
~~~
jstanley
Select "text-only version" to have it actually load any content.
------
rounce
> I am using in a new Ford Mondeo the navigation system with SD Card
> FM5T-19H449-FC Europe F4. I can read the card but not write on it. I want to
> add to the card some POI´s. Can you help me to do it?
Sounds like somebody has the write-protection 'clicky-thing' in the wrong
place. If I had a penny for every time this has caught me out.
~~~
duskwuff
Well, that and the data on the card is probably in some proprietary format.
But that's not the point. :)
------
ikeboy
> I can’t help them and I’ve learned over the years that just trying to
> explain how I have nothing to do with the product they’re using is often
> just too time consuming and energy draining to be worth it.
You could write out a form response once, then just send it to everyone, and
not respond to follow-ups. Not that you have to, of course, but it shouldn't
be energy draining, at least.
~~~
zapu
I've been in that position before, where people would find my e-mail address
as a supposed tech support for something I have no relationship with
whatsoever. Usually when you tell them they have a wrong e-mail, they get
really angry ("I want to talk to your manager!" kind of angry). So it's better
to just not respond at all.
~~~
Kiro
That sounds extremely funny. I would pay good money to get to be on the
receiving end of "I want to talk to your manager!" when you can act however
you want.
~~~
GFischer
It gets old very quickly.
I used to have a phone number that was one easily mistaken digit away from the
largest pizzeria in town, and people angrily complaining about wrong or
delayed orders was not funny. One of my siblings sometimes took orders he had
no intention of fulfilling :P
Edit: see also legal (or other) threats, from the same author (mentioned
elsewhere in the comments)
[https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-
warnin...](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warning/)
~~~
kbart
_" Also, I have yet to figure out how to unhack the hackers"_
Couldn't read any further due to tears in my eyes from laugh.
------
gwbas1c
GWBasic is an old version of Basic used on PCs in the 1980s. I've used it as
my online handle for about 20 years because the first time I logged into a
dial up BBS, my GWBasic manual was the first thing I looked up when I had to
come up with a handle.
For a period of time, googling for "GWBasic" lead to my home page, even though
there is no mention of "GWBasic" on my web site.
I once got a support request for GWBasic. It was rather flattering, and my
response basically went along the lines of "I haven't used GWBasic in 20 years
and no longer have the manual."
------
swang
When I was little, back in the 90s, I ran a Star Wars fan site on my AOL
account. This was a time where you could still count on your hand the number
of "popular" sites for Star Wars and if you knew how to remove the border from
an image with a hyperlink you were well ahead of the design curve.
One day I received an email from some school kids in Missouri(?), St Louis
maybe. They addressed it to, "Mr. George Lucas" and asked if I (George Lucas)
would go to their school to talk with them.
I was totally blown away. At first I found it incredible someone would think
George Lucas would have the website I built. Then I realized how incredible
the Internet was that someone from St. Louis could even go on somewhere and
assume that in the first place.
I think I ended up emailing them and breaking the new to them.
------
ffjffsfr
How can you find text of license of curl in Toyota? I have friend with Toyota
wanted to verify. Or maybe someone in this thread can verify this? Is it
somewhere in user-guide?
Seriously how people can possibly think some random email from user guide or
whatever text they find in car is valid support channel? It is either
completely idiotic or there's something wrong with Toyota information guide
that leads to this misunderstanding.
~~~
greenshackle2
People's ability to not read the text in front of their eyes is amazing. I
imagine people click around and pattern-match the e-mail address, without
reading any of the text/license around it. I can imagine that for some not too
tech-savvy users, most email addresses they encounter in the wild are support
addresses of some sort.
------
coldcode
Ask Google for help. Yes, I know that's an oxymoron, Google doesn't do
customer service for a reason. Most companies find it easier to ignore
problems with their customers than to do anything.
~~~
ryuker16
Sign up for Google ads...they roll out a red carpet and even call you first to
check up or offer free tutorial by a human on new features.
------
danaliv
What on earth does a car need curl for?
~~~
Chris2048
curl somedomain.foo/latest_car_software.sh | sh
~~~
mnx
[http://somedomain.foo](http://somedomain.foo) obviously, wouldn't want to
have to deal with certificates and all that.
------
NetStrikeForce
I've got the feeling I've read this before.
Could it have happened to someone else? Or maybe to Daniel himself but under
different circumstances?
~~~
slashink
He previously posted one about someone emailing him about a hacked Instagram
after finding his name and the email @haxx.se in the licenses.
EDIT: Here's the link: [https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-
warnin...](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19/subject-urgent-warning/)
~~~
JshWright
Ironically, one of the analogies suggested in the comments on that post starts
out "Imagine you have a Toyota..."
------
eriknstr
I wonder if any of those carputers and infotainment systems are using a custom
identifier in the curl they ship. Imagine scrolling through access logs
listing regular Firefox, Chrome and IE entries and then all of a sudden you
get to one that says
User-Agent: Toyota Corolla
:)
~~~
Findus23
The Tesla Webbrowser is sending a custom user agent:
Model S (4/8/14, v5.9) = Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML,
like Gecko) QtCarBrowser Safari/534.34
------
knodi123
I can sympathize. I am not hiring, nor am I looking for a job, but I get
several resumes and interview offers a day, because some dingus in Andhra
Pradesh used my email address to apply for jobs all over the world, and a
separate dingus used my email address to make postings on a "tech jobs in
india" board.
I used to have an auto-reply to tell them that they're hitting the wrong
address, but I suspect most people don't even read my reply, and I know a
percentage of those who do are ready to start an argument with me about why
I'm wrong. Nature of the internet, I guess.
------
kkirsche
Hug of death. Couldn't find it in a cache. Anyone else able to?
~~~
lucaspiller
"Proudly powered by WordPress"
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBl...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBljOwjoJ:https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-
toyota-corola/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)
~~~
kkirsche
Thanks!
------
stretchwithme
I have the "classified" user account in one of the big web email providers.
For years, the Boston Globe was setting "reply to" on the emails they sent to
people that placed classified ads to "classified".
So guess who got the replies from advertisers using the same email provider?
That's right. Me.
I explained the problem to the Boston Globe, but they just didn't get it.
Once, somebody sent me all their credit card information so they could place
another ad.
------
chillydawg
Working cache link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBlj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:os8OBljOwjoJ:https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-
toyota-corola/&num=1&hl=en&gl=uk&strip=1&vwsrc=0)
------
INTPenis
During some computer archeology once I was trying to find out more about a
binary running on a very old system.
I ended up e-mailing a guy who had worked on translations for a library that
was statically linked into the binary. He had no idea what I was talking about
but I jumped on his address because he was danish so I could speak to him
natively.
------
little_data
Great article thanks! Although the article was about the unfortunate side
effect of having contact information publicly available, I also discovered
that there is an open source community to establish standards for the back end
infotainment systems in cars (and other things). Neat stuff.
------
jv22222
I wrote the database abstraction layer and interface for wordpress (ezSQL). I
can't tell you how many 1000's of emailes I've recieved asking me to fix
Wordpress installations!
------
atomical
Off topic, but what's the deal behind the bluetooth audio lag? Does it apply
to calls as well? I've experienced it with music. Is this an Android problem
or a problem that could be fixed by the automakers?
~~~
grawlinson
Pretty common issue with Bluetooth, I've found. Average latency is ~100ms.
Here's a good (albeit brief) read about it.
[http://stephencoyle.net/latency/](http://stephencoyle.net/latency/)
~~~
atomical
What I'm experiencing is way beyond 100ms. At least a second or more.
------
smegel
> I’m sad to say that I rarely respond at all. I can’t help them
Well you could say "please contact your local dealership".
------
devinp
corola or Corolla?
------
ommunist
I believe this is karma of every stable open source product, which gained
enough popularity.
~~~
noobermin
That would be the opposite of karma, wouldn't it? Unless OSS is unrewarded
evil in your eyes
~~~
ominous
$ google "define karma"
karma
/ˈkɑːmə,ˈkəːmə/
noun
noun: karma
(in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future
informal
good or bad luck, viewed as resulting from one's actions.
Not all karma is good. The important part is the "resulting from one's
actions"
~~~
109281091
These definitions aren't a computer program. They require some degree of
cooperation from the reader.
~~~
ominous
Yes, language, as well as culture and money, exist because people cooperate on
some level.
------
svnssn
I guess this is what you should expect when you are requiring your copyright
notice to be disclosed... Live with it or change license.
~~~
woliveirajr
Don't know why this downvoted. Perhaps the wording used? Because the idea is
correct. One way to fix would be, for example, changing the license in any
future version to read "If you're using this software inside any component
that will be used in a car, you should display the _Copyright_automotive.txt_
contents instead of this one"
~~~
e28eta
If you're really going to complicate displaying the license, you could try to
compel the company using libcurl to provide _their_ support contact
information immediately before the license text.
I doubt it would actually work.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Kik Messenger App Debuts Own Digital Currency Amid Bitcoin Boom - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-25/kik-messenger-app-debuts-own-digital-currency-amid-bitcoin-boom
======
almostApatriot1
Am I the only person who finds this kind of depressing and scary? I thought
cryptocurrencies were supposed to be about democratization and
decentralization. Now if you want to make money on Kik, you apparently are
going to get paid in Kin, a currency Kik controls for which there is no
standard conversion to USD. How is this different than getting paid in Walmart
Dollars.
~~~
atemerev
This _is_ democracy and decentralization -- allowing private entities to issue
their own currencies. It is much better than the single monopoly of the
government-issued money.
~~~
foepys
> allowing private entities to issue their own currencies. It is much better
> than the single monopoly of the government-issued money.
Please elaborate on this.
Why is it better for the people to have dozens of currencies that they can
only use for a very limited selection of stores and have to trade for other
uses?
The only incentive for "private currencies", that I heard of, is to confuse
customers and make them forget that they are, in fact, using real money and
not only digital tokens.
~~~
splintercell
> Why is it better for the people to have dozens of currencies that they can
> only use for a very limited selection of stores and have to trade for other
> uses?
It isn't necessarily better to have dozens of different currencies, but it is
better to have the ability to issue your own currencies rather than be
dependent upon a single monopoly which may (and does) abuse its power.
Second thing is, there is no real way to determine how many currencies/tokens
are consumers ok with, other than to really try it out in the market. Let me
use an example.
Today if you have Amazon prime TV, then they have a whole section
subscriptions for channels where you can subscribe to Prime, Netflix, Hulu,
Crackle, CBS, Showtime, Scifi, History Channel etc, services. Initially it
started out with just Prime, Netflix, and Hulu, but now there are so many
options, you can't just watch Homeland if you have these three subscriptions.
The problem isn't just that you need to pay more, but rather that you have to
subscribe to so many services.
This is too confusing, but this also means that this is a problem to be
solved. In future (and I think some company has already started) to build a
package subscription. Maybe another solution would be to have every show a
pay-per-view basis (which Amazon already does).
The idea is, that the reason why different subscription services exists
because of some other, unavoidable business reason. But this can be solved
from the user experience point of view differently without resorting to a govt
monopoly on entertainment.
Same thing goes with these cryptocurrencies. They exist for different,
unavoidable business reason, but it is also annoying to have to deal with
different currencies, so I believe in future there will be more basket of
currencies solution (like ICONOMI) which allows people to hold 2-3 cryptos at
max, and from their POV, the conversion and payment to the native currency
happens seamlessly.
~~~
sharemywin
The problem is volatility. If the amount of people that are speculating >>>>
than people willing to sell other things to buy "your coin" in a bad market.
You could collapse the currency.
~~~
splintercell
But that's the whole point. We have solved this problem for over 2000 years
now using financial derivatives.
A farmer in ancient Rome did not want to undertake the volatility of grain
prices when his crop eventually comes to the market, so what he did is sells
his future crop to a fixed current price to someone who wants to undertake the
risk of price fluctuations, and this way a speculator got the profit which
came out of correctly predicting the future grain prices and farmer got a
fixed predictable price.
Same goes with these currencies. A speculator might provide enough liquidity
to your crypto, in return he gets a better deal for your coins.
------
SurrealSoul
At what point does a premium virtual asset become a "currency"
For example, if Clash of Clans has gems that you purchase to purchase items
and such inside the application, is that a currency?
'...sells tokens that can be used to buy services on its platform. The idea is
that as more and more people use Kik, the value of those tokens, called “Kin”,
will rise in value.'
But how is this different than buying premium currency in a free to play game?
The "Kin" can only be used inside Kik, how does the value increase?
~~~
corry
Respectfully, I think you and others in this thread defining "Kin" too
narrowly by thinking of it exclusively a premium virtual token for use inside
of Kik.
Yes, that's obviously the first use-case. But thinking bigger, the combination
of anonymous identity / mobile messaging + bona fide cryptocurrency can lead
to something way more significant for Kik's users (who are primarily teenagers
& pre-teens - people don't have access to credit and find it difficult to
participate in the economy).
Assuming some level of mass adoption / easy FX to Bitcoin or traditional
currency... Kin could represent a new way in which these users could
meaningfully participate economically.
Kin will be tied to their anonymous Kik identity; it's managed through Kik
which is always-on always-with-them (smartphone); it's the lingua franca for
buying stuff inside of Kik with their friends & fav brands. And if they can
eventually use Kin outside of Kik (either directly or via simple FX mechanics)
- could be a game-changer.
So from Kik's POV it's definitely worth the extra headaches and effort to try
to do this as a cryptocurrency vs. just internal tokens. Worst case, it
doesn't really work and they've over-engineered a token system. Best case,
they're a major player in the next-gen of cryptocurrencies.
~~~
corry
Note: I just came across this:
[http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/](http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/)
Much better detail on the what's / how's / why's. Including link to the
whitepaper.
~~~
noxToken
This makes much more sense. I thought it was just currency that needed to be
exchanged from real USD. You can earn it as a reward. It just might be a game-
changer.
------
baobabKoodaa
Kik is launching their own digital currency as a token on the Ethereum
network. Multiple tokens run on top of Ethereum. One of these tokens is called
ETH. It's Ethereum's native and most widely accepted token. Why is Kik
launching their own token instead of using ETH? Typically the answer to this
question is about creating additional features that the native token ETH
doesn't have (Ethereum tokens can be programmed to follow arbitrary rules).
No, Kik's token will not have any additional features. The sole reason they
are creating their own token instead of using ETH is to have a money printing
machine that they control. It's in their white paper after several pages about
decentralization and fairness. Search for "Kin Rewards Engine".
~~~
DiNovi
ETH is not a token that runs ontop the network, it is the asset that powers
the network.
~~~
baobabKoodaa
ETH is a token just as Kik's Kin will be a token. You are correct that it is
built into Ethereum, rather than on top of Ethereum. I tried to make that
distinction by calling it "native".
------
pooper
I have nothing good to say about Kik. I just want to remind anyone who is
thinking about giving them money that they are the same litigious assholes who
forced node and npm to give them (and not just deactivate) the namespace kik.
They are obviously shitty people and everything they touch is shit.
~~~
chickenfries
IIRC, it was npm (not node) that rolled over and gave it to kik just because
they felt like it would be "confusing."
[http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-
npm](http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm)
[https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-
breakin...](https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breaking-of-
the-internet-3d4d2a83aa4d)
~~~
deletia
This ^
Arguably one of the best things to come out of that whole incident was NPM's
realization that the (then) entire system of dependencies had a huge issue;
that is, the fact that one pissed of developer could break a massive amount of
production codebases.
IMHO the incident was a good learning experience for the JS community as a
whole and really shouldn't be framed so negatively all the time.
~~~
chickenfries
I think a lot of it was much ado over nothing, but I agree that if you didn't
already mistrust tiny, anemic modules written by single developers in your
production code that it was a good lesson.
~~~
deletia
Exactly :)
A lot of larger companies affected needed a wake up call regardless.
~~~
pooper
The issue to me isn't the deletion of modules but rather the reassignment of
modules. I'm completely ok with deleting modules. I am not ok with taking a
name that used to exist and just giving it to someone else. That is the crime
here not the deletion of modules. That should be the wake up call.
------
lwlml
There is a reason why you shouldn't adopt the e-mail address or phone number
your cable company _could_provide to you: it ties you closer to their network
and increases your dependence on it. I doubt that Kik's "core competencies"
are anywhere near what it would take to launch and maintain a digital
currency.
So, don't call it a digital currency and call it for what it really is, a
"customer loyalty" program where hard money and attention is traded for scrip
that never... ever... leaves the "company store."
------
pdog
Why does Kik need a decentralized cryptocurrency to handle payments for
digital goods? They can do it with virtual credits on their own servers a
million times more efficiently.
~~~
corry
Because doing it as a decentralized cryptocurrency would allow it to one day
be more significant than just an internal token systems. There is power in the
combination of anonymous identity / messaging + bona fide cryptocurrency.
~~~
s73ver
But, and this is the important thing, how does that help kik make more money?
~~~
benjaminmbrown
By owning 90% of a digital ecosystem
------
659087
This is all starting to feel awfully similar to the time shortly before the
last major bitcoin crash.
I've had 2 people who know absolutely nothing about technology tell me of
their plans to take out 401k loans to buy in over the past couple weeks. Both
refused to hear it when I pointed out how bad this decision could turn out.
Both had fully bought in to the stories being pushed by "$100k by the end of
the year!" type crazies/pumpers on reddit.
------
dalbasal
Are any of the cryptocurrencies out there with a "monetary policy" aim of
fised exchange rates, IE a digital derivative of USD or EUR? I know this is
sort of heretical in that it abandons some of the lofty, revolutionary goals
of digital currency but...
Currencies like e-pesa or the simpler share-able phone credit pseudo-
currencies, give their users stable values. It's hard to imagine a neigborhood
shop in Manilla dealing with bitcoin's volatility.
I think you need either (1) very fast, cheap & easy ways of converting to hard
currency or (2) price stability.
I was hoping that bitcoin would develop the first. That way bitcoin could work
as a sort of infrastructure, with most people thinking in fiat currencies but
the actual transaction taking place in bitcoin. That hasn't really happened.
^Oh, and I generally like the idea of bootstrapping up to full fledged
currency from an embedded, toy currency base. Good luck Kik.
~~~
drdeca
a group called "MakerDao" is working on a token on Ethereum called Dai, which
is backed by collateral in the form of a variety of different tokens, and is
set up so that the price will target some multiple of something called
"Special Drawing Rights", which is a basket of national currencies.
I think eDollar is (was?) going to be (is?) something backed with Dai, which
would target the value of USD . (I have not kept up with it, so I don't know
what the state of eDollar is.)
~~~
RexetBlell
There is also Digix which plans to issue Gold backed tokens.
[https://www.dgx.io/](https://www.dgx.io/)
------
conradk
I'd guess they probably kept a few thousands or million coins for themselves.
This way if this takes off, they'll have millions of dollars worth of coin to
trade for real money.
Or else they'll act as an exchange, which seems to be a good business too, as
long as you have enough capital to get it going.
~~~
rch
Someone should work through the mechanics of doing this as a form of IPO,
without running afoul of applicable regulations.
~~~
seibelj
The is already happening en masse. Look up "initial coin offerings" (ICO's)[0]
[0] [http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/initial-coin-offering-
ic...](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/initial-coin-offering-ico.asp)
------
detroitcoder
For clarification, Kin is a token using the Ethereum blockchain. There is a
straight forward tutorial how anyone can create their own currency/rewards
program/token.
[https://www.ethereum.org/token](https://www.ethereum.org/token)
------
EternalData
Not sure the cryptocurrency boom and gift certificate utility are super-
correlated -- Target has been trying to trap me and my USD with those checkout
cards for ages. Usually the incentive is social shame for not just giving
straight cash to my friends as gifts -- here, I'm not so sure?
I guess it's about as viable as Dogecoin.
------
ge96
You know "ML" throw that word around. I've seen some _ehem_ sites where you
get paid a fraction of a cryptocurrency for explicit photos.
I was thinking for training an ML to recognize "acts" in explicit videos,
you'd need a lot of data haha... so you'd need a way to pay people for their
photos... but also the whole age thing... and why not regular money. But
Kik... their own money... I don't know. Easier said than done obviously... I
was also thinking about running a bitcoin node, watching transactions and
providing an API analyzing sales for "patterns' but not sure... ahh...
I wanted to cry when I bought Amazon gift card to convert my bitcoin to a
"safe currency" and a few days later it grows by $700 whyyyy oh well.
------
patrickbolle
HN threads on anything related to Ethereum (not Bitcoin) seem to really stir
up a lot of junk and hate comments. So weird.
I'm just a web dev that thinks Ethereum is really cool technology (and have
made some great money from ETH), but there are a lot of naysayers here.
------
dharma1
Educated guesses when regulators will comment on ICOs, and the impact of that
on the crypto market?
------
deft
Kik releases interesting features about every 6 months, then promptly abandons
them. They had a cool 'webapp' feature with a JS library for people to write
browser apps that ran and integrated inside of kik. They dropped that and
launched the bot store. Before this they had Kik Games, which were dropped for
the browser.
Not sure why they do this. They still haven't monetized bots (I'm guessing
this is how they will). Games and webapps could be monetized from the start as
embedding ads was easy. I don't know what Kik is doing.
~~~
dyarosla
Maybe they don't either? Looks like a lot of test pivots?
------
dreamdu5t
Not a single ICO has delivered its promised product or service. The only
returns have been from new investors or speculation.
I think it's still early to completely write them off as _just_ pump and dumps
~~~
sgspace
Have you ever heard of Ethereum? These Kik tokens run on top of Ethereum which
had an ICO a couple years ago.
------
corry
Here's the whitepaper that actually discusses what they are doing (much better
than this article IMO):
[https://kin.kik.com/Kin%20Whitepaper%20v1.pdf](https://kin.kik.com/Kin%20Whitepaper%20v1.pdf)
Also here's Fred Wilson's write-up (he's an investor in Kik):
[http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/](http://avc.com/2017/05/kin/)
------
almostApatriot1
The whole 'earn points for this' system seems like a good idea in general, but
I wonder how appealing it will be for advertisers to buy coins that wind up
having such an unstable price. By the time they make it to the consumer they
could be worth half of what you paid for them. I imagine a simpler system
would be more practical but the prospect of making tens of millions off of an
ICO was just too appealing to pass up.
~~~
benjaminmbrown
This system is designed to make advertisement obsolete
------
oryband
Please see [https://kin.kik.com](https://kin.kik.com) for more info,
[https://reddit.com/r/KinFoundation](https://reddit.com/r/KinFoundation), and
[http://slack.kinfoundation.com](http://slack.kinfoundation.com) for
discussion.
------
kalleboo
Why did the submitter add "amid bitcoin boom" to the title here? Or did
Bloomberg change it?
------
PunchTornado
Aren't these the guys behind the npm fiasco? Wouldn't use them.
------
rmason
Here's a short video that explains what Kik is doing:
[https://vimeo.com/218866968](https://vimeo.com/218866968)
------
flylib
this is hilarious, Facebook can just launch their own coin if needed if you
want to compete with them that way by giving users coins which will give them
monetary incentives to use your service, hell Kik is laying the playbook for
FB to copy them
------
edmanet
Why not just use bitcoin?
~~~
AlwaysBCoding
10-minute block times make Bitcoin unusable as a transactional currency in
it's current state (don't shoot the messenger).
~~~
JTon
What currency isn't transactional? I'm not following; are you suggesting
bitcoin is not well suited for any purpose?
~~~
uncletammy
Believe it or not, Bitcoin isn't actually transactional these days. A new
feature called "replace by fee" was introduced that allows coins that were
used in a transaction which is still in queue for processing (hasn't yet been
included in block by the miners) to be spent in a different transaction as
long as the spender pays a high enough fee to jump to the front of the queue.
~~~
placeybordeaux
I was under the impression that that had always been allowed by the protocol,
it's just an implementation detail on if a node will relay the tx and which tx
the miner will choose.
------
mobilemidget
Not booming today, dropped 500+
~~~
placeybordeaux
Over a 24 hour period it's down 1.2%
------
kleer001
Silly.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
What should release v1.0 actually mean? - kirubakaran
http://blog.kfish.org/2008/02/release-xsel-110.html
======
airhadoken
For the purpose of commentary, let's assume that you're actually creating a
product for the public. 1.0 means that this is the first point at which you're
confident that the product reflects your vision for a first release. It is
feature complete (for all the features you haven't pared down or pushed back),
and all of your known bugs from the beta period have been addressed.
Notice that I said "known bugs from the beta period." If you haven't had a
beta period, you're having one now -- you're not at 1.0. I align with the
traditional camp that considers beta software to be on a feature freeze. They
may not work right yet, but they're implemented.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Clocks - highCs
http://procyonic.org/clocks/index.html
======
agumonkey
I strongly suggest to read his blog
[http://dorophone.blogspot.fr/](http://dorophone.blogspot.fr/)
Lots of funky emacslisp, emacslisp monads, some forth interpreters and so on.
------
bugmen0t
> (N.B.: This is mostly exploratory work and as such doesn't really try to be
> cross browser - your best bet is a recent Chrome or Chromium, but some
> clocks work in recent Firefox or Safari.)
works well in Firefox.
------
viach
Interesting, i like it. There is another resource for creating generative art
like this [http://www.contextfreeart.org/](http://www.contextfreeart.org/)
------
ChrisArchitect
9 months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6856931)
------
eridal
this is awesome!!
there are a bunch of clocks, just change the clock number in the url.
it's really nice being able to follow up the artist's creative process.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
RequireJS: a JavaScript file and module loader - jamesjyu
http://requirejs.org/
======
ahemphill
What makes this different/better than Head JS, LAB, et cetera? If you're
familiar with the project, pitch us.
~~~
maigret
Same here... Why would I use all these special (quite untested compared to
GWT, Dojo) JavaScript libraries, instead of using Dojo - which has already a
fine module layer as well as a build system.
~~~
YuriNiyazov
I don't know why _you_ specifically would use it, but some developers prefer
to mix-n-match their toolchain rather than use everything from one project.
------
gregory80
i feel like requuireJS hit hacker news last week, and the week before that.
I'm would genuinely like more information on the authors of this library. I a
little confused why their examples have the script tags in the HEAD of the
document, when it is well known that script tags block all other resources
from loading and should be placed at the bottom of the page.
[http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/27/loading-
scripts-...](http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/04/27/loading-scripts-
without-blocking/)
If the authors or developers have some magic to bypass this, besides just
drawing the script tags via JS as Steve Souders suggests, I would be excited
to see that presented more front and center.
~~~
YuriNiyazov
An example for how to use RequireJS needs to be as clear and simple as
possible, and putting a SCRIPT tag into HEAD is still the clearest and
simplest way - the stuff that Souders writes about is Advanced JS hackery - if
you understand Souders, then you also understand how to rewrite the RequireJS
example to be even more efficient than it is.
One of the bigger misconceptions about RequireJS is that it's about
efficiency. RequireJS does provide an efficient way to load up the scripts,
but that's an important side benefit of the actual reason why it exists: To
provide sane modularization and dependency management of your Javascript code.
~~~
gregory80
thanx for the overview. Sounds like this falls into the same groups as LABJS
and ControlJS to some degree.
I don't really agree that putting the script tag in the head is a simple
example. The tornado web docs, talk about loading script tags last, and they
cover a lot more than just where is the best place to put script tag.
<http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation>
I could buy the "it's okay to write demos with script tags in the head" bit in
the same why I buy it's "okay" to use document.write() examples b/c it's
'fast'. Which is to say, I don't buy either argument.
If requireJS is aiming at people who don't know any advanced JS 'hackery', why
on earth would that same dev know they need "sane modularization and
dependency management". They still think it's "okay" to load script tags from
the HEAD.
------
warble
Dojo has many similar features - compilation, dojo.require().. might be a
consideration as well if this is attractive.
------
unicornporn
omfg, that website is beauty itself. seriously.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: GitHubby, my iPhone GitHub client - escoz
My new iPhone app was finally approved yesterday, and its now in the appstore:<p>http://escoz.com/githubby<p>It's a github client for the iPhone, and its free.. As i bet a lot of you guys here in HN use GitHub, I would love to receive some more feedback!
Thanks guys, love HN!
======
escoz
Clickable link, hope you guys like it: <http://escoz.com/githubby>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Return of the Blue Lego - yumraj
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2010/04/return_of_the_b.html
======
RyanMcGreal
Sad commentary on the ongoing Holy War mentality of many programmers that the
author felt the need to add the edit:
>This post was _not_ a Flash pro/con, or Flash vs HTML5 statement.
~~~
xinsight
Considering this was produced by a flash development shop, I find that
statement to be disingenuous. _Of course_ they are pro flash.
And if flash developers actually provided useful content for people who didn't
have flash -- they usually leave it blank or say "get flash" -- then they
wouldn't need to rely on browser manufacturers to display a broken plug-in
icon.
------
aresant
If nothing else this whole Apple-vs-Flash mess illustrates just HOW much power
Apple has at this point due to their closed platform.
It's no wonder that MSFT got hammered so badly by anti-trust - Apple has their
own mini-monopoly in full bloom by owning the browser, and core applications
on their platform.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Continuous Deployment with BitBalloon and Travis CI - bobfunk
https://www.bitballoon.com/blog/2013/10/31/continuous-deployment-with-bitballoon-and-travis-ci
======
restardo
Great post! ;)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The TSA screws up again: makes mother fill up empty bottles of breast milk - airnomad
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/the-tsa-screws-up-again-makes-mother-fill-up-empty-bottles-of-breast-milk/
======
bond
Unbelievable....
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
I want to learn Lisp; any books or site to learn from? - reagancaesar
I want to learn LISP any books or site to learn from?
======
davesmylie
Depending on what sort of lisp you're wanting to learn, theres the Structure
and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
It uses scheme (a varient of lisp) and though a bit . . . challenging, is
excellent:
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>
------
pk137
I wonder if you googled about this even a bit! There are quite good number of
pages devoted exclusively to review & discussion of LISP books.
For starters: <http://bc.tech.coop/lisp-books.htm>
------
malandrew
Practical Common Lisp - <http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/>
The Little Schemer
The Reasoned Schemer
The Seasoned Schemer
------
WhoSayIn
ANSI Common LISP by Paul GRAHAM -> <http://www.paulgraham.com/acl.html>
~~~
tincholio
Depending on how much programming background he has, pg's On Lisp might be a
good option as well, and it's free: <http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html>
------
maxdemarzi
<http://landoflisp.com/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Raw unprocessed images from Cassini's first Saturn inter-ring dive - astdb
http://ciclops.org/view_event/251/Rev-271-Raw-Preview
======
elorant
We take a lot of science's achievements for granted, but if you pause and
think about it for a moment it's mind boggling. That thing is 1,5 bn kms away.
~~~
dougmany
A few links later and I found:
>So here's raising a glass to our kind. We have done a remarkable thing ... to
set our craft on a long-distance mission in search of lovely blue oceans like
those of Earth, and have it answer us with such gratifying certitude.
[http://ciclops.org/index/8201/A-Subsurface-Globe-
Encompassin...](http://ciclops.org/index/8201/A-Subsurface-Globe-Encompassing-
Watery-Realm-on-Enceladus)
------
juancampa
From the article: "The image has not been validated or calibrated. A
validated/calibrated image will be archived with the Planetary Data System in
2018".
Anyone knows what calibration/validation means in this case? I hope there are
higher-res versions coming down.
~~~
QuinnyPig
Everyone talks about having more compute power in their wristwatch than the
entire Apollo mission series did.
I figure that NASA simply retasked the Apollo computers to image processing.
Waste not, want not, but the compute time now gets measured with calendars.
~~~
kobeya
You can't just photoshop an image to make it pretty and call that science.
NASA processes the image using calibration data taken from other sensors on
the craft, trying to make as realistic a reconstruction as possible of the
light data entering the camera, in a way that is physically reasonable and
from which one can draw inferences from and not be accused of chasing image
processing ghosts.
~~~
sandworm101
Except that many of the "pretty" images released by nasa to the media are only
that. Scientific value is one type of value, promotional value another. That
far out from the sun the only realistic pictures would be shades of black. Our
eyesight isn't made for such environments. That they need to be photoshopped
so that we can perceive their detail doesn't detract from the facts of those
details. One image for us to understand and appreciate, another from which to
make scientific measurements.
~~~
WD-42
> That far out from the sun the only realistic pictures would be shades of
> black.
You realize you can see Saturn with the naked eye _from earth_ right?
------
nkg
Do anyone care to explain what we are looking at ? #eli5
~~~
astdb
These are photos from Cassini spacecraft's set of 'Grand Finale' manoeuvres
around Saturn - this article has a good summary
[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-28/cassini-sends-back-
clo...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-28/cassini-sends-back-closest-
pictures-of-saturns-atmosphere/8478390)
The images from the initial link are the newest raw images taken during the
flyby which happened about two days before. Possibly the closest images ever
taken of Saturn.
Google did a great doodle too [https://www.google.com/doodles/cassini-
spacecraft-dives-betw...](https://www.google.com/doodles/cassini-spacecraft-
dives-between-saturn-and-its-rings)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mobile VoIP: Client side call quality - moxie
http://www.whispersystems.org/blog/client-side-audio-quality/
======
j_s
Impressive! Low-level/low-latency audio on Android has been extra hassle for a
long time: <https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434>
I understand and respect the reasons for using GPLv3 but it's still a bit of a
bummer every time I see it locking functionality like this away from wide-
spread use. My very limited perception is that it comes down to protecting the
secret sauce; I can't immediately think of any compelling reason to segment
reusable parts of this particular app for 'closer-to-free-as-in-beer' status.
The FSF has a page documenting their recommendations for choice of license
here: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html>
~~~
moxie
It's simple to me: anyone who wishes to take our work and also openly
contribute their work are free to do so. Those that don't wish to also openly
contribute their work need to contact the copyright holder.
~~~
j_s
I agree that the license accomplishes your intended purpose in a very
straightforward manner, and I do not pretend to have even the slightest
footing from which to suggest otherwise (or that you should change it).
I was only sharing my selfish desire to see the utility classes you've created
to make Android’s AudioMixer API usable for your app become more widely
available - some of the functionality you've implemented should have always
been supported at the operating system level. As I'm sure you're well aware,
licenses like the LGPL attempt to push the balance slightly towards more
widespread usability while ensuring any additional contributions return
upstream.
------
casca
Great stuff, thanks Moxie. Any chance you could release
WhisperCore/WhisperMonitor (even as a paid app) so non-Apple devices would
also have the option of a usable firewall?
~~~
moxie
Thanks. WhisperMonitor is on the roadmap!
------
josh2600
This is awesome. If anyone from whisper sees this, please get ahold of me off
site. I've been trying to say hello but haven't found much in the way of
contact info :/.
~~~
moxie
Hey, I'm moxie at whispersystems.org
------
dshep
Nice website design.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
The Alternative World Drug Report - fuzzix
http://www.countthecosts.org/alternative-world-drug-report
======
CharlieA
The biggest barrier IMO to a legal drug economy, with regulation and
legitimate corporate players, is reversing years and years of learned stigma
that "drugs are evil". And the incredibly irony here of the "please think of
the children" mentality, is that it's reinforcing this feedback loop, and I
don't see any way to break out of it.
The government can't legalise drugs because of the massive community backlash
there would be. So the continued illegality, of the trade sees it linked to
criminal activity on a macro scale (terrorist groups / bikies etc.) as well as
at a local level (home invasions / thefts / pharma. raids etc.) not to mention
the violence and the risk of overdose that prompts teary eyed parents to come
on the news and espouse about the evils of drugs, leading to the (admittedly
fairly compelling) conclusion that stamping out drugs would be a good thing.
And that, of course, means the government can't legalise drugs because of the
massive community backlash there would be...
~~~
jfrm
There is a middle ground with decriminalization.
[http://www.countthecosts.org/resource-library/drug-policy-
po...](http://www.countthecosts.org/resource-library/drug-policy-portugal-
benefits-decriminalizing-drug-use)
------
Nursie
Good luck with that. The evidence has been mounting up (and been pretty
obvious) for years now, but nobody in Government is willing to climb down from
their 'tough on crime' stance for long enough to do anything that's actually
useful here.
Plenty of ex-officials, sometimes within days of their standing down, have
sensible things to say, but until someone that's actually in a position of
power gets their head out of their arse and does something about it.... yup,
we're all still paying for a violent, pointless exercise that maximises the
societal harm it allegedly seeks to mitigate.
~~~
Wawl
I found this paper about drug policy change in Switzerland [1] very
interesting.
The country was pushed toward evidence-based policies by a very large and
visible drug scene, which had serious health consequences.
Some states started trying different approaches and fueled federal debates
(The US system is similar to the swiss one). They did it even as far-right
parties like SVP showed increased support, which caused almost schizophrenic
results. For instance in 2008 "a resounding 68 percent of the population voted
in favor of the new narcotics law based on four pillars, which included
heroin-assisted therapy, while in the same referendum, only 33 percent
endorsed decriminalization of cannabis"
[1] [http://www.countthecosts.org/resource-
library/mountaintops-w...](http://www.countthecosts.org/resource-
library/mountaintops-what-world-can-learn-drug-policy-change-switzerland)
------
disbelief
Does the 270 Million worldwide drug users number seem a bit low to anyone
else? I'm also wondering if that means "daily users" or "addicts" or "people
convicted of a drug-related offense"?
~~~
CharlieA
A bit more detail further in the report: "The UNODC estimates, conservatively,
that between 155 and 270 million people worldwide, or 3.5% to 5.7% of
15-64-year¬olds, used illicit substances at least once in the last year.
Global lifetime usage figures probably approach one billion"
~~~
robin_reala
What does illicit mean in this situation? Illegal in the country the drug was
taken in at the time?
~~~
refurb
If it's an UN study, it probably includes all drugs that the UN regards as
needing "control".
<http://www.unodc.org/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Universal Login System for websites - nooledge
http://ukey.one/demo/
======
tbirrell
And this is different/better than the google/facebook universal logins how?
~~~
nooledge
Thank you for your comment. Let me tell you a few pros:
\- You can integrate Google and Facebook directly, or integrate Ukey1 and get
all in one.
\- Especially with Facebook, you need to follow API changes, but if you have
Ukey1 - you don't need to care about it - we care. For example a week ago, one
of my friends told me that Facebook changed something and since that time FB
login doesn't work on his website - he still waits for his developers to fix
it). Other example - pixabay.com - their FB login doesn't work at least for 6
months.
\- There are people who don't want to use social logins. If you don't want to
loose those users, you need to implement email/password option as well. It
means, you need to store passwords in your database and care about
authentication. Ukey1 offers social logins (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) as
well as classic email/password option. It means, no barriers.
\- As a user, with Ukey1 you have absolutely full control over your personal
data you share. It's not possible with Google or Facebook. And this is just a
beginning.
\- As a user, you can merge all your social identities. Why? For example, very
often I have a problem that after some time I can't remember what social
account I previously used on different websites. And I am not alone.
\- And finally, are you familiar with new General Data Protection Regulation
in EU? If you collect personal data about European citizens, you should. Ukey1
will solve all technical aspects for you, Facebook nor Google not.
------
tomtompl
No SSL. Ouch
~~~
nooledge
Thanks for your comment. There is no reason for HTTPS on our demo page because
there are no secret transmissions there. Actually, this demo shows that our
solution may be used on every kind of website even they don't use HTTPS. Of
course, authentication itself and all API calls are via HTTPS.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Singapore Weighs Fate of Its Brutalist Buildings - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/27/world/asia/singapore-brutalist-buildings.html
======
quicklime
Having grown up in a working class family, I find it strange that western
hipsters are so taken by industrial chic architecture. It's an environment
that I grew up hoping to escape from. But architectural styles come in and out
of fashion, and yesterday's factories and warehouses are being converted into
coffee shops and homes that people love and pay a premium for.
In particular, the neighborhood that my parents lived and worked in is now a
very expensive and trendy part of town. There's little industry left; in fact
a lot of local companies are complaining that there's not enough warehouse
space left to rent, because it's all being converted into lofts! Sadly my
family sold out way before it became cool :(
I've heard it said that it's the styles that have just recently gone out of
fashion that are the least fashionable, whereas the styles that have been out
of fashion for longer often make a comeback. This applies to clothes, cars,
music, and architecture too.
So one thing I've wondered is: if the industrial style could go from being
considered ugly to being loved, is it possible that this could happen to
another style of architecture/design that we all currently consider to be an
eyesore? And what style would be next?
It makes a lot of sense that Brutalism would be it, and maybe these
Singaporeans are just ahead of the curve.
~~~
conanbatt
If there is objectivity to beauty, it would deem brutalism as an example of
ugliness.
I grew and studied around brutalist buildings and they are impersonal and
humbling in the bad way: like when you visit a gothic church. Particularly
because of the visible aesthetic decay of its materials.
I love hating brutalism though.
~~~
jcranmer
Brutalism _can_ be beautiful. The Washington, D.C. Metro system's coffer
vaults is generally ranked highly in terms of aesthetically pleasing designs,
and is also a prime example of brutalism.
~~~
improbable22
I'm surprised people think it brutalist. I took those tiled ceilings to be a
classical reference -- the pantheon in tube shape.
~~~
tptacek
There are other brutalist buildings with classical flourishes; the calling
card of brutalism is just exposed raw concrete.
~~~
improbable22
Do you have other examples in mind? Trying to think of some and failing...
~~~
tptacek
The Canadian Embassy?
~~~
improbable22
Thanks, had never seen that. Presumably the committee had a starchitect and an
ambassador, both with veto power.
------
spacegod
Singapore may have the world's best modern architecture. I used to be a
skeptic of modern architecture but I really enjoy builidngs like the Interlace
and Marina Bay Sands. One of many things that changed my thoughts when I was
living there. Fantastic country and people.
~~~
jjcm
I'm very curious to live there at some point in the next 5 years. What things
would you have done differently if you could go back to when you first moved
there?
~~~
shaki-dora
Not OP, but I found Singapore to be rather hell-ish. It feels like one giant
American mall, with possibly too much money for its own good.
HK, as a comparison, has preserved its character and charm, with life on the
streets and many unique neighborhoods.
Singapore happens when you think SimCity is realistic: the primacy of the
automobile, the belief that one additional Starbucks is always better than one
marginal tree, the instinct that any public meeting must be broken up, unless
it’s a queueueueueue (a long queue) at an Apple Store, etc.
It’s completely identical to Dubai or any of the Gulf metropolis, only with
rain. The #1 Thing to Do in Singapour is taking the bridge to Malaysia, and
never coming back. They think they can demolish the brutalism, but it’s
already too late: it must be in the water supply. Anything built after ca 1980
is still brutalism, only with glass. When you get to Singapore, you take a $50
rise to the city center, and wonder why you are still in the airport.
Singapore is what happens when you don’t allow creative people the occasional
drag of a joint: they take revenge, and make you live in it.
~~~
sjwright
The parent is a controversial opinion and one that I do not entirely share,
but as a person who has lived in Singapore for a while I am comfortable saying
that it's a legitimate, plausible opinion.
To the people down-voting it because you disagree, please rescind your vote
and supply a rebuttal in words.
~~~
shaki-dora
It’s fine, I was arguably overdoing it for comedic effect. Still, for
Americans especially, I believe there are destinations in SE Asia that are far
more rewarding than Sing Sing. If you need the economic environment, HK would
be an obvious choice, and maybe Shanghai. If you are doing remote work, the
list becomes far longer. I spent three years in different cities worldwide in
ca. 3-month intervals before getting stuck in Berlin, and I would recommend
Barcelona, Florence, HK, Australia’s east coast, Melbourne, Cape Town, Buenos
Aires, Rabat, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Beirut (check the local war forecast), and
Havanna.
~~~
Gigablah
At least you didn’t quote William Gibson.
~~~
kirvyteo
Lol...I was waiting...
------
Antonio123123
Here is a picture of the building in the article
[https://i.imgur.com/1BW2j35.png](https://i.imgur.com/1BW2j35.png)
To me it looks like an old beach resort.
------
alexpetralia
When I read the title, I thought this was almost the exact same article as the
one about Poland: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/t-magazine/poland-
brutali...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/t-magazine/poland-brutalism-
architecture.html)
------
hliyan
Even though this article contrasts brutalist buildings with the more modern
glass-and-steel aesthetic, I think both are products of their time and may age
equally badly in the eyes of future generations. On the other hand, the
architectural styles of the older, more historical buildings in New York,
London, etc. seem to have aged well. In that they look old, but not "brutal".
There may come a time when even the modern glass and steel facades will look
brutal...
~~~
tobylane
They've aged well because they were deemed worth saving after several decades.
Since Penn, Euston stations the interest in saving as much as possible rather
than just the best examples has caused some lesser quality old buildings to be
kept.
~~~
shaki-dora
I’ve heard this explanation (i. e. selection bias) a few times, but I don’t
think it holds true. I live in a 190x building in Berlin that was nothing
special for its time. Yet people prefer this style to anything built later,
including most modern buildings (which are, however, preferable to the
abominations of the 60s, brutalism or not).
Here’s a streetview:
[https://goo.gl/maps/bmFBmYywHAF2](https://goo.gl/maps/bmFBmYywHAF2) walk
around a bit and you see many such buildings. Only where bombs destroyed the
older houses in WW2 will you find anything build after 1920.
The reasons aren’t necessarily a loss in taste: the older buildings have far
higher ceilings, which may be due to them often being filled with far more
people than is usual today. Alternatively (or because of that) heating costs
did not factor into such decisions.
As to skyscrapers and larger buildings such as museums or hospitals, it’s
important to remember that glass & steel & concrete is rather new technology.
It’s far cheaper than brick, and simply a compromise between costs and
appearances that was not commonly available back then. It’s also somewhat
inconsistent but undeniable that we appreciate the decorative elements on the
exterior, or the stucco inside, yet it feels somewhat tacky to make them
today: McMansions are what happens when you think you can plunder all that’s
beautiful from previous eras.
~~~
darkpuma
Very high ceilings is one technique used to keep buildings cool during the
summer before AC or even electric fans were around.
------
retrogradeorbit
Next time you are in Singapore, go check out the Park View building. Make sure
to explore the statues outside and go into the ground floor and be amazed.
~~~
netsharc
I remember seeing this building and thinking the building would fit for Wayne
Enterprises. Didn't know one could go inside!
~~~
snicky
I had exactly the same thoughts when I stumbled upon it wandering around the
downtown late at night. It was dark, I was alone in the patio and the building
front looked amazingly scary.
------
beezischillin
Those Singaporean buildings look quite good and you can tell that they at
least cared enough to build them properly and take care of them. I've seen
some buildings built in that era in the UK, while travelling and I always
found that they stood out, painfully, most of them eyesores.
On the opposite side of the spectrum to Singapore, as a Hungarian who had the
bad luck to be born and grow up in Romania, I hope that one day it will be
financially worth it for the country for these buildings to come down and be
committed to the graveyard of bad memories. Imagine brutalist architecture
built to be exactly the same, shoddily and cheaply, repeating endlessly across
the landscape. Buildings where the goal was to stuff as many people in as
cheaply as possible, buildings where each of them was built not according to
plan but according to what materials were left when every worker and official
stole their tiny bit.
For most people in the west, it would be one of the most severe types of
punishment imaginable, having to be born, live and die in a depressing,
prison-like environment like that.
------
wilkskyes
Something about the stairs of the building in the main photo looks extremely
dangerous, like one could easily fall off a side, or if someone were standing
at the top of the stairs, they would have a clear shot into the open space if
they jumped off.
------
Nursie
Honestly those don't look as awful and oppressive as a lot of the european
examples. This may be because the sun shines in Singapore from time to time...
also they seem to at least have some concessions to form that is not pure
function.
But still pretty ugly. I can't grok the mindset that asks for these to be
protected, other than as a weird form of contrarianism.
~~~
zimablue
Brutalism is a lot more interesting when you have a vague idea of the
background of it => it's a kind of socialist/communist philosophy in
architecture, pretty buildings are the enshrinement of social hierarchies into
architecture, so build something that is egalitarian by nature - lots of
identical units, function over form. Open spaces, honesty in the sense that
the architecture shows you how it's really made with exposed concrete etc, not
a facade. I guess you could argue that it's the lisp of architecture - no
hiding the construction. I guess the point is that it's not mindlessly ugly,
it's a statement about priorities and honesty in aesthetics.
~~~
Nursie
But you have to look at the results - ugly monoliths that create oppressive
spaces.
Having grown up around the results in the towns and cities of England, it's
hard to see these ideals when a grey-brown lump of concrete is blocking out
the already weak winter sunlight, unbroken straight lines make the wind howl
through and chill you, and dark spaces accumulate litter and urine and seem to
just encourage social problems.
So that's why I don't grok the mindset - can people not see what it actually
becomes? I get that egalitarianism was there in the intent, but intent is not
really relevant. Results are relevant.
~~~
fredley
As with all architecture there are good and bad examples (with bad examples
usually lost over time - leaving only the good), and with brutalism in
particular issues with poor maintenance. Maintain any building of any age and
architectural 'school' poorly and it will become rundown, shabby, and
unpleasant to live in/around.
I walk through the Barbican frequently, which is rightly a much celebrated
building, and find it an extremely elevating experience. I also recently
visited Royan Cathedral which is honestly one of the most beautiful I've ever
been in. I think many brutalist buildings have been blighted by decades of
neglect almost from right after they were built. That's not going to leave the
best impression on anybody.
~~~
Nursie
I don't think you can just blame poor maintenance - the material and style
choices are just poor to start with.
The cathedral looks to me like a gun emplacement, or some relic of a forgotten
war.
~~~
darkpuma
Funny you mention relics of wars. Have you seen the ruins of the Oslobođenje
building in Sarajevo? That war ruin somehow manages to capture the aesthetic
of _well maintained_ brutalist architecture almost perfectly. Brutalist
buildings on their best days look like ruins from a city under siege. Walking
into a neighborhood with brutalist architecture feels like you've walked into
some alternate timeline where WWIII is raging.
The cynical side of me suspects that brutalist architecture is a reflection of
the psychological damage WWII inflicted on a generation of architects. They
experienced an ugly world, then sought to recreate that ugliness in their
work. Experiencing war corrupted them. Their legacy, their still standing
buildings, are not unlike the iron harvest French and Belgian farmers
experience every year when they till their fields and find bombs from WWI.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How many genetic ancestors do I have? - maxerickson
http://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/
======
DonGateley
Can it be calculated how far back we need go before each of us, with high
probability, is descended from everyone then living? Does the question even
have an answer?
~~~
graham_coop
Yes, people have developed simple models to give us some intuition about this
question. The first thing to keep in mind is that not everyone at a particular
time in the past will leave descendants to the present day. But quite a high
proportion of the population will leave descendants to the present day. It's
been estimated that around 80% of the population at a given time will. So we
can ask how long far do we have to go into the past until we can expect
everyone in the population (who left any descendants in the present) to be our
genealogical ancestor.
Your number of ancestors grows very quickly, k generations you have up to 2^k
ancestors (2 parents, 4 grandparents etc). So if our population has N
individuals in it, we need to go back log2(N) generations until our number of
ancestors is on the order of the population size. So even if our population
was made up of a billion people it takes only 30 generations (~1000 years) for
us to reach the point where it is likely that you are descended from everyone
in the population. What’s happening here is that if we go back far enough
everyone in the population (who left descendants) is your ancestor many times
over (via various routes back through your family tree). Now this is only an
approximation, and this statement has been made more precise by Chang (1998)
[http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/Ancestors.pdf](http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/Ancestors.pdf)
.
~~~
graham_coop
However, in the calculation above we have ignored the fact that populations
are structured, i.e. individuals any where in the world are not equally likely
to be your parents. This means going back a few generations in the past
individuals in your geographic area may be your ancestors, but individuals in
geographically remote areas may likely not be. This means that while in a well
mixed population (where individuals) move around a lot the above result will
hold, in populations where migration is geographically limited it may take far
longer for you to be descended from everyone (who left any descendants).
However, some individuals within populations do migrate, and so some
individuals in the population will have an ancestor in some distant geographic
location in the previous generation. You only need to trace part of your
family tree back to one of these migrant individuals in order for you to start
having ancestors at geographically distant locations. Given the vast numbers
of ancestors you have only a small number of generations back, it is quite
likely that you trace your ancestry back to many different migrant ancestors.
In turn these migrant ancestors quickly themselves have many ancestors further
back in time, and so your ancestry quickly spreads around the world. Indeed
Rhoades, Olsen, and Chang (2004) estimated under some fairly conservative
assumptions about human migration that you might well trace your ancestry to
everyone in the the entire world (who left descendants) may be just ~three
thousand years ago. See
[http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...](http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureCommonAncestors-
Article.pdf)
~~~
graham_coop
Carl Zimmer has a really nice writeup on this,
[http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemag...](http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/07/charlemagnes-
dna-and-our-universal-royalty/) , where he discusses Chang's result and Peter
Ralph and I's paper on this topic
[http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjo...](http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001555)
------
QuantumChaos
We got both kinds of science here, simulation and theoretical approximation
------
babesh
This doesn't take into account males who inherit the Y chromosome wholly from
the paternal side. It also does not factor in mutations that occur along the
way.
~~~
Myrmornis
It says "autosomal" in the first sentence.
What makes you think the mutation process is relevant to this subject? He's
talking about ancestry of genomic segments. It doesn't matter what mutations
occur on those ancestral lineages.
If you don't understand the topic, I'm baffled as to why you would post two
sentences criticizing it.
~~~
babesh
You know you're right. Bye bye Y Combinator.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
SQLAlchemy vs Other ORMs - Sami_Lehtinen
http://www.pythoncentral.io/sqlalchemy-vs-orms/
======
tdicola
Am I weird for preferring raw SQL over query abstractions like these ORMs
expose? IMHO SQL is a perfectly fine language. I do however like letting a
library do all the dirty work of turning SQL query output into objects.
There's a good talk from this year's PyCon that shows SQLAlchemy's core
library and how it gives a nice closer to raw SQL interface to a database:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSdzUxRYpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSdzUxRYpA)
~~~
andybak
It's an interesting question but I want to make a meta point.
I came here to read people's thoughts on the article but the top comment
shifts the debate onto a wider topic.
This happens all the time on HN and is something I find slightly irritating if
I'm actually interested in the topic itself. It's like that person at a dinner
party who always changes the subject onto what THEY want to talk about.
I'm not blaming you - it's the fact that your post is the top one and the one
most commented on that derails the original topic - which is a group decision.
Oh well. Democracy in action I suppose.
~~~
rosser
So find, upvote, and participate in — or, if necessary, _create_ — a thread
that offers the kind of discussion you're hoping to see. Coming into a thread
that's not the discussion you wanted, and being all, "But _guys_! We should be
talking about _$other_thing_!" is an even more annoying dinner party guest,
IMO.
~~~
andybak
Yep. I was aware of that as I wrote the post. :)
In my defence - the $other_thing is the _actual_ article though.
It's also that there are some predictable topics. Every post about a new
Google product has someone bringing up the Reader shutdown and every post
about ORMs has someone talking about how much they prefer raw SQL...
------
scardine
A Python ORM that stands out of the pack is Pony:
[http://ponyorm.com/](http://ponyorm.com/)
~~~
smnrchrds
Agreed. It is the most Pythonic ORM by far. Unfortunately it will never be as
popular as its less restrictively licensed counterparts.
~~~
mercurial
An ORM which decompiles Python generator bytecode and turns it into SQL? Never
heard of it before, but that's precisely the kind of insanity I like.
------
andybak
With the addition of custom lookups and transforms in Django 1.7* I'd be
curious to know where it still falls behind other ORMs. I've only needed a
couple of bits of raw SQL across a dozen or more Django projects.
* [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/custom-look...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/custom-lookups/)
~~~
hcarvalhoalves
I've been working with Django for 5 years. In my experience, Django's ORM is
pretty good for the common cases (specially when your query maps one-to-one to
a single model), but for anything that you need a bit more flexibility
(dealing with scalars, GROUP BY, a custom JOIN) you're on your own with raw
SQL, which gets unmaintainable quickly since you can't chain it with QuerySet
and suddenly you're not compatible with the rest of the codebase.
SQLAlchemy is more interesting in that it doesn't hide SQL away, just provides
an API for it. Underneath everything you're still dealing with strings (you
can just print most objects, like queries, columns, expressions, SQL
functions, etc), so you're less likely to be suddenly incompatible with the
rest of the API when doing something that deviates a little more from the
common cases.
------
rafekett
I had to use ActiveRecord last week after a year straight of using SQLalchemy
and it was downright painful. doing anything beyond simple CRUD is near-
impossible without writing raw SQL. i used to like ActiveRecord more when I
didn't understand relational databases, but now I don't understand how anyone
who's ever used SQL directly in their life could tolerate AR.
~~~
joevandyk
ActiveRecord supports lots of stuff through arel
([https://github.com/rails/arel](https://github.com/rails/arel)).
Are you sure you understood how to use the full functionality? What was
missing (besides CTEs)?
~~~
rafekett
maybe this has changed, but arel's documentation last time i used it was about
as good as the rails documentation, so it was wildly incomplete/inaccurate.
for example, last week I wanted to a bulk INSERT. maybe arel can do this
(though I highly suspect it cannot since this isn't a part of relational
algebra at all), but that's kind of worthless if i can't find any evidence of
how to do it without reading the arel source.
------
kbd
I'd love to see a comparison with non-Python ORMs. I've used Sequel for Ruby
and it's _wonderful_ but, even though I've used SQLAlchemy as well, I don't
have a sense of pros and cons of their respective general approaches.
------
rch
I use SQLAlchemy for just about everything won't suffer too much from the
expected ORM overhead. I've found it to be powerful, intuitive, and well
suited to larger projects.
Are there many other Python developers working directly with libpqxx though?
I've recently started exploring the idea of moving some of my relatively
stable, postgres-specific code into a dedicated library and would be grateful
for tips or words of caution. My hope is that this approach will wind up being
useful in cases where I'm coding against a large body of pre-existing stored
procedures.
------
wldlyinaccurate
I've used Doctrine 2 with PHP, and am yet to find another ORM like it in any
language. It stands out as unique (to me) in that you just write plain old
classes which don't need to know about the ORM. You write a separate schema
which Doctrine reads and then uses proxy objects for the mapping.
Am I the only person that finds this preferable to coupling your objects with
the ORM?
~~~
rch
It's been a while, but I enjoyed using Castor before other approaches became
so widely adopted in the Java world. Does it seem conceptually similar at
least?
[http://castor.codehaus.org](http://castor.codehaus.org)
~~~
wldlyinaccurate
From the very little I read of the documentation, it seems like a similar
concept -- mapping the objects to the data is done _outside_ of the objects.
------
gabordemooij
Too bad the idea of on-the-fly ORM never really caught on in the Python
community
([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pybean/0.2.1](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pybean/0.2.1)
not my project btw).
I believe this is a better way to approach the mismatch between the object
model and the relational model.
~~~
zzzeek
some people love this idea, and for many years we've had a product called
SQLSoup
([https://sqlsoup.readthedocs.org/en/latest/](https://sqlsoup.readthedocs.org/en/latest/))
which does exactly this on top of the SQLAlchemy ORM, and the docs for pybean
look quite similar.
However I don't have the resources to maintain this very old project right now
(it's only about 500 lines, anyone can pick up the source if they cared).
A more SQLA-centric version of this idea is recently released as the automap
extension
([http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/orm/extensions/automap....](http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/orm/extensions/automap.html))
which includes the "map everything on the fly" step plus relationship support,
and you then use traditional Query patterns with it. Reaction to it has been
mixed, depending on where the user is coming from.
~~~
Nullabillity
Slick ([http://slick.typesafe.com/](http://slick.typesafe.com/)) seems to
support this as well in a type-safe manner, but personally I'm not too keen on
having the compilation depend on having a stateful database available.
------
fideloper
No mention of Active Record vs Entity Mapping ORMs? Are there not many Entity
Mappers in existence? The only popular one I know of is Symfony's Doctrine (in
PHP land)
~~~
numbsafari
I think you'll find examples of each in the OP, and most of them follow the
Entity Mapper-style.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: What's the most impactful business book you've read? - karamazov
I'm looking for book recommendations that have changed the way you think about your company or your career.
======
dangrossman
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do
About It
[http://www.amazon.com/The-E-Myth-Revisited-Small-
Businesses/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-E-Myth-Revisited-Small-
Businesses/dp/0887307280)
~~~
romanhn
Another vote for E-Myth Revisited. I went in with fairly low expectations
(since most business books tend to disappoint, in my experience) and came out
with some fresh perspectives on building businesses.
------
yma
I recently read Creativity, Inc. By Ed Catmull. I enjoyed the book because of
the stories behind Pixar's growth and importance of candor in their culture.
------
JSeymourATL
Jay Abraham's Sticking Point Solution; great food for thought when you're at a
loss for growth ideas> [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515635-the-
sticking-poin...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6515635-the-sticking-
point-solution)
------
karamazov
I just finished "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and "Little Bets", both of
which were great.
------
pavornyoh
The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman. A very good read and you can get it
on Amazon.
------
pjungwir
Managing the Professional Services Firm by David Maister.
------
erbdex
The Hard thing about Hard things, Ben Horowitz.
------
gadders
How to Win Friends and Influence People
------
bakztfuture
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
~~~
mrfusion
I didn't get that much out of it. What made it so compelling for you?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project (2009) - tbrownaw
http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany
======
tbrownaw
Looking around their site I don't see much further on this, but they did have
a release this February. Does anyone know if this actually worked, or of other
attempts that worked / didn't work?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it) - spindritf
https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/
======
h2s
Reasons why I bookmark pages:
1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly
2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly
3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly
My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed
Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this
particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between
browsers constantly so no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be
useful to me.
I try to curb what I call my "data hoarding" tendencies too. If I start
bookmarking things for real, I tend to fall into a harmful pattern of
bookmarking _too many_ things. Next I start fretting over whether they're
organised correctly, whether they're named clearly and so on. I've found it's
better for my productivity if I just rely on the address bar autocompletion.
It's always cool to read about this kind of usability work though. Mozilla is
still king in my book!
~~~
Karunamon
>no single-vendor syncing service is ever going to be useful to me.
Ever tried Xmarks?
------
kijin
Very interesting take on redesigning Bookmarks.
But the mockup they produced at the end seems to have several issues, at least
when it comes to compatibility with my bookmarking habits. I wonder how they
plan to address these issues:
1\. Only a single level of hierarchy. There's a "pile" for "school work", but
what about having sub-piles for each course that I'm taking? I don't want
bookmarks for my CS course getting mixed up with bookmarks for my political
science course.
2\. Can I toss the same bookmark in more than one pile at the same time? The
neat thing about tagging is that tags are many-to-many. The concept of piles
seems to be a reversion to folders. Don't get me wrong, folders are cool, too.
But they have the annoying limitation of being one-to-many.
3\. Relying on screenshots and/or favicons instead of page titles to represent
each bookmark would quickly get confusing when you bookmark multiple pages
from the same website. Can you tell one NYT article from another from 120px
thumbnails of each page? (Hopefully, those buttons in the top right are for
toggling between icon and list view.)
4\. What if I have 10,000 bookmarks? Is your idea highly scalable (pardon the
buzzword), or is it optimized for ~200 bookmarks?
All of these nitpicks stem from the fact that a bookmark manager should not
only help you save pages for later, but also help you _manage_ the pages that
you've saved. Here's the question: Does your product facilitate saving and
organizing methods that allow the user to retrieve any page within 5 seconds,
5 years later? Because I do occasionally revisit pages after a decade or even
more, after I've accumulated thousands of other bookmarks ranging from "read
this afternoon" to "potentially useful to a future project".
------
HyprMusic
I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read
that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks,
and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks.
Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms
of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks
after x days or after I've already visited them once.
All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but
this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.
~~~
mitjak
I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread
organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution
consists of:
* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.
~~~
Derbasti
Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack.
I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later
articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.
------
srean
I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have
several hundreds of them open for months on end.
For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works
for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance
will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this
behavior is not unique.
I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open
tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and
have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.
The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it
stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as
well as the link.
So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc
function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.
It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the
browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF
only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on
low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text
in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have
access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for
xmarks, but I still do anyway.
And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory
footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I
think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions.
Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking
the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly
surprised.
@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of
times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the
laptop hibernate when not in active use.
Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot
of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant
admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I
have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed
though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based
browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a
byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)
@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been
nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could
be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and
memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.
~~~
lukifer
I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles
RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a
new chance in about a year.)
Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory
leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).
~~~
nnethercote
That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have
wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people
with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and
Chrome fails miserably.
As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory
problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind
of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had
minor memory consumption improvements. See
<https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/> for more (possibly
too much) detail.
If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of
tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it
might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have
a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see [http://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix...](http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-
firefox-easily-fix-most-problems).
~~~
cpeterso
What is Chrome's bottleneck with hundreds of tabs? The resource load from
hundreds of processes? IPC overhead for the browser process to managing the
content processes?
~~~
lucian1900
Memory usage for that many processes. Even with all the sharing it tries to
do, its per-origin (there's usually at most one process for each origin, not
for each tab) overhead is much higher than Firefox's.
------
davecap1
I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of
Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and
only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior
seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not
focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of
improving one that is not well known?
------
webwanderings
The most interesting and important topic which is near and dear to me and I
find it totally unbelievable that nowhere in your article/study above, you
make a single mention of the browser History and how it correlates with the
user's need and habit of saving-of-bookmarks. Browser history (in theory) is
basically your bookmarks which you never saved manually but they are there in
your browser available for you at the command. Now, how Mozilla is going to
upgrade its long-overdue Bookmarks Manager without paying any attention to the
History feature, is beyond me.
In any case, I welcome this blog post. It's been a long time. One thing I
really hope Mozilla does is that they get rid of their tags, or at least they
come to some sort of standards with other browsers. Nobody else is supporting
the tags as Firefox and that in itself is a limitation because you are holding
up the user base with your tags. And what are the odds that your article also
does not discuss tags (am I missing something big here??).
~~~
vdm
Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from
the page.
------
latif
My add-on <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/categorize/>
combines bookmarks and tab-management. It lets the user group bookmarks into
sets that a user can open all at once or singly. This approach almost
completely eliminates the need for an address bar.
Another interesting feature of the add-on is that it unifies bookmarks and
web-search. The two seem totally disparate but they can be integrated
seamlessly in a very cool way. Check <http://techuser.net/beyond-chrome.html>
for an overview of the approach.
------
DanBC
I'm glad they're working on something, because my bookmarks are a good example
of horribly broken.
(Ideally I'd have something that looked like the grid-home layout that most
browsers have now, but for all my bookmarks. Then it'd have the ability to
create / destroy folders, and drag and drop functionality to move bookmarks
around.)
~~~
drivebyacct2
I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My
bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my
closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the
contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.
------
kule
Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later
date.
What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so
that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can
still read what was on the page.
~~~
skymt
Have you seen Historious? <http://historio.us/>
~~~
StavrosK
Woohoo, I made that. Have a free premium month as a thanks for the
recommendation (what's your username)?
~~~
corin_
I'm a paying user of yours so I don't have any specific problem with you or
historious, but I don't like that you're offering a free month here. I'm sure
it won't _really_ have any impact, but in theory by rewarding people who say
"have you tried <product>" in a HN comment you're incentivising people to make
those comments, essentially offering people the chance to use a referrals
scheme without it going through referral links.
~~~
StavrosK
That's true generally, although it doesn't really apply in this case. I don't
usually give free months to people who mention historious, I was just happy to
see a mention and gave a freebie.
Arguably, the free bookmarks you get through referrals are more useful, since
they don't expire...
------
reinhardt
I used to hoard links, pages, resources at a higher pace than I could consume.
All it did was increase the size of a self dictated TODO list and the feeling
of being "left behind" more and more.
I don't use bookmarks anymore, or for that matter any other "save for later"
tool or process. If I can't read it _right now_ , chances are I won't do it at
all. And that's ok. Ultimately, none of this matters much, if at all.
------
tribe
This is definitely something I have considered before. I often have many many
tabs open, usually as a means of remembering things that I should go back and
look at. I use tree style tab [1] to organize them, and I try to keep things
in groups by subject. I think that rather than having the user organize their
bookmarks / long-term tabs, it might be easiest to group them automatically by
subject or hyperlink trails. If a group wasn't visited after some time, it
could be dumped into a designated bookmarks folder. I don't think it would be
hard to set up filters which look at the content or titles of web pages and
determine what type of group they are. For example, reddit/slashdot/hacker
news posts waiting to be read could be grouped and dumped in one bookmarks
location while stackOverflow and github tabs being used for a project could be
in another.
[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)
------
jedahan
Mozilla's UX posts continue to impress by being thorough and open-minded.
~~~
AndreasFrom
Firefox is improving at an amazing pace for both users and developers. It
seems like the rapid release schedule has sparked a flame.
------
lurrch
Mobile devices are fantastically horrible objects, and you have to blame the
deliberately hobbled, crippled nature of touch screens for many, many things
that suck when (trying) to use one.
My fat fingers are too stupid to learn how to type on soft keyboards, and
that's the end of it. Even when turning on pointer position feedback that
shows the path and position of the cursor, to reveal what the interface
_THINKS_ I'm trying to do, it's usually a little off because my fingers are
soft fleshy blobs. Soft keyboards are one of the more reasonable examples of
touch screen software, and there are many varieties, and they get a lot of
truly professional attention. Seriously, try using an ordinary desktop
keyboard with a water balloon. It yields poor results.
Touch screen experiences suck. Add to the fact that many devices include
resolution independent interfaces, and there becomes this hellish mix of
software controlled guess work that stands as an insurmountable obstacle
between me and the delivery of actual professional work, beyond typing an
e-mail. They will never yield the pixel perfect pointing precision of a mouse.
Touchscreens are prompting the destruction and reinvention of lots of things
that work fine with any Keyboard/Video/Mouse interface, are twisted into
horrid mutant abominations that make me want to commit suicide on touch
devices. Everyone is bending over backwards to coddle and baby people who own
these status symbols du jour.
That being said, there needs to be a line drawn on re-designs of perfectly
useful software, in the name of the holy tablet/smartphone/touchscreen
complex.
Case in point: Bookmarks & RSS
In Firefox, this is one of the key features that has me hooked for life (while
it remains in place). In every mobile device I have ever seen, RSS is an
abomination, and I refuse to embrace it. Internet Explorer is too awful in
general, so don't even bring it up (I won't get into why Chrome is also a non-
starter, but I'll just mention that in-browser authentication is point-blank
wrong, and I don't like signing into my browser). But it's perfect in Firefox,
and they shouldn't touch it. If RSS ever disappeared from Firefox, I would
simply never look at another feed again. I would not use a stand-alone RSS
program to consume and digest RSS feeds.
RSS is a key component of bookmarability in Firefox, and it ain't broke. Not
on desktops and laptops. I hope these kinds of details aren't lost in the rush
to compete with amateur crapware that we find on mobile devices.
~~~
unimpressive
I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it
"fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's
awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.
------
GBKS
Love the process, but not the final mock-up. While the grey boxes look neat,
the visual format is inappropriate for bookmarks. If they use fav icons like
the NY Times logo, you won't be ale to tell what the bookmark is about. Small
screenshots of the pages also don't work since they become illegible and many
times only ads can be recognized since they are made to stand out. So this
concept should be validated with real content. I'd assume that a text-based
version would be much more usable.
I'm looking forward to see what will come from this.
------
wooptoo
A mind map browser history/bookmark system would be the most intuitive. With
timestamps and relations between items.
Most of the time when searching through my browsing history I remember a small
bit from the page that I want (like a phrase), but not the whole address or
title. So searching for something like "find that page about a Python module,
which I opened two days ago" would be truly helpful. Hell, even searching by a
page's dominant _color_ would be helpful sometimes, since I have a good visual
memory.
------
grayc
For what it's worth, the basic reasons I use some form of bookmarks are:
1\. I want to go back to a website for new content; or
2\. I want to store content to read/view later; or
3\. I want to share something with someone else who is not sitting next to me.
So for 1, I really want a link, for 2 I really want a local copy (in case the
page moves or is removed), and for 3 I'd like to send someone (or a group of
people) a copy (for the same reason as 2, but usually the time interval is
shorter so it's less likely that the page will vanish, so a link is more
acceptable). Sync across machines is also great for 1 and 2, not so much for
3.
I really haven't found a browser-based tool that I like for any of these. I
mostly use email for 2 and 3 because I can copy and paste text or attach a
file to store a copy of the content. For 1 I usually type in the URL because
it works with any browser, but I do keep some bookmarks for sites I rarely
visit.
A dedicated tool could do a lot better than my email client, though. Even
though I want the original content, I'd usually like to know if it's been
updated or changed since I last looked at it (imagine storing a copy of this
comment thread, for example), which would be easy to do within firefox but is
impossible as I have it set up.
Edit: I forgot to mention the other nice feature of email: most clients can
easily handle thousands of emails easily -- they do it by: search;
folders/tagging; threading; sorting by different columns; and I'm sure I'm
missing others. So those might be other organization schemes to consider; I
don't think that organizing the bookmarks into piles is going to scale well.
------
theootz
Related to bookmarks...
I no longer use Firefox and have long since switched to Chrome, but in doing
so my bookmarks have become effectively useless. What I mean by this is, in
Firefox, one of the greatest (and probably underused) features was the ability
to tag individual bookmarks instead of simply pushing them into a single
folder.
This meant that, when I wanted to revisit a bookmark later on, I simply had to
start typing in the tags (which I always made broad and diverse). By typing in
more and more tags that I thought would likely relate to the article I wanted
to reach, it would narrow it down. I never had to remember what the article
was called, or where it was, or anything like that.
Now if this automatically happened while bookmarking? Some intelligent manner
in which the page could be skimmed for keywords or something. Bookmarking and
retrieval becomes much simpler...
Just wanted to throw that out as something to consider :)
(Now, one Chrome, I usually just leave tabs open or try to organize into
folders and fail miserably :/ )
~~~
webwanderings
Welcome to the club. Many of us have realized by now that none of the browsers
are following any standards when it comes to bookmarks. The tagging is the
exclusive Firefox feature and we were simply hijacked by it over the years.
You moved to Chrome after using Firefox for many yeas (so did I) and you
realize that your Firefox tags are not welcome at Chrome.
------
zemanel
Pure browser feature bookmarking features (meaning not extension based) have
evolved much slower than other features ( or to be exact, concepts) and what i
take in the end regarding the article are UX impromevents on the existing
features but not much about concepts, namedly searching and perhaps
organization.
By search i mean the ability to, on the bookmarks page, search not only by the
bookmark title but by the URL content itself, which would mean adding a page
search engine to the browser. When a user bookmarked a page, it's contents
would be indexed (taking into account the security implications)
I believe people already do it today on a sense, it's most of the time easier
to search Google than browse dozens or more bookmarks.
As for organization, any machine learning (if im addressing the correct
concept) would probably be better than my current method, because a correct
bookmarking process "pain" increases exponentially with the number of
bookmarks a user already has.
~~~
lesterbuck
At least one bookmarking service, pinboard.in, offers a paid option of full
text search on the contents of all bookmarks:
<http://pinboard.in/upgrade/>
~~~
zemanel
Cool in itself, wasn't aware, but dependent on a thirdy party service and
indexing/searching seems to happen online?
A browser builtin local solution could be best
~~~
mbreese
I don't know... I'd prefer an online option, so that I could have the same
bookmarks searched from multiple devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, etc...)
~~~
zemanel
Yes you have a point and according to the Opera link above, the indexes seem
to smalish
------
andrew_wc_brown
I used to save bookmarks like crazy, and I was in the boat that had used
stumble upon, delicous, magnolia, and diigo. I don't use social bookmarking
anymore, or regular bookmarking because I'm always on my own computer can can
you the autocomplete search bar to bring on past visit websites.
1\. Tab - One time read 2\. History - I might need to return a few times in a
week, month 3\. Bookmark - Something I want indefinitely Rails API
Its never hard to remember your favorite websites, chrome autocompletes it,
it'd be faster to autocomplete type it then click a dropdown menu.
The only Mozilla UX news that will interest me is if they made the default
look of Firefox not feel heavy. I still think of Firefox as being slow.
------
tarr11
I wonder how many people use FF exclusively. This is what breaks all these
fancy bookmarking apps for me. I use Chrome, FF, Safari, even IE, depending on
what computer I am on.
If I had to standardize on a single browser for the bookmarks, I'd choose
Chrome.
------
blahedo
Aside from the content, this is a fantastic exposition of the _techniques_ of
UX design, and since I teach a unit on that I wanted to make sure I'd be able
to give the link to my students. But I'm on my home computer right now, and I
manage that from my office computer, so I...
...emailed the link to myself. :P
Which is actually an interesting confirmation of several points the article
made. Most of my save-for-later is "I want to consume this, but don't have
time" and "I want to come back to this momentarily", for which I use the
leave-tabs-open strategy rather than bookmarking or emailing. I knew this
article would be great almost from the time I saw the title....
------
yason
I hit Ctrl-D and later search for something of resemblance by typing into the
url bar and letting results flow in from bookmarks.
I'd much rather just _minimize tabs_ into a staging area than bookmark. And
then type things into the url bar and finding pages. Or browsing the staging
area visually, much like an eternally long strip of tabs. And tabs preserve
context unlike bookmarks.
THe only thing that prevents me from saving too many tabs is that browsers get
crashy/laggy when I do that and I have no way to stash the saved tabs to some
place where they don't clutter my desktop visually.
------
sabret00the
I have three uses of saved pages. \- The open tab: return to it later \-
Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar \-
Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news
sites
Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or
for very specific functions.
The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all
bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where
Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.
------
bazzargh
There's only two things I use the browser's bookmarks for now - firstly to
prime the pump for FF's awesomebar. I rely on that when I delete my history
(which I do irregularly during development).
The second thing is bookmarklets, which are also a subversion of the
mechanism, but let me customize /across browsers/ which most extension
mechanisms don't do.
Glad to see Mozilla tackling the fragmented collection of bookmarks I've ended
up with as 'favourites' in Google Reader, Hacker News, twitter, youtube,
vimeo....
------
ollysb
My ideal solution would be to search my pinboard bookmarks from the address
bar in chrome. As it is I get fairly close using alfred and a custom search
for pinboard.
------
olalonde
No mention of HN's "saved stories"! :)
~~~
evoxed
Honestly, this is the main reason I always have a tab open to HN. There are so
many items on here that I know I don't have the time to look into immediately
but will return to, and having them saved just by upvoting feels really good.
I very close attention to what I vote for, and when I go hunting for a link I
know there's a good chance it'll be saved along with comments for context.
------
Lagged2Death
I think "Firefox's fancy-pants bookmark features are too complicated and
confusing" would be a much more accurate summation of the article (and a point
I'd agree with) than "Bookmarks are broken," but I guess it wouldn't grab so
many eyeballs, either.
------
amitamb
I worked on a app to let you keep your bookmarks searchable from any browser
and share them with others at same time.
<http://www.microki.com/>
------
stuaxo
Getting a certificate error trying to open this page.
~~~
shardling
WFM. (In all browsers I can test on OSX.)
Hopefully you're not experiencing a MitM attack! :)
------
CT100
I wish browsers had 3 suggestions for which folder to put the bookmark into -
that would save me time scrolling through my bookmarks.
------
webwanderings
Does Mozilla know that their blog's comment section is probably broken? I
cannot submit my comment where it matters.
------
code_duck
Safari's Reading List comes to mind.
~~~
keeperofdakeys
For those that haven't used Safari, can you give a quick overview of using
this feature?
~~~
mh-
better description here than I could muster:
<http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/#safari>
_Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an
Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free
Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up
to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you
looked at available on all your devices, too._
[http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_he...](http://images.apple.com/mac/shared/osx/apps/images/safari_hero2_2x.jpg)
------
derleth
My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two
bookmark files _with tags attached._
Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can
understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks.
I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. _The tags from both original
files must be preserved._ If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original
files, _it must be tagged the same way in the new file._
_Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option._ I like my privacy.
It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension
that will do this for me.
~~~
damncabbage
_It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension
that will do this for me._
I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own;
extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.
(I fear you may be very much into the Realm of the Edge Case.)
~~~
derleth
> I hate to be That Guy, but maybe you should look into writing your own;
> extensions are fortunately just bundles of JavaScript.
Javascript isn't the hard part here; it's trying to figure out how to extract
anything like what I need from the places.sqlite databases that hold all the
relevant data.
~~~
kbrosnan
If you trust the cloud Mozilla's client side encrypted sync service will do
this.
If you want simple and dirty.
1\. Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on
the Library window on each machine
2\. Pick your favorite scripting language
3\. merge the two json backup files using your script
Import the resulting json file in a clean Firefox profile.
~~~
derleth
> Create a backup of your bookmarks using the import and backup button on the
> Library window on each machine
I've tried this. The tags are not in the JSON dumps. The Mozilla people
apparently believe that backing up your bookmarks means to back up everything
_except_ the tags.
A corollary: The only way to actually back up your bookmarks is to back up the
places.sqlite file. Nothing else contains all the relevant data.
~~~
kbrosnan
Tags are in the bookmark backup JSON.(Storing tags was one of the primary
reasons for moving from bookmarks.html.) Search for "root": "tagsFolder"
anything that is a parent of that is a tag.
~~~
derleth
Hey, thanks. Looking at a pretty-printed JSON file with that little piece of
info cleared it up for me.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Humans.txt - chmars
http://disqus.com/humans.txt
======
RKoutnik
I was expecting something along the lines of
[http://humanstxt.org/](http://humanstxt.org/) but fun little easter eggs like
this are always nice!
------
samweinberg
Github - [https://github.com/humans.txt](https://github.com/humans.txt)
Bitbucket -
[https://bitbucket.org/humans.txt](https://bitbucket.org/humans.txt)
Flickr -
[https://secure.flickr.com/humans.txt](https://secure.flickr.com/humans.txt)
------
outcoldman
[http://www.google.com/humans.txt](http://www.google.com/humans.txt)
[http://facebook.com/humans.txt](http://facebook.com/humans.txt)
~~~
GhotiFish
why did you include facebook?
[https://www.facebook.com/centipedes.txt](https://www.facebook.com/centipedes.txt)
~~~
defective
To contrast it with Google. Activate your humor subroutines and scan again.
~~~
Touche
I get 404 on all of those.
~~~
MatmaRex
The Google one apparently is a 404 on HTTPS, and a text file on HTTP.
------
mherdeg
I've always been partial to transformers.txt (it's robots.txt in disguise).
------
psawaya
Oh, hey:
[https://medium.com/humans.txt](https://medium.com/humans.txt)
------
Semiapies
Cute! I wish more sites actually _had_ humans.txt files.
------
CatsoCatsoCatso
[http://www.googleventures.com/humans.txt](http://www.googleventures.com/humans.txt)
Is a pretty swish one.
[http://liverpool.gov.uk/humans.txt](http://liverpool.gov.uk/humans.txt)
"BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD" (bottom of text)
I'm surprised this passed on a Government site, slipped it past compliance eh?
------
thetylerhayes
I was wondering how long it would take someone to find this.
------
chrisdevereux
Interestingly, there isn't a robots.txt
------
rubyfan
Hey, sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?
------
mattkrea
Haha this is great
------
aristomc
wow lol, didn't expect that.
------
batemanesque
hah! a reference to a popular aspect of geek culture! more of this, please.
~~~
qwerty_asdf
I understand the subtext of your comment which has
subsequently provided me with a degree of positive
emotions.
------
talles
best. humans.txt. ever.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: A privacy-friendly, paid SaaS alternative to Google Analytics? - Rjevski
Does anyone know of a paid, hosted alternative to Google Analytics?<p>I would like something similar to GA but from a company whose own business model is not about user data, so there would be no conflict of interest where they would (presumably) use analytics data from <i>my</i> website for their own purposes.
======
apkallum
Matomo/Piwik[0] hosted? They have enterprise support too, I think.
[0][https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Let me take you through my dream office - tckr
https://blog.coderbyheart.com/office-design-by-an-office-hater
======
noir_lord
Decided to change job recently, applied for two, went for an interview at the
first and they offered me the job.
I took it on the spot despite the other place paying more.
One of the reasons I took it on the spot was when asked where I'd prefer to
work and I said somewhere quiet he said there are offices upstairs, take
whichever one you want.
That was _the_ major deciding factor (among others), I know the other place is
open plan.
I'll take slightly less pay to sit in a quiet office and work over an open
office.
(Other things I liked about the job where flex time, I buy all hardware I need
myself, they pay for conferences, training courses, no phone on the desk (I
asked for that and they said no problem), an interesting complex problem (I
like enterprise stuff) and they are strongly focused on building out some
proper in-house technical skill and replacing their creaking systems, I get
technical freedom, I can use whatever I want on the backend and I'll be
assembling a team as they bring stuff back in house and final kicker it's 10m
walk from where I live so no commute).
Since both places pay more than enough for me to live comfortably in north of
England I'll happily take the slightly lower pay (in the short term) for the
above.
I don't think employers _still_ understand how much _some_ developers loathe
open offices, it's not a 'prefer' to, it is a 'won't if at all possible'.
~~~
ensiferum
"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most".
In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is
to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else
just suffers.
~~~
mgkimsal
This evergreen topic comes up enough that there will always be multiple sides
to this topic. I've gone so far in past threads to imply that other devs were
"wrong" about being more productive in open office plans, and got bashed for
that. "Don't tell me how I'm more productive", etc.
There may never actually be _hard data_ on this, because it's, at core, likely
very hard to measure, but I'd love to read some research/findings on this
issue more.
I'm in a coworking situation now, with a private space, and I'm always more
_productive_ in the private space. But I do relieve some stress and get
energized by interacting with others in the common area. And in previous jobs,
there's _of course_ always times when you need to talk to colleagues about
project issues, and that's a requirement.
To the folks (devs) who insist that they are "more productive" in open plan
offices, I wonder if the rest of the folks in the room with you are equally as
productive, or if the productivity is just being shifted from some people in
the room to others.
~~~
mseebach
I think there are at least two different kinds of productivity. One is the
kind where you need to progress through a non-trivial body of work with a
well-understood end-state. Your primary, if not sole, output is code. This is
probably well suited for private offices and remote teams.
The other is where you're solving a problem that isn't in the first order a
code problem. There are typically humans involved in these kinds of problems.
Most instances where the problem is defined as "building the right thing for
the customer" where part of the problem is coming up with "the right thing".
This works well in open plan offices where multiple people can quickly give
input/get feedback. Remote working is probably not a great idea. Most work in
early startups is probably in this category, and that also offers a model to
explain why open plan offices are so common in not-startups-anymore: these
companies are very eager to retain the energy of their early days, and a lot
of that energy is tied to the collaboration of the open plan office, even if
not necessarily suited to the workloads of the more mature company.
Tl;dr: when people speak of being more or less productive under certain
conditions, a lot probably hinges on what kind of work they are doing.
~~~
dhimes
There are also people other than coders in tech companies. I'm next door to a
sales group for a tech company. They do a lot of yelling.
~~~
mseebach
Yes, I agree that co-locating teams that aren't directly collaborating can be
counterproductive. Loud sales teams, obviously, yes, but quieter teams will
also have different patterns of buzz that will be disturbing to unrelated
teams near them.
~~~
dhimes
It's interesting. They get REALLY PISSED at the developers about stuff.
~~~
noir_lord
When I've worked in none-developer companies I've always found the office
staff are fine as long as you don't rub it in their faces that you earn more
and have more freedom.
Well except one place where the people in the office where just horrible
(really toxic culture largly down to the 'office manager' been about one step
short of invading Poland) so I just did as I pleased (wandering in at 10am
wearing flip flops and combat shorts), I was pulling 60hr weeks so the boss
didn't care and she hated me anyway because she had to do payroll and knew
what I was earning, I was knackered from day one on that job.
~~~
dhimes
What's interesting here is the sales group is from a different company. Their
devs are at a different office. So I hear the stuff like a fly on the wall.
What I _don 't_ hear is the root cause of the angst. Is the sales team
overpromising? I don't know. But when something's not ready for their demo it
gets quite loud.
------
loteck
As a technologist working at a company that helps businesses design & build
office space, one item I notice always lacking in conversations about office
space is growth.
The article brushes off growth by suggesting you just open a new office when
you've grown. This suggestion lacks understanding of how growth happens. It's
rarely an instant doubling of headcount. Most organic growth creeps up.
So let me invade your "dream" office with a bit of tough reality. Everywhere
you imagined 3 people, 6 months later, put in 5. Then 4 months later, every
available "single quiet" space, replace with a full time desk. Then in 60 days
put a few part timers and interns out in common area, permanently. Now hold
the line for a couple years while we find affordable space to relocate
everyone to.
Your dream space becomes just another overcrowded, noisy envitonment due to
the realities of cost and efficiency that drive every business.
~~~
tckr
Ok, so I would ask an architect: build me an office that can scale. What would
they answer?
We have shitty offices because there is no solution, so allow me to at least
say: if you want me to work in your office (which I think is not necessary at
all) build me one, that suits my productivity and not the constraints of the
real estate market.
Realistically, as a company you would start with one floor, and once it fills
up, rent another in the same building.
Companies here are doing this and lending more floors then they initially need
and are subletting them, so they can move in later.
We could rent an ware house and build offices out of shipping containers. That
could be done.
~~~
xixixao
An open plan office, starting with 50 desks, can grow to 75 or even 100, by
gradually increasing desk density.
You cannot evict ppl from floors you own on the spot. Growth is hard to
predict.
Hence the dream office will stay a dream unless you are working for a no-
growth company doing the same things all the time.
~~~
xorblurb
An over-crowded open-office is even more productivity destroying than an open-
office of a "normal" density.
Plus, like already said, you can increase density (at least if the target is
not overdensity) in other configurations...
Maybe it's more difficult to over-crowd if you don't have an open-office, but
that's a feature, not a bug.
------
imgabe
I like the concept of the shared 3-person offices. I think that's a good size.
As someone who works professionally designing offices (as an engineer, but
working with architects and interior designers) let me bring up a few
practical considerations.
1\. Accessibility. Offices have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities
act. This includes requirements determining how wide passageways have to be.
So having a wall immediately in front of a door as you enter a room is
problematic. You need enough space between the wall and the door for a person
in a wheelchair to enter and turn around. This creates a lot of wasted space
compared to not having the wall there. Likewise the study corrals in the quite
space room are way too close together, the bathroom doesn't have a handicapped
stall, if you have showers, one or more of the shower stalls will also need to
be accessible.
2\. I'm not sure how well the unisex bathroom would fly. There are code
requirements for number of toilets / urinals required based on occupancy.
Usually it ends up cheaper to separate the bathrooms since some of the
requirements for men can be addressed with urinals, which are going to be
cheaper.
3\. There's a reason most offices don't have a stove. Once you put a stove in
a pantry it becomes a kitchen - a commercial kitchen. This brings a host of
other requirements for automatic fire suppression over the stove. Exhaust
hoods over the range. Makeup air to replace the air pushed out by the range
hood. Grease traps, all sorts of things. Not that it can't be done, it's just
expensive and most companies will not pay for it.
4\. Space requirements - the design is very space inefficient. While it's nice
to have a big room shared by 3 people, it's going to cost a lot in terms of
rent. Offices are leased in terms of $/sf. Every extra square foot that isn't
being used is costing you money. The main reason companies like open offices
is that they can cram a lot of people into a minimum amount of space. This
would be really nice and a wonderful place to work, but it will cost a
fortune.
~~~
wolly
> I like the concept of the shared 3-person offices.
I don't. This seem like a smaller version of an open office. Everyone has
someone in their field of view, plus there's a TV and large glass windows with
couches directly outside of them. That seem like a great way to get a little
bit distracted all the time. Three people in one office is usually much worse
than two people in a smaller office. Since if one person does something
distracting, they are distracting the other two people. And when two people
want to talk about something they are distracting the third person.
What the author describes seem more like "not having to go to meetings" or
"not being bothered by management" than actually being able to work
undisturbed for a predictable period of time.
------
cies
I'm feverishly anticipating for e-ink displays (same stuff as your e-readers),
to be plugged in as second monitors. These displays work "outside", and then
_my_version_of_the_dream_office_ can become reality: working in NATURE.
This of a beautiful garden when many spots: open sun or shady, in a glasshouse
or in an airconned glass covered veranda. And "office workers" just find
themselves a spot!
Besides that I also thing standing desks are a must. This is the least you can
do to mitigate early death by desk-job. On top of that I think that under desk
treadmills are another huge step forward. And a spot where you can do a few
stretching exercises (with a pull-bar) is also not a luxury in my opinion.
~~~
cableshaft
E-ink monitors can't come soon enough. I would love to work outside. I've
dreamed of courtyard office spaces that are open to the outdoors, have trees
and plants everywhere, for well over a decade now.
I have a patio in my front yard at home and sometimes on the weekends I try to
bring my laptop outside to work on my own stuff while my puppy is tethered,
and it's almost impossible to see anything on there, especially if the sun is
out at all. Bring on the e-ink!
------
willyt
Architect here. Distraction is an issue for us as well. My ideal office would
be along these lines too. Mostly it's just construction and rental cost that
prevents it; open plan offices use much less floor space and are simpler for
things like HVAC and fire evacuation. If you want to change this to an
enclosed layout you need to reconfigure all these systems. Most office space
is built speculatively by developers and will be designed to be fitted out as
open plan because of this. Most office space that is built for a specific
company is also built to this standard because it improves the resale value of
the building if it can be sold as generic office space.
~~~
tckr
Yes, that is exactly my point.
We have shitty offices, because they are build to suit the real estate market
not productivity.
But there are examples which are horrible by design, and not because the
property value was important: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2015/11/30...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-
about-the-future-of-work/) (first pic)
~~~
smikhanov
The employer's financial cost of the lost productivity of an average developer
in an open space office is much lower than developers like to think, and much,
much lower than the cost of the office with private rooms. By placing people
in the open space, companies pay almost three times less in office rental
costs ([https://www.mikhanov.com/2015/06/08/open-plan-offices-
creati...](https://www.mikhanov.com/2015/06/08/open-plan-offices-creativity-
and-programming-429)).
In other words, unless you're Sebastian Thrun, Chris Lattner, Lars Rasmussen,
Cliff Click or Guido van Rossum, your company doesn't care (and rightly so)
about your lost productivity because it just simply doesn't matter.
Gentlemen whose names listed above, I am certain, can have any office they
want.
~~~
xorblurb
Linked post entry is complete bullshit:
1\. the author's estimate for non-commoditized software development is
ridiculously low (0.1%)
2\. even then, those 0.1% are at the risk of not getting private/shared
offices. Do you want that for people working on medical devices or other fun
critical stuff now embedded in your everyday life? Well, too late. They are
working in shitty environment right now, I know that because I'm one of them.
Maybe one of the reason they are, is because a "manager" read that kind of
blog post which comfort them to be happy to do absurd economies.
3\. you can have shared office room with multiple people per room. Even
somehow big shared office room, if some trade-off are needed (although around
10 people should be a real max, otherwise above that there is no real
difference with a big open-office floor.
4\. if you want to do an economic analysis, even if the surface hypothetically
needs to triple (which I don't believe for a sec, see above), you need to
compare lost revenue per developer (or other interesting figures in case of
not yet profitable) -- _and_ think about non-linear factors -- to the cost of
extra space renting (mostly linear). "Pay[ing] almost three times less in
office rental costs" (which again, I don't believe) is not a business goal.
------
GuiA
Cool post. A few issues I see:
\- 30 people team?! I find 10-12 or so to be the max size before things
descend into chaos
\- 3 person office seem like a wrong compromise to me. If you want to optimize
for focused time, individual offices are best. 2 people offices can be
alright, but you'll necessarily have moments when someone comes to talk to
your coworker for 30 minutes about blablabla. If you want to optimize for in
person collaboration, pick a studio/lab like layout for the whole team
(topping out at 10-12). But 3 people is just an odd middle of the road
approach that's too awkward in practice, in my experience.
\- The wall covering the door is a good idea in theory, but in reality it
would probably mean distraction every time someone knocks at the door. How
does the visitor see whether the person they want to see is in or not without
entering and potentially distracting everyone?
\- Bathroom stalls would work if they were fully closed stalls, European
style. If this is in the US, then it'd get really awkward as you hear loud
farts next to you and recognize the shoes of Jerry from accounting. Individual
bathrooms would be much better.
\- Those "quiet time" seats seem awfully tight, and the library inconveniently
narrow.
~~~
tckr
> 30 people team
If it's a product team, you can easily have a company with 4-5 teams (design,
development, marketing/sales, support, content) so it's not to uncommon to
have a team grow to that size. And this size is still manageable, if they are
not all doing the same.
For me 30 is the max, I prefer it smaller, too.
> 3 person office
For me that's the ideal tag team: a junior, a medior and a senior working hand
in hand is great. In general I find my to be the most agile in teams of three.
3 opinions are a choice, and you can quickly find input if you don't have to
stand up to move.
_If_ I'm in the office I want to use that opportunity to be in close contact.
> The wall covering the door
You can peak through the window left and right of the door to see everyone in
the room.
> Bathroom stalls
Good point, I'll just update the design (similar to the shower)
> Library
Yes, you could be right.
~~~
carlob
> a junior, a medior and a senior
first time I hear the word medior. It's a fun neologism, but it's technically
very wrong in Latin: senior and junior are comparatives (older and younger),
so medior would be more medium?
~~~
tckr
We use it in Germany quite regulary.
It's the experience level in the middle between senior and junior.
~~~
_nalply
Perhaps you live near Netherlands? Here in a German speaking part of
Switzerland I never heard that word.
~~~
tckr
Rhein-Main region.
~~~
bshimmin
I work with an English guy who's been in Amsterdam for a few years now and he
often says "medior". He usually corrects himself to "middleweight" after a few
seconds.
------
Domenic_S
You have to have meeting rooms. People always say you don't, but you always
do. Where do you do sprint planning? Project brainstorming? Private meetings
(with actual privacy needed, like reviews)?
~~~
tckr
No dedicated meeting room? Yes, meetings should be reduced to an absolute
minimum and can be held in one of the offices or in the stand-up area. This
makes them public and everyone easily has the chance to join in. The same is
true for client meetings, which in my experience rarely take place at the
office if you are an agency, anyway. So, no dedicated meeting rooms necessary.
Sprint planning: in the town hall if the sprint involves most of the team, or
in on of the offices. A three people office can accommodate a small sprint
team of 6-7 people.
Project brainstorming: In the town-hall, in the kitchen, maybe outside when
taking a walk?
Private meetings: In most cases, the privacy of the corner seating areas will
be enough, but I think most of the times at least small office will be vacant,
because not everybody is in the office all the time.
------
BatFastard
LOTs of things I like about this office layout.
What I would add, black out blinds on all outer facing windows. I don't see a
refrigerator or a coffee machine/water/drinks.
What I don't like.
I would say rather then a white board, do a white wall.
Is the TV screen really needed? Its so easy to just teleconference on your
monitor.
Stand-up room needs to white board space for sure! Maybe use a projector
instead of a the monitors?
Cant say I care for the bathroom RIGHT next to the kitchen, personally I would
prefer those on opposite sides of the room.
I think the wall leading into each office takes up a ton of space, and adds
little value. How about a sliding barn door style door instead.
Last and most controversial. Get rid of the laptops and give everyone a
desktop machine. Create a laptop pool for people who want one when out of the
office. Use VMs to get your environments on them quickly. Plus I LOVE two
large monitors, but I do a lot of UX work. Code on the portrait monitor,
browser in landscape.
Thx for sharing!
~~~
bigzen
Okay you have my interest. Could you expand on why you would like to see
desktops with laptops for a VM? Would the laptop borrowing happen on a night
by night basis? Wouldn't you expect some employees to always take the laptops
home. Genuinely curious as to why you think this would be better. (more cost
effective, better office env, etc.)
~~~
tolien
Not the OP, but:
> Wouldn't you expect some employees to always take the laptops home
Maybe, but there's two issues here - they're either taking them for personal
use, or they're taking them to do (additional) work on. In the majority of
cases, you probably don't want to encourage either of these (in the same way
you wouldn't encourage someone to stay in the office till 3 am).
There's probably a group (on-call, not always in the office, etc etc.) who
would be better served by a docking station but speaking from the experience
of working at a place where _everyone_ gets a laptop, there's a significant
majority who have either never or very rarely needed to take a computer out of
the office in years but took the more expensive/more difficult to repair/more
likely to fail hit anyway.
~~~
TheCoelacanth
There are other reasons to take a laptop home. For instance, at my workplace,
the night before snow is predicted, nearly every single person will want to
take their laptop home so that they can work from home the next day if it
snows. If your laptop pool is smaller than the number of employees, there
won't be enough laptops to go around.
~~~
BatFastard
I just can't imagine a software developer not owning a computer. Its a basic
tool of your craft. I always have my own tools. An employer might prefer that
I use theirs at the work place, but I dont depend on it for my livelihood.
~~~
TheCoelacanth
Most companies don't want their IP floating around on computers that they
don't control
~~~
cuddlybacon
In addition, a lot of people don't want to workify their computer.
------
yakshaving_jgt
One sad thing that this article (I think inadvertently) illuminates is how
hypersensitive Americans are about mundane parts of life like using the
bathroom.
Markus' office design works over here in Europe because [I'm fairly certain]
his crowd invests heavily in a healthy social culture at work, as opposed to a
nervously litigious (i.e. immediately defer to HR) culture as is so common in
the US.
Personally, I think Markus' office design is excellent. What I would change
however, is the television setup. I've been 100% remote for most of my career,
so I'm always the guy on the television. I would much prefer to be on
everyone's screens individually like a little StarCraft briefing room.
Some benefits:
\- sound quality is better
\- less chance of audio feedback
\- visual cues (like when someone wants to interject) are easier to pick up on
\- screen sharing is usually easier
\- difference in latency is less pronounced
~~~
tckr
Yes, I agree. This is absolutely working so much better. I'm working remote
for many years and I always enjoy it, when people are using headsets and their
individual devices.
Primarily the TVs are used for sharing screens, and team metrics. So they are
mostly used for data, rather then communication.
------
stevesearer
One modern office concept readers who like OP's concept might find interesting
is at the company zeb in Munich, designed by Evolution Design:
[https://officesnapshots.com/2016/10/26/zeb-offices-
munich/](https://officesnapshots.com/2016/10/26/zeb-offices-munich/)
~~~
tckr
Yes, looks like they put very much effort into having enough quiet, secluded
desks and a lot of meeting room sizes but still maintaining a very flexible,
open-floor plan.
------
snegu
Definitely a place I would like to work. Only thing it's missing is a place
for nursing moms to pump (and an in-house daycare if I'm dreaming).
~~~
lj3
You mean like at Veridian Dynamics? :) Molding the children of today into the
workers of tomorrow!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SLFlNH0TLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SLFlNH0TLY)
~~~
btown
Better Off Ted is such an incredible, underrated comedy, so tongue-in-cheek it
hurts. Anyone who's ever felt under the thumb of a corporate environment (or,
for that matter, wants to know the bullet they dodged) will find something to
love. It's on Netflix.
------
mattpratt
I recently finished _Deep Work_ by Cal Newport. In the book he discusses a
workplace concept designed by David Dewane called the "Eudaimonia Machine".
This workspace has multiple sections you progress through linearly, slowly
moving towards independent, distraction free, personal chambers where you
perform your most productive, thoughtful, deepest work.
My dream office would have more rooms like this!
~~~
tckr
Yes!
I imagined having a floor where people arrange themselves based on lighting
preferences, so the farther you go into the floor the lower the lights are.
You can't have the lights brighter then the previous office.
~~~
mjevans
If only our monitors were good enough to follow that trend... instead of
defaulting to brightness that tries to battle the sun at noon.
------
Kiro
Am I the only one who actually likes open offices? I like the vibrant feeling
and never have any problems with distractions. I just put my headphones on and
zone in.
~~~
dasmoth
You're definitely not the only one.
Here's a question though: in a workplace with lots of space that's able to
offer a choice of a small private office or a well-set-up desk in an open
office for every developer, would you still choose the open space? And would
you be comfortable seeing people who are junior to you disappearing into
private offices?
~~~
reitanqild
I chose to sit in the hot equipment room for months at some place because i
needed quiet and some people just didn't get it.
Now I have my final day in a open floor plan. For the second time in my life
it has worked well, -IMO mostly because everyone is really nice and busily
working on their own stuff.
------
williamle8300
This is awesome. Thanks for putting in the time to put this together.
I love the 3-man office. Personally, I would just make it a 1-man office. I'm
a very loud thinker and easily distracted so I really can't have anyone in the
room when I'm hacking.
~~~
douche
The 3-person office would be just about enough for one person. Get rid of the
interior-facing windows. Make sure the walls and doors are sound-proof.
Combine the three desks into one large surface that's big enough to actually
work at. Get a beefy workstation, and a quad 27" monitor array. Make sure the
lights for the office are on their own circuit, so they can't be turned on by
anyone else on the floor. Bookcases.
------
Pica_soO
Open floor in the center, lots of single person office rooms at the outer
ring, with the ability to switch any time.
------
ensiferum
My previous office where I worked is one of the best ever.
\- office rooms (usually 1 team or half a team per room, about 3-4ppl)
\- electric tables for everyone (so you can work either seated or standing)
\- very nice kitchen, 2 * cooking facilities, 3 fridges, espresso machine
\- sauna + showers + lockers and towels
\- laundry facilities
\- music room with bass, guitars, eletric drums, keyboards. also combined as
VR room
\- games lounge with big ass screen and some consoles and PC with proper
"rally setup"
\- big library with sofas
\- quiet room with 2 beds
Additionally:
\- occupational nurse comes to the office once a month
\- physiotherapist comes to the office once a week for some exercise
\- Monday morning starts with a common breakfast
and of course some very smart people!
~~~
tckr
Wow. Sauna <3
Where was this?
~~~
Sammi
Sounds like Finland :)
~~~
tckr
I had the same thought!
------
kinos
I feel like the solo zones would get monopolized by people that like being
solo until necessary.
------
mynameishere
Traditional closed offices, conference rooms for group work, and multiple non-
shared unisex bathrooms (exactly like the kind in a typical house--how
innovative!)
That's the perfect office, and I know because I've worked in it and every
other variation.
~~~
r00fus
How many houses have unisex bathrooms with stalls? I know it was popular on
Ally McBeal, but how many of these exist? Or am I just sheltered and
unworldly?
~~~
Klockan
I think he meant unisex bathrooms without stalls. That is each bathroom
contains its own toilet and sink and there is a normal door you can close to
it without any gaps. Every office and every school outside of US I have been
to have had those.
Personally I think it is really strange that people who earn six figures still
has to shit next to each other with almost no privacy.
------
Fifer82
"which also brings everyone together during lunch time"
Fuck that. I am out of there for some air, a walk and peace.
------
silveira
Really cool office. I like that there is a lot of windows. I imagine they
could be closed if you want less sunlight/glare.
I like the unisex bathroom. The majority of bathrooms are already unisex, as
everyone have unisex restrooms at home. We could avoid a lot of complications
by having them in the offices as well. Another good thing of your model is not
having the gap in the stalls that is so common in the US. I also loved having
a shower. One thing, why do you need the window between the bathroom and the
kitchen? I don't like the idea of everyone in the kitchen looking who is going
to the bathroom.
One thing that would bother me working in this office is that it looks like
almost every computer screen has a window behind it or is facing a common
area. I don't like that, personally.
The one-on-one meeting area, I think they would be better in a place with a
whiteboard and more acoustic isolation and privacy. It could be used for
interviewing a candidate too.
The stand-up room could lose one window in favor of a whiteboard.
------
dbg31415
On the whole, certainly an improvement over any open-floor plan.
But... some points made me cringe.
> The unisex bathroom has a separate shower for those that come to the office
> by bike.
I do not want a unisex bathroom. I've had a unisex bathroom... at work and in
college and I don't want to go back to that again. Unisex bathrooms create way
too many awkward situations... (And also, I wouldn't put the bathroom next to
the kitchen... that's just odd.)
> The kitchen is very well equipped with a large stove, because cooking is a
> great social activity, and you can’t beat healthy, self-cooked lunch.
I don't want there to be a kitchen at work. Truth be told, I don't even want
there to be a microwave at work... this is the source of the bad smells the
author was complaining about. These things never get cleaned right. I've
worked for a lot of agencies, including some really nice places, and unless
they have full-time custodial staff going around cleaning up after you, the
kitchen will always be disgusting. And the smell... encouraging people to cook
at work I think is a horrible idea. If I had a kitchen... I certainly wouldn't
put the stove against an interior wall, I'd want that to be vented outside
with a strong range hood fan.
> No dedicated meeting room? Yes, meetings should be reduced to an absolute
> minimum and can be held in one of the offices or in the stand-up area. This
> makes them public and everyone easily has the chance to join in.
I'd want one or two dedicated meeting rooms. If only for interviews, or staff
disciplinary meetings / HR meetings where it wouldn't be appropriate to have
it in someone's office... I don't need a massive conference room, but a couple
of 12x12 rooms with round tables and some white boards would be nice.
~~~
justinpombrio
> Unisex bathrooms create way too many awkward situations...
Fortunately this awkwardness can be avoided by having separate sex bathrooms,
because people of the same sex are never attracted to one another.
> And also, I wouldn't put the bathroom next to the kitchen... that's just
> odd.
For plumbing reasons, things that require water tend to be near to one
another. Ever noticed that bathrooms are always above one another, even in
buildings with otherwise complicated floor plans? At least, I assume that's
why.
~~~
coldtea
> _Fortunately this awkwardness can be avoided by having separate sex
> bathrooms, because people of the same sex are never attracted to one
> another._
Far less often, by biological imperative, so yes. It can be, if not avoided,
diminished.
------
tckr
A lot of commenters wished for single person rooms. As a remote worker, I'd
say: if I want to work solo (for some time), why go to the office in the first
place? I'd stay at home or go to a coffee shop.
I could imagine having a second floor, that has more privacy features: single
person offices, rooms for private conversations, power napping, nursing mums,
yoga.
What do you think?
------
TylerE
A microwave creates enough nasty smells, and he wants a full kitchen?
~~~
petepete
So long as it's separate and ventilated, a kitchen would be fine.
I've worked in places where people can't be trusted to wash their mugs and
cutlery, though, so it wouldn't work everywhere.
------
teddyh
I always thought that Fog Creek Software’s “Bionic Office” was interesting:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-
office/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/)
------
cyberferret
Nice designs - I like them and would certainly consider some of those ideas in
any future office fitout of mine.
However, I am unsure about those walls just inside the doorways that act as a
buffer. Why not just have a door (with a glass window, the wall with the door
doesn't already have a window)?
That way, the team working in the room can simply close the door when they do
not want to be disturbed, or open it when they don't mind visitors. The window
still lets others look in to peek at what they are doing, and the non window
space on the door can still be used to put up signs, posters etc. as they
would on the wall section.
~~~
tckr
I wanted to have a little visual blocker, too. Just a glass door is not
enough. Visitors can peek through the windows to see if a person is available.
And I would add a red / green LED to the door knob which signals if you are
free to enter.
The wall inside also serves as a stand for the (heavy) flatscreen and has a
coat hanger. I think it adds a nice cosy touch to the office, you you come in
an e.g. take off your shoes.
~~~
cyberferret
Fair enough. The fact that the wall has multiple purposes is pretty neat. The
concept is growing on my now.
------
masukomi
We had 2 ovens in our last office. They got used once that i can remember. No-
one wants to deal with bringing in all the materials to cook an oven meal and
no-one wants to deal with all the cleaning afterwards... I'm not bringing in
my pans, knives, cutting boards, spices, vegetables, meats, starches etc. to
work, to cook one meal. No-one else is either. So you've got a large expensive
hole in the wall that no-one uses. Get a second microwave instead. ;)
------
throwaway41597
Good effort! Although you can't please everyone.
I think you should mention cost. The rectangle is about 20m x 16m = 320m2 or
about 10,7m2/person. And the ceiling is about 3.5m.
~~~
tckr
Yes, right. I have no idea what typical offices have per person?
~~~
chillydawg
I currently py about £500 per month per head for serviced office space. Very
small, though, with six of us and could easily grow to 8 or 9 in the space so
the cost drops.
~~~
throwaway41597
And how many square meters ? Do you find it enough ?
------
dyeje
I like it a lot. Some tweaks I'd suggest:
1\. Alternate configurations of the offices to handle growth. People are gonna
get added, it's inevitable so you may as well make the best of it.
2\. 2 - 4 meeting rooms. They're just a must. Customer / contractor calls,
interviews, client meetings, private meetings (nobody wants to get fired in
front of their peers), etc.
------
buro9
I worked on the Cloudflare London office with a few other colleagues and an
external architect firm who were tasked with making it a reality.
The proposed dream office would not work because:
* Teams are not always 3 or 6 and they grow and contract constantly
* Unisex bathrooms are fine for guys, not for anyone else
* 1 shower is never enough
* The airflow and temperature hasn't been thought about
* Growth hasn't been thought about
Also, in the comments someone suggested a proper stove in the kitchen. Let me
dampen that immediately, fire regulations and other rules probably state that
you cannot have an open flame or other heating devices outside of a very small
selection or well-controlled items. You also probably are not fitting the
electrics for this.
Unless your company size is very stable (WRT growth), you are going to have an
open plan office.
It is the only way to deal with "fit more desks here", "change the layout like
this", "that team is now growing faster than this team, swap their locations
around".
Things we focused on:
* If we're going to have open plan (urgh), can we make it visually organic and not a battery farm (mis-align things, introduce space, randomness, natural materials, etc)
* If we're going to have open spaces, can we control the lighting so that it is flooded with natural light, we have zero strip lights and each area has control of their lighting (big windows, with blinds, dim lights over work areas, desk lighting people can control, LED strips for even lighting over walkways)
* To keep it habitable, we pump far more regular air than most places would, and we only aircon a little when it really is outside of a comfortable range
* If we're going to have communal spaces can we have them cosy and quiet (read "A Pattern Language", we purchased a lot of old Danish furniture and furnished small spaces like a little living rooms, very comfy)
* If we're going to have a town hall space / auditorium, can we limit the noise or impact on the rest of the environment
* If we're going to have a shared kitchen, can we make sure people can sit with most of their team (bench tables beat small tables, as the latter constrain you to 6 people and a team may be 7)
But it is an office, there is high growth. In the current London space we
started with 60 people and now have just shy of 100, and it is the same space
and we're not yet sitting on top of each other. That is only achievable by
having open plan and not filling in space with desks until you have to, and by
moving people around when you need to.
The ideal office shown... would be lovely. But to have that, you cannot really
have any growth, and I bet the air would stagnate in that space pretty
quickly.
Things we got wrong:
* Not enough of the right sized meeting rooms. We put in 4 x 2 people, 2 x 4 people, 1 x 8 person. Later had to add 2 x 6 people and another 1 x 8 person.
* We are starting to feel the noise levels, this really is about how sales grows fastest at a certain point in the life of a company and sales are inherently noisy by comparison... we've moved engineering away but this still means some staff who are not in sales are impacted by sales noise.
Things we got right:
* The flow around the office is really nice, people interact without being forced together or too far apart
* 3 showers for 100 people is enough that no-one waits long even when a quarter of staff are cycling in the height of Summer because we don't dictate a start hour to all staff (only those covering shifts)
What you build is according to needs, but growth dictates almost everything.
You may not even _stay_ in your new fancy office for more than a couple of
years if your growth is that good, and this is going to dictate your spend.
Ultimately for it to make sense to design an office, the amortized costs need
to be competitive with hiring space from Regus or something. If you've gone
too far down the path of a design that involves putting up internal walls and
spaces that need ripping down to handle growth, then the project is probably
doomed to fail.
~~~
buro9
Oh, and sound.
Sound is so hard to model, control, reason about.
Every assumption you make about how sound works within a space will be wrong,
and small spaces like meeting rooms are even harder to get right.
------
jlebrech
what about open plan but they give you ear buds in the morning and you can
only communicate via memo or in a meeting room.
~~~
tckr
Open plan would work, if people would be cautious about the noise they are
creating.
But people don't.
------
amelius
It eludes me why all the images are taken from above, a viewpoint from which
no user will ever actually see the office ...
~~~
tckr
You can use the viewer in FPS mode (click on the feet icon).
------
Arizhel
This has a lot of problems.
First, legal problems: you can't have a unisex multi-stall bathroom in the
USA. I'm not sure if it's actually illegal (it probably is in many states),
but it'll never fly even if it is. Honestly, what you really need is a male
restroom that's about 5 times the size of the female restroom. Again, that
won't fly politically, but practically it makes sense because there's so few
women in software. Better yet is to just ditch the shared bathrooms
altogether: they're nasty and smelly, and it's inhuman to have to sit on the
pot next to someone with only a crappy divider which doesn't even go to the
floor so you can see their feet and their pants around their ankles. You also
have to worry about Idahoans playing footsie with you in there. Whoever came
up with this idea has serious mental issues, and somehow it's the norm almost
everywhere. Instead, just have separate 1-person unisex bathrooms, and put
little showers in at least 2 of them for the cyclists.
The walled offices with giant windows: these windows are much too large on the
inside. The whole reason for a walled office is to have privacy, and you're
taking it away with those windows. Also, you're distracting the people sitting
inside because they'll see all the people walking by their office, since that
office will most likely open into a high-traffic corridor. Make the windows
much smaller, maybe enough to see the top of the head of someone sitting
inside and that's about it. Or just get rid of them altogether, or maybe have
frosted glass. Windows on the other side are nice, but there's only so much
space along the outside wall of the building, so who gets to sit here? Likely
only managers.
The dedicated "quiet alone-time" places are great, but there aren't nearly
enough of them. They're going to get monopolized, while all those "team
spaces" are going to get ignored mostly. How about just having only the quiet
1-person places, and just one or two of the team spaces for the people who
really like that or in case something comes up where people want to work as a
team temporarily?
The library isn't a bad idea, but it's not nearly large enough.
The "townhall" is a massive waste of space. You don't need daily stand-ups,
that's a patch for lousy management. The building should have a large meeting
room shared by all departments for events where you need everyone present.
Honestly, we'd all be better off if we could go back to the way offices were
in the 70s or 80s, minus the smoking inside part.
I do like his illustrations though: it reminds me of playing Duke Nukem 3D.
~~~
repiret
> First, legal problems: you can't have a unisex multi-stall bathroom in the
> USA. I'm not sure if it's actually illegal (it probably is in many states),
> but it'll never fly even if it is.
It is illegal in the US, see 29CFR1910.141(c): "...toilet rooms separate for
each sex, shall be provided in all places of employment [...] Where toilet
rooms will be occupied by no more than one person at a time, can be locked
from the inside, and contain at least one water closet, separate toilet rooms
for each sex need not be provided."
[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2016-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2016-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-2016-title29-vol5-sec1910-141.xml)
~~~
aninhumer
That sounds like it's fine as long as you have fully enclosed lockable stalls?
(i.e. "toilet rooms")
------
mdip
Interesting thoughts and I haven't personally formed an opinion about where I
stand on this one, quite yet.
I worked at home for almost ten years until two months ago when I started a
job at a tech company at their main office. They have the oft-maligned[0]
open-office layout, which coming from a work-at-home coding job, should have
been _really_ painful. Their approach, however, has worked out really well for
me for a few reasons:
0/ Staff understands the need for concentration when coding. _Almost_ everyone
here is a software developer, so we're all respectful of one another. I was
told on _day one_ that if someone has headphones in, it's best to instant
message them rather than walk up because there's an unwritten rule that
"headphones" means "I'm concentrating". I actually wonder how many folks have
headphones in with nothing on -- I use my active noise-cancelling cans
regularly with nothing but the noise cancelling turned on because it gives
solid, simulating, silence. But the thing of it is, the place isn't loud or
overly distracting.
1/ There are a number of meeting rooms and couches throughout the office,
located in quiet places, with no "rules" about use other than that scheduled
meetings win over impromptu for meeting rooms. People are encouraged to work
wherever they're comfortable and I prefer to sit on a couch with my feet up
since while I was working at home I tended to work on my couch in the living
room or in my bed rather than in my office[1]. The couches are placed in areas
that are offset from the general office area, so they're quieter, as well. I
simply don't sit at my assigned desk and nobody cares (really, it's
encouraged). My desk is also located on a side of the office where lights are
turned off because those who sit over there prefer it[1].
2/ They have a number of other alternative workstations set-up, like
unassigned standing desks (with bar-stools for those who want to sit at a
standing desk...). This allows me to switch things up when I'm in a rut and
need an environment change to inspire me.
I thought it was going to be a lot more painful to adjust from working at home
to working in an open-office environment. I'm finding I like it quite a bit,
though. At the end of the day most companies have two choices for office
layout -- open or cube farm. The reason is that cubicle walls are considered
furniture under tax code, whereas offices are classified differently. This
makes cube-walls far more cost effective than "real walls" due to the
increased time that it takes for the latter to be allowed to be written off.
Having done the cramped cube-farm arrangement, I'll take open. Cubicles are
the worst of both worlds -- they feel like working in a (small) closet, and
when laid out the way they typically are, they destroy ones ability to
navigate an office, block natural light and make a place feel more prison-
like. Open offices kill privacy and negatively affect concentration but allow
light to flow and make the office feel big and ... open ... which I am finding
I like quite a bit. Plus, it's a lot easier to ride the one-wheel skateboards
around the office when there's fewer obstructions.
[0] Oft-maligned by me, specifically. I wrote regularly about my hatred of
this kind of office but now having spent a few months working in one, I am
enjoying it quite a bit provided a few features are present.
[1] I casually mentioned my dislike for the darker side of the office to one
of the company founders who introduced himself while I was working on the
couch in the kitchen. Before I could get the sentence out was told "Oh, just
move your desk!". I haven't done so because I have no need. Sometimes I want
to work in the dark (it's not actually "dark", it's just not lit by interior
lighting -- our office is pretty bright due to the wealth of windows and
natural light during the day), so I troll back there when I feel like it.
Because I can work in so many different places in the office, it's irrelevant
where my desk is.
------
preordained
This is a nice thought exercise...but that this is often treated like one of
the great tribulations of our time as developers...it's a bit pathetic. I'm
not saying things can't be better, but as a working people, we're not exactly
oppressed.
~~~
droopyEyelids
How could you take the time to complain about this article while there are
children starving in Yemen?
Being given the choice to read someone's thoughts on improving people's lives
isn't exactly oppressing you.
~~~
preordained
It's an issue developers, or hacker news, harps on all the time. You would
think we are working in some unregulated third world factory conditions. Most
of us work in a comfortable office with plenty of amenities. Yes, the open
trend is less conducive to work we do. Noted. I just feel fixating on this
stuff and (IMO) exaggerating how vile and terrible the average working
conditions for us are makes us look needy and entitled as a community. My .02
I'm just honestly disturbed how much this "issue" seems to resonate with
hacker news. I could leave well enough alone, but I had an opinion I wanted to
share.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Precision Opportunities for Demanded Bits in LLVM - luu
https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1714
======
rwmj
Nice, but I wonder if applying an SMT solver to just about every instruction
in your program isn't likely to blow up sometimes. The solver is, after all,
worst case NP complete.
~~~
yokaze
Not really, since the input of the solver is bounded by the native word size
of the architecture.
~~~
rwmj
It still might try to do 2^64 operations then.
------
chrisseaton
Does anyone know how do LLVM's demanded bits compare to 'stamps' in compilers
like Graal?
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Tools never die ... never - justnearme
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/02/01/133188723/tools-never-die-waddaya-mean-never?sc=fb&cc=fp
======
Detrus
Ballista, scorpio exist only in re-enactments and are far from the
functionality of the originals. The originals required human hair, it was the
springiest, had to be processed very particularly and it's very labor
intensive to recreate, so re-enactors have not. Their historical range is ~400
meters, replicas do ~150.
Complicated specialized tech made in large urban populations is the place to
look. Many things went extinct only to be reinvented once large urban
populations arose again. But sometimes there was alternative technology,
people did not remake the ballista because there were guns by the time urban
populations bounced back in Europe.
Greek fire, Roman concrete, Egyptian concrete lost and reinvented. Damascus
steel - exact process lost, Japanese made something similar. Egyptian block
built ships are lost [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/building-pharaohs-
ship....](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/building-pharaohs-ship.html)
but ships for the same purpose were reinvented and drastically better. We
don't use large wooden ships today, except for re-enactments. Siege towers not
used, city walls not built, but we have tanks and trenches.
So it depends on how you categorize it. Functionality of tools remains, but
some specifics are drastically different, so it gets subjective.
~~~
stcredzero
_Ballista, scorpio exist only in re-enactments and are far from the
functionality of the originals...Their historical range is ~400 meters,
replicas do ~150._
Being gimped is not exactly "going extinct."
_Damascus steel - exact process lost_
There is now a compelling claim for having found the process again.
_Functionality of tools remains, but some specifics are drastically
different, so it gets subjective._
That's the thing. It's hard for _functionality_ or the need for it to
disappear. And where it's supplanted by superior functionality, there's still
reenactment. There is probably technology that has disappeared, but only in
the case where we've _completely lost all mentions or records of it._ That's
the only way something can get beyond the reach of the re-enactors. However,
by the time something's gotten that obscure, it's been too thoroughly
forgotten to be counted.
In other words, we can't find lost technology, because technology is really
informational in essence, and if it's lost it's lost from anyone's
consciousness or any known record _by definition._
------
zacharycohn
I think the more interesting discussion (and where I hopped this was going)
was that tools never die, they just evolve.
For all of his examples he was able to come up with some trivial example of
some near-extinct culture in some very small part of the world using them. But
for instance the chariot wheel EVOLVED into the automobile wheel, hammers
evolved into jackhammers and hammerdrills (and just plain hammers), brass
helmets into motorcycle helmets.
I think finding a tool that is no longer used and has no "children" would be
the truly interesting find. If a tool is used to serve a purpose and solve a
problem, are there any categories of problems that we simply don't run into
anymore?
And for the people talking about parts for '87 chevy's and IDEs or dead
software projects, I think you're taking his point far too literally.
~~~
derleth
> I think finding a tool that is no longer used and has no "children" would be
> the truly interesting find.
I'd look at tools used for gas lamps.
Candles are still legitimately used for emergency purposes, but without a gas
distribution network using gas lamps is pretty much impossible, given that
it's no longer reasonable to keep gas fixtures around as long as electricity
works reasonably reliably.
Frankly, gas lamps are the worst of both worlds when compared to candles and
electric lighting: They're reliant on complex infrastructure, even if you
somehow have your own gas supply, and they're still based on the toxic and
fire-hazard-prone technology of burning flammable things. When you factor in
the risk of gas leaks, they're actually worse than candles.
~~~
ars
In Israel some Jews use gas lamps for lighting on the Sabbath because the
electric grid is run by non-religious Jews in violation of the Sabbath, and
they don't want to benefit from that. (Before you ask: There is no central gas
distribution network in Israel because of the risk of war, so all houses have
individual tanks.)
The requirement to avoid the electric grid is disputed, and most religious
Jews don't, but some do.
------
genieyclo
One I remember being fascinated about from Latin class: the Antikythera
Mechanism[1].
EDIT: Others include Roman cement, which was _masterfully_ produced by them.
It's the reason so many of their structures and amazingly engineered roads are
still around today, millenia later.
[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism>
~~~
steveklabnik
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk>
------
genieyclo
Seems lots of ancient medicines and herbal plants with special effects were
lost like Silphium[1] and Nepenthe[2].
Who knows what other amazing things perished with the Library of
Alexandria[3], House of Wisdom in Baghdad[4], Library of Pergamum[5], and
Imperial Library of Constantinople[6]?
[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium> [2]:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthe> [3]:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria> [4]:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom> [5]:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Pergamum> [6]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantino...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantinople)
------
showerst
My understanding is that we can't rebuild a certain gel that's used in some
older nuclear weapons, because we've lost all of the formulas, all of the
production processes, and the handful of people who had both the scientific
understanding of the stuff and the clearance.
Has anyone else heard this story, and can they back it up with a real source?
~~~
msbarnett
You're thinking of FOGBANK[1], which they apparently had to reverse-engineer
the manufacturing process for after, essentially, losing the any documentation
of how to make it.
On the subject of the question in the article itself, it seems trivial to come
up with technologies that have stopped being made: semaphore towers, metric
clocks, lisp machines, and slide rules spring to mind.
[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK>
~~~
arst
Slide rules are still made
([http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=slide+rule&x=0&y=0))
------
3pt14159
The best bet would probably be a tool used in a now dead religion. For
example, a tool specifically design to force a live fish down the throat of a
duck to appease kurlog, god of pond boats.
~~~
ars
Maybe the tools Egyptians used to remove internal organs before embalming?
------
jsulak
Greek fire (unless you want to count napalm as the same thing).
~~~
makmanalp
As well as serpentines and such ancient war machines.
~~~
shkb
Damascus and bulat steel too. Lots of weapons mentioned here...
------
bobds
Damascus steel.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel>
I'm sure there's tons of tools that are extinct and no surviving record of
them exists, so we don't know about them. In that sense, you could say it's
all a matter of documentation. If something doesn't exist at a given moment
but is documented, it's likely that it will be made again at some point.
------
dy9
I would have gone for something big and expensive, like, say, the lunar
module. Is anyone making a new lunar module or a hydrogen dirigible these
days?
------
ars
I was going to suggest the physicians head mirror (the one with a hole),
except <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_mirror> says "They are still
routinely used by otolaryngologists in the clinical setting, particularly for
examination and procedures involving the oral cavity."
------
Jun8
"I tried ... Paleolithic hammers (still being made) ...". OK this is too good
to be true. I googled and it IS available, for $230:
[http://www.stoneageartifacts.com/html/Artifact-
Hand%20Axes.h...](http://www.stoneageartifacts.com/html/Artifact-
Hand%20Axes.html). It is mind boggling who buys these things.
------
chwahoo
I'm currently reading Kevin Kelley's book and am enjoying it, but I find his
"technology NEVER dies" conjecture mostly uninteresting. I guess it's a strong
enough statement that it begs for disproof, but I haven't heard any
interesting conclusions that rely on it.
------
ladon86
OK guys, this smells like a challenge. Can anyone think of a tool which has
been made extinct?
~~~
Charuru
I wrote an IDE the other day that nobody uses. Does that count?
~~~
sammcd
Not sure why people are voting you down. I've written quite a few tools for
coding that have gone unused, and its exactly where my mind went too.
------
ars
How about the tool used to weld a metal link around a prisoner or slave's
ankle?
I can't imagine anyone still knows how to do that. (But I'm semi expecting to
be proved wrong.)
~~~
groby_b
I'm willing to bet money that you will find members of the BDSM community who
will know the exact process and are more than willing to hook you up. (So to
speak ;)
------
conover
I heard this on the radio on the way to work this morning. The obvious thing
that came to mind was the technology used to build the pyramids.
------
Charuru
There is a bit of a survivor bias in this challenge, as the tools that are no
longer being made corresponds well to tools which nobody remembers.
------
maeon3
The problem here is not asking a clear question. There are millions or
billions of tools that are no longer being built today. I made one just now as
I was writing this post, it will never be built again.
Yes it is a cute conclusion, it outlines an interesting social phenomenon. But
'Tools never die' is not correct.
Also, Fred's steam engine is no longer built, it was unique, if you show me
steam engines, it is not Fred's steam engine.
------
derleth
[http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/radiumemanator...](http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/radiumemanator.htm)
I give you the radium emanator, a device used to infuse water with the healthy
radiation from radium. From the link, "It appears to have been made from
cement mixed with uranium ore."
Needless to say, it was never a good idea, and the use of this tool died out
with the end of the radium fad and, presumably, more than a few of the fad's
adherents.
I will be very surprised if _anyone_ was still making this or something to do
the same thing.
~~~
pontifier
I'm sure that along those same lines there are products that have been
discontinued because the long term effects of their use overwhelms the actual
benefits. DDT, lead based paint, and asbestos ceiling tiles come to mind.
------
derleth
Williams-Kilburn tubes, which were CRTs with high-persistence phosphor used as
memory and display devices beginning in the 1940s. The 'high-persistence'
means W-K tubes are the exact _opposite_ of where CRT technology stands today:
They're useless for TVs and computer monitors, because the phosphor stays lit
too long. However, that's what you want if you're using the phosphor to store
bits of data in a vacuum tube computer, or to display the contents of memory
in that computer.
Plenty of people are making CRTs today. I doubt anyone is making CRTs that
would be useful W-K tubes.
(Another guess might be core memory but, knowing NASA and some of IBM's
customers, I have a suspicion someone still has real uses for a few hundred
kilobytes of core.)
[as originally posted by me elsewhere]
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Streaming Video and Audio with Low Delay - mortenvp
http://steinwurf.com/blog/2018-04-25-2022.html
======
urlgrey
Periscope developed a Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LHLS) technique that
relies on HTTP chunked transfer-encoding to stream video bytes as they are
encoded at the origin. This is still subject to TCP packet retransmission
overhead, but the time-to-first-byte is reduced significantly and leads to
less buffering on the client.
Here's a Periscope post about LHLS:
[https://medium.com/@periscopecode/introducing-lhls-media-
str...](https://medium.com/@periscopecode/introducing-lhls-media-streaming-
eb6212948bef)
Most systems that serve HLS media use fixed content-length segments, which
requires knowledge of the length of a segment before the first byte can be
sent over the wire. So, for a 5 second segment you would need to encode the
entire 5 seconds before the first byte can be sent; this does not apply when
streaming the segments with chunked transfer encoding.
Incidentally, at Mux we also use chunked transfer-encoding to stream video
that is encoded on-the-fly with great performance.
~~~
reggieband
I've heard from colleagues that this won't be possible with DASH due to the
switch to fMP4 format. One of my co-workers tells me that fMP4 requires the
entire segment to be loaded before playback can begin while TS segments don't
require this. We've been looking into very small segments (e.g. 1s duration)
to reduce latency but I've been interested in the LHLS approach since I first
heard of it.
~~~
urlgrey
Very short segment durations are effective only when latency is more important
than quality.
Each TS segment must start with a key-frame, and the GOP size can't exceed the
duration of a segment (e.g. one second). Lowering the segment duration
increases the frequency of key-frames, which has the effect of lowering the
quality you can achieve at a given bitrate.
~~~
RBO2
Note that this is a Apple requirement for HLS. Most people don't realize that
the GOP size doesn't impact the latency, but it impacts start-up time.
------
kazinator
Low delay is much, much more important for _calls_ than for streaming. One
second of buffering delay may be acceptable in streaming playback (users often
contend with longer delays). That much delay will severely degrade a video
call, especially if the audio stays synced with the delayed video.
~~~
MiniMax42
Also, for real-life auctions where online bidders can participate
~~~
kazinator
There is justification in regarding that as a form of video call rather than
media playback, even though the video may be only in one direction and the
reverse communication (flow of bids) isn't AV.
------
fenesiistvan
Instead of a separate protocol you can already use a codec with built-in FEC
such as OPUS.
~~~
nh2
Which video codecs have that inbuilt?
~~~
TD-Linux
None, so a separate FEC can still be useful. You can use FEC like described in
the article with WebRTC: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-
fec-08](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-fec-08)
------
jakobegger
Anybody have an idea how to put this into practice? I recently tried streaming
video over wifi from a Raspberry (for a robotics hobby project) , and
everything I tried was either unusable or very delayed.
Is there an open source low latency video streaming solution for hobbyists?
~~~
mbrumlow
I use ffmpeg and some custom services for
[http://robot247.io](http://robot247.io)
All the code is on GitHub. I can get very low latency video. Most of the delay
comes in the form of the speed of light being so slow.
On the web site in use jsmpeg.
~~~
m3adow
Can you link the repo please? I couldn't find a link in the site and would be
interested.
~~~
mbrumlow
Here is the core of the site. I have not had much time to keep robots on line
but if you want a demo you can ping me at my username at gmail and I can pop a
robot on line (during work hours if I am in the office).
I have been working on a better web interface that has on screen controls,
because most people seem to want to type in like twitch, but the arrow keys
are what you use.
[https://github.com/mbrumlow/webbot](https://github.com/mbrumlow/webbot)
------
coldsauce
Anyone know what the best streaming solution for browser <-> browser video
calling is? It probably has to be built on top of WebRTC but I'm wondering if
there are codecs and forward error correction algorithms out there already in
Javascript to use.
~~~
kwindla
For small numbers of people in a call (say, n < 5), the "best" \-- meaning
lowest latency -- solution is direct browser to browser WebRTC connections.
Both Chrome's and Firefox's WebRTC implementations have quite good FEC built
in. And sending UDP packets directly between peers will have much lower
latency than routing through a media server.
Of course, sometimes peer-to-peer won't work for you. Maybe you have
requirements that push you towards routing media through a server. (Content
filtering, or compositing video or mixing audio, for example.) Or maybe you
have more than a few people in a call. If so, upstream bandwidth and encoding
become bottlenecks for mesh/peer-to-peer. Finally, some firewalls won't allow
UDP traffic from/to computers behind them, so you'll need to route UDP through
a central server, or (much worse) tunnel over TCP.
Back on the subject of latency and error correction in WebRTC, here are some
fun links:
Draft spec for FEC in WebRTC: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-
fec-08](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-fec-08)
Mozilla article from when they first turned on Opus FEC. Includes sample audio
for calls with 19% packet loss. (19% packet loss is very, very bad. My startup
makes a browser-to-browser video calling tool, and we try hard to deal well
with packet loss that high, but it's a losing battle.)
[https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/audio-fec-
experiments/](https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/audio-fec-experiments/)
Notes from the very knowledgeable folks at Callstats.io about WebRTC FEC.
Covers some of the same material as this thread's original post:
[https://www.callstats.io/2016/11/09/how-to-recover-lost-
medi...](https://www.callstats.io/2016/11/09/how-to-recover-lost-media-
packets-in-webrtc-with-fec/)
Tsahi Levent-Levi's benchmarks showing how a few different media servers
perform in the context of 10% packet loss: [https://testrtc.com/webrtc-media-
server-packet-loss/](https://testrtc.com/webrtc-media-server-packet-loss/)
------
thefourthchime
The title is misleading, when they say low-delay, really they mean over UDP
instead of TCP. Their answer to video over UDP is a marginal efficiency gain
in a forward error correction algorithm called RLNC.
I haven't looked at RLNC, but it does seem to have some gains over more
traditional FEC schemes.
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04873](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04873)
~~~
mortenvp
As stated in the article, low delay is very hard to achieve over a reliable
transport based on re-transmissions (such as TCP) - you have to wait for the
loss to be detected and then the retransmitted packet to arrive. This is at
least 3 x the latency of the link. Therefore if you really care about bounded
low latency you need to use some form of erasure correcting algorithm (to
provide upfront redundancy).
In the article we simply show that substituting one "old" algorithm for a more
modern one can give you much better efficiency (protection against packet
loss) for the same bandwidth and latency/delay budget.
~~~
thefourthchime
Please help me understand then. I see RLNC compared to 2022 Single mode has
the same overhead of 25%. When I compare the two using your tool at the end of
the article, the only change I see is an improvement from 5% random loss to
25%. The burst loose stays the same. Correct?
~~~
mortenvp
Yes, you get a much better random loss protection with RLNC. So if you know
that all your losses are bursts you may be able to live with 2022. Essentially
the difference between the two algorithms are that with 2022 only a subset of
your packets are protected by a redundancy packet (and you have to choose how
to protect them), whereas with RLNC you can protect all available packets. If
we leave the premise of this post (namely that we want to generate traffic in
the same pattern as 2022) RLNC can even protect against longer bursts compared
to 2022.
Did that make sense?
------
rjeli
Anyone know what PSNow/ cloud gaming services use? I’m using it to play some
ps3 games and the delay is immediately noticeable when you start playing, but
your brain adjusts and it’s not noticeable. Has to be around 300-400 ms round
trip
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Slack Lunch Club - mikestaub
https://slacklunch.club
======
gitgud
Cool idea, but the GitHub [1] readme looks like this project was kind of over
engineered. Was this project a guide for building highly available apps?
[1] [https://github.com/mikestaub/slack-lunch-
club/blob/master/RE...](https://github.com/mikestaub/slack-lunch-
club/blob/master/README.md)
~~~
mikestaub
Yes exactly, that was the goal. There are many tutorials showing you how to
build a react todo list with firebase, etc. There is always so much more that
needs to be done to run a real web app in production. I kept the actual app
extremely simple to put the focus on everything else. Also, choosing ArangoDB
made the initial setup much more complicated as there is no hosted solution
yet on the market. But now that all the setup work has been done, anyone can
just clone the repo and use it for their own app. :)
------
mtmail
The launch blog post from another recent HN submission
[https://medium.com/@mikestaub22/slack-lunch-club-
part-1-7-de...](https://medium.com/@mikestaub22/slack-lunch-club-
part-1-7-deep-dive-into-a-modern-web-app-d3eb980a215)
------
newman8r
It's nice to see more projects using ArangoDB, it's one of the more enjoyable
database systems I've worked with.
~~~
mikestaub
I couldn't agree more. That was one of the main goals of this project
actually, to raise awareness for ArangoDB.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Planting Perennials Next to Potholes: Silos, bikesheds, and how to prioritize - dvaun
https://bravenewgeek.com/planting-perennials-next-to-potholes/
======
dvaun
I slightly modified the title in order to convey its original meaning _and_
fit within length constraints.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Anyone using Samsung DeX? - genericone
I will be getting my hands on a Galaxy S9 in the near future and one of the touted features is "Dex", some sort of mobile desktop. There was a big discussion about it a year ago, but I haven't exactly heard much since then. What are hners take on Dex? Is it any good? Do you use it on a regular/semi-regular basis? Is it just a charger at this point for most people?<p>Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15743785
======
gaspoweredcat
i played with it briefly when the s8 came out but i dont believe that much has
changed with it since then. the idea is all well and good i guess but the
reality is that most of us have plenty of desktop devices already and as a
general rule theyre more useful than a basic desktop environment on an ARM
based system
unless for some reason you have a monitor, keyboard and mouse but nothing to
connect to them it may suffice for something but id argue that even a
raspberry pi is more versatile
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
How Quaternions encode rotations: derivation and sample code - CarolineW
http://loopspace.mathforge.org/HowDidIDoThat/Codea/Quaternions/
======
jacobolus
Anyone interested in such topics should check out geometric algebra, a.k.a.
Clifford algebra. Start with
[http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf](http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/OerstedMedalLecture.pdf)
Matrices and trigonometry are in my opinion a pedagogically, conceptually, and
practically poor way of understanding and using quaternions; furthermore,
cross products (and the associated confusion about a right hand rule and polar
vs. axial vectors and so on, not to mention a total failure to generalize to
higher dimensions) need to vanish from the earth.
More generally, this is a topic that should be explained first using pictures,
ideally interactive ones. The algebraic manipulations to formally prove what
the pictures explain visually should just fill in the bookkeeping details.
Finally, perhaps the most important reason geometric (Clifford) algebras
should be used for pedagogy, even if you plan to write code which only uses
quaternions per se, is that they make the “sandwich” multiplication of versors
as operators on vectors completely obvious as composition of reflections.
~~~
grondilu
Say what you want about geometric algebra, if it has a least one merit, it's
that it makes rotations in 3D space and their link with quaternions very
simple to understand.
Also check out my implementation in Perl 6:
[https://github.com/grondilu/clifford](https://github.com/grondilu/clifford)
With it, quaternions become:
use Clifford;
constant I = @e[1]*@e[2];
constant J = @e[2]*@e[3];
constant K = @e[1]*@e[3];
say I² == J² == K² == I*J*K == -1;
~~~
logfromblammo
The subalgebra of 3D Clifford using the scalar and the 2-blades represents
quaternions.
The subalgebra using the pseudoscalar and the 1-blades can _also_ represent
quaternions.
You have to be careful using other people's implementations, because certain
operations are anticommutative, so sign conventions and operand ordering
matters a lot more. For instance, choosing whether K is defined as e3 * e1
rather than e1 * e3 depends on whether your base vectors square to 1 or -1.
Geometric Algebra is cool. It lets you say things like "the intersection of
two spheres that don't touch is a circle with negative radius." You can't even
represent a circle with negative radius in regular geometry.
~~~
grondilu
> You have to be careful using other people's implementations, because certain
> operations are anticommutative, so sign conventions and operand ordering
> matters a lot more. For instance, choosing whether K is defined as e3 * e1
> rather than e1 * e3 depends on whether your base vectors square to 1 or -1.
Sure. For my implementation I thought a lot about how to deal with signatures
and stuff. It's technically easy but making it simple and elegant is not
obvious. I first thought about defining a @signature array, but then it
occurred to me that it's much simpler to create two infinite spaces : one
euclidean and one anti-euclidean. Later I've learned that Hestenes and others
have considered this as well, they called it the _mother of all geometric
algebras_ , or _universal geometric algebra_ [1]. Conveniently, Perl 6 deals
with infinite lists very well, so it was very appropriate.
So in my implementation, @e[$i]² is +1 for all $i. If you want vectors with
negative squares, use the @ē basis.
With geometric algebra, there are indeed several ways to represent
quaternions. In fact there are several ways to represent complex numbers as
well. I don't think it's a pitfall. As long as notations are clear and simple,
it should be fine, I think.
1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_geometric_algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_geometric_algebra)
~~~
logfromblammo
No, not a pitfall. it is more like a small pothole in the road: the problem is
easily avoided if you already know that it exists.
------
gravypod
For anyone who hasn't been exposed to this problem before, like me, there are
countless applications for this sort of mathematical operations in game
development.
Back a few years ago a friend and I were attempting to write a game engine. We
hit many road blocks but what often killed us was fixing gimble lock. This
isn't an issue for many things like FPSs or side scroller but when you get
into the realm that we wanted to tackle (first person space flight) it becomes
a challenge.
Quaternions, from my position as the ultimate laymen, take up the slack that
Euler coordinates/angles have. The issue comes from rotating an object. Once
the object is upside down, it's coordinate system stops working as you would
expect. If you are head-to-floor upside down then your up relative to the
world is down. When applying rotations that are based on shifts in pitch, yaw,
and roll it is difficult to have correct behavior.
If instead of this, you implement quaternion rotations for all objects, this
entire class of headache melts away. The problem is finding a good explanation
of how this works or even yet how to implement it. It's what's stopped me dead
in my tracks many times as the implementations often available still have many
bugs (when in Space Engineers if you rotate your cursor a circle quickly
you'll slowly rotate your character, this is a common bug in many
implementations I've found)
I'm definitely going to read through all of this when I get back from uni
today.
PS: Mathematicians/dark arts practicers, if I'm incorrect about anything I've
said here please let me know and point me to where I can learn more
~~~
devbug
How familiar are you with the complex plane?
It helped me a lot to be explained quaternions starting from the complex
plane. More specifically, by constructively inspecting their properties.
There's a great interactive article that gets the pedagogy of teaching such a
complex concept (pun definitely intended). Unfortunately, I can't seem to dig
it up.
I recall the author's blog using all kinds of CSS and/or WebGL trickery to
make 3d backgrounds – anyone know which blog I'm referring to?
~~~
kalid
Steven Wittens:
[https://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-
glory/](https://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory/)
[https://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory-
pt2/](https://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory-pt2/)
------
duiker101
This seems a very good and in-depth. I recently had to learn a bit of this
stuff and coming from very basic math Quats are a bit of funny concept at
first. This video does an amazing job at explaining what they are
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mXL751ko0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mXL751ko0w)
and the pro/cons over euler angles. The whole channel has some pretty good
resources for anyone looking for a "soft approach" at math.
------
chombier
Quaternions are much easier to grasp once you are familiar with basic Lie
group theory, in particular the adjoint representation of the group over its
Lie algebra.
Then the link with rotations becomes obvious and it gets very easy to
transport geometric operations from the unit sphere to the rotation group
(spherical linear interpolation, averaging, etc...)
~~~
munchbunny
Unless I'm missing something, this feels like trying to understand a less
complicated thing by first understanding a more complicated thing?
~~~
chombier
Sometimes this is the math way ;)
More seriously, Lie group theory puts the light exactly on the shared
structure between quaternions and rotations (both are smooth groups related in
some way) and ignore the secondary details, so you spend time understanding
what matters.
It may be more abstract, but you get more from your efforts in my opinion.
------
Sharlin
I haven't thought about it before but once you start thinking of complex
numbers as "numbers that want to turn" (every unit complex number is
isomorphic to a rotation on R^2), the concept of quaternions analoguously
representing rotations in R^3 becomes pretty intuitive even if you don't quite
grok the details.
~~~
Bootvis
Hmm, but I would think that a quaternion represents a rotation in R^4 (for
which I lack intuition).
~~~
uryga
===== EDIT: this is mostly wrong - see jblow's reply. Sorry for misleading you
into thinking I know what I'm talking about :D =====
I think of it like this: a complex number represents a rotation in a plane.
You need two "coordinates" to do that. 2d has one plane, but 3d has two planes
- think about how an anti-air cannon rotates left-right and up-down. So, if
we've got two rotations to represent, you must need two complex numbers -
that's four "coordinates", or one quaternion.
~~~
chombier
> but 3d has two planes
Why not 3 planes?
~~~
uryga
Okay, my wording wasn't the best here. 3d doesn't "have" 2 planes. But, for
some reason, you can look in any direction in 3d by turning in two planes.
Test it yourself: turning your head left-right is rotation in one plane,
turning it up-down is rotation in the other plane. here's my shot at
illustrating this:
[https://goo.gl/photos/Cxt7KPbos5o2QnkD9](https://goo.gl/photos/Cxt7KPbos5o2QnkD9)
to be completely honest, I'm not sure if this intuition is correct. But it
seems to make sense
~~~
jblow
It's correct that you can look in any direction with only two planes, but
that's not enough; you need to be able to control your orientation around that
final axis. You need 3 planes for that (3 "rotational degrees of freedom").
The idea that a quaternion is somehow two complex numbers is wrong.
~~~
chombier
I think you can do that using two rotation axis only (cf. proper Euler
angles).
And quaternions _are_ made of two complex numbers.
edit: typo.
~~~
Kristine1975
_> And quaternions are made of two complex numbers._
I don't pretend to grok quaternions (I only use them), but I'm fairly sure a
quaternion consists of three imaginary numbers plus a real number.
~~~
chombier
Sure, but the way they play together can also be expressed by the means of two
complex numbers (which makes 4 real numbers in total).
~~~
jblow
This is not true. You can't factor a quaternion into two complex numbers.
Please don't spread misinformation.
------
EllipticCurve
Nice, lots of detailed explanation!
For people interested, to use them in a C/C++ context, feel free to have a
look at my Quaternion-Library.
[https://github.com/MauriceGit/Quaternion_Library](https://github.com/MauriceGit/Quaternion_Library)
~~~
jordigh
This looks like C. Why do you call it "C/C++"? It could just as well be
C/ObjC, right?
~~~
generic_user
C and C++ share the same memory model and can be called quite easily form each
other with the use of an 'extern "C"'.
It's a common practice to write libraries in C for flexibility, (many
languages can ingest C) and use the 'extern "C"' for use in C++ code.
You can also write a thin C++ class wrapper for a more native object oriented
interface.
~~~
jordigh
But all of this is true for ObjC too. How come people write C/C++ to describe
pure C code but not C/ObjC? C is as much of a subset of ObjC as it is a subset
of C++.
It's funny people don't do this as much with other languages. For example,
nobody describes pure Javascript as "js/html" even though you can have lots of
js inside HTML code.
~~~
generic_user
Its an interesting point.
C is actually part of of the C++ standard. Within the ISO C++11 standard there
is the C99 standard with some adjustments and exclusions. The integration is
quite tight. So one can say C/C++ with some clarity.
Library writers often go thorough a lot of work to write extensive object
oriented interfaces around C libraries. And they intend that the user use the
C++ version not just import the C version in there C++ code. So in that case
it is a necessity to use C/C++ because there are two separate interfaces.
In the general case I would guess that 'most' C programmers write some C++ and
vise versa. So you have a very large overlap of C/C++ programmers. Objective C
on the other hand is probably a significantly smaller group and is simply not
big enough for C/C++ communities to think to much about.
~~~
jordigh
> _In the general case I would guess that 'most' C programmers write some C++
> and vise versa._
That's not what I've seen. People usually either write C++ exclusively or C
exclusively and hate the other language (probably more C writers that hate C++
than C++ writers that hate C).
Some people write very C-accented C++, with mallocs and frees instead of news
and deletes and so forth (these are usually people who prefer C over C++ but
are writing C++ for whatever reason). I guess those people could be said to be
writing "C/C++". But in general I think people overestimate how close the two
language communities are. What I have seen is that people like one language
and deride the other.
~~~
generic_user
There are some people that probably get to worked up about it especially on
the internet as you said. But in a professional environment where you have
deadlines and a budget you don't have the luxury to be a language purist. You
have to use libraries and choose from whats available and whats the best
choice often that means mixing C and C++. I'm not saying that people
necessarily like to code in C if they prefer C++ or the other way around but
they will often have to. And so have some competency weather they like it or
not.
------
OliverJones
The Evans and Sutherland graphics rendering pipeline has been doing this for
almost two generations. Dr. Sutherland's clipping divider depends on it.
[https://www.google.com/patents/US3639736](https://www.google.com/patents/US3639736)
------
spuz
Numberphile did a good simple explanation of quaternions:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BR8tK-
LuB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BR8tK-LuB0)
------
ipunchghosts
You will eventually regret any use of Euler angles. - John Carmack
~~~
Coincoin
I would agree if it said "most" instead of "any". Euler angles are useful.
Just be very careful with them. Convert to quaternion as soon as possible and
convert back to euler as late as possible when needed.
However, you will never entirely avoid them because they are just too
practical. Under careful constraints, they make code interfaces simpler.
This is especially important if you are to expose that code to a
multidisciplinary team. There is no way you're going to teach an artist how
quaternions work just so they can rotate their stuff around the up axis, when
simple yaw-pitch angles cover 99% of their use cases.
------
na85
So much js on that page that it took almost a minute to finish loading, and
then my phone's browser froze.
~~~
wmil
He's using MathJax to display equations. There are a lot of equations.
[https://www.mathjax.org/](https://www.mathjax.org/)
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Detecting underground smuggling with low-frequency radio waves - darshan
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tm/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14072497
======
asciilifeform
Yet another freedom-suppression technology.
~~~
eru
Yes. It just increases the price-differentials, until drug smuggling pays
enough again.
Escaping for humanitarian reasons will be made more difficult. And we do not
want to rely on arbitrage there.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies. - pavs
https://apps.gov/
======
mattparcher
I know that we’re in a recession, and I don’t mean to nitpick such a huge
technical/political advancement, but what happened to the guys who designed
whitehouse.gov?
This is clearly only meant for official use, but if we can see it, there’s no
reason to hold back criticism: I’m seeing unnecessary images and flash, tiny
font size, annoying horizontal scroll bar (only in Safari, of course),
Trebuchet (for the logo?!), cheap stock images, etcetera, etcetera.
------
Derrek
Wow, this is pretty awesome. I work with various federal agencies and am
amazed at how little they share resources, even within the same agency. This
seems like a huge step in promoting reuse of resources.
------
pavs
More information: [http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Streaming-at-100-In-the-
Cloud...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Streaming-at-100-In-the-Cloud/)
------
dangrover
Also fun: <http://dotgov.gov/>
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Introducing Mycroft Core - ldlework
https://mycroft.ai/introducing-mycroft-core/
======
coldtea
> _We are pleased to announce that Mycroft Core 0.6 Alpha is available for
> download today. Mycroft Core is a lightweight, portable piece of software
> written in Python. You can run it on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a
> gaming rig. Mycroft Core includes Adapt, Mimic, OpenSTT, and multiple open
> APIs to create an experience that allows users to interact with their
> technology using the most natural form of human communication – speech._
I whole paragraph in, and I -- a programmer, who has worked with text-to-
speech APIs AND Python for years-- still don't know what the duck this is.
Imagine the average programmer or layman.
"Mycroft Core is a lightweight, portable piece of software written in Python."
Wrong. I don't care what language it's written in, nor whether it's
lightweight or portable, until I know what it is.
Better: "Mycroft Core is an XXX. It is portable and lightweight piece of
software written in Python"
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
In a world of venture capital - abecedarius
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/05/15/in-a-world-of-venture-capital/
======
datashovel
IMO the technology industry should be focusing less on maintaining the status
quo, where they are constantly and continuously dependent on VC to bootstrap
businesses, and more on figuring out how to make it easier for brand new
businesses to bootstrap themselves into existence.
Sure it's more "glamorous" to be wooed by VC firms, or to even get in the
door, but IMO it skews priorities and is probably one of the main reasons
there's such a high rate of failure in technology startups.
In today's environment, the real essence of what it means to "build a company
from the ground up" gets lost in translation.
~~~
yesimahuman
I think there's something here. I run a VC-backed company, and though we did
that for a specific reason and have no regrets, I still feel like the world
hasn't truly seen companies like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, GitHub, etc.
(before those that raised, raised).
The VC world does tend to dismiss these types of companies, which I now
realize is simply out of frustration at the lack of investable opportunity in
these high-margin, growing, _and_ sustainable companies.
I think we haven't given enough weight to the idea that what those companies
have done is revolutionary, and is actually a lot more contrarian than the
existing startup model.
~~~
datashovel
I think a huge part of it is regulations. Imagine all the successful
kickstarter projects that have ever existed. Then imagine a world where, if
each of those people who "purchased" from these projects actually owned a
percentage of that ongoing success?
I think, of the many points of attack in leveling the playing field, removing
regulations that prevent small-time "investors" from owning equity in ventures
is a candidate that's high on my list.
Although in a way that passes the buck (ie. you're still dependent on
investors and giving away equity). I am looking forward to seeing how crowd-
sourced loans and such will work. For example imagine a prosper.com at scale
(catered specifically toward small business loans).
And wouldn't it be nice if regulations didn't prevent a small startup from
creating such a crowd-sourced loan program?
How about a crowd-funded VC platform? I imagine alot of things are in the
works that will help reduce the importance of the middle-man (ie. the
investor). I look forward to seeing how that all comes together. But none of
it will get off the ground until regulations are no longer the barrier to
entry.
~~~
danieltillett
There is a reason for all these regulations. While I am generally pro-
deregulation, letting unsophisticated investor put money in start-ups is
highly dangerous. While it would make it easier for genuine companies to raise
money, the problem is it makes it much easier for scammers.
~~~
datashovel
I think this used to be the case. But think about what the internet has done
for "reputation" tracking. I think deregulation would open the "potential" for
scammers, but at the same time would open a market for websites like a "Yelp
for investors".
~~~
danieltillett
Given how much reputation "massaging" occurs on Yelp I am not sure this is a
good model :)
The solution to preventing scamming is to make it harder for scammers to raise
money than genuine businesses. The major difficulty is it is very difficult
for unsophisticated investors (actually all investors) to make accurate
judgments into the character of founders of start-ups. Even if we had a good
reputational system for start-up founders (we don't), most founders
(especially the most innovative ones) are not going to have a lot of history
to support any such reputation system.
On the topic of reputation, Linkin^ has a good platform to monetrise this
demand. They could charge users (and pay other users) for reputation
endorsement (not just skill endorsement). They could have users provide an
enormous amount of biographical detail and then have others verify (or not
verify) this data. Make enough links and it will be very hard for a scammer to
succeed over the honest.
^ Actually this could be a great idea for a start-up. Have people upload
massive amounts of biographical data and then pay other people to endorse each
data point - probably someone is doing it already and will soon tell me all
about it :)
~~~
datashovel
I agree reputation isn't an easy problem to solve. I think taken to its
logical limit something like what you've described above is likely close to if
not the correct solution.
Using the tried and true methods that already exist in the public key
infrastructure of the web, I think the problem of tracking reputation online
(in a reliable way) is something that will be solved in our lifetimes.
~~~
danieltillett
The real interesting question here is how many data points do you need to
confirm to establish that someone is trustworthy?
------
lordnacho
Wow, this is almost a description of a pyramid scheme.
Investors invest because they think more investors will invest later. You need
the brand name investors because investors need to see the brand name
investors in your company's pitch, making it more likely there will be future
investors. The firms are selling shares by promising (well, making a string
indication) someone else will buy the shares at a higher price later. Also,
you can make money by investing without the firm making money.
------
increment_i
>> "We made the deadly mistake of thinking of MetaMed as a business that was
trying to turn a profit and grow organically, rather than a start-up whose
‘profits’ would come from selling its stock to investors at a higher price.
Even in the explicit context of a profitable case, this was still true."
When the author explains that the goal of the startup is to profit through
selling its shares at ever higher prices, it seems like he's basically saying
the entire industry is a giant game of Find the Greater Fool.
I'm sure I'm missing something though.
~~~
MCRed
You're not missing anything. It's kind of intrinsic to the system-- when you
have VC that wants really high rates of growth then they will require/force
the startup to take a path that may be much higher risk but also much higher
reward.
When you are building a business, you have to make decisions that keep you
alive.
In the process you may have less likelihood of becoming unicorn but much
higher likelihood of surviving.
EG: I think VCs want you to take a 1 in 10,000 chance at being a billion
dollar company, vs a 1 in 1 chance of being a $100M company.
------
JoshTriplett
The other news here that I hadn't seen elsewhere: when and why did MetaMed
fail? That was an idea I would like to have seen succeed. Is anyone else
working on that?
~~~
danieltillett
It is an idea I would like to see succeed too, but I think the problem is
there is no way to make money out of this service. I suspect it would work far
better as a boot-strapped business offering a very high end service to the
mega wealthy.
~~~
JoshTriplett
In the short term, charge at least as much for the service as it costs. In the
long term, rely on the resulting wealthy and thankful patrons.
------
staunch
> _Because another of the characteristic mistakes of young founders is to go
> through the motions of starting a startup. They make up some plausible-
> sounding idea, raise money at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a
> bunch of people. From the outside that seems like what startups do. But the
> next step after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: gradually
> realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating all the
> outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thing that 's
> actually essential: making something people want._
[http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html)
~~~
danieltillett
It is not only making something people want, you need to make something people
will pay for, either directly or indirectly.
~~~
adyus
Could it be that "want" is now a type of currency? It seems that some of the
things people "want" and get for free (GMail, Facebook, Twitter) have been
converted to money somehow.
------
waterlesscloud
"Starting a business is not about doing business. Starting a new business is
about raising investment."
"Fundamentally, the venture capitalist is asking: will this company be able to
raise money in future rounds?"
------
ianstallings
_I have given a lot of thought to, which is why the bigger venture capital
firms dominate the market and make oversize profits while the other firms
taken together make almost no profits_
Is there some data on this?
------
TheGrassyKnoll
AKA "The rich get richer"
------
michaelochurch
What he's describing is a feudalistic, dysfunctional reputation economy.
I wish there a way to make everyone realize this at once, so we can abandon
this mess wholesale and come up with something else.
The reputation factors dominate in light of the realization that the current
Bay Area "tech" scene is built on taking behaviors (insider trading, market
manipulation) that would lead directly to jail if done on public markets, and
applying them to unregulated private equities. Since the people getting burned
the hardest on the investment are young employees, no one seems to care,
though.
This is also why there will probably never be a competing VC-driven tech hub,
and why VC will always be extremely local. The VC business is that way because
so much of the note-sharing and market/reputation manipulation is borderline
unethical and it would be suicide to put too many of the conversations that
actually matter in writing.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Ask HN: Why is content creation in the browser such a pain in 2016? - rngesus1
Creating content in the browser is IMO something that has not been solved properly in 2016. Either we get TinyMCE/CKEditor with messy mark-up and weird x-platform quirks, Markdown that non-technical users don't want to use, OSS libraries with horrendous APIs (draft.js) or promising OSS libraries that are dropped by maintainers once they realize how much work it is to get this stuff right.<p>Did I miss something here, or is this just one of those topics that browsers are incapable of handling well?
======
fagnerbrack
<div contenteditable></div>
~~~
rngesus1
yes, I think this is a very appropriate answer. yet, google somehow did it -
why no one else?
------
rayalez
Check out gitbooks.io for writing.
Slides.com + Screencastify allow me to create presentstions and youtube
videos.
Draw.io is absolutely awesome for diagrams.
Image and video editing don't have great solutions as far as I know.
------
VertexRed
What kind of content creation are you talking about?
If you just mean making pages online then things are probably easier now
thanks to Bootstrap and all the useful jQuery plugins.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Dril - octosphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dril
======
tristram_shandy
>The Fact Remains That Your A Guy From Reddit, And Im A Guy Who Posts On A
Website Thats Somewhat More Prestigious Than Reddit
Dril is the Shakespeare of our age.
------
dril
God, for a Wikipedia page to dance around the identity of an author (Paul
Dochney), for what amounts to essentially a well-received daily comic strip in
a newspaper, really says a lot about what's wrong with the world as we know
it.
It's just too much to plainly state:
@dril is Paul Dochney
Once you have a book to sell, and have been interviewed by Vice, it shouldn't
be a big deal to say that. At the very least, it's also reasonable to give the
author his own wikipedia page, and cross-link to the persona's wiki.
------
whalesalad
If I could only bring one twitter account to a deserted island it would
without a doubt be dril/wint.
------
nwsm
This reminded me to buy his book.
There is something very relaxing about reading 75% nonsense, 25% satire posts.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Show HN: Learn Facts. Be Smart. – SnapFact - discoversquare
http://snapfact.me
======
calbear81
Interesting, I would be more interested in learning the "why" in addition to
the "what". This Feynman story is instructive in that sense:
[http://www.haveabit.com/feynman/2](http://www.haveabit.com/feynman/2)
~~~
discoversquare
That's really interesting. Thanks for the share. The "why" surely gives deeper
understanding and gives context.
------
sixpenrose16
It would be nice if community could contribute with submissions.
| {
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China's investment in fusion power - meric
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/chinas-bid-for-manmade-sun-20110504-1e7h4.html
======
ender7
Fusion really is the answer to the world's energy crisis, for all the reasons
laid out in the article (can't melt down, ease of procuring fuel, no
pollution, relatively small generation of nuclear waste). It's a shame that it
doesn't have better funding.
In addition to the tokamak work being done in the EU at CERN, the US has been
funding fusion research for years at the NIF. The US system does not use a
tokamak (magnetic confinement of a donut of plasma), but instead involves
crushing balls of hydrogen with lasers. The US and the EU are currently in
competition to see who can get to "ignition" first. The NIF is hoping for it
to happen in the next 2-3 years.
This sounds great and all, but there's at least 10-20 years of work still yet
to be done before we can start building commercial fusion power plants.
Ignition will be a wonderful "HEY, IT WOOORRRKSSSSS" moment, but there are a
lot of big unanswered engineering questions looming ahead, such as "what
material do we build the ignition chamber out of that can withstand
temperatures high enough to melt salt as well as survive constant neutron
bombardment?" Hopefully ignition, when it happens, will motivate major
countries to open their wallets and let pour the funding. We'll see. An
appreciable percentage of the US's plasma physicists may retire once the US
gets ignition. They have been working on this problem for quite literally
their entire careers.
~~~
berntb
You might want to Google e.g. Polywell, General Fusion and Tri Alpha.
None of the small alternatives are probably that likely to succeed, but if one
of those horses reaches their target, it will change the world.
(You could probably make a good argument that the chance of one of the small
fusion projects to work is higher than the chance of tokamaks ever to be cost
competitive with fission.)
~~~
DennisP
Also focus fusion, Helion, magnetized target fusion, and levitated dipole.
------
dreww
Unfortunately, there's almost no actual information about China's fusion
research in the linked article. There is a lot of information, almost
rambling, about the future of their fission plans after Fukushima, most of
which has been covered more cogently elsewhere.
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