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History of Windows Startup Sounds - showhndaily http://mashable.com/2012/10/24/windows-startup-sounds/ ====== showhndaily Followed by Blue Screens of Death - <http://mashable.com/2012/10/25/microsoft- blue-screens/> ------ showhndaily Brings back memorable moments of waiting on my old desktop PCs to boot up.

Ask HN: How much time do you spend with your spouse or partner? - septerr How much time approximately do you spend with your significant other on weekdays and weekends? ====== mtmail Some will answer little, others with answer a lot, yet others 'it depends'. And all can be happy or complete unhappy with that scenario. Sorry to be negative here. Even if this was a poll (and polls on such a small demographic don't work) all you'll get is anecdotes.

Show HN: And now for something furniture and movie related - aswerty https://www.seenonset.com/ ====== aswerty Submitter here. Over the last number of months me and a friend have built a website (www.seenonset.com) for finding and buying furniture and decor that's found on the set of movies and TV shows. I have a technical background and he has an interiors background. The website isn't particularly interesting from a technical view point - it's a standard ASP.NET MVC web application hosted on Azure. But on the business side it's a bit more interesting; we're trying to provide a new approach to buying household items that ties in with peoples connection with media. We think it's an especially good time for something like this since online sales for furniture is growing and there is a real lack of brand awareness when it comes to furniture which we want to change. Anyways, I know the furniture and interiors market isn't a typical interest of HN but I was hoping for the usual critiquing in terms of the business model (we rely on affiliate sales for the moment) and website design, along with any other thoughts you'd care to share. At this point I might just note that the site isn't mobile optimized yet. Thanks for having a look. ------ FiatLuxDave I really like the idea. I hope you are a success. The prices are too high for my cheap tastes, but that's probably as it should be for these items. One feature which might be nice to have would be a place for users to request an item or show (without having to think of contacting you through email). I know that the way things work, you probably are showing those items and shows you already have contacts with. However, taking requests might show you where new demand might be, so you know which shows to start making new contacts with. ~~~ aswerty Thanks for the feedback, sorry for the slow response - I was off-line over the weekend. Prices can be above some peoples budgets since we focus on original manufactures and don't try to provide the cheap knock-offs. Taking requests is definitely something we want to do on the site. At the moment people generally just get in touch with us via our social media pages. We're still in the process of figuring a lot of it out so we don't want to rush into adding features and then realizing it wasn't the right approach. ------ herbst Kudos thats a pretty smart affiliate idea. ~~~ aswerty Thanks :)

Task management software - celljunk-e I'm looking for a recommendation for a good hosted task management system. All I need to do is post tasks, notes with the tasks, file attachments and set priority. I found basecamp to be really annoying. Any suggestions? Paid is fine...not looking to be cheap. ====== adamtaa I have one word for you. Trello. Supporting details include "it just works" and "It is free". Seriously check that out. ~~~ onlyup Can you give me an example of how you use Trello? Can you set rules for items moving to the next stage? Does anyone use this in work to manage their projects? (As part of a team and not as part of a team) ~~~ ScottWhigham Well, it's not project management software so there are no rules or stages. You add a task to a board. Then you can comment on that task, move it to another board, share it with someone else, etc. I'm pretty sure their website has all of this stuff answered way better than some random reply you'd get here. ~~~ onlyup I just thought it might do more that what it appears to do ------ celljunk-e Producteev is now in first place for me, but the android app needs to be updated. I've spent this week testing just about every PM software on the planet :P ~~~ ScottWhigham Wait - you said in the OP that you wanted "task management" but now you've upgraded to "project management"? Those are quite different in my eyes. Task management can be done just fine with a plain .txt document but project management needs a much more rigid implementation. ------ r23712 You should try Blimp (getblimp.com) have being using it for a few month and it just works. They have a free plan. ------ webbruce Asana ~~~ celljunk-e Not terribly impressed...but it has potential. I like trello better thus far. Toodledo is nice, but doesn't have collaboration.

Former CIA Director argued for more appropriate responses to leaks - Nokinside https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/sep/11/cia-leakers/ ====== tristanj This document was written in 1984 and was publically released in 2008. Meaning it was written during the Cold War in an entirely different political climate. It's not stated in the article anywhere, it really needs to be mentioned somewhere... ~~~ Nokinside Yes. The reasoning is still sound. It's the moral panic after 9/11 that made people and politicians to lose their marbles. ------ Nokinside Comments based on title and not reading the article below this message. Thank you.

Cutting edge: Just what is it about adding blades that makes a razor better? - boundlessdreamz http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/04/beauty.mens.razors ====== omgsean I get a better shave out of my single-blade safety razor, shave stick, and brush system than I ever got out of my five-blade shaving-cream-from-space setup. The reason these multi-blade things are so popular is because Gillette can sell replacement blades for damn near a fortune and people keep on buying them. On the flip side, razors for a classic blade can be had for about ten cents a piece.

Online Collaborative Modeling; Still Sketchy - DanielBMarkham http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/online-collaborative-modeling-still-sketchy/ ====== DanielBMarkham Author here. If anybody has any other tools they'd like to share, I'd love to hear about them. Happy to update the grid.

The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design - SirLJ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/25/the-tyranny-of-chairs ====== mattlondon Just out of curiosity, am I the only one that seems to be happy to just sit on a dining chair when at my desk? When the WFH wave hit, people seemed to be going mad buying webcams and office chairs. Loads of people I work with spent a _lot_ of energy researching and discussing chairs etc. I have a sit-stand desk and I stand for perhaps 2 to 3 hours any working day. But the rest of the time I just sit on a normal old wooden dining chair. No pain. No aches. No RSI. No CTS. I've been doing this for decades and nothing seems to have gone wrong yet. I do run 2 to 4 times a week so I do wonder if that helps avoid problems? Are all the uber-expensive office chairs just snake oil? Or have I just been lucky? ~~~ 2OEH8eoCRo0 >I do run 2 to 4 times a week so I do wonder if that helps avoid problems? I think there are a lot of stressed and unconditioned office workers who want some magical device to solve everything. Vertical mice, split vertical keyboards, expensive chairs. None of it replaces exercise. Might be a controversial opinion. ~~~ nostromo This is my experience. I had lower back pain while sitting at a desk when I was younger. Once I started lifting weights, and specifically doing heavy deadlifts, I've never had back pain again. Interestingly, a lot of people are afraid deadlifts will _cause_ back pain, but in my case at least, it _cured_ back pain. ~~~ stouset General fitness and strength training is just about the closest thing we have to a miracle cure for a wide array of common issues. ~~~ 2OEH8eoCRo0 Yup. Too bad it doesn't come in pill form. ------ scrooched_moose If anyone is looking for a better chair, we found this was a great time to pick up Herman Miller Aerons off of craigslist. There's a steady stream of small-to-medium offices in our area closing, and they're all liquidating office furniture. We picked up 2 for $500. They're a massive improvement over my $80 chair that was fine for a few hours a week pre-WFH, and my back is feeling much better. ~~~ supernova87a This isn't exactly work related, but do people have opinions on the Herman Miller Eames chair? You know, this iconic look? [1] I ask because the lockdown has me fantasizing about distracting myself with replacement stuff for the home. But this chair is freakin $5000. Is it that good to be worth it? Or are any of those $1000 knockoffs acceptable quality? [1] [https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge- seating...](https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge- seating/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottoman/) ~~~ scrooched_moose We have a 60s hand-me-down Eames. It is a very good chair. The build quality is fantastic and stylistically it still holds up. It is truly a "lounge chair" though - almost a semi-recliner. I rarely use it if it's a social situation because it sits back so far. It's amazing for relaxing and watching TV or a movie though. I'm assuming the quality has held up. I've never tried a knock off. ------ adamnemecek The worst chair in the world is the American high school/college desk+chair combo like this one [https://www.schooloutlet.com/v/vspfiles/assets/images/Screen...](https://www.schooloutlet.com/v/vspfiles/assets/images/Screen%20Shot%202016-07-13%20at%2010.00.49%20AM.png) The people making and buying these place are committing crimes against humanity. ~~~ grugagag It's not comfortable but I don't think that's the worst chair especially if you pay attention how you sit in it. The worst chair is the cheap office chair that is often misaligned, wobbly and encouraging you to rest your back in a wrong way. And the free rotating swivel makes sure you are you really have a bad posture and not being able to sit properly. I relearned to sit down and now prefer a rigid surface and most often don't rest my back on anything. If your back is tired and you need to use the backrest it's time to get up and walk around a bit. ~~~ adamnemecek You shouldn't have to pay attention to how you sit in it. there is literally only one position to sit in. ~~~ KozmoNau7 You can almost certainly improve how you sit down. A lot of people just sort of flop down and sit with their hips slid forward and a pronounced bend in their back. Anecdotally I have also noticed many of the same people complaining about a lack of legroom in trains, airplanes, cars and so on. If they would simply sit down by pushing their butt and lower back into the chair instead of lazily flopping down, there would be plenty of space. (Not directed at those people with long legs, who do have genuine legroom issues even when sitting up straight) ------ Theodores Chairs need a failsafe mode. This is what I call better design. Recently my father sat on a chair that collapsed underneath him. It was a seemingly okay teak garden chair that had been recently in service and offered up to important guests. So in that way it was good that it was him rather than his brother in law or elderly neighbour that received a bruised elbow. This got me thinking about the safety of chairs. This chair - a folding chair - really should have included a wire around the seat so that it had a failsafe mode in order to prevent complete failure once the wood of the seat eventually gave up. There should be proper testing of seats to see if they are fit for purpose. Car seats for babies can't be passed on because there could be some crack in the polystyrene, yet regular chairs have no standards for safety. It is not a big deal until such time as you see a valued relative come a cropper. Design is how it works and chairs are not designed to have a failsafe aspect to the design. ~~~ lightgreen Realistically, how many people get injured from collapsed chairs? I think less than from fire or drowned or something. Just buy not the cheapest chair, and you will be safe. ~~~ Theodores There is no such thing as an accident. If your chair breaks in a restaurant you can sue them. I bet the restaurant owners never thought of this when setting up. Injuries can also be quite serious, it depends on the circumstance and the individual. Your argument is the same for airbags, seatbelts and wearing hard hats. We live in a Health and Safety world where liability exists. Except for chairs. ------ jamespetercook I don’t think I’ve ever found a chair that I felt completely comfortable in. I like to sit upright and feel alert and most chairs seem to be made for relaxing. I’ve always wondered if it’s just me or not, and have often thought about designing a chair but realistically I don’t have the skills :( ~~~ TACIXAT I have this same issue. I've never seen a chair that supports shoulders back and down good posture. They all seem to hunch or arch forward. None offer the mid back support needed to put your chest forward. Same situation for sitting cross legged. My solution for posture has been a standing desk. I never really made any progress on my posture until I started standing. ------ blunte At age 35, otherwise healthy and having spent 10 years in Herman Miller Aeron chairs, I had hip problems and a small but growing waistline. Then I transitioned to working from home and built my own standing desk (sadly before the very affordable mechanical Ikea standing desk was first released... But which I have now happily used for years). The first few weeks were challenging, but within three months I could stand for 12+ hours a day, and my hip problems went away. Also my overall energy seemed higher, and afternoon energy dips became less noticeable. For 13 years now I stand for virtually all of my day, and I have no back or hip problems. I do have slight spider veins on my ankles and knees, and that may be due in part to the standing. But it is cosmetic and barely visible, and totally worth the trade. ~~~ grugagag How do you type standing for long periods of time? Do you rest your arms on the table? ~~~ chiefalchemist If you're using a mouse my PT told me to "anchor" your elbow on the desk so you use your wrist to move the mouse, not your upper back. This is true whether standing or sitting. There was a good reason I was in PT and was told this ;) ~~~ blunte I've always used a mouse with my fingertips, and my outer hand bone is resting on the mouse mat. Rarely am I pushing the mouse around with my entire hand or arm... ~~~ chiefalchemist It's not your "entire arm" per se. It's that - per the PT - the shoulder and upper back aren't designed for repetitive micro-movements. That is, unless your elbow is anchored your shoulder is likely doing more work than it should. ------ raindropm For anyone that have sore butt syndrome, here's my personal tip: improve blood circulation of your...butt! I bought Steelcase Think six month ago to replace my $50 chair, and while it is good chair with good price and comfy-but-firm seat cushion, it cannot solve my chronic "sore butt" problem. Half and hour in the chair and my butt soreness begin to appear. Doesn't help that I'm the type that sit in front of monitor all day. I know I need to move more frequently, or did some light exercise or stretching, but when you need to work, you need to sit anyway. Then I read that the soreness is the result of lack of blood circulation, so I decide to give thing that improve it a try: a beads car seat. You know, the vintage-looking one taxi driver use. THE SORENESS IS GONE. It's been several months since. Now I can sit all day long without feeling a thing. Note that the version I use is the 'beads mat' with rubber texture on the bottom(This is important because it help prevent the beads seat from slipping) ~~~ mpol Sore butts are a common theme in cycling :) On longer rides people might prefer harder saddles. A softer seating clamps down on your soft tissue and prevents proper blood circulation. Having a harder seating will make you sit on your sit bones and have your blood flow free. The sit bones can start to feel a bit irritated after some time, but that is the time to get up for a walk. If your soft tissue (from lack of blood flow) starts hurting, it is because it is starting to get damaged. Even if you would walk for an hour and sit again, the pain would come back instantly. ~~~ raindropm That's new to me! because I never ride a bike more than 10 minutes at a time haha. Everything you describe is what I experience. I have good time sitting on my old wooden chair, and yes, the butt is free of pain (but my back hurt instead, because its backrest is in upright 90 degree angle) also there is not armrest whatsoever so I can't work for long.... well, maybe that's the point, I need to move more. ------ rkagerer I hate how the first thing this site does is make me lie and say "I'm Happy" about their cookies. ------ war1025 I read somewhere that if you want good posture, just sit on the edge of the seat. So that's what I do and it seems to work fine. Chairs with backs are nice, but it seems like they will always just lead to terrible posture. ~~~ NicolasGorden I've used a posture corrector. It's really very effective and cheap. Love it since it makes me conscious every time I start slouching. ------ amanaplanacanal We would do better for ourselves to get rid of chairs entirely and sit on the floor. Getting down and up from the floor is a natural human movement that would keep us all fitter into old age. ~~~ johnchristopher Have you tried sitting on the floor and work with a keyboard ? Do you have a setup you could share ? I suppose Japanese should have something fitting but that might be a stereotype. ~~~ dmvinson [https://www.nutritiousmovement.com/furniture-free- ahs13/](https://www.nutritiousmovement.com/furniture-free-ahs13/) is an example of someone doing this in their home. Personally, my setup is a coffee table along with a zafu (buckwheat hull filled floor cushion) and sheepskins or a zabuton to cushion the floor a little. It's very comfortable, although I'd like to also have a standing desk to go with it. Coffee tables tend to be a pretty good height for this purpose if you want to avoid purchasing something custom. Besides that it's just a regular desk setup, albeit missing drawers or storage on the table. ~~~ johnchristopher > [https://www.nutritiousmovement.com/furniture-free- > ahs13/](https://www.nutritiousmovement.com/furniture-free-ahs13/) Interesting reading, thanks. Would you be so kind as to share a picture of your setup ? To have a rough idea of heights, space arrangements, elbow positioning, etc. ? ~~~ dmvinson Yeah, here is what I'm working with as of now. Moved recently (like everyone else) and still getting an office setup, but this is the basics. As far as height, I'd say it's a very ergonomically sound setup when in kneeling position with the cushion in between your feet. Laptop just below eye level, arms level, etc. I think the biggest benefits are it forces you to move and adjust a little bit more than in a chair, and forces you to use your muscles to sit properly much more. Would highly recommend to anyone. [https://ibb.co/XYN3HFx](https://ibb.co/XYN3HFx) The coffee table is [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lisabo-coffee-table-ash- veneer-...](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/lisabo-coffee-table-ash- veneer-70297658/) The sheepskin is from sheepskin town, but any cushioning that softens the floor for your ankles/knees is good. ~~~ johnchristopher Thanks a lot, much appreciated ! I was browsing though the different pillow/cushion and was a bit worried at first by the $150 zafu/zabuton but it looks like there are ~$50 ones so I can give it a try. ------ gagabity The Ikea POANG recliner chair, you know the one, is the most comfortable chair I have ever used, you need to rearrange your desk setup because its so low and leaned back but once you have it destroys any other option out there, your back is just relaxed. ~~~ tonyedgecombe I can sit and read in mine but I can't imagine trying to work in it. ------ polote I have been trying to find info on laying down desks and chairs in the past few weeks, but there is really not a lot of people who have experienced with it. If you had, please comment here ~~~ megameter Here is my setup, which is a very inexpensive, low-footprint way of doing it: 1\. A large lap desk. This is a powerful tool for adding flexibility as you'll see. It lets you keep all the peripherals near you. I currently use it with a USB hub, a 65% mechanical keyboard, a keypad with macro functions, and a trackball mouse. 2\. A floor chair with reclining functions. The one I have is one of the cheapest on Amazon, basically a folding backrest with a bit of cushion. 3\. A laptop/monitor arm and a shelf to hang it off of. With a laptop angled at 90 degrees so that the screen is overhead, I have a fully supinated setup on the floor, with the floor chair folded most of the way back for support. But it gets better. With a low folding table or breakfast tray I can switch the laptop and chair over to floor seating. Here the lap desk serves as a way to let me move around more. This is a great way to add variety of posture and stretch as I work, and I find that I use different positions for different levels of intensity during the day. Supination is better for passive viewing, while upright with no support is focused, intense. Seated with the chair reclined is the medium for "Tired but still want to work". And then I still have more traditional feet-dangling seats I can use too. Again, just haul over the lap desk and plug in. The best part is, none of these items need to cost more than $100. Most are closer to $50. So you can solve everything with an investment of perhaps $200-300. ~~~ nfour Sounds interesting - I have a lapboard setup as well but it could use improvement. Any chance you could provide some pictures? ------ spaetzleesser It kind of sucks that computers allow us to do most of our work while sitting in the same place. When I started working there were more reasons to get up, take something somewhere, walk to the printer and so on. This feels much healthier. I don’t think any design with better chairs, stand up desks or whatever will make it healthy to stay in the same place the whole day. If I had to choose a career now I would definitely think about something that allows for more walking or other activity. ------ jseliger For people working at computers in offices, get a motorized desk that can raised or lowered to a pre-determined height at the push of a button. [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand- de...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/24/geekdesk-max-sit-stand-desk-review- two-years-with-a-motorized-desk/) ------ armagon Gee, I was just thinking I needed to make some new chairs for the kitchen table (which seems to be a somewhat challenging woodworking project, as curves as usually called for and the way to craft them isn't obvious). I wish the article offered more advice about what makes a good chair, or chair alternative. ~~~ cpwright If you are going to invest the effort in a set of dining chairs, I would recommend watching the Wood Whisperer guild dining chair videos. I have made a Hank chair and high chairs, but have never made a dining char. I did buy the class and found how Marc Spagnuolo broke it down interesting and informative. ------ throwawaysea Perhaps we need to design for a furniture-less world, where we sit and stand as we did for most of our evolution. ~~~ lightgreen We just need neuralink with text input and output to the visual cortex so we could do our work literally anywhere: on the bus, lying on a bed, taking a shower. ------ trashcan I replaced an Aeron with a a gaming chair that was much more affordable (although it was back-ordered for a few months). What a huge improvement! It feels like I'm in a bucket seat in a car, which is basically what it is. ~~~ herman_toothrot Which specific chair did you get? ~~~ trashcan [https://secretlab.co/collections/omega- series](https://secretlab.co/collections/omega-series). I opted for the fabric cover to discourage my cats from chewing on it. :) ------ unnouinceput I use my bed as my chair. My desk has wheels, so I can sit on my "chair" way more comfortable then on any expensive chair. ------ sgt101 I got a gaming chair at the beginning of lockdown, and I propped up my desk to get everything to the right height. The things I looked for : adjustable arm rests, adjustable height, adjustable tilt and headrest & lumbar support. Also buy a 28" 4k monitor, proper keyboard and mouse device of choice (I got an apple magic pad). All for ~ £500. It's worth the investment. ~~~ _alex_ Do you like the gaming chair? I ordered an aeron and didn’t like it, sent it back. Need a new chair. Decade old office chair is falling apart. ~~~ sgt101 yes, it's good : [https://secretlab.co.uk/collections/titan-xl- series](https://secretlab.co.uk/collections/titan-xl-series) ~~~ bladegash I have the Omega and love it. Comes with a lumbar pillow too, which works great. ------ lightgreen Btw for those who are in London I can recommend refurbished Herman Miller chairs from this guy [http://www.welovechairs.co.uk/](http://www.welovechairs.co.uk/) I’m not affiliated with him, just bought a chair from him and was very happy by the service. ------ ezoe Exercise ball is the best chair for me. It has the best cushioning unmatched to any unreasonably expensive chairs. Backrest and armrests aren't necessary. You should have developed enough core to support your weight. You are free from developing injuries caused by long use of ordinary chair. It's cheap and portable too. ------ BrandoElFollito I've been sitting on a ball at the office for now 3 years. I love it. I do not have any hard numbers, but the fact that I move around, make small jumps , must keep balance etc. seems to be a good thing. I was sitting on an office chair at home during lock down and I think my back hurted more ------ LoSboccacc > The real science of ergonomics, Cranz argues, should point designers toward > chair design that supports and enables the body’s need for movement, not > stillness – with seats that angle downward in front, for example, and have a > base that’s flexible enough for the sitter to shift their body weight from > leg to leg weird then not finding mention of the Varier Balans chairs. I had one growing up, and bought another one after a month of lockdown as my home office setup wasn't meant for extended usage. that one and a standing desk seems working well so far. ------ mspe You could also combine furniture instead of buying an expensive standing desk: [https://imgbox.com/9tFW5Pvs](https://imgbox.com/9tFW5Pvs) ------ blueridge My sense is that we all just need to _move_ more: sit, stand, roll around on the rug, squat, go for a walk, you get the idea. Basically don't spend the entire working day in a single position. I briefly went through a phase where I thought I'd enjoy the no-furniture lifestyle, but it wasn't for me. It also wasn't for my partner, nor my parents when they come to visit, nor anyone else whom I might want to invite into the home. I don't want to Marie Kondo the shit out of my space—I want to surround myself with beautiful, practical pieces of furniture that I enjoy using. I don't think most people go and try out furniture before they bring it home. I'm talking multiple trips to a furniture store, where you go and sit and explore the same few pieces over and over and until you're sure you've found something you love. You've got to stay seated for a bit to figure out where the pressure points are, whether or not the angle or depth of a seat makes your legs go numb, or hurts your back, etc. Do you like a firm seat? Do you like to sit "on" the cushions, or "down in to" the cushions? You want something with a high seat, or a low seat? There's a lot of furniture out there. It pays to take time to do the research, learn about how it's built, learn about different fabric types and how they affect the way a cushion holds it shape, then spend a good deal of money on a quality product. Furthermore, there's a huge difference in quality between buying a chair from West Elm and buying a chair from Knoll. For instance, I think this is one of the most comfortable and practical chairs on the planet: [https://www.knoll.com/product/saarinen-executive-arm- chair](https://www.knoll.com/product/saarinen-executive-arm-chair) We use it as a dining chair, and as a reading chair with an ottoman, and as a standard desk task chair. It's truly wonderful. Is it expensive? Yes it is. But it looks great, it's built well, it has a firm and comfortable seat, and it'll last a lifetime. But hey, comfort is subjective, you like what you like! Edit for those who are furniture shopping: \- Saarinen chair linked above also comes with casters and hydraulic lift: [https://www.knoll.com/product/saarinen-executive-arm- chair-s...](https://www.knoll.com/product/saarinen-executive-arm-chair-swivel- base) \- Don't knock it, it's surprisingly comfortable for long stretches: [https://www.knoll.com/product/brno-chair-flat- bar](https://www.knoll.com/product/brno-chair-flat-bar) \- Great reading chair (with ottoman) if you have the space: [https://www.knoll.com/product/womb-chair](https://www.knoll.com/product/womb- chair) \- Of course, the Eames lounge chair is a classic, though if you're taller than 5'8" go with the Tall version as you'll get a deeper seat and head support. For those with lumbar spine issues, probably not the most comfortable: [https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge- seating...](https://www.hermanmiller.com/products/seating/lounge- seating/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottoman/) \- Wonderfully firm sofa, great for long meetings, reading with attention. If you like to lounge, not great for movie nights. Durable fabric options, along with custom leather: [https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/sofas-and- lovese...](https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/sofas-and- loveseats/andre-sofas)

Three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface - prostoalex https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/ ====== nabla9 [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632) If I understood the paper correctly, the results are totally unimpressive. The experiment setting seems to me to be intentionally convoluted to sound impressive. Like it's just creative bullshitting. This is how it works: (Edited after scribu corrected me) 1\. Senders make a decision by concentrating on flashing lights. They use EEG- cap to capture difference in spectral power between light flashing 17Hz and 15 Hz using the Welch's method. The choice is difference averaged over several epochs in 10-second period (must be very low paced game). Lots of signal processing and averaging to get yes/no answer between bright 17Hz and 15Hz visual signal from steady state visually evoked potentials. 2\. This one bit of information was then conveyed to the Receiver using TMS using signal where 10 consecutive pulses is yes, absence of pulses is no. Thresholds are well calibrated beforehand so that yes/no can transmitted. Receivers gets TMS signal that is completely different from what Senders did. ~~~ scribu The senders do NOT control the cursor by hand. From the paper: > The Senders convey their decisions of "rotate" or "do not rotate" by > controlling a horizontally moving cursor (Figure 8) using steady-state > visually-evoked potentials (SSVEPs). ~~~ nabla9 It seems that you are correct. The cursor is moved by concentrating on the lights. ------ pizza > “We essentially ‘trick’ the neurons in the back of the brain to spread > around the message that they have received signals from the eyes. Then > participants have the sensation that bright arcs or objects suddenly appear > in front of their eyes.” Incredible. Also, the article mentions using a coil to stimulate the receiver's brain. Is this some form of trans-cranial magnetic stimulation? By the way, in case anyone wants to listen to a decent critical theory lecture on neuralink-esque technologies, here's one by slavoj zizek [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38alQSKtVbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38alQSKtVbA) ~~~ nvrspyx Yeah from the image at the start of the article, it looks like they’re using TMS. You can see the coil sticking out to the right behind the man facing the camera. It’s attached to a blue arm. Furthermore if you look to the right of the coil, there are 3 little silver balls. These are coated in an IR-reflective layer (silver color) that are used by a camera to track the position of the coil in 3D space. This is more than likely a Localite system if anyone wants to look it up. My guess is that the people had MRI scans, which were used to find the right place to stimulate. The Localite system uses a pointer with another 3 balls that is pointed at key positions of the head and then slid around the surface of the head. The head also has its own 3-ball tracker. This allows the Localite system to get an accurate reading of head size and positioning in 3D space. This also allows the system to “place” the brain image from the MRI inside the head. Then, using a screen, you get an augmented reality view of the TMS coil and the brain relative to the head to get accurate positioning and angle to place the coil. The 3-ball tracker for the head was probably removed for the image, but you can see it in the image further down in the article. You can also get a better view of the TMS coil. You can also see the Localite system in action on the monitors and the camera in the top right. It’s really cool stuff. ~~~ egocodedinsol Your description of the localization approach is accurate, but this system is almost certainly Brainsight, given the screen shown in the image at the bottom, the IR camera in that image, and the shape of the tracker arm. The general approach is straightforward: MRIs are have real-world coordinates. Anything on the head (TMS, EEG, a surgical instrument) also has real-world coordinates. To co-register the two, you need to associate 1) markers at MRI time 2) markers at TMS time. Once you have that correspondence, you can position any other objects relative to either one, like surgical instruments with reflective markers or TMS systems or whatever. ~~~ nvrspyx Looking at it again, you’re right. That isn’t Localite. I should’ve said localization system instead. I’m not familiar with Brainsight and I haven’t been involved with the research using Localite in a couple of years, so I missed that. ------ stupidcar The Neuralink presentation a few days ago made the important point that the physics of neurons makes it impossible to read and/or write their state with any kind of accuracy without getting very, very close to them. As such, these kinds of completely non-invasive methods of interfacing with the brain are a dead end. Barring breakthroughs in scanning technologies that completely upend basic laws of physics, you will always be limited to a low- bandwidth channel that only works by reading the crude, aggregate state of the whole brain or a large area of it, and requires extensive training for participants to learn how to send basic signals. Since the limits here are hard physical ones, not ones that can be engineered around, there's no way for this to be gradually refined into a more useful system. It will ways be a hack. If we're going to produce high-bandwidth brain-machine / brain-machine-brain interfaces that allow useful collaboration, it's going to require getting inside the skull and getting up close and personal with brain matter, whether we like it or not. ------ d--b This is a little weird. Why would you use a Tetris like game for this? There is only one bit sent. It’s also quite hackish. To select yes or no, they have to look at some flashing lights the scientists know are going to generate different patterns in the brain. So it’s not like the guys are thinking “yes” and that’s being transmitted. Similarly the receiver’s brain is being stimulated kind of randomly by electrical impulse. It’s basically electrical communication but where the transmitter and receiver are wired in unsual places in the brain... ~~~ nvrspyx Of course it’s hackish. The technology is still somewhat rudimentary. They’re stimulating the visual cortex and the only way to do that (or stimulate brain areas in general) in a non-invasive way is using TMS, which isn’t “pinpoint” accurate. It’s shooting a strong magnetic pulse to stimulate the surface of the brain through the skull. Since TMS doesn’t have deep penetration for the receiver and neither do the electrodes for the senders, they’re limited to surface areas of the brain. The places are not unusual. In terms of the senders, it would probably have been easier to simply use an eye tracking camera to gauge which one they were looking at, but it wouldn’t have been “brain-to-brain”. We’re still a LONG ways off from telepathic-like communication. We’re also a long ways from even picking up “yes” or “no” signals from people’s thoughts. It’s still an important achievement nonetheless to get such readings from the senders and to make such manipulations to the receivers conscious visual perception, even if it’s not measuring conscious thought or creating a specific image. ~~~ stinos > _We’re also a long ways from even picking up “yes” or “no” signals from > people’s thoughts_ Yes and no. No because even though the tech exists, it's not exactly ready for the masses and doesn't work 100% and usually needs calibration and isn't exactly comfortable to wear. Yes because technology allowing people to form words on a computer by picking individual letters based on just EEG exists already; so that's more then yes/no. Likewise there's the experiments to have people move robot arms etc. (i.e like Neuralink from Musk, which isn't really new). You can even already buy commercial games where you control a cursor on the screen based on just 2 electrodes. ~~~ noir_lord My understanding is that what musk is doing isn't new in the sense of novel but new in the sense that he's pushed the refinement of the technology to the outer envelope. Which is a pattern with him (and a good one) in that he takes existing tech and pushes it to the outer envelope, batteries, motors and rockets all existed long before musk was born but he's done valuable and interesting things with them. Someone had to make a technology for for market. ~~~ stinos _new in the sense that he 's pushed the refinement of the technology_ That's what I understood as well. For example there's a mutlitude of practical problems with current in-brain electrodes, ranging from limits in the amount of them, their lifetime, lifetime of connectors, surgeries being quite difficult, possible problems with infections etc. None of them are extremely hard to solve but it basically requires a ton of money being thrown at and that seems to be Musk's plan, allowing to get like 3000 electrodes with the preamp/digitizer stage implanted subcutaneously. ------ warent "This is the first demonstration of ... a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain." I'm completely blown away by the gravity of this achievement. This is a somewhat unassuming article for one study among many, but yet here we have something that, in my opinion, is essentially the equivalent of the discovery of how to create fire, or the invention of iron. Of course it will likely take many more decades at least before we can scale this and use it in a more practical way. Nevertheless, maybe I'm being melodramatic but I really feel like we have very clearly just entered into a new age as a civilization and species. ~~~ innomatics Melodramatic... perhaps. I don't see it as brain to brain. Eyes are clearly required to stare at the yes or no pulses for the sender's. Seems like an extremely low bandwidth way to digitise 'thoughts'. Also a bit skeptical about the receipt of this single bit of information being directly into the brain. Essentialy zapping part of the brain to cause a perceived flash. It's and incredible gap still toward encoding something as complex as a real thought. ------ dboat I wouldn't want to be an early adopter for this type of technology. Even just play old VR is still so new that we don't know what sort of effects prolonged use will have on physiology and cognition, and direct stimulation of the brain, a system whose precise functioning still seems so largely unknown to us, seems all the more dangerous. I feel that some day we will be able to comprehensively decode neural communication but I would liken our current state to something like surgery in the Victorian era. I wonder if these student volunteers see the situation differently than I do, or if they are just that brave. ~~~ hnlmorg VR really isn't new. It's quite literally been around a few decades. Longer if you count devices like Sensorama[1] but the Oculus-style VR headsets that we're familiar with now has been around since the 90s (albeit at a significantly lower polygon count). Plus there has been lots of research already about extended periods of altered realities. From people living inside mock space capsules through to simple experiments with people wearing special glasses[2]. Though granted I don't know of any research regarding extended use Oculus-style VR for weeks / months at a time, there have also been a lot of research regarding the use of such technology and how it can alter our mental perceptions beyond what we visual see (eg I cannot find a reference for this one but I did read research about people using avatars of the opposite sex and how quickly people came to register that was their pseudo-psyical body) As an aside, this research reminds me a bit of Sword Art Online[3]. A Japanese light novel (which has been ported to different formats from anime through to computer games) and which is about "full dive" VR headsets. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorama) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upside_down_goggles) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_Art_Online) ------ bin0 Look at Neurable, they've been around for years: [http://neurable.com/](http://neurable.com/) Tech is pretty good, and they're working on a VR headset which works with games. If you talk to the founder, his story is really interesting. He has an uncle who was crippled in a trucking accident, and his end goal is to create a version of this which can help cripples regain mobility. He's using games as his beachhead market to get traction, proof, a chance to iterate, $$$, etc. Pretty inspiring stuff, and "social-conscience" investing done right, in my opinion. ------ kuprel Looks like OpenBCI hardware: [https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/eeg](https://shop.openbci.com/collections/frontpage/eeg) ------ mfbx9da4 This is fine but doesn't present any jumps in technology. It's still just EEG. The electrical stimulation sounds pretty dangerous as it's non invasive so must have a pretty large stimulation zone.

Can Universal Basic Income Achieve Economic Security? - UpshotKnothole https://daily.jstor.org/can-universal-basic-income-achieve-economic-security/ ====== Fjolsvith Why don't we just go a step further into fairness and say that everyone gets the same income regardless of their wealth. Have the government take all the income except the equal amount and spread it around to every deserved person.

Ask HN: Should it be illegal to discriminate against poor writers/speakers? - amichail Should it be illegal to discriminate against people who are poor writers/speakers but who are good enough to be clearly understood?<p>Why should society penalize people who have not mastered a messy natural language? ====== rmah I submit that not only should it be legal, but that it is good to do so! More seriously... You write "but who are good enough to be clearly understood". Have you considered that perhaps they are only clearly understood in their own minds? By definition poor communicators (speakers/writers) have trouble getting their point across. If they get their point across well, they are not poor communicators. ------ JoeCortopassi If I'm reading this correctly, you aren't actually asking if it should be illegal to discriminate against people with poor communication skills, but rather people with foreign accents that make people difficult to understand. Either way it's a tricky subject, because people are super sensitive to these kind of things. But if a teammate on a project can't be understood, than they won't be effective, tasks will get confused and messed up, and the project will eventually suffer because of it. In this avenue, it's perfectly understandable to list communication skills alongside education and work experience But if you mean just rejecting people because they have a unique accent, but can be understood, than I would agree that is wrong. ~~~ amichail I'm referring more to the use of unsophisticated language and occasional grammar errors. ------ jambo howud u complish tht? [That was a serious question with an illuminating response. How would you know whether those who downvoted me were doing so because of my comprehensible but poor writing style, or out of disagreement?] ~~~ JoeCortopassi I'll upvote, just cause I think you were trying to make a point

Ask HN: Declining NDAs - nxzero Really dislike NDAs for intro talks, always say no to them, but don&#x27;t have any reasoning beyond if I have to sign some secrecy agreement just to find out how you create value, how&#x27;re you going to explain it to customers, investors, etc. who also normally don&#x27;t sign NDAs.<p>What is the best way to decline NDAs? When does it make sense to sign NDAs? What is a good &amp; bad NDA? ====== mtmail I had luck sending [http://www.friendda.org/](http://www.friendda.org/) for intro talks. Not even signed, just the URL and "can we both agree on this?" in an email. ~~~ nxzero Thanks, really appreciate the effort to provide your take on the problem. While I could easily see this working with friends, it not really what I'm looking for. Here's so far here's the best expression of why I don't sign NDAs: [https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/09/08/nda-stifle- creativi...](https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/09/08/nda-stifle-creativity/)

Uber Surge Price? Research Says Walk a Few Blocks, Wait a Few Minutes - ckurose http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/29/452585089/uber-surge-price-research-says-walk-a-few-blocks-wait-a-few-minutes ====== mw67 Or use this app: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/surgeprotector/id925613132?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/surgeprotector/id925613132?mt=8) ~~~ swypych Cool concept, but it keeps crashing (iPhone 6, iOS8.4) ------ turnip1979 Last time I encountered a 4x surge pricing, I downloaded Lyft ... the minute I ordered it, surge pricing ended (really annoyed me and I went with Lyft anyways). If it wasn't for surge pricing, I'd be cheerleading for Uber. Surge pricing adds a level of uncertainty ... and 4x on a 50 dollar ride is insane if it ends in a few minutes. ~~~ viscanti Isn't that the whole point of surge pricing? It's attempting to balance supply and demand. On the supply side it's trying to get more drivers where there's more demand. On the demand side, it's trying to see if you really need a ride, or if you can walk a couple blocks or if you can wait a few minutes. ~~~ toomuchtodo If surge pricing is enabled in order to temper demand until supply can catch up, it promotes supply from places Uber may not like (Lyft). No app yet to query Lyft and Uber, see who is cheaper at the moment, and launch the cheaper provider? ~~~ jimkri Here is a website that does the comparison between the 2, but you have to manually enter the surge percentage, [http://www.whatsthefare.com/](http://www.whatsthefare.com/) I think someone mentioned it at least a year ago in a discussion about Uber vs. Lyft. ------ mml In my experience, surge pricing on a nice day doesn't last long. When the weather is nuts, you're gonna pay. Too bad I'm not a researcher. ------ ryanx435 just like I refuse to pay covers at bars, I refuse to pay surge pricing. Uber is my go to app, but if they are doing surge pricing than I switch to ihail (an Uber clone run by a taxi company). if they ate busy, than I use lyft as a last resort. I hate using lyft because they don't offer a fare estimate. using this process I have saved myself 100s of dollars in ride fares. ~~~ eastbayjake > I hate using lyft because they don't offer a fare estimate. Where are you using these apps? In the Bay Area, I like Lyft better than Uber because Lyft gives you a specific fare but Uber gives you a range. (FWIW, there are many other reasons I like Lyft better than Uber.) ------ __Joker How does customer need to counteract if he needs a time sensitive ride? Lets say, I need to go to Airport at time x. Neither I can book earlier to guarantee a ride nor can I wait out the surge. ~~~ monort Use a transfer service, which offers pre-orders. Uber is losing all my airport rides because they don't have it. ~~~ TeMPOraL They probably don't want it anyway. It's more profitable for both Uber and the drivers to not take such rides; in the time to and back from airport they could take several within the city. ~~~ monort If it's profitable for a generic limousine transfer services, why it's not profitable for Uber? Blacklane seems to be profitable too. ~~~ skimpycompiler Logistics of planning all those orders and rides is expensive. ~~~ Retric Sounds like a job for software. ~~~ skimpycompiler It'd be interesting to see how someone handles vehicle routing problem on a large scale, quickly and optimally. ~~~ TeMPOraL Isn't that a solved problem since like the early 70s? Even computing power is not a limiting factor now, only those pesky humans bickering about "central planning" and "democratization". ~~~ skimpycompiler Haha, solved? Put in the time windows, put the capacity limits, put the pickup and delivery (this isn't same as just delivery). It's far from solved, and far from efficient. Field isn't even mature as theoretical computer science, not even rigorous enough :D You have papers talking about their newest hybrid genetic memetic evolutionary deep simulated annealing bullcrap algorithm getting hundreds of citations. You have services like Routific, Routyn, Viamente, WorkWave, and others struggling with it. No one in this world has the technology powerful enough to optimize at scale. Example. WorkWave is talking about exploiting 45Billion dollar market of optimizing thousands of technicians and their routes, but they can't even scale that on a daily basis for large number of delivery points, given how slow their optimization engine is. Same goes for every service mentioned above. Oh yeah, WorkWave bought Viamente for $4M, that's how much their tech was worth. Seems a little bit low for something that could attack the 45Billion market. I have not stumbled upon a single one in the last 10 years that has any potential. All are leeching or would like to leech the big companies that can afford a 1 day waiting time for optimization. UPS seems to be all happy about its routing engine, but they too are being weird about it, if it's good then show it. Someone who solves this for Uber will definitely get its first billion. This would be a huge engineering effort since the problem is NP-hard :D ------ jdlyga I always just try the request again a minute later and surge pricing is usually gone. ------ msde Or use a new company like [https://fasten.com/](https://fasten.com/) who doesnt do surge pricing. ~~~ 3princip >No surge pricing ... however if you're late for work ... you can always Boost your ride. The website explains to boost ones ride is to apply a multiplier to the price. One might call this a surge. ~~~ msde That's just good economics. Fasten clearly understands economics and incentives far better than Uber does. Uber is the classic case of aggressive government style intervention in a market causing it to collapse - no riders or drivers in high demand areas during surge pricing. This is a total failure of market policy because no price discrimination is allowed. Fasten is akin to setting minimum wage. They set a low base price but if you want to get somewhere faster or get preference during a busy period then YOU can raise your price by what it's worth to you. This is a big stumbling block for Uber to which Fasten has a rather decent solution. ~~~ forgetsusername > _That 's just good economics. Fasten clearly understands economics and > incentives far better than Uber does._ It sounds like an auction. It's a clever system, but I don't think it represents a more fundamental understanding of economics than Uber's system, which is to raise prices to induce supply to match demand. ~~~ dragonwriter > It sounds like an auction. It's a clever system, but I don't think it > represents a more fundamental understanding of economics than Uber's system, > which is to raise prices to induce supply to match demand. Uber's system is a central planner trying to simulate the results of a two- sided auction by centrally setting prices to try to achieve a desired result given supply and demand signals. Fasten's system strips out the simulation and just _is_ an auction, which allows supply and demand to align without requiring central planning. I think its pretty fair to describe the latter as evidencing a better understanding of economics. ~~~ toomuchtodo Especially since its been proven that surge pricing doesn't incentivize more supply. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/17/ho...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/17/how- uber-surge-pricing-really-works/) ------ mezeek The simplest way is to move the pickup point ever so slightly until you reach a spot without surge pricing, then simply walk there as it arrives. ------ deathtrader666 Nope. This doesn't work. I've walked more than a couple of miles, and waited more than an hour.. the surge stays between 4X to 5X.

Ohio school districts sue Facebook for accepting ECOT ad purchases - Keverw https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190411/ohio-school-districts-sue-facebook-for-accepting-ecot-ad-purchases ====== adamiscool8 On a quick read of the relevant statute [0], seems like they'd have to show the Facebook ad buys were made with actual intent "to hinder, delay, or defraud any creditor of the debtor" \-- which might be a tough lift when the ads were to promote enrolment and therefore intended to improve the ability to repay creditors? Also sounds like Facebook may have been a "good faith transferee" in receiving the payments. [0] [http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1336](http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/1336) ------ Gunax I am not sure I understand how Facebook is even supposed to know about these things. Does this law really say that you cannot run advertisements if the business is facing insolvency? What constitutes insolvency, and how is Facebook supposed to know (especially if it's a private business)? And while this is a school, other business might be operating in advertising- heavy industries where running ads is their plan to get out of financial ruin. ~~~ reaperducer FTA: _The districts, which may never be made whole for state funding they lost when ECOT inflated attendance, are alleging that Facebook knew the online charter school was financially failing when it sold ads to help ECOT boost enrollment. That, under Ohio law calls, would be an illegal and “fraudulent transfer.”_ ------ Keverw Seen this and thought it was a bit of a ridiculous lawsuit, maybe a unique one. Somehow Facebook was supposed to know about the school's financial problem? I doubt people in Facebook's office in California are watching the local news for Ohio. Facebook just approves ads for content, but as for targeting and budgeting that's all self-controlled and mostly automated other than ad content being approved. I believe Google's ad system works a similar way, ad text or image is approved but as for budget and keywords that's all on you to set up, pause, resume, etc. Kinda feel like the school districts are stretching the law here. I wonder if the school paid with a credit card? Did their bank and credit card network commit fraud too for allowing the payment to go through? ~~~ henryfjordan > Somehow Facebook was supposed to know about the school's financial problem? > I doubt people in Facebook's office in California are watching the local > news for Ohio. They took the money, and according the law they shouldn't have done that. Facebook doesn't get some magical pass because their systems are automated. If they want to do business, they need to follow the same rules as everyone else. If their automation doesn't cover all the corner-cases of the law, that's on them and they should be deprived of any profit derived from their rule- breaking. ~~~ ars How far do you want to take that? If some tiny locality passed a law that in order to accept online advertising you must XYZ, with the penalty in the millions - would you expect Facebook to follow that? What about another country? Would it not be more reasonable to require Facebook to have a physical presence in the locality in order to be bound by its laws? ~~~ rhizome How would the tiny locality establish jurisdiction, or even standing? Locate a branch office of Facebook there? ~~~ ars Well, that's kind of my question, isn't it? Does Facebook have a branch office in Ohio? If they do then they have no excuse. ~~~ Keverw Found the case, it's against Facebook Payments. I'm actually surprised they have this info online as some court websites are very outdated or under a paywall. I know one website to pay tickets online in another county for example traffic tickets(red light cameras, etc) said it wasn't secure in Chrome yet they asked for sensitive info. [https://clerkweb.summitoh.net/PublicSite/CaseDetail.aspx?Cas...](https://clerkweb.summitoh.net/PublicSite/CaseDetail.aspx?CaseNo=CV-2019-04-1369&Suffix=&Type=) Then Facebook has a license in Ohio too since Messenger lets you send money to people over chat. [https://www.facebook.com/payments_terms/licenses](https://www.facebook.com/payments_terms/licenses) So maybe that's one way they can claim power over Facebook. Looks like the last action on the case was 05/17/2019 where it was assigned to another judge. So wonder what the next steps are for this case, will be interesting to follow. I was just curious about ECOT yesterday since that's the school I did my final years of high school and was wondering about where people would get their transcripts if say for college... Looks like records were being transferred to the last known district of residence, but there's also an email if you need help getting them it looks. I'm guessing probably where you lived when you were last in school then, probably not where you are now if you moved since then. The Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West in Toledo was the sponsor of ECOT. [http://www.esclakeeriewest.org/ECOTInformation.aspx](http://www.esclakeeriewest.org/ECOTInformation.aspx) Also looks like the server is at Franklin County courthouse, the judge there approved $300,000 to upgrade the server to preserve it, as the FBI is also looking into the school over the campaign contributions. Then the other big thing ECOT got in trouble over was the way of accounting attendance. [https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190801/judge-approves- moving...](https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190801/judge-approves-moving-ecot- records-to-new-computer-server) I liked ECOT. If I needed to ask questions I could send a email(they had a fake email system, wouldn't go to external addresses) or even call up... I felt they cared a lot more compared to the last public school I went to. Actually got way better grades too. But someone else who went to ECOT after me felt a bit different, so maybe things changed more since I went. I wish we had more school choice in America, instead of the city school being the default. Wish more competition but I think schools in general feel threatened and enjoy having a monopoly on education. Then apparently it's easier to fire teachers at charter and private schools, so public school teachers can be lousy and have great job security. Also other schools could try and claim they lost money too because of this, but aren't part of the lawsuit... Wonder how that works in the future if say Facebook lost and ordered to pay which is split between the schools. Can the other schools join in on the lawsuit or would they need to file separately? Not sure if it's technically considered a class action, since usually you get a notice about the lawsuit to join it automatically if you do nothing with a date to submit a claim or you opt-out to then file your lawsuit or get nothing. Be interesting if these schools won, and then other schools sue for the same amount... Then would FB have to pay out twice the amount? Unless they are only considering what those schools believe they lost directly that was spent on ad money, and not the total lost statewide, as that would make more sense - but I think they want the total money spent at FB total not considering which schools the funds originally came from. As ECOT had students in all 88 counties across the state, so it sounds like other schools not part of this lawsuit might be leaving money on the table if FB is found in the wrong. ------ jeffdavis It seems silly to talk about Facebook "knowing something". Even an individual who knows something does not necessarily incorporate the implications of that knowledge into every decision they make. A whole company certainly can't. ~~~ catalogia Companies shouldn't be held to lower standards the larger they are, which would be the natural consequence of your line of reasoning (the larger the organization, the less likely it is to understand its own actions.) ~~~ jeffdavis My philosphy is decentralization, in large part because of the nature of information flow. But in the context of the system we have now, it really is silly to say that an entity as large as FB "knows" something. And further, in the context of the lawsuit, trying to say that one company should be responsible for the internal financial situation of another enforces centralization -- and will ultimately _favor_ large companies. ~~~ Keverw Decentralization is interesting, but still some flaws and challenges in designing systems. Then making them mainstream is also another challenge as some of these systems are used for bad. But be interesting to make the internet ran by the people for the people instead of mega-corporations, even some people aren't happy with what's happening with handing over control of the .org TLD. I've always thought it's interesting though how an online company is supposed to follow the laws of the multiple states, and even worldwide since a website is accessible worldwide without borders. There are cases where US and European law conflicts. So a company has to decide which law is better to break. I feel the US would be way more aggressive, so maybe European law would have to take the backseat when the company lawyers do a risk analysis. Some stuff is as clear as mud and seems made up as they go. Then also at least 2 countries, maybe more require data for citizens to be held there so that countries own governments can backdoor it. So a backup must be replicated and stored in that country too. The top big tech companies have the money to deal with this, but some stuff like this is very hard for startups. Also wouldn't surprise me if some of these companies try to push regulations to make it harder for startups, so they can get comfortable and stay an established player in the market without needing to compete or innovate. Then also localization of languages seems like duplicated efforts. ------ jeffdavis "it gets about $800 in state aid per student and loses more than $6,000 for each local kid who goes to a charter school, instead." That's confusing. Can someone explain? ~~~ ars Instead of getting $6,000 for each kid of who to the local school, that money goes elsewhere, and they only get $800. AKA students are walking cash machines to the schools. ~~~ sodosopa Of course they are. Their education determines how well they can support future community needs. Public education is a continuous reinvestment in a community. ------ sojmq [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9mhM4-...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9mhM4-ituxgJ:https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190411/ohio- school-districts-sue-facebook-for-accepting-ecot-ad- purchases+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk) ------ anm89 This is clearly insane. ------ sodosopa Knowing what we know now, we know that Facebook saying they “did not know” something is a boldface lie. ~~~ anm89 The logical implication of saying "Facebook saying they did not know something is always a lie" is that facebook knows literally everything at all times. That's like some bizarre self hating facebook worship at that point.

Hillary PAC Spends $1M to ‘Correct’ Commenters on Reddit and Facebook - kushti http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/21/hillary-pac-spends-1-million-to-correct-commenters-on-reddit-and-facebook.html ====== 6stringmerc "It's not propaganda when we do it!" \- Every Politician, Ever Kidding aside, I'm not a fan of astro-turf avenues of engagement. There's no point 'discussing' with a shill. Much like there's no reasoning with a hungry, rabid dog when you're holding a delcious cut of steak. Though the analogy may be flawed, it is worth considering how intensely votes are courted, generally speaking. ~~~ oh_sigh Propaganda is, by definition, anything which promotes or publicizes a political cause or POV. Are you really against that? Or are you just afraid of the word "propaganda"? ~~~ 6stringmerc It's a loaded term to insinuate that the cause or POV is using less-than- transparent mechanisms to garner a desired reaction. I've got no problem with political discourse, or even espousing controversial ideological proposals. That's all natural and healthy. What I dislike is using tactics to frame one side of a narrative as impervious to criticism, which in this case, seems to be the desired outcome from the entity providing $$$. ~~~ oh_sigh How would it be impervious to criticism? It seems like these people are going around looking for statements that are incorrect about her and correcting them. ~~~ 6stringmerc They are being paid to "correct" them by the person who has a vested interest in how the "corrections" portray the facts, linguistically. Let's toss out a hypothetical example: Fact: Hillary Clinton is being investigated regarding her use of a private email server. Fact via "Correction": Republicans have instigated an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for political gain. See what I'm alluding to? If not, then okay, but I don't think I can get much more granular. ~~~ tamana Can you give a non-hypothetical example? ~~~ 6stringmerc Not at this time; apparently the operation is just getting started according to this documentation. If the group does their job well, then - partially kidding here - there should be a representative coming by relatively soon to correct my perception of what the group is motivated to do and how it looks in real life. As in, the burden of transparency isn't on my suspicion, but rather in their actions. To correct my suspicion, they should have no trouble showing all the cases of non-propaganda-resembling "corrections" they've performed. Then there'd be no reason for a person like me to suspect gamesmanship in the endeavor. ------ erpellan I must now assume that any comment on this page of the 'so what?' or 'everyone does it' variety or any downplaying whatsoever is in fact a paid shill. That includes any disagreements with this statement :) ~~~ superobserver You might not be far from the mark, actually. The funny thing about at least one Hillary supporter that I know is how vocal they are about all other politicians being just as bad as, if not worse than, HRC, and that ergo, HRC is no worse than anyone else, and ergo HRC is as equally viable as anyone else. It's quite a distorted Weltanshauung. ------ snowwrestler In case anyone wants to read the actual press release, which is referenced but not linked from the article: [http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project- of-...](http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-correct- the-record/) ------ r-w This may give her a stronger online presence in a naïve sense, but it also undermines all of her genuine supporters. Now every Hillary supporter on the Internet looks like they’re being paid off. Really makes you wonder what kind of administration she’d run. Seems like money always turns up wherever she turns up; the direction of causality is up to your imagination. ~~~ raddad Don't politicians pretty much buy their votes? Only difference is where the money comes from and how they spend it. I haven't looked into it, but I wonder what the price for a vote is these days? ~~~ FooNull Depends on whose vote ------ Dirlewanger FEC reform is the number one thing that the US federal government needs but no member of Congress will ever touch. All presidential campaign funds must be 100% publicly funded. I don't care how much more it taxes onto federal tax or how un-American it is. This shit will never end otherwise. ~~~ maxerickson I'm turning into a single issue troll with this, but I think we can make a positive change at the state level by changing ballot access. Just stop allowing parties to nominate candidates. The machines can still endorse a candidate, but we could gut the national election process one state at a time by requiring any individual that wants to be listed on a ballot to submit petitions for that ballot, rather than receiving the blessings of a privately run national organization. ~~~ tamana How would that solve any problems? Submitting a petition to be on a ballot is a basic effort for national party. That's practically the the reason a national party exists in the first place. ~~~ maxerickson It would make the conventions irrelevant. The national party chooses the candidate to place on ballots using whatever rules they set for the national convention. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be all the procedural nonsense that we see put towards trying to win the national conventions, people that thought they had a serious shot at getting a plurality of votes would organize to get themselves on ballots. We'd have a ballot this fall with 10 names on it, not 2.5. Click to show the partisan requirements here and note the huge disparities with independents: [https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...](https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candidates#Party_nomination_processes) So not only is there the huge well organized machine you mention could easily collect signatures, there is also generally a much easier (and tightly controlled) path to the ballot. edit: It's quite likely that the president would be selected by the Electoral College, but personally I'd prefer that to the current process where the president is selected by the superior voter targeting strategy. ------ projectileboy Is this surprising to anyone? I assumed that all corporations, politicians and celebrities pay armies of minions to cultivate public opinion. How could it be any other way? I hardly think Bernie Sanders' campaign doesn't do the same thing. ~~~ pstuart I'm guessing the Sanders' campaign has enough volunteers doing that. /meta ------ r-w Maybe the real problem is that people in this country still think that the more they hear something, the more it’s worth hearing. If they’d only keep those little slivers of truth about Hillary in mind among the sea of lies—if there were any mental permanence to their observations about her—then maybe she’d stop being able to slip through the cracks like she has about the emails, the speeches, and (foreseeably) _this_ Big Brother-esque move. ------ koolba Paying for shill comments would probably be cheaper: [https://xkcd.com/1019/](https://xkcd.com/1019/) ------ patrickg_zill What it means (in combination with the analysis that a huge %age of Twitter followers are not real) is, there are even less humans that like her, than we think. She is like a rich person that bribes people to hang around her. ------ trhway 1M - how come so cheap? With a 1B+ scale campaigns one would think that such an important tactical theater would receive more spending. Probably it is one of the indication of a reason - not enough resources spent/committed - why Hillary doesn't do that well with the young. ------ tawpKek Vintage thread on consensus cracking: [http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread429408/pg1](http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread429408/pg1) ------ quanticle Can anyone tell me why this is wrong, exactly? Or, for that matter, why this news? Edit: to be more clear, I don't expect the same level of objectivity from Reddit or Hacker News comments that I do from an actual news story, so I don't have the same ethical issues with the Hillary campaign paying people to post comments on her behalf. ~~~ gshulegaard Hmmm...well I can only speak for myself, but I see a number of problems with this. To spare time though, I will focus on the two things I perceive to be the biggest problem: "Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs." PACs which raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and other private business groups have always been questionably legal. However, they have been allowed to exist under strict regulation so long as they remained completely separate from candidates' campaigns. It would appear, however, that a PAC is now coordinating with the Hilary campaign while not being under the same fundraising restrictions. To me, PACs have always been subversions of the American governmental process and now one operating more or less as the "long-arm" of an individual candidate's campaign just makes them even more troubling. The second thing is this type of brigade behavior, especially with funding behind it, is particularly dangerous since it has a disproportionate ability to influence general public perception. It may not influence you or I much individually, but I am not sure Hacker News readers/commentators are a representative sample of the "average American". ------ harigov I don't see this as a problem at all, as long as these commenters are representing the opinions of Hillary. I actually believe that people/organizations should be given an opportunity to respond to these comments "officially" using the same channels that commenters make use of. ~~~ wille92 What about pro-Hillary comments coming from unofficial social media accounts? The article didn't say exactly where these comments would be coming from. I assumed they would be "astro-turf" type users that purport to be everyday reddit users but are actually affiliated with this Hillary PAC. ~~~ oh_sigh So what if they are? As long as they don't misrepresent themselves, why not? ~~~ alistairSH _As long as they don 't misrepresent themselves_ An astro-turf user is by definition misrepresenting themselves. They gain credibility by presenting themselves as unaffiliated with the candidate. ------ lifeisstillgood Seems simple to police : have an account that has a "registration" number. You get some basic training and access to a FAQ generator and can post "on message" replies - all above board as you need it. ~~~ tamana What about users who don't claim to be working for the campaign? The problem isn't overt campaigning. The problem is covert astroturf campaigning. ~~~ lifeisstillgood Well, don't do that. It's like having links to PACs - there was a political campaign sending tweets to a shell account about which wards it needs targeting (can't find the reference) - jail time was needed. Same here. If people with no connection to a campaign are responding online - fine. If there is a connection. Gosh, jail time ------ tathastu Obligatory: [https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/) ------ Upvoter33 much bigger problems exist, you know, like the quality of the news media. commenters on message boards: not so much, paid or not. ------ lasermike026 Sock puppets.... ------ user10001 I don't really have a problem with that since a person would only go to Reddit or Facebook to be brainwashed anyway.

A Sound Card Before Its Time - userbinator http://www.os2museum.com/wp/a-sound-card-before-its-time/ ====== rahimnathwani Did any of you, back in the 90s, build a parallel port DAC to use with Linux's PC Speaker driver? I never did, but was tempted. In the end I just splurged the 80 GBP for a SoundBlaster 16. It's amazing what people can do with great software and just a little hardware. (See bottom of page: [http://linux-audio.com/Sound- HOWTO-3.html](http://linux-audio.com/Sound-HOWTO-3.html)) ~~~ nikanj According to the list, AdLib is the only one that’s no longer manufactured. ~~~ duskwuff > no longer manufactured. OR IS IT?! [https://texelec.com/product/radlib-opl2-sound-card-8-bit- isa...](https://texelec.com/product/radlib-opl2-sound-card-8-bit-isa-adlib- clone/) ------ js2 > _With appropriate software, the VCA could respond to voice commands, > function as a voice-controlled keyboard, record and play back digital audio, > synthesize speech from text, detect and produce dialing signals, and > function as a 1,200 baud modem. All that in 1985._ This is very similar to the Novation Apple-CAT II which was available by 1981 or so: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple- CAT_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II) [https://web.archive.org/web/20160508112704/http://www.jammed...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160508112704/http://www.jammed.com:80/~jwa/Machines/cat/) Ironically, Novation was wiped out when they retooled to produce a card for the PCjr. ~~~ 394549 Could that do the voice recognition functions? The Apple-CAT II sounds like a conventional modem. I think the unique thing about this IBM sound cards is that it had a programmable DSP which made it much more flexible. ~~~ js2 Yes, my recollection is that it could recognize voice on the line. Besides that: \- It had a four-voice synthesizer, so it could play music / synthesize voices, etc over the line. \- It had a handset input, I think w/digitizer, so it could be used as a voice distorter. \- It supported Bell 202 1200 bps half-duplex to another Cat II. \- It could control a tape recorder, so it could be used as an answering machine. \- It could control home appliances via BSR X-10. \- It had RS-232 support, so it could be used as a serial printer controller. It was not a conventional modem. ------ simulate Radio Shack's TRS-80 had a voice synthesis box available for $399 way back in 1979: [http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-voice- synthesizer/](http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-voice-synthesizer/) Here's a YouTube demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeIJxXCh8P8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeIJxXCh8P8) ($399 in 1979 is equal to about $1399 in 2018) ~~~ fanf2 Superior Software’s SPEECH! for the BBC Micro: software speech synthesis on a machine with relatively anaemic sound hardware. It was so cool back in the 1980s :-) [http://www.triumphoverchallenges.com/working-at-superior- sof...](http://www.triumphoverchallenges.com/working-at-superior-software- leeds/) [https://youtube.com/watch?v=1hC7Vjl_EWY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=1hC7Vjl_EWY) ------ pasta My first sound card was a Gravis Ultrasound Max I bought for around $400 maybe? Cut out a part of the PC cage so it could fit. Added memory from an old video card to it and it worked great. But things were going so fast that maybe one/two years later the Soundblaster 2 came on the market. Maybe it was $200 and producing much better sound. Edit: changed the prices as others point out they are wrong. ~~~ einr The GUS Max came out in 1994, the SoundBlaster 2.0 came out in 1991 and was a significantly more limited card than the GUS (no wave table synthesis, no 16-bit audio or stereo) In 1994 the state-of-the-art SoundBlaster would have been the AWE32 and it was $399. You must be misremembering :) Sound cards did not drop to anywhere near $20 until the very late 90's or early 00's and those $20 cards were bottom barrel stuff that would have been less advanced in many ways than the GUS Max even then. ~~~ sundvor "In 1994 the state-of-the-art SoundBlaster would have been the AWE32 and it was $399." Now I remember why I was never able to save any money in my late teens... ------ avian Off topic, but is anyone else consistently getting a plain “you don’t have permission to access” 403 error for this link? ~~~ rasz you need a proxy, blog author manually cuts out ISPs after encountering spam/heavy traffic ~~~ nottorp What good is a blog if no one can read it? ~~~ Theodores What good is the reading of a blog if no one can track it? ------ Jaruzel Relevant: I've recently build a DOS based retro gaming PC using an old Epia 5000 mini-itx motherboard. The reason I picked this board (other than I already had one) is that it has onboard support for Ad-Lib and Soundblaster audio, meaning most DOS era games playback audio without any modification. These boards still pop-up from time to time on ebay, and are way cheaper than a modern ad-lib clone card. ~~~ xhrpost So you're directly installing DOS on the device and not using emulation? ~~~ Jaruzel Correct. Plus the required drivers in config.sys, and using a SD card as the C: drive, all in a slimeline, silent mini-itx case. I've added a text gui (think Curses) to easily select games and apps. It's not done yet, but I'll probably knock up a webpage all about it at some point. ------ reassembled Did anyone here ever have the speech synthesizer card for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer? I remember playing a game called Parsec on that computer and if you had the speech synth plugged into the expansion port of the TI the game would speak at times. ~~~ rwmj There were lots of speech synthesizer cards for 8 bit machines. What they had in common was the SP0256 chip ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256)) which could synthesize speech by chaining together a series of phonemes. Or you could use the phonemes to create "pew-pew"-type special effects for games as I did ... ------ tokyodude I remember being blown away by a DAC on a Commodore Pet. Unfortunately I don't think there are any videos. It wasn't common to own a video camera in 1980 [http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/pet/audio/index.html](http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/pet/audio/index.html) I'm not actually sure that's the correct software. All I remember is it sounding like real instruments back when I was used to simple beeps from the built in sound ------ userbinator 20MHz is not a lot, but a DSP is quite different from a regular CPU, so I wonder if it's powerful enough for decoding low-bitrate MP3... ~~~ rasz A big maybe. While 20MHz TMS32010 DSP in 1985 was around 386DX 33MHz horsepower wise, if you ignore things like single cycle 16x16 multiply(10-20 faster than 386), it might still be too slow. For comparison ~3x faster DSP56001 in Atari Falcon needs 16MHz CPU assist to decode MP3. ~~~ einr Comparing to a general purpose CPU, I remember from the olden days that a 486 DX4/100 was just BARELY able to decode stereo MP3's if you used a well optimized MS-DOS playback program. In a multitasking environment like Windows -- forget about it! ~~~ madengr Windows back then wan’t multitasking. OS/2 on the other hand; I could download at 9600 baud and play Wolfenstein at the same time. ~~~ einr I ran Windows 95 on my 486. ------ drosan 403 Forbidden You don't have permission to access /wp/a-sound-card-before-its-time/ on this server. :c ------ walrus01 the ps/2 models 25 and 30 were sold in large numbers to educational institutions, so my guess is that it was paired with some sort of weird education-related recording and playback software. ~~~ teddyh It can’t have been made for that, since the IBM PS/2 series of computers was not released until 1987.

Z Kombinator - hassy http://zkombinator.com ====== TazeTSchnitzel The sad thing is that the Samwer brothers are real people who actually do this, and they're quite successful at it too: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the- germany-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-29/the-germany- website-copy-machine) ~~~ czzarr why is that sad? Silicon VAlley claims ideas are worthless and execution is everything, until someone actually copies their idea. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel Well, I'm not Silicon Valley. I just don't like the concept of simply copying someone else's idea as a business model, because you're piggybacking on someone else's idea, and it's uncreative. ~~~ ArekDymalski I wonder what is your opinion about barbers, shop-owners, car manufactures or basically any business outside of the internet. I think that there's big difference between copying the business model and the product/service itself. ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel It's more copying a company, its business model, idea, everything down to the fine details that bothers me. Not so much copying a business model or an idea. ------ Aaronontheweb Obviously a parody, but it underscores a historical trend of overseas investors pouring money into clones of US companies without any substantial innovation or changes. One question I'm struggling with... Is a clone a legitimate (abstract) business if the differentiator between clone and U.S. original is the experience working with European / Asian customers and catering to their needs specifically? ~~~ alexpenny He's making fun of the Samwer brothers, which would mean he probably doesn't think clones are legitimate business. ~~~ Aaronontheweb That much is obvious. Not asking him. Asking the HN crowd. ------ railsjedi Haha, great little parody. Timing of it may have something to do with our little stunt yesterday: <http://ncombinator.com> ~~~ zinssmeister do you regret calling it NCombinator? Seeing as you could have avoided slipping into this clone mindset or does it not really matter to you guys? ~~~ railsjedi Doesn't really matter. Our goal was to get some early attention. Once we build the community up we can change the name and turn it into something real. Right now it's just an idea and the only platform we had to generate the sufficient early interest was a ridiculous name and launch. ------ Eduard If YCombinator thought globally, Z Kombinator wouldn't have a chance in the first place ;-) ------ Mz With a German American background, I hear that like someone with a strong accent mispronouncing the word "the" as "zee". It adds another dimension of humor for me. ~~~ heretohelp As a German-American: you mean like "sie"? ~~~ Mz Um, not really what I was thinking. To me that sounds less harsh/strong than what I had in mind. I guess it depends. I am imagining a very harsh accent. Some folks in my family pronounce ich like "ish", others closer to "ick" and then some do a more gutteral sound like you find in loch (a la loch ness monster). So, uh, maybe. ------ danvoell Where is Z Hacker News? ------ swapsmagic what the ....

Headed To College? Design Your Dorm Lets You Build Your Pad In 3D - edw519 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/headed-to-college-design-your-dorm-lets-you-build-your-pad-in-3d/ ====== mcastner This is neat but I'd like to be able to try it out before having to register. The register popup should be when you wanna save or print the mockup maybe.

Drone used to save two swimmers caught in rough surf - SQL2219 http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/world-first-a-drone-has-been-used-to-rescue-two-swimmers-struggling-in-heavy-surf-20180118-h0kg9m.html ====== ColinWright Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175512) Other submissions of the same story from different sources, which might be useful in evaluating some of the comments on that page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16180146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16180146) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16177381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16177381) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176665) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176430)

uTorrent Becomes Ad-Supported to Rake in Millions - tomse http://torrentfreak.com/utorrent-becomes-ad-supported-to-rake-in-millions-120810/ ====== huhtenberg No surprise here, really. uTorrent went downhill steadily after it got bought by BitTorrent. The original uT was beautiful in its well-thought minimalist design and lean code. The first thing BitTorrent did was they messed with the UI. Then started bundling some BS features like streaming, ratings and so on. And an elegant, simple, yet intricate piece of software started crumbling. I used to give uT as an example of really good software design and execution, but sadly it's no more... time for a rewrite it seems :) ~~~ xentronium Transmission is my go-to client on linux and os x. Very smallish and simple UI. I wonder if their port to windows [1] is usable. [1] <http://sourceforge.net/projects/trqtw/> ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel Transmission's great. Came with Ubuntu, lets me download Torrents from magnet URIs, out of the way with no hassle. Or what mTorrent used to be (the greek m looks like a u, but isn't, and is pronounced "micro" for the SI prefix) ~~~ gcr Are you talking about µTorrent? If so, µ is pronounced "mu" or "mew"; see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C> ~~~ TazeTSchnitzel Ah, my bad. Its Wikipedia page is MTorrent though (uppercase) ------ baddox I've never understood why anyone who is tech savvy would use a closed-source BitTorrent client, _especially_ if they plan on using it to commit copyright infringement. There are open source alternatives, like deluge (which is cross platform and has a remote client feature that's splendid) or rtorrent (a great little ncurses client for *nix). ~~~ lelandbatey The best client that I have used so far is by _far_ Transmission for *nix systems. I learned about it when I got my first mac, and now it makes for a lovely headless seedbox. ~~~ antihero The web UI is also really nice and simple. I think the reason I use Transmission over rtorrent is that it seems to allow you to "eat" stuff that you put in a blackhole, which is rather nice. ~~~ someperson Wait what? ------ beloch They've hit a sticky spot. I'd much rather pay a couple dollars for ad-free software than use something with annoying ads in it. However, like most people I'd probably be illogically unwilling to suddenly pay for the same software I've been using for free. In the short-term I'll probably just avoid updating, but in the long-term I'll migrate to another torrent client! This is probably the beginning of the end for uTorrent. ~~~ jmillikin > I'd much rather pay a couple dollars for ad-free > software than use something with annoying ads in it. It's a torrent client. If you're willing to pay money for a nicer experience, then you're not in the target audience. ~~~ eps I'm willing to pay money for a nicer experience with movies, but I can't. Presently, that experience - no ads, no DRM and instant access - is only available for free. ~~~ Rastafarian Completely agree + IMHO it's insane to give money to the entertainment industry, provided it will use part of them to bribe politicians, destroy freedom, establish totalitarian control over Internet and PC platform. ------ vasco In a perfect world the ads would be a small link right after the torrent title/name. The link would read "buy original" and would send you to a webpage with links to Amazon/Steam/other store where you would get to buy the original if you liked what you read/seen/heard/played. They could make some affiliate profit out of it too. ------ jdangu Massive alienation of users through invasive ads is the beginning of the end. ~~~ octopine Starting with uTorrent "enhancing" their users' experiences with bundled adware: [http://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/04/utorrent-update-comes- bundl...](http://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/04/utorrent-update-comes-bundled-with- adware/) ------ micheljansen I've actually never used uTorrent myself, but I found myself quite appalled by the title and then slowly warming up to the ideas as I read the article. As I understand, the company behind uTorrent currently makes their money from people who install a browser toolbar bundled with the uTorrent installer. This is one of the sleaziest sources of revenue. Putting some ads in the app itself is at least honest. Even better, rather than having your average "Clean your computer now!" ads, they apparently plan to advertise using "sponsored torrents", from within a BitTorrent client. That's actually pretty clever! If they push this a bit more, they can use uTorrent as a trojan horse for a legitimate BitTorrent platform the way iTunes went from being an app to put music on your iPod to a full-blown music store. I'll defer my judgement until I see how this turns out, but it can hardly be worse than a browser toolbar. ------ sp332 This seems like the perfect application for oldversion.com <http://www.oldversion.com/uTorrent.html> ------ ianstormtaylor Wow. TorrentFreak has 48! bugs found with Ghostery. I think that is the highest I've ever seen. Speaking of a service that's supported by ads (and worse than ads). ------ uvTwitch Thanks for notifying me to not upgrade uTorrent. ~~~ tuananh i haven't upgraded since 2.0.4 ~~~ ditoa Yeah I am still on 2.2.1 as I did not like the changes they were making to the UI (thankfully just a few clicks changes it back to the old look). Never even installed 3.x ------ CrazedGeek [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_client...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients) If you feel the urge to switch. (I like Transmission -- clean, efficient, great as a daemon + web interface). ------ DigitalSea Looks like it's time to give Deluge another try. uTorrent started out great then they started bundling in malware and now they're adding in advertisements - as if they need the extra cash in the first place. ------ ojiikun I can't claim that I was the first to have this thought, but I will post it to provide a possible positive counterpoint: If these adverts are for legitimate, legal torrents, their addition to the client could greatly increase the fraction of torrent traffic that is, well, legal. This would help put an end to the "all torrent traffic is illegal" argument for throttling and blocking used by ISPs and governments. So perhaps this is a ploy to make some advertising money, but with a subplot of ensuring torrents keep working the way they do. ------ smegel uT went crap after 3.1. I use an old 64 bit version of 3.0 - no ads and no plan to upgrade. ~~~ alan_cx Er, I thought it went crap after 1.6.1 !!!!!!! IIRC, and please forgive my terrible memory, something happened with ownership or the main programmer "selling out", which caused a lot of worry about privacy, etc. I believe that 1.6.1 was the last "safe" version in relation to that. And for years I stuck with 1.6.1 Whether or not is was utterly wasting my time, I really dont know!!! ------ RexRollman With that kind of money, I wonder how long it will take someone to sue them for "profiting from promoting piracy", even though they don't. ------ thirsteh Millions? Doubt many of the users of the application care about ads, so unless they charge for impressions... ~~~ dguido They didn't say the currency they're using. It's millions because it's all in Facebook dollars (effectively ~$5 USD total). ~~~ autodidakto Must be FB dollars if they can't manage to keep the lights on with 15-20 mil ------ SeppoErviala Why use proprietary adware when there are FOSS alternatives available? ------ jamesjguthrie Time to choose a new BitTorrent client. ------ PaulHoule if they get rid of that conduit.com BS I'll be happy ------ minm Here is one alternative: <http://www.tonido.com/app_torrent_home.html>. Manage your torrents from anywhere.

GNU RCS 5.9.2 - lelf http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2013-11/msg00014.html ====== comex I still use RCS occasionally for versioning single files, although the speed and ease of initialization of Git make it not so useful these days. Incidentally, having maintained RCS history for a large file that made it up to 1.1677, I discovered that GNU RCS is very inefficient at applying the reverse line-based diffs in order to retrieve an old revision - rcs takes 27 seconds to retrieve 1.1 while my small Python implementation takes 0.5 seconds. I guess it probably keeps in-memory data in a contiguous buffer rather than an array of lines? ~~~ gwu78 Can you post your ,v file somewhere? I'd like to try to replicate your experiment, using my rcs(1) and cvs(1). While I'm impressed that your Python script is quick, I'm not sure that Python is ever "small" compared to any POSIX-like UNIX userland utility. An accurate perspective of the size of any "Python implementation" would account for (a) all the files you need to install on top of a POSIX-like UNIX userland in order to get Python to run and to run your script and (b) the fact that the OS Torvalds would have used if not for the AT&T lawsuit, namely BSD, does not include Python in the base install. If Python were truly "small", I'd consider it for use in embedded systems. ------ octo_t for old legacy systems, keeping /etc/ in RC is (and has been) a massive godsend. Its nice to see a rarely used bit of software from 31 years ago still being maintained. ~~~ jlas Nowadays I sometimes create a git repo in my /etc directory ~~~ Gnewt I use etckeeper, which is basically the same thing except with some nice hooks like auto-commit on apt-get install. ~~~ emillon And fixes the permissions. With /etc in git it becomes world-readable. ~~~ lallysingh A script that gets the current permissions for every file/dir and emits a chmod command for each one is pretty handy. ------ davvid If you find yourself versioning single files, and still want to use Git, you may want to check out "Zit, the Git-based single file content tracker". [https://github.com/Oblomov/zit](https://github.com/Oblomov/zit) ------ vincie I use it extensively for any files I touch that I do not share with anyone else, especially configuration files. Comes included in NetBSD, so no need to install anything else. ------ army We had to use RCS for university projects and submit the versioned files. It has many shortcomings but the simplicity of it is nice for some purposes. ------ jng People still use RCS? ~~~ octagonal Why take a car to the neighbourhood store when a fit-for-purpose bike would work just as well, while being free of all the complexities that a car has? ~~~ pekk because it actually isn't helping your health or the environment to use RCS, and actually isn't more complex to do with another tool.

How to get enough protein without meat - petethomas https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/how-to-get-enough-protein-without-meat/2017/11/13/b6d139b4-c3d7-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html ====== spodek The article lists protein density in grams of protein per cup or ounce, but a more relevant measure is grams of protein per calorie. Most people's health issue is too many calories. In grams of protein per calorie, many plants score high. You just have to eat more, which, if you make delicious food, is a benefit. ~~~ DiThi > Most people's health issue is too many calories. It's like saying the issue of a murdered man is too much metal inside the body. Technically correct but misleading. If you replace the carbs by exactly the same amount in fats, most people will lose weight. Many of them would be unable to eat so much because they would feel stuffed and stop feeling hungry all the time. And for those that eat the same amount of calories, they would not be in fat storage mode so excess is secreted. ~~~ bagacrap This is misleading. If they don't eat as much due to higher satiety, then you are not replacing with equivalent calories. Calories are meant to be and are calculated as the lingua franca of macronutrients. 5 calories of one really will have the same effect on your waistline as 5 of another, holding all else equal. Regardless, the grandfather is discussing macronutrient distribution and you seem to be in favor of optimizing it as well, so I don't think there's disagreement here. ~~~ DiThi > If they don't eat as much due to higher satiety, then you are not replacing > with equivalent calories. That's one factor of why eating fat instead of carbs defeat the calories-in- calories-out idea. But it's not the only one. Both the lack of release of insulin and ketosis helps the body work much better. > 5 calories of one really will have the same effect on your waistline as 5 of > another, holding all else equal. That's the problem, nothing else is equal when you have a vastly different proportion of macronutrients. ~~~ namelost OK let's ignore protein for a second. You're saying that if you eat the same number of calories, but as fat instead of carbs, your body will store less of it. i.e. that the human body is much more efficient at extracting energy from carbohydrates than it is from dietary fat, i.e. more of the energy from dietary fat is wasted. Macronutrient choice cannot affect the amount of work that your body does, only what percentage of the calories are wasted (inefficiency). On the face of it this makes no sense because fat is such a good energy source that _it 's what our bodies use to store energy_, so why would our bodies have problems extracting energy from dietary fat? ~~~ DiThi I didn't say that our bodies extract less energy from fat. It stores less energy as fat. Fat storage mode is stimulated by insulin, which is stimulated by glucose or by lack of sodium. Insulin brings other health problems in addition to weight gain. ------ hokkos An article about getting enough protein without meat and doesn’t talk about essentials aminoacides is worthless. You should read about Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score and the new Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score all plant proteins are not equals, and should be eaten simultaneously to avoid deficiencies to have a complete profile to bring muscle protein. Also anabolic response is lower with plant based protein versus animal based and it should talk about B12 as deficiencies in it is a silent killer. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correc...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Corrected_Amino_Acid_Score) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Ami...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Amino_Acid_Score) [https://dabamirror.sci- hub.cc/bbb1a373d204d4fe2c1f9a8a38356d...](https://dabamirror.sci- hub.cc/bbb1a373d204d4fe2c1f9a8a38356daf/[email protected]) [http://dacemirror.sci-hub.cc/journal- article/a73bbb377b5c4cd...](http://dacemirror.sci-hub.cc/journal- article/a73bbb377b5c4cd9f09d8376d3ef0ad7/volek2013.pdf) ~~~ KitDuncan This annoys me so much. The essential amino acid myth has been thoroughly debunked for years. [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining- myth/](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/) B12 is the only real deficiency vegans experience and it's easily solved by taking a supplement. B12 isn't some miracle vitamin, exclusive to animal products either. It's produced by bacteria in the soil and since we're usually sterilizing our food, it's not usually found on our produce anymore. That's why livestock are getting it supplemented, just the way vegans are supplementing it. It's not even like eating meat and animal products saves you from B12 deficiency as a big chunk of the population is actually deficient. ~~~ passwordqq Genuine q- can you explain what you mean by- "It's produced by bacteria in the soil and since we're usually sterilizing our food, it's not usually found on our produce anymore. " What if we didn't sterilize? Would the bacteria then produce it in our stomach? Once I "get " those bacteria in, do I have to replenish? ~~~ KitDuncan I am not suggesting you ingest the soil bacteria, for it to produce the B12 inside your body. If you were to ingest small amounts of soil (on fruit or in water) it should already contain B12. I don't know why anybody would do that, if they could just take dirt (hehe) cheap supplements instead though. ~~~ passwordqq OK, got you. Thanks. Follow up q- in that case what's wrong with sterilization? The dirt should still have b12 I think? What about the bacteria though? Not a good idea? ------ brilee Did anyone else find it bizarre that they quoted "grams of protein per ounce/cup" of food? America seems to have slowly adopted the metric system, but it's not what I expected to look like... ~~~ raarts Per cup is weird, especially to the rest of the world, but what really is maddening to me is the 'serving'. Every food app is riddled with nutrients 'per serving' . Completely ridiculous. Servings differ greatly between brands, packages, countries. ~~~ geowwy > Per cup is weird, especially to the rest of the world Cups are not weird, just just a pain in the arse because US cups are 240ml and metric cups are 250ml. If you're following a recipe that needs exact measurements it often trips you up. ~~~ tom_mellior > Cups are not weird Yes they are. For example, the article talks about "dark leafy greens (about 5 grams per cup)". Is that cups of dark leafy greens before chopping them up or after? If you specified the amout per weight, it would not make a difference. If you specify them by volume, it does. ------ ojosilva I've gone (ovo-lacto) vegetarian recently and I couldn't be happier. My body feels lighter, my mind more productive and my mood improved somewhat. My initial intention was to be somewhat "flex" and have meat and seafood once in a while, like once a month, but I've eaten meat only once in 4 months and it was not specially satisfying: it tasted overwhelmingly salty and I wasn't able to enjoy the flavor. I guess I lost interest. Biting into a dead animal now feels wrong, it feels like eating food from a garbage can. Even eggs, milk and sometimes cheese seem like a stretch for me now. I did not anticipate that. In fact, I thought I was going to really enjoy my "meat day" but now I dread it. Friends ask why I did it. I don't have one particular reason. Just did it. I'm not sure if the planet's better because of me not eating meat. I don't want to sound moral, but it does feel civilized, in an almost naive way, not to crave other animals. But I know I'm vegetarian because my body, and not my conscience, asked for it. I've always been a proud meat eater. I laughed at my sister when she turned vegan. But I now feel relieved like a criminal that confessed his crime after 40 years in hiding. Trust me, eating meat is not important when you eat from a wide range of sources. Eating meat, poultry, seafood should be a special, almost mystical thing (in some religions it is), reserved for special occasions. It should be local, not global. The massive processing of animals is not only cruel and insanely wasteful, but is quite unhealthy from the epidemiological and physiological perspective. ~~~ cies As a long term lacto-ovo vegetarian, who is went mostly plant-based for health reasons: dairy causes many ailments, a quite unnatural food for humans to eat... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3c_D0s391Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3c_D0s391Q) ~~~ toasterlovin For some people. Others of us are well adapted to dairy and, for us, dairy is a miraculous food category. It is a great source of protein and fat. It adds a wonderful dimension to so many recipes. And, aside from meat, milk is one of the few single foods that you can largely sustain yourself on (I think of it as mother nature’s Soylent). ~~~ cies > Others of us are well adapted to dairy No one is properly adapted, that why milk consumption is associated with shorter lifespan and some diseases. > And, aside from meat, milk is one of the few single foods that you can > largely sustain yourself on (I think of it as mother nature’s Soylent). What? Do yo mean to only drink milk (or eat meat)? In that case you lack fiber, big time. I've mentioned, and provided you with a video revealing how damaging milk is to the human body. It will sustain your medical bill, until you die. :) > It adds a wonderful dimension to so many recipes. That's an opinion, and I must say I also really like the taste of some milk products. ~~~ toasterlovin > No one is properly adapted, that why milk consumption is associated with > shorter lifespan and some diseases. Adaptation to a lifestyle dependent on milk and it's derivatives was a huge inflection point in the evolution of Europeans. It gave the bearers of this adaptation a tremendous advantage over people who lacked it and consequently spread rapidly. If I were you, I would be very suspicious about diet advice derived from epidemiological studies, since those studies can only ever infer correlation, not causation, and are likely mostly useless as a result of this shortcoming. This article by Gary Taubes goes into great detail about why (and, seriously, this is one of the most important things I've ever read): [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t....](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html) > Do yo mean to only drink milk (or eat meat)? Yes. See the Maasai (huge milk consumption) and Inuit (who historically ate a diet consisting entirely of meat from sea mammals). If you're interested about diet and how it relates to health, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is an amazing book, which is, on the surface, about how dietary fat and carbohydrates affect health, but is really a deep dive into how we ascertain knowledge and how the political process of scientific recommendations gets corrupted by human shortcomings. ------ hoosieree Anecdotal, but my vegetarian friend had "excessive protein" show up in a blood test. Which was surprising, because he's not _trying_ to get extra protein. Personally, when I'm vegetarian (95% of the time) I just make sure to get some beans and grains and variety, and call it a day. ~~~ copperx That's highly unusual. Did he have protein clearance problems due to early kidney disease? ------ k__ I never had the impression that protein was a huge deal for vegans. Considering tofu and seitan. Aren't low testosteron levels a bigger issue? ~~~ cies > Aren't low testosteron levels a bigger issue? Nope. Vegans have higher T levels. Also higher than vegetarians. Here an article with plenty links to studies: [https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/12/less-cancer-in- vegan-m...](https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/12/less-cancer-in-vegan-men- despite-more-testosterone/) ~~~ fingerprinter Linking to nutritionfacts.org is like linking to Exxon with an article on why green energy is bad. ~~~ cies What does nutritionfacts.org sell? Broccolli? Does nutritionfacts.org pay for studies? Nope. (Exxon does) Sorry, bad comparison. But I understand what you mean: Greger eats a plant based diet himself so he must be biased and the probably goes about cherry picking studies to match his beliefs. After a lot of research I've come to the conclusion he's honest and works in the interest of people's health. ~~~ saosebastiao > What does nutritionfacts.org sell? A religion. ------ d13 What about the amino acids? Aren't those more important to a vegetarian diet than protein? ~~~ cies Protein breaks down in amino acids, so when zoomed out they are pretty much the same thing in nutrition. ------ coldtea A better question is, why? ------ ardit33 Can't read the article because of the paywall. But if you are looking for protein without consuming meat, then usually dairy protein is great. 1) Milk based products that are high on protein (either whey, or casein). Most shakes are usually whey. Otherwise yogurt is a great source (Icelandic skyr is mostly protein). Some cheeses have more protein than fat, etc... 2) Egg protein. Either full eggs, or just whites, or powder egg protein. 3) Peas, Beans, Peanut Butter are good protein sources as well... but you can really eat so much in a day 4) Avoid soy, (for many reasons, but mainly because it is thought to be andrenogenic). If you can't eat either milk or egg based products and I think you are a bit out of luck. Yes, there are people that manage fine with (there even vegan bodybuilders), but it really becomes tough diet wise as it is very restrictive.... ~~~ optimusclimb It seems pointless to me when people become "vegetarian" to opt out of the factory farming/animal cruelty machine...only to eat massive amounts of eggs and dairy. ~~~ anarazel It's a question of degree. One hundred gram of meat vs 200g of yoghurt implies a significantly higher energy use and on average is more crucial pretty calorie. ~~~ cies He's talking about the "factory farming/animal cruelty machine", thus ethics. You are responding about "energy use", this environmental impact. Two separate reasons to go vegan. (besides the issues of pollution, scarcity and health-impact) ~~~ anarazel I also referenced the cruelty? The point being that to get the same amount of energy out of milk/egg based products you'll need fewer animals than for meat based production (where animals have to grow for multiple months to years just to be slaughtered). Which means fewer animals will suffer to feed one person. It's obviously possible to reduce further. ~~~ cies Hard to compare the cruelty involved in breeding-for-slaughter, breeding-for- milking-then-slaughter or breeding-for-egg-laying-then-slaughter. Or to compare suffering in a chicken with the suffering of a cow. How many chicks convert to one cow? Bottom line is vegan, period. And even that line is blurry if you zoom in enough :) ~~~ optimusclimb Just in case you check your replies now and then - yes, you get what I was saying. One can opt out of meat and meat products for reasons of health (which are complicated and debatable, but a personal choice), reducing environmental impact, and not taking part in the way we currently handle animals for food. The latter one is complicated, as it is technically possible to opt out of supporting the chicken/cow "matrix" if you really truly only ever eat meat/eggs/dairy from animals that are raised, used, and finally killed on (likely) local farms that generally treat their animals with "dignity" for whatever that's worth until they kill them. I personally don't think that real free range cattle and chickens that are eventually slaughtered have bad lives for what they are - but being able to only eat such animals is definitely a choice only available to the upper-middle class and up, given the current system. But if you're a vegetarian and you routinely buy 48 egg cartons for $6 at your local safeway and eat tons of cheese? You just have a restrictive weird diet.

Yes, Python is Slow, and I Don’t Care - mithunmanohar1 https://hackernoon.com/yes-python-is-slow-and-i-dont-care-13763980b5a1 ====== scarface74 I was all ready to savage his opinion after reading the headline but I agree looking at my architecture that I designed for the company I work for, CPU isn't the bottleneck. Every time I try to increase performance by multi threading as much as possible, the databases start screaming. On the other hand, the idea that dynamic languages are more productive than static languages are laughable. Statically type languages prevent a lot of bugs and allow for a lot of automated provably correct refactorings that simple cannot be done with a statically typed languages. You can't even reliably do a "find usages" of classes using a dynamically typed language. ~~~ carlmr >On the other hand, the idea that dynamic languages are more productive than static languages are laughable. Statically type languages prevent a lot of bugs and allow for a lot of automated provably correct refactorings that simple cannot be done with a statically typed languages. You can't even reliably do a "find usages" of classes using a dynamically typed languag Exactly, I get quick and precise code completion, I catch plenty of errors beforehand etc. I'd say I'm about 10x as productive in C# as in Python, with similar amount of experience. Python only shines when there is a library that does something really well that you need. For me any productivity advantage in Python is from lots and lots of libraries. Also in terms of maintainability, I find my C# code easy to read and modify a year later when I've forgotten completely about it. In Python I need to rescan all of the types into my head until I can understand what the program does. I mean with var and dynamic, C# offers everything you need for duck typing efficiency, while preserving the very important statically typed interfaces. ~~~ bluntfang >In Python I need to rescan all of the types into my head until I can understand what the program does. Couldn't that be solved with sane variable naming conventions and docstrings/documentation? ~~~ scarface74 Maybe. But it can be more easily solved on a strongly typed language where you can right click on a method and do "find usages" and it can. E done algorithmically. ------ freetime2 I pretty much agree with everything in the article - except for the bit where he tries to quantify why python is better from a developer efficiency perspective than other languages. The main example he cites is a study that compares the amount of time writing string processing routines in different languages - which is quite a bit different from the work I do every day. I develop web apps which means I generally work in very large code bases, and spend most of my time modifying existing code rather than writing fresh code from scratch. I have found that statically typed languages (java + typescript) and the fantastic IDE support that comes along with them make it really easy to navigate around the code and refactor things. Also - the compiler tends to catch and prevent a whole class of bugs that you might otherwise only catch at runtime in a dynamically typed language. Of course there are other situations where I prefer to use Ruby as my scripting language of choice - it all comes down to using the right tool for the job at hand. Unfortunately I don't think the author gives enough consideration to the trade-offs between static vs. dynamically typed languages, and I think he would have been better just leaving that section out as it isn't really necessary to prove his point that CPU efficiency isn't important in a lot of applications. Ultimately though I completely agree with his main point: "Optimize for your most expensive resource. That’s YOU, not the computer." ------ mangecoeur Python is also heavily used in science, where performance really does matter. It's successful because of how highly ergonomic python apis can be built on top of optimised C/C++/Fortran libraries. That said, there is clearly a desire to write 'fast' code in python itself without swapping to C. Cython helps, but to get really fast Cython code you actually have to write with C-semantics (so you are basically writing C with Python syntax). Projects like numba JIT are interesting in that they can optimise domain- specific code (i.e. numerical/array code) that's written in normal python style. It also means jumping through a few hoops (although with the latest version in many cases all you need is a single decorator on your hot function). You can even do GIL-less multithreading in some cases. Overall things are looking promising, with the addition of the frame evaluation API and possible improvements to the python C-api that could make JIT and similar extentions easier. ------ boomlinde The author argues from his professional experience as a Python developer that it's fast enough, that you'll spend most time waiting for I/O anyway, that you can just throw more servers at the problem etc. The problem is that his experience as a Python developer doesn't accurately reflect the prevalence of problems where runtime CPU performance actually is an issue. Of course not, because who in their right mind would make an informed decision to solve such a problem in Python? Python has worked for him because it is only useless for a category of problems that he hasn't had the opportunity to solve because he's a Python developer. Outside this professional experience, not everything is a trivially parallel web service that you can just throw more servers at if CPU time exceeds I/O waiting. It all really boils down to what your requirements are, whether you have all the time and memory of a whole server park at your hands, or a fraction of the time available in a smaller embedded system, how timely the delivery of the software has to be and how timely it needs to deliver runtime results once it's up and running. There are times where Python just isn't fast enough, or where getting it fast enough is possible, but more convoluted and tricky than implementing the solution in a more performant language. Developer time may be more expensive than the platform that my solution is for, but that doesn't get around the fact that it eventually will need to run with the available resources. ------ agentgt Unless we are talking like circa 1999 I don't think I have heard a complaint yet that Python is slow. I'm curious who or where the author heard that from (not specifically the people themselves but the domain they are in). What I have heard complaints about Python are (and I don't agree with all these points): * Its not statically typed * The python 2/3 compatibility * It has some design flaws: GIL, variable assigning, mutable variables, lambdas, indentation (I don't agree with all these but this is complaints I have heard). * The plethora of packaging (ie its not unified) I guess one could argue its slow because it can't do concurrency well but that really isn't raw speed. Then the author started comparing string processing of programmer time from a study which... doesn't help the authors point at all. * Python has and will always be fast at string processing and most people know this * The people that complain about python speed are almost certainly not doing string processing * I have serious questions about the study in general (many languages have changed quite a bit since then) ~~~ pg314 > I'm curious who or where the author heard that from (not specifically the > people themselves but the domain they are in). In the telecom domain, I've dealt with data big enough that Python wasn't really feasible. Think 100 of millions of records in CSV format that need to be parsed and processed. Doing that in Python is going to be painful. ~~~ classybull Python is insanely fast at data processing and analysis because it has very fast libraries. As a matter of fact, don't know if you've heard, but data processing it kind of like.. Python's thing... ~~~ mattkrause You're violently agreeing with each other. Python _itself_ can be pretty slow. Doing image processing on data stored as list-of-lists-of-integers would be brutally slow. On the other hand, numpy is an import away, and it can be quite fast, especially if it's been built with an optimized BLAS/ATLAS, etc. ~~~ AstralStorm By blazingly fast you mean 100x slower than C++ equivalent and only 20x slower is you're very careful to avoid accidental copies. For reference, MATLAB is about 30x slower with no special care. Pure Java on Hotspot was 5x slower except it dies on big data input due to very slow GC and goes to 50x slow. Source: handled big audio data from hdf5 database, gigabytes sized. C++ equivalent had no vectorization or magic BLAS or anything. ~~~ joshuamorton As I'll often say to these comments, then you're doing things wrong. Numpy code can be written to never leave the numpy sandbox, and at that point it should be as fast or faster than naive c++ (because you'll be getting SSE and stuff for free). There's a reason almost all deep learning is done in python. ~~~ pg314 Not all data is a good fit for Numpy: some data is non-numeric or not a homogenous array. > There's a reason almost all deep learning is done in python. The heavy-lifting in e.g. TensorFlow is done in C++. Bindings to Python make sense because it is one of the few sanctioned languages inside Google, and it is widely used outside of Google and easy to pick up. ~~~ joshuamorton >The heavy-lifting in e.g. TensorFlow is done in C++. Bindings to Python make sense because it is one of the few sanctioned languages inside Google, and it is widely used outside of Google and easy to pick up. That's exactly the same as with numpy. I'm not sure what your point is. C++ is also one of the few sanctioned languages inside google, as is Java. >Not all data is a good fit for Numpy: some data is non-numeric or not a homogenous array. I'm curious what kind of data you're working with that can't be represented and effectively transformed in a tensor (numpy array). ~~~ pg314 > That's exactly the same as with numpy. I'm not sure what your point is. I was replying to "there's a reason why...". You didn't specify that reason, so from the rest of your comment I took it to mean that Python (with numpy) was fast and good enough to write deep learning stuff. That doesn't seem to be the case for TensorFlow. > I'm curious what kind of data you're working with that can't be represented > and effectively transformed in a tensor (numpy array). I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of numpy, but my understanding is that the basic data structure is a (multi-dimensional) array of values (not pointers). That leads to a number of questions. If you have an array of records (dtype objects), and one of the fields is a string, am I correct that each element needs to allocate memory to hold the longest possible value that can occur for that field? What if that is not known beforehand? How do you deal with optional fields (e.g. int or null)? Do you need to add a separate boolean to indicate null? How do you deal with union types, e.g. each record can be one of x types, do you make a record that has a field for each of the fields of those x types? Do those fields take up space? ~~~ joshuamorton >You didn't specify that reason, so from the rest of your comment I took it to mean that Python (with numpy) was fast and good enough to write deep learning stuff. That doesn't seem to be the case for TensorFlow. Tensorflow tensors are numpy arrays, or are transparently viewable as such. >If you have an array of records (dtype objects), and one of the fields is a string, am I correct that each element needs to allocate memory to hold the longest possible value that can occur for that field? What if that is not known beforehand? Yes, although you can also store numpy arrays of pyobjects, which are arrays of pointers. You'll be able to vectorize the code, but you won't get the same performance improvements as with a normal numpy array, because that same level of performance isn't possible with an array of pointers. Note that for most machine learning applications, you'd preprocess your string into a vector of some kind. >How do you deal with optional fields (e.g. int or null)? Do you need to add a separate boolean to indicate null? Yes, but I'm not sure when you'd do that. That is, again in most machine learning applications you'd be representing things as one-hot arrays or as some kind of compressed high dimensional position vector, where 0 would represent a lack of presence of some thing. >How do you deal with union types dt = np.dtype((np.int32,{'real':(np.int16, 0),'imag':(np.int16, 2)}) is a 32 bit int that can also be accessed as a 16 bit complex number via .real and .imag. ------ icebraining "It doesn't matter than Python is slow, besides we can use compiled libraries to speed it up" "People saying it doesn't matter that Python is slow are deluding themselves and preventing Python from getting faster like JS did" "Python is inherently harder to optimize than JS since it has <very dynamic features>" "Smalltalk/Lisp/etc are also very dynamic yet are much faster" "The slowness of Python is harming the planet by being inefficient and therefore wasting more energy/producing more pollution" Did I miss any arguments? I know certain topics are bound to attract some repetitive discussion, but "Python is slow" has been one of the worst. ~~~ dom0 > "Python is inherently harder to optimize than JS since it has <very dynamic > features>" Python is not a very dynamic language in the sense that you actually _can 't_ change a lot of stuff (and a number of the things you _can_ change just segfault CPython). I think JS is more dynamic, for example. Or Ruby. ~~~ icebraining These are not my arguments, mind you; I don't know enough to make them. You've piqued my interest, though: can you give me an example of those things that you can't change or that break CPython? ~~~ dom0 Things like the Carlo Verre hack (also a thing you can't change —any more— in Python: builtins), editing objects during their construction (via e.g. gc)... generally, the gc module allows other ways as well to crash your interpreter. >>> import gc >>> 'foo'.lower() >>> gc.get_referents(str.__dict__)[0]['lower'] = str.upper >>> 'foo'.lower() segmentation fault (core dumped) python (That's the method lookup cache) A talk in this direction is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGofLIzX6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGofLIzX6g) ------ Waterluvian Python is my Swiss army knife. I love it because it is a single tool that can aid in almost every project I do. But if I'm doing one specific thing a lot, I want that thing to be done well and done efficiently, so I'll reach for the specific screwdriver I need. Also most of my problems are IO bound so single threaded concurrency is fine. But I represent a very small portion of the global problem space. ------ dom96 The fact that Python is slow isn't its only problem. What I care more about nowadays is wasting my time hunting bugs that could have been avoided by a static type system. ~~~ blumomo Please tell me, do you write tests? I've learned that it's necessary. I do 100% code coverage and I'm enjoying TDD a lot. ~~~ virmundi The whole point of static type systems is that they give you the "type tests". 100% code coverage just to get what the compiler would give you is a waste of time. If python is supposed make developers more productive, this is just dragging them down. ------ dahart Python's value to me has always been that it's easier to get things done, not it's speed. One time when I was interviewing a candidate for a coding job, the candidate said she loved Python the most "because you can just yell at it and it'll work." It's both the breadth of the standard library and ecosystem, and the simple language design, that make developing things in Python faster for me. Doing problems on Project Euler has been an education for me in how algorithm matters more than speed. Lots and lots of people spend hours writing long C++ codes that are easily beaten by a few lines of Python. It certainly goes the other way too, and the wrong algorithm in Python is even that much slower and more painful than the right algorithm in C++. But when the right algorithm is used and the problem is solved in a few milliseconds, it really doesn't matter which language uses more CPU cycles, all that matters is whether you saw the insight that let you skip 99% of the search space, and how much time you spend writing code. ------ _pmf_ Somewhat ironically, Python is used a lot for things that would benefit from raw speed (data processing pipelines) and do not benefit at all from dynamic typing (since the kind of property bags / data frame views over data are easily replicated in statically typed languages). But Python's C extension API is quite a bit easier than p.e. Matlab's MEX API (to me at least); can typical Python IDEs compile and relink extension modules without an external build step? > Your bottleneck is most likely not CPU or Python itself. With applications that are dominated by raw data processing, it's very, very easy to be CPU dominated. Hell, I had one quite trivial data converter for logfiles where the "parsing the printf string" part of Java's printf dominated processing and writing a custom formatter halved processing time (while regexes can be compiled, the format string cannot be precompiled and will be interpreted each time); it's one of those things where I would intuitively say "why did this moron write his custom formatter" if I stumbled upon it in a code review. Intuitively, you'd expect this to be a simple case of an IO dominated task (which it is now once the bottleneck has been removed). If it's fire-and-forget batch jobs, you can get away with it, but if the converter is part of a user facing fat client application that runs on a old office laptop, you don't have that luxury. ------ kodablah The article could be titled: "Yes, Python is Slow To Refactor and Maintain, and I Still Don't Care". I never understand why dynamic language enthusiasts primarily focus on new code only. You have to discuss all sides of increased or decreased productivity to make a rational argument. ~~~ hasenj Python is optimized for getting interesting things done in a few lines of code. Small scripts you write once and then forget. For serious projects? IMO python is a disaster. ------ wyldfire > Your bottleneck is most likely not CPU or Python itself. I've found that this is often the case. Nearly always disk or network. But it's sometimes surprising how little work you need to do to become CPU-bound. This is the price we pay for such a tremendously dynamic language. Indeed, the article's suggestions of C/Cython/PyPy are good ones to remedy the problem when it occurs. ------ jayflux I get the point this guy is making, but if you need something parallel for a cpu bound task, throwing more hardware at the problem isn't the most efficient solution if you can just use more cores. For example adding another quad core when the first cpu is only using one core anyway is inefficient and expensive. Right tool for the right job I suppose. ~~~ nhumrich Python does multiprocess very well. You can easily use all cores on your machine. Pythons main "disadvantage" is threading because of the GIL. But each process gets its own GIL. So when you multi process, your not limited to one core. ~~~ classybull This. I had a problem where I needed to scrape roughly 20,000 html documents daily, which is normally a pretty slow task. You have to open the file, load it into memory, parse the DOM, and then run all of your selection methods. Sequentially, it took about 60 minutes daily. Multithreading slowed it down because it was CPU bound. Multiprocessing allowed me to run 12 processes across 8 cores. That took the total processing time down to about 4 minutes or so. And I was able to write the code in a day. Writing something similar in Java or C++ would have taken me a week. ------ nadam "It used to be the case that programs took a really long time to run. CPU’s were expensive, memory was expensive. Running time of a program used to be an important metric." As hardware gets faster we give it new tasks that could not be achieved before. Like rendering high resolution stereoscopic images using physically based shading at 90 FPS on relatively cheap consumer hadware (VR). There are still quite a lot of code that we call 'performance critical'. Most of that code is written in C/C++ (and CUDA and glsl, and hlsl, etc...) today. ~~~ ivm It's still expensive on client machines because most of the persons in the world are NOT software engineers with 6-digit salaries. They run cheap computers with HDDs and Windows polluted by a ton of 3rd party crap. They don't know how to fix it and silently suffer. I was cleaning a local vet clinic's devices recently – they were literally switching between two computers to not wait 5 minutes of non-responsiveness because some bloated software was occasionally consuming 100% of CPU. ~~~ mark-r A lot of businesses these days prefer web apps. It's not hard to understand why - all the hassle of system maintenance falls to the people who host the app and can afford to know their stuff. If your Windows PC is suffering from rot just replace it with a Chromebook. ~~~ ivm "Just get money for a new device out of thin air and just replace all your paid or even cracked Windows software with subscription-based alternatives that will not work without Internet. Ah, also just relearn all your workflows." Sorry, but that's how being in a bubble looks like. ~~~ mark-r I wasn't suggesting that businesses were anxious to replace things that already work, I'm suggesting that as they acquire new software it's more likely to be web-based. Devices are often replaced on a schedule anyway, especially if they're leased. ~~~ ivm I wasn't talking only about businesses in my previous reply. But most businesses on the planet aren't bathing in money either. You are speaking as a citizen of a rich country where devices are relatively cheap and stable Internet is available everywhere. ------ VHRanger The problem is not so much that python is slow. It's that in some scenarios python can't be made fast. Fast prototyping is great but being stuck with a prototype for deployment isn't. ~~~ traverseda >It's that in some scenarios python can't be made fast. Can you give some examples of this? I mean, obviously with enough effort you can "make python fast" since it has good C bindings, and can just be a thin wrapper around fast stuff. Similar to how command line tools can be ridiculously fast[^1] despite, ostensibly, running in bash. So I'm a bit confused about what you're claiming. Organizational issues, it's difficult to get management on board with an optimization pass? [^1]: [https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster- th...](https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your- hadoop-cluster.html) ~~~ VHRanger My point is do you have competent C programmers on your team? That said, there is a point in some python prototypes where you "hit the performance wall". For whatever reason, you'll need to look at one of the options to make python faster and none of them are painless unless you're already a serious C programmer. ------ traverseda There's are still some big gains python could make, if python implementations were better. Micropython is equivalent to a real-time cooperative-multitasking OS. If it had ~~better~~ support for things like cffi, you could implement posix on top of it. I can imagine a laptop that runs gnu+python in the next few years. That's a whole new usecase, simply because that implementation uses a lot less ram. What usecases would we discover for a faster python? Shared objects and proper sandboxing would also be huge. ~~~ jerf "There's are still some big gains python could make, if python implementations were better." At this point, I would find it far easier to believe that you are underestimating the difficulty involved in what it takes to speed up Python than that there are enormous gains yet to be had in speeding up Python. I suspect JS has had more optimization effort expended overall, but Python has still had a ton of work by lots of smart people, and generally got an earlier head start on optimization. (They didn't start trying to make JS "fast" right away; they spent rather a lot of time getting JS's hookup to the DOM in the face of things like .innerHTML working first, before anyone even cared to do what we today do routinely without thought in plain ol' Javascript, let alone with our glorious frameworks.) There are enormous gains to be had in speeding up "a language that is like Python except certain things are banned", but people have already done _that_ analysis too and discovered that broadly speaking, if you do that, too much existing Python breaks. If you want to see something like that, check out the RPython aspect of the PyPy project, which successfully implements a fast subset of Python. But it is a noticeably restricted subset of Python; AIUI it's not even close to something you can just drop in to your code and get faster speeds. One of the things that I've learned from Python and the other attempts to speed up the scripting languages is that despite the mantra, yes, there _is_ in practice such a thing as an intrinsically slow language. (The theoretical existence of a Python interpreter that can run all existing Python code at C speeds doesn't do us much good if we have no idea after decades of very smart people banging on the problem how to manifest it. Personally I'd suspect that while such a beast theoretically exists it has an exponential complexity startup cost or, if you prefer, exponential compilation costs. And probably a pretty decent code and/or RAM bloat cost, too.) And Python is one of them. Some of the reasons why it is so much fun to use are part of that intrinsic slowness. Some of them really aren't. I personally think there's a lot of up-and-coming languages that are exploring the space of how to get those nicer programming abstractions and programmer- convenient code without paying anywhere near the runtime cost that the dynamic scripting languages of today do; it's one of the more exciting developments I see coming up. People complain a lot about code bloat and poor performance of our code since right now we have to choose between "fairly inconvenient but fast" and "convenient but slow and bloated". Patience! Better choices are developing, but they're still young. ~~~ monkmartinez Will you please share the languages you thunk are up and coming? ~~~ jerf Go is an early entrant into this space, but I think part of the reason it is early is also that it is less ambitious. But to answer the ever-present question on HN about "why would anyone ever use this language?", something modern, almost as easy to use as a scripting language [1], and almost as fast as a compiled language, doesn't actually have a lot of contenders. (Old fogeys... like me!... like to observe that if you drop modern you have some things like Delphi that fit that slot, but they're all pretty much dead now, and Go has good support for concurrency in the modern processor environment.) In the "you probably can't convince your boss yet" category I'd recommend Crystal ([https://crystal-lang.org/](https://crystal-lang.org/)) and Nim ([https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim-lang.org/)). Given the programming landscape and the general direction of things lately, I also bet there's a couple of serious contenders developing out there that haven't even hit HN yet. [1]: For at least a broad class of problems. Put Go head-to-head with a problem someone would use NumPy for and Go will go down in flames in the ease- of-use and line count department. However I use Go for a lot of networks servers (not even necessarily Web servers, but network servers) and the line count for these comes out maybe 20% larger than Python, and it doesn't take much developer cognitive energy for those extra lines. I've also used Go for some command-line type apps where the line count is probably 50% over Python, but I also got some significant wins from the type system and concurrency, so, all in all there's a lot of things I can prototype with about the same mental effort in Go as I could in Python. Being able to declare interfaces that existing types conform to turns out to cover a surprising amount of those "duck-type" scripting-type cases. ------ booshi This keeps getting posted, and while it makes some valid points, it's a lot of handwaving. Arguably, other languages can get code out faster depending on the dev, language, etc. ~~~ 0xcde4c3db Agreed. Things that are handwaved include: 1) Performance can be a genuine requirement of the product, i.e. if it's not fast enough, it doesn't ship. You can't ship faster and cheaper by sacrificing the thing you need to ship (well, you _can_ , but then you're shipping a different product, not meeting the same requirements sooner; it's no different than cutting a feature). 2) Many processes can't be horizontally scaled in an efficient way, period. Not because the programmer is ignorant of some cool algorithm, but because the problem is fundamentally expensive to parallelize. Maybe you end up getting something like a 20% boost by having twice as many nodes, even after applying all the cool algorithms. And you don't necessarily get that scalability in your code base for free, either. 3) "Speed" in the mobile and embedded spaces is often as much about energy efficiency and thermal management as getting done sooner. 4) The metrics for deciding that Python is faster to develop in only measure small problems. People tend to shy away from Python for bigger projects, and the reasons for this are pretty hotly debated. ------ bluedino Many times when Python is blamed for being slow, it's the programmers fault. Python is great that you can 'regular' people writing code in it quickly. The problem is, these regular people don't always understand algorithms or things like caches, threads, databases... A lot of these users can just say "My department needs a $40,000 24 CPU server with maximum RAM from MicroWay/SuperMicro, we need to run our codes faster", when they are just trying to brute force things. They understand the problem domain but don't have the programming skills to use a computer to efficiently solve it. But, these guys are all a step ahead of the ones who are stuck in the mindset of "C is the only language fast enough for my work", while not even understanding pointers and basic syntax and getting stuck on silly things like text processing, which could be done in minutes in Python. ------ nhumrich Author here. Surprised to see this toping HN. Appreciate all the feedback. Let me know if you have any questions. ------ progman Yes, time to market is important. However, you don't need to compromise convenience of development for the sake of performance. If you twist your Python code to get performance it takes time. If you need performance, and like the syntax of Python then you should take a look at Nim [1]. With Nim I develop as quickly as in Python while I get the performance of C. [1] [https://nim-lang.org](https://nim-lang.org) I believe application performance _is_ important on servers. It makes a difference if your Shop software written in Python is able to handle 50 requests per second, or if the same software written in Nim can handle 500 rps. And by the way, Nim provides static typing which helps a lot to catch errors at compile time. ~~~ cup-of-tea Nim seems really good, but does it have a decent REPL these days? I'm not sure if it would be as convenient with a statically typed language, but I like the incremental development approach so much that I only use C if I absolutely have to. ~~~ dom96 It doesn't. But you can grab Aporia (or some other tool) to quickly compile and run some code, it replaces a REPL very well in my experience. ------ deadsy Premise: It's more important to be productive than to have fast code. Conclusion: Use Python. Is the premise true? For many cases- yes, but it depends. If you are running an application on the cloud and your metric is $/user/year and you have many users then saving some compute resources for each user gets attractive and you don't want to just throw another VM at it. Is the conclusion true? Garbage collection gives big productivity gains. Other languages have GC. It's not nice to see your Python code die after a few days because you messed up the type passed to a function. Other languages fix that at compile time. Multicore is now. Other languages are built with better multicore awareness. ------ __s > without getting stuck in the weeds of the small things such as whether you > should use a vector or an array Yes, instead get into the weeds of tuple vs list Not included in the graph of time-to-solve-problem static languages: statically typed languages with type inference ~~~ scbrg Given that they have exactly the same interface, that choice is really easy. You go with one until it turns out to be insufficient, and then you switch to the other and _not a single line of code_ has to change, except at the point where you create the thing. Incidentally, the same is true in many situations in Python, and that is (IMO) one of its strengths. ------ agnivade > However, this is no longer true, as silicon is now cheap. Like really cheap. > Run time is no longer your most expensive resource. Our client won't spend more money than a t2.medium instance on aws. Nothing we can do about it. In that case, run time does become an expensive resource. But I get the point that OP is trying to make. Just wanted to mention that not all of us have the comfort of having enough resources on which our app runs. ------ fiatjaf > It’s more important to get stuff done than to make it go fast. This is not a real absolute. It is only valid when what you have to run will not benefit a lot from performance or suffer a lot from lack of it. The real guidance you can have in these matters is: how many times is my code going to run per second? Some programs are written to be run once a day, others 10000000 times in a second. The first ones should be written in the language you're most productive in, the second ones in the fastest possible language. ------ karmakaze Putting aside the discussion regarding productivity, there is a case where I have found execution time to matter. Scaling an application which uses an unsharded database. The long transaction durations and number of connctions were bottlenecking db throughput. The particular app was a Ruby/Rails monolith. ------ nervous123 This sentiment is the reason for almost all software (especially on the web) beeing a load of crap. It's slow, it's buggy and developers always give the same excuse: CPUs and memory are cheap, therefore we can waste our customers time. Imagine what we could do with the amazing hardware we have, if people started to do the sane thing and actually use the hardware to do things efficiently. ------ Thaxll Giving EvE Online as an example is bad because that game artificially slow the game loop to keep up with the number of players, would this happen with C++ on a recent architecture? Probably not. ------ sedlich In "What if CPU time is an issue?" we could also mention the nim language (and not only cython) because it compiles (not only) to C and feels like python. ------ donatj I know it's not trendy, but I would argue PHP is as productive for developers as Python and has a MUCH faster runtime, particularly after 7. ------ snarfy Slow doesn't matter when you scale horizontally. ------ hellofunk Yeah? Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and _I_ don't care.

Ask HN: Ways to make money on the side as a full time developer? - kace91 Context: I&#x27;m a European developer in my late twenties. I would like to make more money, as right now I&#x27;m barely able to save (just 100&#x2F;month or so, after cutting expenses). I have zero contacts to get small projects like websites for mom and pop shops, and my family comes from a very non entrepreneurial background so I literally don&#x27;t know how any way to make money that doesn&#x27;t involve just getting a salaried job.<p>Ideally it would be something that uses my current skillset as a developer and that would let me set up my own schedule so it can be flexible.<p>Do you guys have any idea for a side gig? ====== lukaszkups I was in the same situation as you are - at one time I realized that instead of running after side gigs I should just find a full time job that will enable me to earn as many money as I need, instead working 12+ hours/day (8hrs + side gigs). In overall, that was the greatest solution I made - it reduces possibility of the burnout etc. ------ sethammons I support all the other suggestions so far. I would also suggest considering something outside your skill set. I have a buddy who does lawn care on the side as a weekend gig. Maybe other things considered more blue collar. My cousin is a pool boy in SoCal. He was making over $100k a year before he backed off due to health reasons. ------ quickthrower2 Without knowing the numbers, location, family (ability to move city/country), experience level etc. It is hard to say. But most likely the best bet is to find out how you can earn more money from those core 40h/week. Best for you to come up with a strategy based on your circumstances and tolerances. There is a lot of good advice in HN if you search on [https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com). And look for patio11 posts, as he has posted alot about money and getting more of it. I think the golden nugget is don't tell a future employer what you are earning now. My advice - don't be embarrassed to be earning double what you are earning now for doing the same thing somewhere else. Options to think about: Contracting, Skills that pay more (React?), Companies that can pay more (trading companies? FAANG companies?), Cities that pay more, Countries that pay more, Roles that pay more (management, architect), Negotiation with current employer (will they pay more if you say you might leave). Don't trade your spare time for money. Trade time for making your time worth more money. Also maybe cut your expenses more? The only time I've been in your situation as a dev is with a non working partner to support. If you are single, consider living in a shared house for example. Also I'm not a big earning like a lot of the HN crowd. ------ philipkiely In addition to my full-time job, I write articles for a few different publications. I recommend this as a strategy for you for a few reasons: 1\. Getting your name out there can lead to more contracts or better jobs 2\. Its a great way to develop your skills in areas tangential to your expertise 3\. There are lots of great publications in Europe, Smashing Magazine comes to mind. 4\. Based on your paragraph above, your written English is more than sufficient for technical writing. Note that the per-article pay is not great (using Smashing Magazine again as an example, they pay 200 USD per article), but I think writing is a great way to earn a little extra cash right now while building a portfolio that can get you better opportunities. ------ zufallsheld > I have zero contacts to get small projects like websites for mom and pop > shops Open Google maps, look for shops around you and check if they have a website. Many probably will have some old, shitty website. Talk to these shops. ------ patatino The easiest way to save money is by cutting expenses. Take a really good look at what you spend on what. Cheaper mobile abo, cheaper internet abo at home, do you need Netflix, Spotify premium. Cook more, less take out food. Things add up pretty quickly. Cold email companies with old websites, send them 1-2 themes you think would match their brand. I did that years ago, and on average on ten emails, I would get a customer. ------ natalyarostova Honestly, some self-study to transition into a job that pays more would probably have the highest ROI on your time.

How to hire a good software development team? - meleshka Hi everyone!<p>I have an idea for a mobile app, but I haven&#x27;t got any coding skills. What is the best option for me: hiring a dedicated team of developers, trying to learn to code on my own, or looking for a freelancer? ====== raooll A software Engineer with 10+ years of experience here. I would say that all depends on the idea itself and the technical complexity of the app. If it is a pretty straight forward app you should probably hire a single developer/ team of 2 person to develop the app. If the idea involves a lot of technical complexities it will be a good idea to get a technical partner first and then look for outside help. The technical partner will help you with some part of the code and managing the freelancer/team etc. If you are not a technical person, you should really write down what exactly you need from the freelancer even before you start looking for one. Do not go for the cheapest freelancer that you can find. ------ Lis-sa Agree with raooll. If your idea is complex enough and you need to cover various intricacies, you'll better hire a dedicated team that will take full responsibility for the development process. Here is a software development company that built a high-quality mobile app ([https://www.itechart.com/services/mobile- development/](https://www.itechart.com/services/mobile-development/))

Ask HN: Considering a move to the Bay Area with a family. Where should I live? - api I have what might be a very good job offer in the Bay Area. Not going to reveal with whom, but it&#x27;s in the vicinity of Mountain View.<p>It would involve relocation to Silicon Valley, so evaluating the possibility of living there is a major part of evaluating the offer.<p>First, some background: I love tech and love to build things, but I also love other things too. I have a family and a five month old baby, and my wife wants to stay home while our kids are young and I support this as well. I am quite interested in developing my career, but I have no interest in becoming an unbalanced workaholic. I also want to have a life, pursue other things, and spend time with the people I love.<p>It&#x27;s not the job I&#x27;m concerned about here. It&#x27;s the real estate hyperinflation of the valley and the culture that this engenders.<p>So what I&#x27;m looking for is: if I want to lead a balanced life with a family, where should I live? Is there anywhere in the Bay Area (commutable to Mountain View in &lt;30-45 minutes) that isn&#x27;t unattainably expensive and where my wife and kids would feel comfortable living?<p>I&#x27;m looking for cultural insight, since financial insight is something I can do myself. I&#x27;ve already made a number of spreadsheets.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m more interested in the long view-- in neighborhoods we could eventually call home. I&#x27;m interested in areas where being a stay at home mom for a while isn&#x27;t terribly weird, where our kids would have other kids to play with, and where the cost isn&#x27;t so astronomical that it&#x27;s going to eat up any advantage from the job&#x27;s compensation. ====== mchannon I think of renting in the bay area much as I do of jobs and careers in the bay area- almost nobody's in it for the long (5+-year) term, so it makes sense to go for what makes sense now (within a longer term plan) and then readjust as your conditions change. The cheapest rents within a reasonable commute of MV are going to be in East Palo Alto. These are still ridiculously high (compared to other metro areas), and the crime rate there is the highest on the peninsula (still very tame by most big city standards; I've never been in another metro area where most residents don't really in their gut understand what crime is). Many people put up with the commute from the east bay, and Union City/Fremont can save you a few hundred dollars a month on rent. Run your hourly rate against the hours spent in traffic and the east bay probably comes out behind. If your wife wants a social life while she stays home, there's probably a little bit more of that in the east bay (from personal experience, there's just not very much room for that in Silicon Valley- nearly everyone's there to work to make the rent or mortgage). Best wishes- if you're coming from a smaller place you may find your perceived standard of living is quite low for the amount of wealth and income that everybody seems to have. In order to guide you better, may want to give us an impression of what metro area you're coming from. ~~~ api Currently in Asheville, North Carolina. Lived for six years in Boston, which is not as expensive as the Bay Area but certainly isn't cheap. Asheville is hugely cheaper than the Bay, but isn't particularly cheap by its local standards. ~~~ yolesaber How are you enjoying Asheville? I've always entertained dreams of moving there because I love the woods and being around nature, but I also don't want to be disconnected from the music scene, happenings in the art world etc. ~~~ api Asheville \- The good: It's gorgeous. Really. One of the most beautiful places in the country. The art and music scene here will _not_ compare to a New York or a San Francisco, but compared to other half a million person small cities Asheville punches _waaaay_ over its weight class. Its art and music scene is better than many medium sized (2-4 million) cities. There are lots of festivals too, like this: [http://mountainoasisfestival.com](http://mountainoasisfestival.com) The food here is incredible. It's easily as good or better than the food you will find in Boston and New York. It is difficult to find a bad restaurant downtown. There is, of course, tons of beautiful outdoors stuff to do: hiking, biking, kayaking, backpacking, mountain climbing, just about anything except skiing (it's the South, no snow). There's lakes not far away too, including some that permit power boating. So there is _that_ kind of skiing. Weather is nice. It can get a little cold/snowy in the winter. Hard winters are not unknown but are rare. Last winter was very mild. Summers are warm but since it's up in the mountains you do not get the soul crushing Southern heat you get in, say, Atlanta or Orlando. If you are a single heterosexual man... well... you will probably like it. I'm not so it doesn't matter to me, but if I were I would not have been disappointed. If you're gay, I know there's a decent gay scene. I'm not so I can't talk about that from first hand experience. It's also generally a pretty tolerant place. Finally, downtown is alive. Unlike most interior cities, Asheville revolves around its center. There are lots of people walking around and lots of people (including me) live right in the middle of the city. \- The bad: It's a small town. It can feel small after a while. The tech scene is so-so. There are a few decent startups and a few major employers, but keep in mind this is a small city. If you're looking for a hot tech scene you'll be disappointed. Personally I kinda wanted a break from that, so I didn't care. I found a good job and picked up some very interesting freelance work. If I turn down the Silicon Valley offer I may go more in a freelance direction, and try to bootstrap my own startup project too. Asheville is an island amid the pentecostal / fundamentalist Christian back country of Appalachia. Drive for 30 minutes in any direction and you are in the _hiiieeeeells_. The job market frankly sucks for most people. If you're in tech -- and _especially_ if you can freelance/telecommute -- you can escape it to some extent. But the joke is that Asheville has the "best educated wait staff in the country." It's not really a joke. Underemployment is a huge problem. And real estate here including rent is not cheap when you compare it to the median income. It looks cheap compared to Silicon Valley, but SV also has a lot of high salaries that you'd find it hard to earn here (unless you can telework / freelance / startup). The RE market is distorted because Asheville is a major vacation and retirement destination. You have to advance your own dreams or career goals. Unlike big, driven cities, the city's culture will not push you. It is easy to get comfortable and give up. (This is a problem outside any of the major cities, honestly.) ------ developer74 I'm glad to see your question, because I'm asking similar questions! The housing market seems prohibitive for a family to move to the area, especially for someone who wants to keep their family as their main priority. Have you looked south, to Morgan Hill or Gilroy? That's a longer commute, but it seems like you can get more for your money. And many companies offer shuttles so you can at least avoid some of the traffic pain. I've also read that the housing market is very competitive, and there are many offers on houses. So if you look for real estate and find things you might like, that doesn't mean you'll get it. You may end up settling for what's left over after the cash buyers with offers 10% over asking price have cleaned up the good stuff. If I were single or even young and married with no kids, I'd make the move in a heartbeat just for the sense of adventure and to see what happened. With kids and a family (especially kids in middle school), it's not so easy. It's important to settle somewhere good on the first try and not risk moving around a lot. It seems very daunting to find a place to live, with good schools, a safe and nice neighborhood, with a commute that is doable, and a house that isn't a million dollars. I guess you can't have it all. ------ hkarthik I was in almost the exact situation as you about a year ago. I had an offer in hand from a well known company in Palo Alto to join one of their innovation labs. From a career standpoint, it would have been a game changer. However, like yourself, I have a young family with small children that I like to spend time with. Moving from Texas to the Bay Area would have quadrupled our cost of living, for only a modest increase in salary compared to other, work-from-home opportunities I was getting. So I chose to take one of those other opportunities. The conclusion I've reached is this: if you didn't start your career in Silicon Valley or SF, it is exceedingly difficult to adjust your life to fit in there when you are more experienced and have family responsibilities. If you still want to do it, I would suggest renting for a year in Mountain View, Menlo Park, or Palo Alto. If you don't mind a little bit of a drive, you can look at Redwood City or San Mateo. Don't worry about the "long view" as you will need to gauge the situation after you get there and don't be at all surprised if after a year, your family wants to move out. Feel free to email me if you have more questions. Email is in my profile. ------ ad_bfl You looking for an apartment or a house to rent? An apartment may be a bit easier to find, but rents right now are pretty high. My business partner just went through this exercise for her sister and it was not fun to say the least. I live mid peninsula - meaning Belmont, and know the area around me pretty well after living here some 25+ years. Foster city is pretty kid friendly and a bit cheaper, but be prepared for finding a place to be a challenge in general. The commute to MV by car can be a nightmare depending on time of day, you may consider taking the train to MV and biking to the office. Redwood city and Menlo park are also options, but neighborhoods in these areas area a lot like New York City, a block or two can be a HUGE difference in neighbors and whether or not you will feel comfortable. ~~~ api An apartment initially, probably a lower cost (in Bay Area terms) one at first, but my thoughts are more long term. I would eventually like to contemplate renting something on a long term basis or buying. The latter seems almost unattainable unless I want to go all the way down to South San Jose or similar, but I'm curious about what locals think and I know there's a lot of SF people on this site. BTW: the thing that has me floored is that the offer would be jaw-droppingly good anywhere else, but has me wondering if it's worth it in the Bay Area. Your real estate costs are mind-numbingly insane. In the long term something has to be done about this or employers are going to start fleeing the area in search of reasonable wage environments, because employees in the valley have to ask for at least 50% higher wages simply to break even with other places. What are your thoughts on east bay: Newark and Fremont and such? ~~~ jrbeal I was born and raised in the area (born at Stanford. Went to high schools in Mountain View and San Jose) and can tell you that the high prices and wages are nothing new. I remember saying the same thing as you back in the 80's. (re: "employers are going to start fleeing...") Needless to say, it never happened! And I doubt it ever will. Speaking of South San Jose, that's where I last lived (before leaving the area) and commuted all the way to Palo Alto every day. It wasn't so bad back in the 80's (around 30 minutes) but I have no idea what it's like now. Maybe it's better! I have a sister who still lives there and is a top-notch real-estate agent. I'm sure she'd be happy to help with any questions. Let me know if you need her number. ~~~ api Just curious: why did you leave? Cost? Job elsewhere? Just for a change? ~~~ jrbeal My company transferred me to Texas. I'd probably still be there otherwise. ------ jason_slack I moved to San Jose from a small NY town back in 2007. What I quickly realized that is that 30-45 mins away is very wide spread and there are times when driving an hour might not get you very far :-) If the job is in Mountain View, maybe consider Sunnyvale, Cupertino. Morgan Hill would take you 45-1hr with good traffic. Longer at times. Santa Clara. There is Fremont/Union City but that is outside 30-45 mins usually, I would say. I dont know about the schools. Really good schools in Cupertino, but higher rent and house prices for sure. E-Mail in profile you wanna chat about this. ------ tptacek You're probably looking for something like San Mateo. Midway between San Francisco and Mountain View, so you're not committed to South Bay companies. Relatively(!) affordable and family friendly. ------ RNeff Ask your new employer for a realtor recommendation, talk to him/her. You have not internalized how expensive the area is and how bad the traffic is. The bridges and the freeways are maxed out during commute. Each city has good areas and not so good areas often next to each other. Newark and Fremont are at least an hour each way to MV. Live close to MV or close to a CalTrain Station. For schools, your choices are Palo Alto, Menlo Park, or a private school. ~~~ api I've encountered this kind of sentiment elsewhere too. It's incredible... not even New York could make a solid six-figure offer almost look like a Wal-Mart wage. The school situation is puzzling to me. The tax base should be fine, and the majority of the schools I see get high ratings on a nationwide basis. Is this genuinely a problem, or is a Valley resident's idea of a bad school one where the majority of the graduates do not get into top-ten universities? Cause my idea of a bad school is one where you have to go through a metal detector to get in and the majority of their graduates go nowhere. :) Great tip about the traffic too. I went off Google directions, and I'm guessing those times are for light non-rush-hour traffic. ~~~ quadlock when you inch along in traffic, you can be 15 mins to your destination for a long time. ------ ishbits Just going through the same thing with my wife and 2 kids. We thought California might be good for a lifestyle change, but I'm not sure of the valley is the place. My employer has offices in Sunnyvale and Costs Mesa. But I'm finding the real estate a little crazy. ------ rdouble San Mateo ~~~ api Looks promising. I see that the schools are not quite as highly ranked as Palo Alto and similar, but aren't bad. They seem to be ranked higher than where I presently live.

Archy - stallmanite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy ====== stallmanite Defunct Textual User Interface which attempted to implement the ideas Jef Raskin had intended for use in the original Macintosh. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin)

Super Mario Bros. is easy with lexicographic orderings and time travel - Swizec http://swizec.com/blog/week-2-level-1-of-super-mario-bros-is-easy-with-lexicographic-orderings-and/swizec/6392 ====== Choronzon I dont know why this isn't upvoted more.Its actually a beautiful visual illustration of the problems and challenges of machine learning. And i dont even like platform games.

Startup School Speakers Rock the House - rms http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2008/04/startup-school-speakers-rock-the-house.html ====== sanj "And last but not least Kate Courteau for all her help with “afterparty logistics.” " There was an afterparty? And here I was feeling like one of the cool kids. ------ snprbob86 I'm coming out to interview for YC on Friday, so I should be hacking on our demo. That, or doing some of the massive pile of homework I have, so that I can graduate at the end of this term. However, I watched just one speaker on justin.tv and was hooked. Sunday completely disappeared. Thanks for all the great talks! ------ rockstar9 thanks for organizing startup school! it was awesome.

'Twisted light' carries 2.5 terabits of data per second - ytNumbers http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18551284 ====== nevster How could this boost wi-fi? (The article mentions wi-fi).

Apple releases iOS 7.1 - davidbarker http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/10/apple-releases-ios-7-1/ ====== baddox It looks like the evasi0n jailbreak has been patched as suspected. Based on the changelog it looks like there are far fewer new features in 7.1 that I want than features from my jailbreak that I would lose. ------ nnnnni Going to have to wait for the jailbreak. cleverpin, adjustable flashlight, and the thing that lets you add more toggles to the top row in control center are must-haves for me! ------ pocketstar jailbreakable?

Blank Touch Bar on MacBook Pro - codazoda http://www.joeldare.com/wiki/mac:blank_touch_bar_on_macbook_pro_late_2016 ====== codazoda Is it just me or are some of the rest of you having this problem?

Nokia Agrees to Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6B - alphadevx http://recode.net/2015/04/14/nokia-agrees-to-buy-alcatel-lucent-for-16-6-billion/ ====== pavlov Essentially this means that Nokia won't get back into consumer hardware for a good while. The mapping division (Here) will probably be sold soon. The mobile networks business is now the primary driver at the company. They'll have their hands full trying to integrate the Alcatel-Lucent networks business with their existing assets. (Remember that Nokia's networks business today is already the result of a merger with Siemens and a purchase of Motorola's networks division, so they have some experience with that.) Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again. I know that Nokia does license the Nokia brand to Foxconn for Android tablets sold in the Chinese market... But that's not a sign of life in Nokia's consumer ambitions any more than it is for other brand licensors like Kodak or Polaroid. ~~~ n8m I just hope whoever buys HERE doesn't screw it up. At the moment I do like them more than the google maps. They are also cheaper when it comes to licenses. ~~~ pavlov I think Samsung will pick up Here. Seems like a bargain for them. Samsung has been slowly building up their own "shadow stack" for mobile. They have everything from the OS up, but map data is a huge missing piece. Also, I think Samsung's homegrown Tizen OS has some ambitions on the automobile side, and that's a market where Here has been doing well. ~~~ n8m I've heard rumours Samsung is already using HERE heavily internally. So it would make sense- but what will happen to the other that are currently using it to (they've mentioned Microsoft, BMW etc. in the article). ------ peteratt HERE engineer here (yes, I also sometimes hate the noticeable amount of redundancy of our corporate brand). One important point that analysts haven't stressed enough while evaluating potential buyers, is the role our top customers play in all this dance. By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys _hate_ Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing. Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO. ~~~ chipotle_coyote Is it perceived as a given that Nokia's going to dump HERE? I used to be with the Point & Find group, which is what became City Lens -- my impression is that they were working on a quasi-secret project all last year, some kind of outdoor adventure thing, but I noticed last month that just about everyone I'd worked with changed their LinkedIn status to things no longer associated with Nokia/HERE. ~~~ sirkneeland Yeah, that was canned. ------ vnglst I don't really understand how this works. Microsoft bought Nokia for about $7B[1] and now Nokia pays more than twice that amount for Alcatel? Where is this money coming from and why is Alcatel worth so much more? [1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia- acquis...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia- acquisition-2014-4?IR=T) ~~~ Aoyagi Don't forget that Microsoft('s lackey) took care of lowering their value as much as possible before buying the Devices and Services unit for some spare change. ~~~ dagw Come on. Nokia was doing a fine job of lowering the value of their handset business on their own. ~~~ pavlov Yeah. It wasn't Elop who created one of the most dysfunctional software development units ever. He was brought in when the damage of previous bad management was just becoming fully apparent. Nokia in 2007-2010 was spending many times more than Apple on R&D. For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software. ~~~ josh2600 Two words: burning platform. [http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the- fin...](http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-final- reckoning-of-burning-platforms-memo-damaged-nokia-by-wiping-out-13b-in- revenues-and-destro.html) There was just no reason to write a memo like that. It destroyed their business, almost singlehandedly, and no, I'm not exaggerating. The consequences of that memo were insane: Nokia's handset sales died all over the world all at once. ~~~ pavlov We don't have more than quarter-level visibility. All we know is that Q1 2011 sales crashed and Elop wrote his memo. Which is the cause and which the consequence? In Q4 2010, Nokia stuffed the channel with outdated products. In a market that was growing accustomed to iPhone and Android, Nokia tried to sell consumers products based on the first touch edition of Symbian S60 -- the same software that was considered outdated when it first shipped in Nokia 5800 years earlier. (Because of the way Nokia's product development pipeline worked, the mid-range phones they released in late 2010 contained software that was several years old.) Isn't it possible that Nokia's Q1 2011 sales crashed simply because the channel was full of Symbian phones that just were not selling? As CEO, Elop would have visibility into that when he wrote his infamous memo. A point against the "evil memo destroyed sales" theory is that purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime. When they stopped buying Nokia's phones in Q1 2011, the decision was already made earlier. ~~~ josh2600 The fallout from that memo was instantaneous and widespread. I worked in wireless at the time and everyone I knew at all of the carriers began to pull Nokia inventory. This was not true in many markets. Even if the burning platform concept was correct, releasing it in a companywide email instead of strategically shifting the company and then announcing the change in a measured, considered fashion would've been much better for their cash flows. Purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime, usually, but I would argue that the CEO of a handset manufacturer declaring their entire existing lineup of products is going to be discontinued in viscerally graphic terms is one of the things that might spur such quick change. ------ fnordfnordfnord Nokia recently auctioned off literal tons of engineering equipment. Looks like they closed a huge engineering facility in Oulu, Finland. A lot of it looked like obsolete stuff (like for a big product line sustaining-engineering group). I don't know enough about cellular to say whether or how much of the stuff was really useful for new product development; but some of the equipment looked very recent. The only thing that I inferred at the time was that T&M resellers are going to have a better year than Rhode & Schwarz. [http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of- com...](http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of- communication-testers%2c-analyzers%2c-oscilloscopes%2c-ge/656/) ~~~ TorKlingberg That looks like equipment from Nokia's handset division ramping down. ------ ed_blackburn I was an under graduate engineer at Nortel Networks in the late nineties and early nougties writing code and building rigs to automate the testing of OC192 tx / rx components before they were assembled and usually dropped under the ocean. I was amazed at the capabilities of this hardware and the next generation from both Nortel and its competitors,like Lucent. It amazes me what is achievable but not viable for mass production. Or desirable by customers (good enough). An industry that matters so much. With no backbone there is no network in so many places. Perhaps a few mergers will unlock the doors? ------ i_have_to_speak Valued less than WhatsApp! ~~~ moondowner Don't forget that in 2013 Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division for half of the price Nokia is paying now for Alcatel-Lucent. ~~~ Aloha I'd argue that the networks business is and always has had more long term value than handsets. ------ ulfw So it's Nokia-Siemens-Alcatel-Lucent? A powerhouse! ~~~ masklinn Siemens is still Siemens, and Nokia bought Siemens's shares in NSN (renaming it Nokia Networks) in 2013. ~~~ raverbashing Yes, they're still going down the drain It's a company that has no speed to compete in the modern world See what divisions they closed/sold off in the past years Can't say I'm sorry ------ ksec So basically now Nokia, Erisson, Huawei or ZTE ( Are there any others ) actually build and run the Network Backend of Mobile Network, while Mobile / Cell Operators does the sales, marketing and customer services? ~~~ Swannie There are. Cisco and others are getting into the small cell space. Not that many people realize that Samsung are in to building base stations. Cisco have always been in the back haul, core mobile routing space, along with Juniper, and some others smaller players. ------ jd3 So Nokia owns Bell Labs now? What a world we live in. ------ eitally This is interesting, and probably good. These are two companies that make sense to consolidate, especially as both eye developing markets in SE Asia & Africa, and _especially_ those markets that are open to Chinese development monies+influence (mostly in Africa). On the integration side of things, yes, it will probably be a little challenging from a business systems & personnel point of view if they really want to become a single-faced corporation, but on the manufacturing & engineering side I think it'll be pretty easy. I don't know if my company is the largest EMS partner for either one, but I do know that both Nokia (otherwise referred to as NSN, Nokia-Siemens Networks) and ALU are both top-10 customers of ours, and collectively responsible for a couple billion in revenue. I mention this not because of anything to do with my company, but because both are already setup for effective automated integration with their EMS partners, so whatever they do on their side (e.g. changes to EDI rules/structure, ECO processes, NPI processes, etc) will be pretty easy to trickle down and deal with on our side. My hope is that Nokia become the business leader part of this acquisition, not Alcatel-Lucent. They are very challenging to work with sometimes. ------ alphadevx I'm curious to know what this means for a potential Palm revival now, given this: [http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing- back-p...](http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing-back-palm) ~~~ Maakuth Very likely nothing at all. Isn't TCL just an Alcatel brand licensee? So it's not connected to Alcatel-Lucent in other ways than the name. edit: question mark ~~~ alphadevx Actually I'm sure you're right, it seems TCL is a separate company based in China. ------ yaiu Plan 9 changes hands ~~~ bwindels Plan 9 was licensed under the GPLv2 last year: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_space/) ~~~ stonogo Lucent still holds the copyright, regardless of which licenses they apply. ------ funkyy Sounds like Nokia is looking for a way to prepare itself to enter the market with new products. Good news for Europeans for sure, since Nokia was the company that usually managed to translate products to European realities. ~~~ tormeh I don't think this has any positive implications for a potential new Nokia handset business. It is, however, possibly bad news for Ericsson and Huawei. ------ chernevik It's possible that the French government's approval of the deal is a dim glimmer of deregulation: [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144feab7de.html#axzz3XNGZS6SG) As tangents go this is an important one. Structural issues are strangling European growth and employment. Reform in France alone would make a big difference, and help pave the way for truly screwed up economies like Italy and Spain. ------ legulere For me this can be seen as a symptom of the problem with technology companies today: If you're too small you won't be able to survive. So everyone gets bought so that they don't die. In the end you have a few big companies splitting up the market under themselves and the hurdles for a market entry are too high. An even better example for this are semiconductor foundries. ------ unfocused I wonder what this means for Alcatel-Lucent here in Ottawa. I briefly worked there in 2001 right after Alcatel bought out Newbridge. There is a strong networking division there designing some of those large backbone "routers". ------ f00fc0d3 Beginning of the end of Nokia Networks. Looks like they dont have any clue what to do. ALU enodeb is crap, Nokia ancient Flexi is crap and their new stuff will be crap if they will manage to sell this to somebody :-) ------ jackbravo Alcatel is one of the main companies that sells FirefoxOS phones here in México. I wonder if it is the same in other countries. And I wonder if this will affect FirefoxOS in the long run? Will they switch to Windows? ~~~ grok2 Alcatel is not in the phone handset business anymore -- it is just the name that is being used by other manufacturers (perhaps TCL). ------ uberneo Alcatel bought Lucent .. Microsoft bought Nokia .. now Nokia bought Alcatel- Lucent .. All mixed up ------ liotier Only two major mobile telecom equipment manufacturers left. Great news for Huawei ! ------ tiernano That was quick... there there rumors just last week... ~~~ ghshephard Rumors typically only become public as the deal is closing, and more people are brought in to do the work on it. The fact that there were rumors was a strong indication that the deal was about to take place. ~~~ rnl Not quite, Apple was rumored to be buying Tesla, which would have made sense considering thier cash reserves, however the deal never happened. ~~~ gilgoomesh Apple rumors are not a typical example. There's a whole industry of idiots "analysts" who do nothing but release click-bait speculation about Apple. ------ shmerl More patent trolling coming? ------ steamy It looks like a merger deal to me with Nokia having the upper hand than an acquisition. ------ ck2 Patents. That's what this has to be about. Produce little to nothing and just sue for royalties on other manufacturers. ~~~ chipotle_coyote I think you -- and others who haven't checked, which is understandable -- imagine that after Nokia sold their handset business to Microsoft, nothing was left but a tiny little husk. If that were true, your assumption would probably be correct, but it isn't. Nokia ended 2014 with over 60,000 employees worldwide and nearly €13B in revenue. They're still a _really big_ company. Sure, they make some money from patent licensing -- as do all companies of that size -- but the vast majority of their revenue comes from network equipment and services.

EU parliaments website in violation of GDPR - mgliwka https://medium.com/matthias-gliwka/eu-parliament-websites-violates-gdpr-200eb2c00e8f ====== deanclatworthy How is this news? Everyone is scrambling to be GDPR-compliant before the due date. Probably the people behind this site also. ~~~ candiodari Well, if the intent behind the legislation was to protect personal data, presumably they would have modified their own behavior before regulating. But they haven't. Makes things clear. They also control the enforcement mechanism. Let's see if they will modify it to save face or if they'll just ignore it. Or do you think they'll fine the parliament (not that they haven't exempted themselves, of course) ? ~~~ Tharkun You're making the incorrect assumption - deliberately, I presume - that the people writing the legislation have anything to do with how the website operates. You're wrong, of course. The EU(P) is a very large and very complex organization, just like many multinationals. Should they eat their own dog food? Probably. But pretending there's some kind of hypocrisy going on is stretching it. ~~~ candiodari Well my opinion is that the EU shouldn't exist. A non-democratic state controlling democratic states seems to me to be a spectacularly bad idea. But I'm a consultant and I've worked and work for these people, mostly indirectly. Let me assure you: there is absolutely no shortage of hypocrisy. You don't need anything more than to walk around their offices and ask what all those weird marking on public and private spaces mean. You'll be disgusted, and cured of any notion that the EU intends to do anything for anyone but themselves. But outside of that, there are clear personal status cult being upheld everywhere around the European organisations, with the biggest distinction between the "fonctionnaires" and everybody else (although as an employee of the commission you're still several rungs above "les gens de la rue" (which does not mean homeless, like in France, it just means normal people of Brussels). And may God help you if you're working for ISS or any of the cleaning companies. At that point your status is so low that people routinely throw things at you just to cool their frustration. This is accepted and normal behavior, despite how incredibly immoral it is. (The "European quarter" of Brussels has a ton of public and private spaces, from "public" parks to a small shopping center (with mostly cafes), and the highly coveted parkings and parking spaces that are reserved, by law, for European officials' use only. So does Woluwe, even if they're a lot better hidden there. To say that these people have no intention to use their power to improve people's lives is absurd when you walk around their offices) ~~~ tscs37 > A non-democratic state controlling democratic states seems to me to be a > spectacularly bad idea. But I'm a consultant and I've worked and work for > these people, mostly indirectly. The EU isn't a state it's a union of states and there is EU elections happening. ~~~ candiodari EU elections aren't selecing the people who make laws. That's the commission and the EU council. By that standard the Soviet Union, China and Saudi Arabia are/were democratic too. They all have/had elections. Elections that do not determine who has legislative and executive power are not elections. The reason why is of course simple. People in member states do not care about the EU. They care about local politics 99% of the time. On top of that member states electorates do not agree on the issues. Not on what the issues are in the first place and certainly not on what is to be done about them. There is no way for politicians to campaign across the EU, it's all done locally. Therefore the assessment of most fonctionnaires in Brussels is probably correct: there is no way to have an effective democratic EU. They also asses that they don't want to do that, as it would not be a unifying force. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Soviet_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Soviet_Union) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Saudi_Arabia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Saudi_Arabia) ------ belorn Reading the GDPR text shows there is a bunch of exceptions for which storing of example IP-addresses can be done without anonymizing or consent, with one of the more clear cut being security. If the processing is done exclusively for security purpose then the site can argue in court that they are in compliance. Compliance with the law is always about context. What is gathered, why and how is it used, and last is there additional factors to consider. Google Analytics in itself is interesting because it is not clear if Google themselves then process the data and for what use, especially for the enterprise version. ~~~ hartator Google Analytics is not a security tool. You can’t even see what an specific IP has been doing. ~~~ michaelbuckbee The issue isn't that _you_ can't see what a specific IP is doing, but Google certainly can, and it's more than that. The GDPR really spells out that you can't ask for consent / basis to do one thing and then flip around and do more with it. Aka, if you consent to signing up for a newsletter they can't turn around and sell your email to another list, take that list to their next startup that's unrelated, etc. For Google this gets tricky, you're consent to using them for analytics (most everyone on the free, non enterprise, version). Are they also using that to feed their search engine? Tweak display ads? Check for fraud? Build profiles of people across sites/browser sessions, and devices? And while this is about analytics, the same can be said for Maps, Docs, Domains, Fonts, etc. all of which have a primary use and (for Google) a stack of juicy secondary uses they can make money off of. Most of it doesn't even strike me as nefarious (it seems reasonable that they'd index pages that come up in Google analytics), but it's not disclosed so nobody is exactly sure what's being done. Even this anonymize IP business is tricky b/c: 1\. They still get the IP as surely as you browsing to www.google.com 2\. They may be tracking in other ways (fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) that unique identify you, so does it matter? ~~~ candiodari > The GDPR really spells out that you can't ask for consent / basis to do one > thing and then flip around and do more with it. That's not how reality works. Laws, despite god knows how many attempts, don't change that. If you have the information, you can use it. > Aka, if you consent to signing up for a newsletter they can't turn around > and sell your email to another list, take that list to their next startup > that's unrelated, etc. Ok. When the spam problem stops, I'll believe this. Until then, I reserve judgement. > For Google this gets tricky, you're consent to Sure, but with a chunk of their operating expenses ($9 billion a year) spent on lawyers ... tricky is not a problem. For everyone else, it is. It gives them a legal way to destroy any company they don't like, it's a land- grab for both their own jurisdiction (as opposed to member nations' jurisdictions), it's land-grab for global jurisdiction, it's a (partial) denial of private contracting rights and it's explicitly designed for selective enforcement. What more could one want in a big new law ? ~~~ frockington Your points made me think that this law is likely just going to solidify market monopolies and ensure competition can't exist legally, similar to large banks in the US ~~~ candiodari Well, yes. However, we should look at illegally: it's going to make it much easier for sites to exist in areas where there won't be any enforcement. So it's going to kill European sites, not anything else. Effectively European companies below a certain size can't allow for forums anymore. Obviously this will impact things like newspaper forums, tech support, webfora on specific topics, ... ------ tephra I don't have the text in front of me but I'm pretty sure there is an exception for member states government agencies (if they choose to have the exception). I wouldn't be surprised if this covers EU agencies and institutions as well. ~~~ mgliwka They're excluded from the fines, but not from the regulation itself. ------ PunchTornado I thought IPs are not considered personal identifiable information. ~~~ muro Yes it is - it's in the FAQ: [https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html](https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html) What constitutes personal data? Any information related to a natural person or ‘Data Subject’, that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer IP address. ~~~ wtfstatists I like this definiton better. IANAL Warning. Personal Data: - PII is Personal Data. - If a user has PII, then all of the userdata is Personal Data. So HN posts would not be Personal Data for the users that have email field empty. And even email (and any other user-entered data) can be made non-PII if ToU explicitly required to be so. My advice would be to legally and technically isolate PII and other_userdata. GDPR/etc compliance become quite easier this way. ~~~ dogma1138 ToU don’t change what PII is or isn’t under the GDPR. The GDPR also states that consent alone isn’t a legal reason to collect or process PII and “advises” against relying and structuring terms of service to collect PII. Basically you can’t build a service ask people for their data and then relying on their consent for the legal reasoning of having that data. You need an actual legal basis e.g. a regulatory requirement or a business requirement to collect that data, and in all cases the requirements unless stated in law must be evaluated against the best interests of those you collect data from. ~~~ wtfstatists > ToU don’t change what PII is or isn’t under the GDPR. ToU can by prohibiting user from entering any PII. In case of email, ToU would say that only non-identifying email can be used. For the rest of your comment, I dont see any relevance here. There is no need for consent for non-PII userdata. All PII userdata is behind legal and technical wall and cannot be accessed by the processor/controller of non-PII userdata. ~~~ dogma1138 There is no such thing as a “non-identifiable” email. You cannot use ToU to bypass GDPR. ~~~ wtfstatists Ok here is my email: [email protected]. Identify me! Know that I wont used the email elsewhere. > You cannot use ToU to bypass GDPR. Just to clarify this is not buried in ToU but laid out clearly. So the website says dont give PII. User still does. And GDPR would penalize the website ? Citation please. ~~~ dogma1138 Are you serious? the fact that your email isn't [email protected] doesn't make it any less identifiable. My IP address is 192.168.1.1 identify me... It also doesn't matter if you think the information is identifiable or not what matters is how the GDPR defines it. The GDPR defines PII and there isn't anything you can do about it you can't ask users to make a throwaway email account and hope that you can pass GDPR by claiming that it's not PII this isn't how regulation works. What matters isn't that the email address reveals your name is that someone can use it to identify additional information about you such as if you are subscribed to a specific service or not. >So the website says dont give PII. User still does. And GDPR would penalize the website ? Citation please. If the website asks for an email address that is PII under the GDPR. ~~~ wtfstatists IP is not a user-entered data and cannot be freely selected, unlike email addresses. > the fact that your email isn't [email protected] doesn't make it any > less identifiable. The only official guidelines about email I could find are in here [1]. It does not say all email addresses are PII. It just says "[email protected]" type addresses are PII and "[email protected]" type addresses are NOT PII. So even "[email protected]" may be non-PII. > someone can use it to identify additional information about you such as if > you are subscribed to a specific service or not. Thats not enough. The service need to have PII. That is, if none of the services has PII, the email address is not PII. > you can't ask users to make a throwaway email account Throwaway is not needed. At best an individual need 2 email accounts. One address for the services where he is identified (eg bank website) and one address for where he is not (eg random forum). So this is not an onerous condition at all. If thats the case you are making. > If the website asks for an email address that is PII under the GDPR. This is not a (official) citation. [1] [https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/refo...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/reform/what-personal-data_en) ------ adamsurak They'll use legitimate interest as a reason. ------ repolfx This is a reasonable observation but I doubt anyone will care. Moreover it misses the point of GDPR. The goal is not to improve people's privacy. It's too vague to achieve that. Obviously the EU doesn't care as even its own websites aren't in compliance - assuming this guy's definition of compliance is the same as theirs. How likely is it the rest of the EU's operations are? Zero likelyhood of that. But that's OK. GDPR doesn't even have a concrete notion of what privacy or personal information actually are. The goal is not to improve privacy, that's just a fig leaf. The goal is to grant the EU large new powers over the private sector and in particular over American tech firms, who will repeatedly be fined and treated as, effectively, a new source of tax income. GDPR is so vague and open ended that there's no way they can ever be compliant, meaning the EU has a new source of cash for years to come. Very useful at a time when they are asking for budget _increases_ despite years of austerity, and facing a budget hole due to Brexit, _and_ member states are getting upset at their financial demands. GDPR enforcement will be very similar to EU anti-trust policy - deeply political and immediately controversial. It is best understood not as a law but as a political move, sort of like how China uses laws against pornography to justify blocking foreign search engines, or how it uses a law against 'spreading rumours' to censor domestic social media. ~~~ yulaow This is stupid, if they wanted to give the finger to American tech firms they could have wrote the GDPR as affecting only foreign firms using EU citizen data without requiring the same level of control over the EU-based tech firms, far easier. ~~~ frockington Are there any EU based tech firms? As an American I honestly can't think of any besides Nokia and that's more manufacturing ~~~ diggan Makes sense, as Americans tend to live in a bubble :) Some of them from the top of my head, that you might or might not recognize: Asos, JustEat, Skyscanner, SoundCloud, LastFM, DailyMotion, Raspberry PI (foundation more than company though), Shazam, Mojang, Skype, King, Spotify, Klarna, Trivago, Xing and BlaBlaCar. I'm pretty sure some of these are quite popular in even the US. (maybe some of them are not having their HQ in EU anymore, but they certainly had at one point) ~~~ repolfx You probably shouldn't insult Americans and then make statements you already know to be erroneous. As you are apparently well aware, Skype is owned by Microsoft. It's an American product now (from the perspective of who pays any fines). Mojang sold to Microsoft. It and Minecraft are owned by the Americans now. Asos is an online fashion and beauty retailer. Having a website doesn't make you a tech firm. Ditto for JustEat. Raspberry Pi - as you note - isn't even a firm at all, let alone a tech firm. Shazam is in the process of being bought by Apple, although the EU appear to be trying to block it. You tried to name tech firms that are based inside the EU and mostly ended up listing firms that either aren't tech firms by any conventional definition, or are now owned by US companies. I think that proves the original point. ~~~ diggan The companies started out being non-american, then they ended up being bought up by US companies. I don't think that says "there is no EU based tech firms" but rather "There are EU based tech firms! But some of them get bought up by US companies and some stay, but at one point they were all EU based". So doesn't at all prove the original point. ~~~ repolfx In context it is equivalent. This thread is about why the EU wouldn't write a law that only affects US based tech firms, if that was the intention. Someone answered that there's no need because there are no EU based tech firms worth anything (no significant employment or tax revenue). That point was correct. The responses all ended up naming either firms that are tiny, or which aren't any longer based in the EU (so there's no need to protect them from the effects of bad laws that primarily affect tech firms). Where they _started_ is irrelevant to the discussion because what matters is _who pays fines today_.

More than 600k UK workers lose their jobs amid lockdown - dustinmoris https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53060529 ====== gregory194 Pandemic has changed our lifestyles,Many people became poor and many startups has to shut their business. The prices in the market has increased, People don't have money to pay for their expenses and there is also a huge salary cut for the working employees, working hours and work load has also increased as they had to complete the pending work of the lock down. Across the world there are very few companies who got benefited buy this lock down like Amazon and Swiggy. Many has got laid off from many companies like Ola

StratifiedJS: Javascript + structured concurrency - danh http://onilabs.com/stratifiedjs ====== olegp If you prefer vanilla JS and are only working with Node, you should check out <https://github.com/laverdet/node-fibers>. I use it in my <https://github.com/olegp/common-node> package to address the same issues as those tackled by StratifiedJS. ------ skrebbel I'm probably missing something, but isn't this race condition galore? As per the front page example: var news; waitfor { news = http.get("http://news.bbc.co.uk"); } or { hold(1000); news = http.get("http://news.cnn.com"); } or { hold(1000*60); throw "sorry, no news. timeout"; } show(news); This starts the first 'or' clause the moment the http.get(BBC) suspends, which it does quickly because http.get is async. Now, if the BBC get returns _just_ after my hold(1000) has completed but before http.get(CNN) had the time to really launch the http request and suspend, i'll have done the CNN get for nothing. Of course in this case this only means a wasted request. But what in case of side effects? ~~~ jerf Ignoring WebWorkers, the underlying Javascript engine is single-threaded, so the problem you describe can't exist. Once you start down a code path, it will continue until it finishes and yields execution. Further, "hold" is almost certainly a magical statement that actually compiles into a pattern of calls to .setTimeout and various handlers, and has no literal existence, so there probably isn't any point at which the hold is "executed". You can't actually turn a single-thread runtime into a threaded runtime at the user level. You can apply a series of increasingly sophisticated hacks that may make program like it's multithreaded, but you can't escape the fact you have only one program counter. (This isn't a criticism of the library. It looks quite useful. It just doesn't magically make browser Javascript truly multithreaded.) This approach is actually quite useful, and is part of what makes the event- based programming style practical. For all the stuff that's going on, you do always have the guarantee that any given event handler will fully execute, and no other hunk of code will be able to observe the half-executed state of any given handler. Without that property you'd basically just be doing conventional multithreading with a really inconvenient code structure. ------ jashkenas After the IcedCoffeeScript post the other day, I found Oni Labs' version -- which I don't remember seeing before -- Stratified CoffeeScript: <https://github.com/onilabs/coffee-script> ------ beggi Eliminating nested callbacks would be one hell of a feat. ~~~ lalc It's not too _too_ hard to do the appropriate transformations--the literature is vast and there are practical implementations today. The hard part is producing readable, debuggable output. I've whipped up a tiny project with the priorities inverted: readable output at the expense of completeness: <https://github.com/lalcmellkmal/nestless> It only does the minimum desugaring to prevent nesting in the common case, no more.

How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language (2018) - Qaphqa https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html ====== okine Gerald Sussman, co-inventor of Scheme and author of SICP, was my undergraduate advisor. The last several times I visited his office, he was usually with Jack Wisdom either programming or deep in thought or discussion about differential geometry and the differential geometry Scheme library they were writing. One time when he wasn't so occupied, I brought up SICP, and asked if he was aware that a lot of people think of reading the book as a sort of magical, enlightening experience. He said, "Yes, I'm aware." I asked if he had any idea why. He said, "The main reason is that it tells a good story. It also has a complete, coherent narrative." ~~~ Rerarom Am I the only person that read the whole of sicp and didn't feel enlightened in the least? I felt way more enlightened when I read the whole of John Baez's this week's finds. Maybe it's a book which you need to read when you're younger. ~~~ gdubs Curious: did you complete all the exercises in the book? Not doubting you in any way, just wondering if that’s a possibility. I know I’ve gone through books without doing the work, while on others I have done the work — and it’s usually a pretty different experience. But, not everyone is gonna connect with everything, regardless. ------ mark_l_watson I have never minded using a so-called niche language. Since 1982 I have been very fortunate enough to be paid a good fraction of my time for using Common Lisp - I consider this to be largely good luck and I am grateful for how things turned out. I also like Scheme but literally no one has ever paid me for Scheme development. In the USA, we have a saying that “you dance with the person you go to the party with.” My dance partner has been Common Lisp. I still feel like I am still a student. I started to read Let Over Lambda (a reference to closures) a few months ago which has reinforced my realization that there is so much about a programming language that I have used for 38 years that I still want to explore. All that said, I have often totally enjoyed building systems with C/C++, Java, Python, Prolog, etc. Designing and writing code can be fun in any language. ~~~ jjtheblunt Didn't you work at CCSO back when Prof Kaplan was just down the hall, unless you were in another building...have you read the Guy Steele original papers on Scheme? They're actually awesome. ~~~ mark_l_watson No, that was not me. I do like Scheme (and a long time ago I wrote a Scheme book for Springer-Verlag), but I was just saying that I haven't used the language professionally. ------ herodotus Reading "Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual" when I was a post-graduate student at Waterloo (around 1977) was a revelation to me. In particular, "Appendix B: The Lisp Interpreter" gives a version of the Lisp interpreter in just 39 lines of code! (The appendix includes notes, and is 3 pages long.) I remember using this code to figure out how Lisp evaluated recursive functions. Until this point in time I had programmed in Fortran, IBM 360 Assembler, Cobol and Pascal. They all required much more documentation, and, in many cases, experiments to figure out what would actually happen in certain cases. I wish the idea of a definitive high-level semantic guide had become a thing. SwiftUI, for example, seems to be wonderful, but learning it, as far as I can tell, requires watching hours of talks, or working through many tutorials. What a contrast with McCarthey at. al's 1985 book. ------ jhbadger I'm surprised that this didn't bring up Paul Graham's "Blub" concept, in which non-Lisp languages are thought to be objectively less powerful than the universal language of Lisp. That's been a lot to blame for the mystical reverence of Lisp in the 21st century. While I'm a Lisp fan myself, and agree that it is more powerful than a lot of mainstream languages, the idea that it is the "most powerful" blinds a lot of hard-core Lisp devotees to things like Haskell that are worth exploring as well. ~~~ goto11 The "Blub" parable is really clever because it says that when other people doesn't use Lisp, it is simply because they are _incapable_ of understanding its power - not because of any practical or technical reason to chose another language. So any argument the "Blub" programmers might use to justify "Blub" is automatically invalid. Of course it can be used for any non-mainstream language, and I have seen it used for Haskell, where Lisp is the "Blub" language. ~~~ exdsq I’ve had this recently. Was writing Python but missed the ease of concurrent functional programming. Used F# but missed type classes. Used Haskell but missed dependant types. Use Idris but miss the build environment of Python. ~~~ bcrosby95 Yes, once you learn enough languages I feel like you just find yourself constantly wishing you had aspects of another language, pretty much regardless of what language you're using. Sometimes its directly related to the language, sometimes its something like the ecosystem surrounding it. This is why I'm wary of "right tool for the job" when it comes to languages. In my experience usually there isn't a singular obvious right language. Maybe one is 35% right, another is 38% right, and the golden ticket language is actually just 45% right. And sometimes you won't really know until you're halfway through the project. If you wanted a 100% singular obvious correct language, you would have to make a custom language with traits from a dozen different ones. But in the real world, the differences between languages you can actually choose from end up being not that large. ~~~ AnimalMuppet I think of languages as a multi-dimensional tree, with branches extending in different directions. I think that the trick is to figure out what the yak- shaving aspects of the project are going to be (which you can think of as a vector), and picking the language that goes the furthest in the direction of that vector (and thereby does the most to minimize the yak-shaving). This requires that you be able to fairly accurately determine what the yak-shaving will be up front (which can be problematic). ------ JetSetWilly I would have thought God would write binaries directly in machine code. The only purpose of a language, is to allow creatures of limited intelligence to create abstractions that hide complexity and allow complex problems to be more easily reasoned about. Presumably God does not need to use abstractions, and can reason perfectly with an infinite number of variables, so a programming language would just prevent an Omniscient being from being able to create as perfect a program as it could otherwise (as any given programming language doesn't let you create any binary). ~~~ 0xebfc Machine code is an abstraction, too. In a Judeo-Christian context, God seems to operate in very abstract terms. "Let there be light" is a highly abstract instruction. In some other religions and mythologies, there isn't a single God giving the instructions from outside, so it seems difficult to make the comparison there. Abstraction is like a lever, and by first-order logic there is no way to avoid using an abstraction whenever we communicate, whether internally via vocalized thoughts, via hn or by some really old books. Maybe that's why humans want to believe that abstraction is so powerful. Thankfully, we're not totally wrong. But thank you for making me imagine a world where the "Let there be light" statement has been meticulously explained in as much detail as possible. "Then, He realized that adding an extra electron to Hydrogen was not such a good idea; the entire universe shattered, and, after a brief moment of embarrassment, he comforted himself with the fact that no-one will ever know of his folly. He continued calculating the correct speed-constants for a particle he made called a photon, which wasn't exactly a particle, but it was small and didn't carry a lot of weight, it was everywhere, and it was mostly directional -- so he figured it might be useful for some sort of massively parallel input apparatus, and his creations can use it to understand all sorts of things about their environment and themselves. Eventually, humans will suspect that light is a wave, too; but that wasn't quite right, either. God made is difficult to figure out for copyright protection reasons, but here's a hint, and get your notebooks out: ..." ~~~ nwsm > "Let there be light" is a highly abstract instruction. The more I think about this, the more I realise it might be _the most_ abstract instruction. It's actually kind of beautiful. ~~~ int_19h I once worked in a company that used a similar approach. So, for example, the "chief architect" would file a _bug_ in the tracker titled, "Product X does not exist". It would then be up to the engineers to "fix" it by creating the product. No wonder Satan rebelled. ~ ------ at_a_remove I have heard for decades how Lisp is transformative, how just having learned it, even if you leave, you will never look at things the same way again. Like having served in the Armed Forces. Every so often I get interested in Lisp, but I always run up against the same conflicts. I look for something that I can run in Windows that has a reasonable set of libraries and then immediately stumble upon the Crusades. You know, the religious wars you saw with emacs vs vi, wars that used to be fought over various Linux distros and window managers, that you will now see about different flavors of agile or whatever. I am quite sure that there are religious wars being fought in the territories of Javascript frameworks that I've never heard of. These wars so often seem to leave the territories barren, the original objectives cloudy, and the participants scarred. What _was_ this good for, again? Anyway, every time I encounter these things I end up asking myself if I have the knowledge to pick a side in whatever war and if joining up is going to actually provide a solution to the problems I wanted to solve using programming, decide I am neither fit nor armed, and back slowly out of the room. ~~~ kerkeslager I'm saddened by your story. Our programming communities can be more welcoming. That said, I think these debates are necessary. Fixing problems starts with deciding what the problems actually are. The problem isn't that the debates are happening, it's that people like you are getting dragged into them. You aren't obligated to participate in debates. Nor do you have to use the absolute best version of Lisp to get most of the benefits. My advice is to pick up a copy of MIT Scheme (works on Windows) and then work through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), and don't read anything else about Lisp until you're done, because you don't need to. MIT Scheme isn't the best Lisp. It's just the Lisp that's used in SICP. You won't win any debates arguing that MIT Scheme is the best Lisp. You might even hear people say MIT Scheme isn't even a Lisp. I agree with some of that, but those debates are irrelevant to your learning. Feel free to hit me up with any questions. I certainly have opinions on all the holy wars, but I won't bring them up, I'll just help you with the task you're working on. :) I'm not a Lisp expert by any means, but I've worked through most of SICP. ~~~ at_a_remove I have looked over the site once a long time ago, when I had a copy of SICP in hand. I just looked now. What I do not see is a robust set of libraries that can help me accomplish the solving of real-world problems. As mercenary as it sounds, I program to solve problems my employer has in exchange for money. I solve problems that people have, rather than problems that books abstractly propose. While Lisp or whatever dialect might be lovely, it may as well be Logo for practical tasks. I do not want to re-implement JSON. I do not want to try to write my own ODBC. I need something beyond a language that lets me solve the problems written in a book that is divorced from real-world stuff, and that has, for the past couple of decades, meant libraries. "The Lisp Curse" is a pretty good explanation of why I won't see those libraries and the situation hasn't changed, that I can see, since I first read it. At the end of the day, if I want to learn a language, I want to have done it for more than the sake of having said that I have climbed that particular mountain. I need something up top that is valuable. Climbing it has to have real-world applicability to me. Can I use Lisp to interact with these GIS formats and solve real-world problems? Not without building my own libraries, and so on. This is why I have liked the war metaphor: all of these folks skirmishing when they could be building factories. I am not asking for Lisp to be Python or Perl or whatever. But it should have a great standard library. Where is this? ~~~ jerf "What I do not see is a robust set of libraries that can help me accomplish the solving of real-world problems." I think the suggestion wasn't to give you the One True Answer to which Lisp to use. The purpose of suggesting working through the SICP book is to give you in concentrated, curated form the insights that Lisp is supposed to bring, whereupon you should turn around and bring those insights back to whatever normal programming world you inhabit. To the extent it is divorced from real world stuff, yeah, that's on purpose, and the entire point of the recommendation of SICP. Fortunately, the world has changed since the SICP was written. At the time, there was a much larger barrier between Lisp and the "real computing world". While by no mean do all languages look like Lisp now, there has been a _lot_ of seepage, and now there's plenty of languages where you can bring the stuff in SICP into the language you use day-to-day. The idea is this: You could learn a new language, a couple of frameworks, half-a-dozen libraries, fight through bugs in all of the above in some immature cutting edge library, and also fight through a lot of accidental complexity because you accidentally selected some task that the weird new language is not very good at, only to arrive after all of this with some new insights about how computation works and what languages can do after a year or two. Or, this suggestion is, learn a very small new language and read a guide book, get the concentrated insights in a few months at most, and then continue using the frameworks, libraries, and experience you already have. (Personally, I recommend SICP as the perfect companion to any self-taught programmer. It is almost laser focused on the sorts of things that the self- taught programmer will find hardest to pick up on their own. Finish it and you really will be able to code circles around most college grads, beating them both practically _and_ theoretically.) ~~~ at_a_remove I did this once with Prolog and did not come away with the benefits espoused. I was told that it would really change how I thought about things and so forth. That didn't happen. I didn't get anything out of it that I could bring elsewhere. I fear the same result after a similar investment in a similar situation. ~~~ kerkeslager _shrug_ That's the risk you take whenever you learn _anything_ new--maybe it won't be useful. The alternative is, of course, never trying anything new or learning anything ever again. Your call! ------ lgas I thought HolyC was God's own programming language. ------ somewhereoutth I would have thought that the Lambda Calculus has a better claim to be 'God's Own Programming Language'. Apparently McCarthy was aware of, but had not studied, the LC. One quote from the article stuck out: "McCarthy invented an alternative, the “true” conditional expression, which returns sub-expression A if the supplied test succeeds and sub-expression B if the supplied test fails and which also only evaluates the sub-expression that actually gets returned." this is how 'true' and 'false' are encoded in the LC, (\x \y x) and (\x \y y) respectively, and the final sentence indicates lazy evaluation. The early (wrong) choice of dynamic vs static (lexicographical) binding, since corrected, suggest the language was far from 'handed down on stone'. Homoiconicity is very nice, though I suspect that the macros it has enabled are often perhaps too powerful a tool. ------ blackrock It was Einstein that said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I think the problem with Lisp, is that it violated this principle. It has a lot of strange little constructs. It came from a time when programmers tried to type as little as possible. In doing so, the language adopted all these little quirks. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it’s just different. Whereas the human mind is a simple graphical machine, and we like to see associations. Like, the usage of an equal sign, to see that we’ve made a variable assignment. Maybe this reaches back to our childhood algebra days, where we associate equivalence with an equal sign. Who knows. But Lisp did away with all that. It created its own style. It gave us parentheses to enclose our statements, which is to be honest, actually a nice feature. But it forced us into knowing the specific ordering, sequence, and symbols in order to make a legal statement. Anyways, I like Lisp, and have always been wanting to use it for something. But not quite sure what. It’s great for writing short macros in Emacs though. You can write a multi line function, then compress it back into a single liner, because of the parentheses. This helps keep your config file short. It doesn’t really work for video game programming, as it doesn’t seem to have the libraries for it. It’s not as fast as C for speed critical applications. It kinda lives in that medium realm, where internal business applications can use it for internal business processing, that can run uninterrupted for decades. But, this space is where Python excels at. Anyways, one day, I’ll finally create that programming language idea of mine, and it’ll be some fusion of Lisp and Smalltalk, but can run almost as fast as C. ~~~ gumby Some implementations (e.g. Common Lisp) have legacy oddities in them for back compatibility but newer implementations like scheme tend not to. Instead of CAR and CDR they have first and last, for example. Emacs lisp is quite slow but adequate for purpose. You can write very high speed numeric programs in Lisp — another book by Sussman was on HN the other day and it’s all about physics, all written in scheme. The fact that code is data allows lots of complex optimizations that are harder or impossible to represent in c ~~~ Oreb I think you got this backwards. Common Lisp does have `first` and `rest` as synonyms for `car` and `cdr`. As far as I know, Scheme does not. I believe you have to use `car` and `cdr` there (unless, of course, you define your own synonyms). I could be wrong about Scheme: My Scheme knowledge is badly outdated, and was always incomplete. ~~~ sigzero Racket has `first` and `rest`. I just tried it. But I tried an online scheme interpreter and it did not have it. ~~~ catalogia first and rest are in racket, but racket has many things not in scheme (and doesn't have some things that are.) If you use the r5rs #lang (e.g. `racket -I r5rs`) you'll see that it doesn't have first and rest. Also, first and rest in racket aren't synonyms for car and cdr. car and cdr take pairs, while first and last only take lists. Try this: (car '(1 . 2)) and (first '(1 . 2)) ------ Qaphqa The fractal flowers and recursive roots: The most lovely hack I’ve seen. ~~~ steve_gh "To iterate is human, to recurse is divine" [not sure who I am quoting] ~~~ gumby I’m pretty sure that was guy Steele and he would have written “recur” (like “to occur”) ------ kelvin0 Lisp has many parallels with Ayahuasca: Both are tough to 'swallow' and not everyone comes out on the other side 'enlightened'. No doubt about the potency of both though ... ------ sgt101 I like the Prolog story "PROably the Language Of God" ~~~ amelius LOGO is the Language Of God, and we are His turtles. L: Language O: Of G: God O: Only God knows what the last "O" stands for. ~~~ DonHopkins A tail recursive acronym! ------ tardygrade The responses I see to lisp seem to vary on a huge range from idolatry to dismissiveness. It's interesting that Gerald Sussman's own point of view on lisp seems to be very much more moderate - that different programming styles and philosophies suit different domains, and ultimately, you should choose the right tool for the right job. Lisp is flexible in that it does not bind you to any philosophy, and is good as a general tool insofar there isn't a specialized tool that would fit the problem better. ------ dang Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225870) ------ eternalban It is borderline blasphemous to think God can't handle a little syntax and would use barebones parse trees cum s-expressions. Do you see DNA chains cranking around without a higher layer phenotype? You do not. QED. ------ forgotmypw17 I thought that was Perl... ~~~ nathell Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/312/](https://xkcd.com/312/) ~~~ colomon Wait, isn't this the obligatory one in this context? [https://xkcd.com/224/](https://xkcd.com/224/) ~~~ nathell Yes, in the context of the OP. But in the context of someone mentioning Perl, the one that I quoted makes sense. Here's the Frost poem alluded to: [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and- ice](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice) ------ jankotek Obligatory xkcd reference: [https://xkcd.com/224/](https://xkcd.com/224/) ~~~ mellavora i was wondering what took so long for this to be posted ------ Koshkin This, then, is a proof of the multiplicity of gods (there must be at least as many gods as there are Lisps). ------ ertucetin Try Clojure, learn properly then we talk... ------ phoe-krk A lot of people, including some prominent faces in the programming world in general, have been writing about Lisp as secret sauce, silver bullet, God's language, source of programming enlightenment, yadda yadda; basically a set of mystic-sounding buzzwords that, other than causing some people to indeed try Lisp, have left a lot of people confused and amused by the wording - or just plain angry and disappointed at the false marketing that I consider the above hyperboles to be. I can see the benefits of the comments that follow the "any publicity is good publicity" rule. In addition, the more-functional-in-approach Lisp dialects certainly follow the "breaking the long-built mental model" scheme that you mention, and so does Common Lisp, since it mixes programming paradigms (including functional one) rather freely. Still, after seeing the effects of the aforementioned hyperbolization of Lisp in the long run, I'm not convinced that its execution went well at all. Lisp is a very good language, but no, sorry, it's not the Magical Silver Bullet of Enlightenment™®© that some people like pg or esr or (to some extent) the author of this post claim it to be. ~~~ reikonomusha I think it _is_ a silver bullet of enlightenment of a certain understanding of what programming languages are. It is _not_ a silver bullet for all of your programming tasks or problems. Most people I know who cast off Lisp are people who read the Wikipedia page, didn’t feel enlightened, then began to complain online about how they were disappointed by their Lisp experience. Or perhaps they went a tad further, got upset by Emacs being unfriendly to setup, and proceeded accordingly. In the Modern Age (TM), programming Lisp is unlikely to convince you to change your usual dev stack to it. But if learned properly, it will enlighten you on the structure of a language and how syntactic malleability is a powerful abstraction for solving many kinds of problems. Enlightenment usually comes from realizing that it’s not a feature bolted onto Lisp, but an exposed interplay between many otherwise ordinary aspects of programming languages: syntax, semantics, interpretation, and the runtime. At this point one typically “sees” how this interplay could (and perhaps even opaquely does) play out with other, non-Lisp languages. These kinds of things could in principle be learned in a compiler course, but compiler courses tend to be extraordinarily opaque as to how such a course would help your day-to-day coding. Lisp provides a visceral, hands-on experience of many (though certainly not all) of the same principles. If you happen to be the kind of programmer who likes absolute control over your environment, because that helps you work through gnarly problems more efficiently than duct taping a bunch of dependencies together, then you may actually end up switching to Lisp. ~~~ cat199 > syntactic malleability this is the key point - not quasi/proto FP most comments I see that are skeptical of the 'lisp as magic' claim seem to focus on the quasi-FP-ability of lisp, leave out the fact that the lisp family is pretty much unique when it comes to _symbolic programming_ , and then optionally go on to talk about how some typed functional non-symbolic language is a better functional language. this is ignoring the 'too many parens', 'no market share', and 'doesnt work well in my editor' people. ~~~ lisper Syntactic malleability is actually a red herring. The key insight of Lisp is: Lisp code is not text. Lisp code can be _serialized_ as text, and it can be _parsed_ from text, but it is not text, it is S-expressions, and S-expressions are not text, they are data structures, specifically, they are trees of cons cells. And because they are trees of cons cells you can construct them without ever constructing any text, i.e. without any parsing. Syntactic malleability is a _consequence_ of this property of the language. It is not in and of itself the central idea. ~~~ cat199 good point.. though arguably if code is data we are somewhat saying the same thing :) in any event, this unique overall property/combination of properties is often overlooked in these discussions ~~~ lisper The "code is data" slogan also misses the point. Text is data, so all code is data, whether or not it's Lisp code. (The only code that isn't data is code that has been compiled down to hardware. In the olden days computers were programmed by plugging wires into plugboards. That code wasn't data. But any code that is rendered in the same medium as the data it processes is data, and nowadays that includes all code.) What matters is that text is structured fundamentally differently from trees of cons cells. Text is a vector of characters. It is a fundamentally flat data structure. It is well suited for humans to read and write with pencil and paper, or chisels and stone tablets. It is not natively suited for describing hierarchies of abstractions, which, it turns out, is what you want when you're writing code.

Some lessons from building a personal finance startup - justhailsatan https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1286027801963896832 ====== dencodev Twitter is such an annoying format for this sort of content

Code Golf at Google - antichaos http://blog.zmxv.com/2015/07/code-golf-at-google.html ====== nate_martin Fun fact: there has been a problem with Googlers calculating hash functions that pass all the test cases for certain questions. ~~~ Retra If you think about it the right way, that's what everyone is doing: calculating a hash from the problem statement into stream of symbols with certain constraints. So the problem here is not calculating hash functions per se, but over-fitting the solution to those test cases. ------ spydum i think the sad pattern I see in a lot of these code golf implementations is the solution score is based on Lines of Code, which we already agree is a POOR representation of either complexity or simplicity. I think it would be far more interesting to measure number of instructions to complete the objective. Though I suspect the folks familiar with assembly would run circles, perhaps you could segment by solution language? ~~~ modeless You may be interested in [http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/](http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/). It's essentially a code golf game with many different metrics to optimize including number of instructions. ~~~ nsajko It's DRM-ed, sadly. ~~~ acc00 Not anymore: [http://www.gog.com/game/tis100](http://www.gog.com/game/tis100) ------ webo Hah, I remember spending hours on this during work hours when I was interning last year. I used to come up with very clever and short solutions only then to find out I wasn't even top 10 :( ------ karavelov Perl is a way more fun for golfing but it's missing from the supported languages ------ acomjean I had to do a code test for a job (sigh). But it actually was kind of fun. The website takes your code and checks correctness and efficiencies. The company posts "challenges" every month. But they also have lessons which contain some interesting code challenges. The only problems is 1) they're timed 2) sometimes the descriptions are kinda mathy which may put people off. [https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/](https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/) ------ Omnipresent Can a googler put the questions in public for others to see? ------ Buge I'm trying to run the c++ version, but it won't compile because the loop variables in the range for loops do not have declarations. ~~~ detrino There was a proposal[1][2] for C++17 to allow: for (e : c) which would be equivalent to: for (auto &&e : c) Gcc implements this when compiling with -std=c++1z. My understanding is that it was rejected by the committee. [1] [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n385...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3853.htm) [2] [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n399...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n3994.htm) ------ rory096 >[http://go/codegolf](http://go/codegolf) How does this work, some sort of TLD magic? (That shouldn't be possible, right?) Is it just routed within Google's internal network? ~~~ jsmthrowaway Search paths. The full address is go.corp.google.com (which is simply a URL shortener), IIRC; however, I think the resolvers are also configured to respond to a bare name in a lot of cases as an optimization. They talk a little bit about corp in their BeyondCorp paper[0], which is well worth a read, and I'm speaking to ancient memory so I might be wrong these days. [0]: [http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43231.pdf) ~~~ rory096 Thanks for the link! Figured it was a bit more complex than just a host file, being Google and all. ------ planetjones I watched the wolf of wall street recently. I see some of the solutions to these code golf exercises as similar to the bankers who beat their chests and celebrate their masculinity in selling penny stocks to gullible investors.These code golf exercises seem like the software developer equivalent: "look at how brilliant and superior I am that I can obfusicate code into something no-one understands in only 2 lines". My concern here is that this Code Golf mentality infects the normal day-to-day coding at Google. Just because an implementation can spawn a few lines it doesn't make it a good implementation. What about clean code, maintainability, automated testing, self documenting code... I pity the codebase I would have to maintain from one of these code golfers. ~~~ jsnell Nice how many off-handed insults you've managed to pack into such small space, based on no data at all except extrapolating from your own prejudices. It's almost like some kind of HN comment golf. A playful programming competition is really not at all comparable to cheating innocent people out of their money. Like, seriously. People are generally able to behave appropriately in situations with different expectations. There's no reason to think that it's not equally applicable to using the appropriate programming style for the project. It's like you're looking at somebody walking on the street in jeans and a T-shirt, and complaining that they're not properly dressed for the opera. And no code gets committed without a code review at Google anyway. Finally, code golf is rarely about obfuscation; obfuscation just for its own sake isn't compatible with minimizing code length. Once you e.g. know the basic Perl golf tricks, the code can be surprisingly readable since it really just contains the core of the algorithm. ~~~ Vexs Insult golf sounds kinda fun. Try to come up with the most insulting thing possible in the least characters. On a more serious note, I agree with you. There's some alarmist reactions to things like this, but in reality I don't think it's an issue at all. Sure, there might be bragging and such, but that's the point of something like this, isn't it? It's a game, not a serious discussion on optimization. Short code is more "fun" than superoptimized to my mind.

Ask HN: Is a multiple monitor setup significant to you when writing code? - crudx It seems like everywhere I read people keep mentioning how important it is for them to work on multiple monitors (usually it's two or three) or one very big monitor (such as a 27" or 30"), and often I hear them saying "the bigger the better". I'm working on a notebook (15.4" display at 1440x900 screen resolution) and I'm pretty happy (or so I think). Alt+Tab doesn't bother me and I don't feel the need to have two or three or one gigantic monitor. Are there any of you who agree with me? How big of a productivity boost does your big setup give you (try being objective please) ? ====== robflynn It is preferred for me if I am performing certain tasks. If I am rapidly editing html/css then I like to be able to see my markup and a preview in a browser at the same time. Whether this be accomplished by two monitors or one monitor with sufficient resolution does not matter. Reading API documentation while I code is another good use case for multiple displays. It gives me a quick at-a-glance ability that I can't achieve with alt tabbing on a single monitor. (I can, it just feels a lot slower because I am constantly having to visually relocate where I was within the document) I refrain from saying that it is a "MUST" or is "REQUIRED", because I can by just fine on my little 15 laptop, but I prefer working on my dual screen setup. If I'm going to go with just one larger monitor, a nice tiling window manager is nice. Otherwise, I can just alt-tab to the other screen. ------ smtlaissezfaire I guess it probably depends what you are planning on doing with the extra monitor. I've been happy with one monitor and alt-tab (CMD-tab on OS X) for a long time, but recently I've realized that the extra monitor comes in really handy for certain things. For me, that's having chrome open in one window and the chrome inspector in the other (this allows me to concurrently see + play with the DOM/css/js without it crowding the display). When I have two monitors and I'm doing this sort of work, I never say to myself: "Oh man, I'm being so productive". But when I'm without the second one, I certainly miss it and feel _less_ productive. ------ metachris I personally find multiple monitors distracting if I don't need to follow lots of log output simultaneously. The 27" Dell U2711 [1] with 2560x1440 works perfectly for me, and is pretty much the only monitor with this resolution in an acceptable price range (~$800). On this screen there is enough space for Eclipse, two Android emulators, and part of a terminal showing the logs, for instance. A 17" display with about 1920x1200 also just works for me. I find lower resolutions very hard to work with. [1] <http://www.anandtech.com/show/2922> ------ asher_ It makes a huge difference in my experience. I use a 30" most of the time with side-by side, but occasionally use one (sometimes two) of my side monitors (20" in portrait) if the need arises. It is rare for me to use more than just the 30", but if you think about what you'd like to be visible it could be as much as; code, browser, specs/reqs sheet and api/library documentation. I am getting a laptop for coding soon and plan to get an external USB display to complement it for this reason. To the OP; just try using two displays for a couple of hours. You'll never go back. ------ j45 It is absolutely critical. The 30-40% productivity gain per monitor is absolutely true. My setups have included: Three 19" screens at 1280x1024. This was uber productive. Reference/communication on the left screen, code in the middle screen, test on the right screen. Now I'm running a 23" Samsung and a 27" Asus. I use the 27" to code and the 23" to read/test on. The 27" has a 1920x1080 resolution but larger type causes less strain on my eyes. Where do I think I'm going to end up? Buying a 27" iMac and using it as a Target Display Mode for my next Macbook Air. I think I could do it all on one 27". ~~~ katem 30-40% productivity gain per monitor? Can you cite that? ------ caw At my previous job I had 2x 19", and that worked great because I could run my VM in one screen and everything else on the other. When I developed, I just switched to another virtual desktop and ran eclipse and a browser. At my current job I have a 24" and a 19". I'm not sure about the extra 19" and how much that gains me, but I'm stuck in VNC all day so I can't alt-tab like normal folks. My 22" 1680x1050 monitor at home is a bit lacking sometimes for pixel space, but I manage to get stuff done with it. ------ bartonfink I don't particularly care about having multiple monitors or even a large monitor. I use virtual desktops with keyboard shortcuts I've configured to facilitate easy switching, and I find that suits my workflow best. If I had a larger monitor, I might use fewer virtual desktops, but the virtual desktop is free whereas the larger monitor isn't. I just don't see the return. ------ warren_s There was a study done on this a while ago: [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8914028...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89140287) I agree with the premise that there are diminishing returns after the 2nd screen, but I personally always use my 13" Macbook screen alongside the cinema display when I'm at my desk. ------ frou_dh All I like is a good amount of pixels and easy keyboard shortcuts for moving and tiling windows. Those pixels can either be on multiple physical screens, or just one with a good (say 1920x1200) resolution. Being able to have 2, 3 or 4 editor/browser/shell/whatever windows tiled and visible isn't essential, but it's a way of working you miss once you've gotten used to it. ------ rshm I feel small screen quite suffocating. i currently have two 22". (Samsung PX2370). Thinking of switching to one 27" apple cinema. If any one have done same or other way around, please share your experience. ------ mlarratt Multi monitor? No. 2 million pixels or more? Yes. More importantly IMHO: Bind as much window management to your keyboard as possible.

AMA: Self-Employment, Remote Work – Gregory Brown (Programming Beyond Practices) - j_s https://mobile.twitter.com/practicingdev/status/771065320228421632 ====== practicingdev Oh hi! I wasn't expected this to be posted on HN, but I'm happy to discuss in the comments rather than having folks head over to Twitter. I assume many people here already are self-employed or work remotely, but I can throw in my two cents on any questions you might have if you aren't... or if you are but just want to hear from someone else's perspective.

Show HN: Facetflow – Hosted Elasticsearch for Windows Azure - nordbergm https://facetflow.com/ ====== jmparki

Show HN: A curation of SaaS resources for developers - nicolasracchi https://github.com/nicolas-racchi/SaaS4Devs ====== nicolasracchi Hey HN, I've been learning a lot about SaaS & bootstrapped businesses in the past year, and I've collected a long list of resources, stories, links, and advice about this topic, coming from the greatest minds in the game and people who've reached their goal of building a profitable business by themselves. Many of them are active HN users, so this community has a special place for me. Today I've decided to publish this curation as an open GitHub repo, and I hope someone here will find it useful. I'm sharing it because it would've been a godsend for me one year ago. By the way, no affiliate/tracking/referral links or any of that.

VCs Look to Royalty-Based Financing to Fund Startups - gbookman http://blogs.sun.com/sun4startups/entry/vcs_look_to_royalty_based ====== ramsh Payments start with revenue. No revenue, no payments. People say revenue starts "immediately" assuming that the royalty-based VC funds a business that already has some revenue. To your other point, it's not that there is less pressure for revenue, but less pressure for "growth" (ex. hiring, expansion, etc.) at the expense of profitability. VCs often push for premature growth at the expense of profits (so they can inflate the company and sell it as fast as possible), whereas RBF is more in line with rapid profits at the expense of growth - i.e. more organic growth through profits. As for Vinny - in RBF if the venture doesn't earn revenue, no payments go back to the VC. Also, if the venture fails and closes, the VC never gets his/her money back. In contrast if you don't pay Vinny, he breaks your legs. :) Banks too. ------ JoeAltmaier Don't understand. No cash flow for months; how can payments start immediately? How can the pressure be LESS to build/ship product for revenue? How is this different from Vinny the loanshark?

Mechanical Turkers Consider Alternative Platforms - tomcam https://www.wired.com/story/amazons-turker-crowd-has-had-enough/ ====== twobyfour The premise is interesting, but the article reads like an ad for a specific alternative service.

Tertill Weeding Robot - akeck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwTWhMbnq9g ====== jelliclesfarm [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h8oWl6FD-7c](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h8oWl6FD-7c) : there are many mechanical weeding robots for field cultivation. France’s Naio Technologies is my favourite. They are coming to North America soon. It seems like Europe is far ahead of us with robotics and field automation. In America, we have always had abundant cheap labour. Also, American Agtech is a data play and geared towards commodity crops. That’s not always suitable for food crops and speciality food crops and fruits etc. Edited to add: I guess tertill is for gardens. It’s not bad but can be better. ~~~ KingFelix What is up with that video? A few seconds in it looks like warp is fixing the shaky/moved camera? Cool robot though! ~~~ techer Not sure but my google photos stabilisation has this effect... ------ pajtai This won't work! The hardest place to weed is in the grass and around strawberries.... both of these can be just as short as weeds, and from the "how it works" page, it looks like it is using height of plant to determine if it's a weed. Got me excited for a second. [https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/](https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/) "Tertill has a very simple method. Weeds are short, plants are tall." ~~~ fenwick67 Yes, it only works for tall plants like tomatoes, raspberries etc., but that doesn't mean it "won't work". ~~~ pajtai I guess I meant, it "won't work" for me personally... and using height as an indicator of weediness seems risky.... at some point you'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and you'll have to remember to work around your weeder... just doesn't seem as convenient as I would imagine it in my ideal world. ~~~ pavel_lishin > _at some point you 'll have a tiny new seedling that you want to keep and > you'll have to remember to work around your weeder._ There's a metal guard you put down around small plants that prevents Tertill from mowing them down. The video does a pretty good job explaining the basic operation. ~~~ larrydag Or just put chicken wire around areas you don't want weeded ------ mikepurvis Discussion from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14715110) I maintain my position at the time: weeding is almost never just weeding. You're there monitoring a lot of different aspects of your plants' health and progress; you need to do that whether you're weeding or not, so you might as well be weeding. This is a solution in search of a problem, and none of these people seem like gardeners. ------ bjornlouser [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwTWhMbnq9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwTWhMbnq9g) ~~~ ThePadawan The video calls "the typical garden size in the US" 100 sq ft (or 9 m^2). I find it hard to wrap my head around that number. If I had 9m^2 of green, I would never call that a garden. Surely this is the average, but not the mean? As lots of apartments won't have gardens at all. ~~~ TFortunato I think maybe they are using the word "garden" in the US sense of "part of your land sectioned off to grow vegetables, fruits, etc.", not "the green space in your land surrounding the home" which we'd refer to as the lawn. ------ Animats Oh, you have to put markers around non-weeds. It's not like the John Deere/Blue River weeding machine.[1] Or the Ecorobotics weeding robot. Those use machine learning to recognize weeds visually. [1] [http://www.bluerivertechnology.com/](http://www.bluerivertechnology.com/) [2] [https://www.ecorobotix.com/](https://www.ecorobotix.com/) ~~~ Nextgrid I'd choose a proven, 100% reliable criteria such as markers rather than fuzzy methods like machine learning which evolve and can break/behave inexpectedly over time. ------ jpm_sd It's really cute, but it looks sort of fragile and underpowered. ~~~ markdown Yup, reminds me of those cheap solar toys you can buy on Aliexpress. ------ mattferderer I'm curious if others who garden have really bad weed problems that can't be solved with mulch & putting stuff down between rows? I find cardboard or brown packaging paper between rows, & layering the whole garden with grass & straw reduces all but a few random weeds. I don't understand the value of weeding robots outside large agriculture. ~~~ jedberg That method only works for about one season, and then you have to redo it all. I guess if you like gardening redoing the cardboard isn't so bad, but I'd rather focus on the plants and not the cardboard. ~~~ mdellavo you have to redo the garden every season anyway ~~~ jefflombardjr I don't redo everything every season! I like to garden smart, not hard. Check out permaculture. Last year, I put down cardboard and mulched - planting strawberries directly in the mulch and piercing through the cardboard. Fast forward a year, now that the cardboard is pretty composted, the strawberries were established last year had root systems in place, broke through the cardboard, and beat most of the weeds. The weeds can't thrive because the strawberries are taking up all the sun. ~~~ mattferderer Sounds like you have a similar effective way for handling weeds. My main point was that I don't think most gardeners have an issue with weeds in their garden. Side note, using large pieces of cardboard or packaging paper goes fairly quick. I wouldn't consider it hard or time consuming. ------ halis Why buy this when I have kids? ~~~ TheCraiggers This thing is cheaper and doesn't talk. ~~~ EADGBE > Tertill uses bluetooth to talk to your smartphone. Close, but not quite. Just wait for the 20 "I'm stuck" notifications. ------ 24gttghh Or not weed at all and change how we think gardens should be planted in the first place. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- till_farming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming) [https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/permaculture- gardeni...](https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/permaculture-gardening- creating-our-own-eco-systems) The robot seems practical enough though. At least it has solar panels built in! ~~~ icebraining Cutting the weeds doesn't seem anything like tilling; in fact, cutting them and leaving the rest there as mulch seems fairly close to no-till. ~~~ 24gttghh The little robot still drives around and compacts the soil a little. I'm not saying it's not progress, but is it actually necessary? ------ WheelsAtLarge I'm surprised they haven't taken the time to create 2 equal gardens one with the robot one without it. If it works then this type of demonstration would be a great marketing win for the company. By not having a sample garden, it makes me dought the effectiveness of it since it such an easy thing to do. ------ jcoffland The website really needs a video demonstrating the product. Edit: there is a video but it only show up on the desktop version. ~~~ neogodless [https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/](https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/) The "hero" image/banner is a simple video demonstrating the "robot vacuum" behavior, in a garden. ~~~ jcoffland It doesn't show up on mobile. ~~~ KingFelix Try this [https://www.tertill.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/02/tertill-i...](https://www.tertill.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/02/tertill-intro.mov) I have used the Divi theme a bunch and I think if you watch the actual link where the video is you should be able to check it out. ------ amadeusw Am I wrong thinking that after a few weeks of cutting the leaves, the root will become gigantic and will keep producing leaves at a faster rate? The only way to get rid of dandelions is to pull the ever growing root from the ground. ~~~ twic _How does it remove them? Won’t the weeds just grow back?_ _Tertill whacks weeds using a spinning string trimmer, which cuts the weed off near the ground. Because Tertill lives in your garden and goes looking for weeds every day, weeds are always small when the robot finds them. A whacked weed may sprout again, but sprouting takes energy stored in the seed or root. By coming back every day, Tertill never lets a weed develop the leaves it needs to replenish this energy, so eventually the weed gives up and dies._ [https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/](https://www.tertill.com/how-it-works/) ~~~ TremendousJudge they managed to invent something even more stubborn than garden weeds ------ rmason So you will end up with a bunch of weeds inside your collar. Someone hasn't thought this through. I've walked a lot of fields over a twenty year period, weeds aren't always in the middle of the rows. ~~~ noobiemcfoob So...you pick the weeds out of the collar? You've reduced the land you have to maintain to just that which this robot can't get to. ------ dajonker TLDR; you are supposed to get rid of all weeds in your garden first, then this little robot will take care of all new weeds growing out of the ground. It's supposed to be pretty much maintenance free and runs on only sunlight. ------ pugworthy I can imagine that when this rolls over a green hose, it promptly tries to "kill" the hose. And I don't want to think about what it does to slugs and snails... ------ jelliclesfarm I might give this a shot to weed between my lavender field rows. I have 1.5 acres. Why not? Just use them on a couple of them to see how it operates. ------ tantalor How well does this do on slopes? ~~~ neogodless From the product web site: Will Tertill get stuck? Tertill uses four-wheel-drive. This helps Tertill move through soft soil, sand, and mulch, and also helps Tertill climb slopes. Its distinctive diagonal wheels make Tertill more stable on slopes and help it get past certain terrain challenges. Tertill relies on several sensors and clever programming to keep out of trouble. To detect objects like the garden fence and big plants, Tertill uses sensors similar to those found in many smart phones—the lightest touch is all it takes. To detect steep slopes, Tertill uses the same sort of sensor that tells your cell phone which way is up. Tertill can also sense if a motor stops turning—perhaps jammed by a rock—so it can protect itself from damage. ~~~ bluedino You'd think it woudl use tank tracks ~~~ cr0sh Tank tracks have problems at a small scale that aren't immediately apparent at full scale. The big one - especially for something "in the dirt" \- is dirt/mud getting between the tracks and ground wheels/idlers. This can easily stop the drive system, requiring user maintenance. Then there's the issue with water rusting parts (shafts, screws, etc). Also, more moving parts equal more things to break. Finally, on a small scale, tracks have a tendency to be easily "thrown" from the wheels depending on how turning is accomplished and the terrain. On a full sized tank or bulldozer, tracks still have these issues, but in the case of dirt, it can just power through the obstacles; dirt and mud may build up, and cause some rust, but the important bits are kept constantly lubricated. Any parts that do grind up the dirt just wear down instead of stopping (and eventually need replacement - very $$$$ replacement). If anyone cares to, hosing off the tracks with a water truck can also be done, but isn't likely to be done. Again, it all comes down to maintenance. Also, full scale tracked vehicles rarely turn "en point", because their tracks can be thrown just as easily as on the smaller scale, but cause more damage and more repair $$$ needed to fix/replace (plus doing it in the field isn't easy, either). The proper way to turn such a vehicle is to not perform such maneuvers, or if you have to, make sure you're on relatively flat and soft ground (that you don't mind utterly destroying - beware your wife's rose garden), and do it fairly slowly. The side load on the tracks and idlers will still be just as high, but throwing the track isn't as great. Usually, though, you steer in a curve just like a car, except using differential speeds on each track. There will still be side loads and "skidding", but the loads are much, much less (also, this is why such machines, whether tracked or wheeled, are known as "skid steered" or "differential steering"). ~~~ turk73 The whole thing is a "nice try" but spending money on something like this isn't green--we're supposed to be consuming less overall and this hunk of plastic will break within six months and then sit on a shelf until it inevitably enters the waste stream as difficult to recycle e-trash. When are people going to wake up and figure out that all this speculative entrepreneurial-ism is pretty much just money making scams that exist as the cost of the environment? Don't want weeds? Be a gardener. Or don't be a gardener: This whole dilettante Instagram gardener bullshit is what needs to die. ------ tmaly I enjoy working out in the garden. It is time to reflect and get off the screen. I don't think I would buy something like this.

Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete - lmacvittie http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/07/31/cloud-computing-makes-servers-obsolete.aspx ====== TrevorJ Because the "cloud" is made up of something other than servers? Am I missing something here, or is this just semantics? ~~~ jshen Yes you are. You don't have to think about the servers, the cloud abstracts it away. Here's an analogy. High level languages make memory management obsolete. You could then ask, "because programs are made up of something other than memory and instructions?", and you'd definitely be missing something. ~~~ tdavis Your analogy makes sense, but it is as broken as the central idea in this piece, and they're both so for the same reason: Despite high-level languages, memory management is still very much a reality for many programmers. People still write ASM and C _every day_. Memory management and physical boxes may be obsolete for Joe Schmoe, but he's not the guy who makes it possible to ignore these things in the first place. There are all sorts of folks out there who's choice to gain copious amounts of low-level knowledge has allowed me to be lazy. ~~~ jshen I disagree with your implications that someone is lazy if they have concerns other than low level bit twiddling. Some of us are trying to build businesses or simply progress the state of the art in other areas. For example, I work in a research group on information retrieval. I could spend hours of my day making progress on IR with higher level languages or I could instead waste productivity on manual memory management. Choosing the former is not being lazy. Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed. ~~~ tdavis I meant the good kind of lazy, so yeah, I wasn't really trying to insult you. _Also, the idea that "some" people still do C therefore memory management isn't obsolete for most people is clearly flawed._ As flawed as the absolute claim, "Cloud Computing Makes Servers Obsolete". Not only is it objectively false (servers are necessary for cloud computing, duh), but it makes no attempt to quantify by saying for whom they've become obsolete. I admit to not reading the article (based on the ridiculous title), but if it claims that cloud computing makes skills in setting up dedicated hardware from OS up and then engaging in smart capacity planning and proper deployment schemes so as to make horizontal (or vertical) scaling as painless as possible without the advantages provided by virtualization less necessary in today's computing landscape, then... I agree wholeheartedly! ~~~ jshen "loud computing makes skills in setting up dedicated hardware from OS up and then engaging in smart capacity planning and proper deployment schemes so as to make horizontal (or vertical) scaling as painless as possible without the advantages provided by virtualization less necessary in today's computing landscape" That makes for a great title doesn't it? LOL ~~~ tdavis Better than <insert sensationalist blanket statement to insight linkbait>. How about, _Cloud Computing Making Dedicated Hardware Obsolete For Some_. Was that so difficult? Took me 10 seconds. ~~~ jshen that isn't a good title. Given the intended audience, you can assume the readership is smart enough to understand that nuances are not reflected in the title. Here are some examples of using your style in well known titles. God is not Great Most of the time (worse title, but more accurate) A failure of Capitalism to self regulate banking and insurance and avoid systemic risk (much worse than the original, but more accurate) A pale blue dot when viewed from a distant perspective in space (much worse than the original, but more accurate) ------ MicahWedemeyer All of the fawning over the cloud really irritates me. I use S3 and EC2 and love them both. However, I also still use local storage and non-EC2 servers. Everything has its place, and the cloud has definitely not replaced the server for me, nor do I see that happening any time in the near future. Especially if you're just starting out, dealing with getting set up in a cloud environment is a headache you just don't need. ------ tybris Sounds nice in theory, in reality less than 1% of applications really need to scale and only one "resource" a.k.a. "server" is going to have to do all the work, simply for economic reasons. Current (shared) PaaS offerings still have too many limitations and lock-in to be a suitable replacement. ------ jacquesm I think it should read 'cloud computing makes _some_ servers obsolete'. Not everybody will be able to host 'in the cloud', the kind of data they host could easily be forbidden to pass to third parties, even for hosting. Think of medical data, banking and so on. Quite a few servers could probably be hosted 'in the cloud', but for now the cost benefits are not really there unless your application falls in to a very specific niche. Bandwidth and storage premiums in the cloud make it very tough to position a cloud based solution vs hosting your own stuff. The only case when it makes sense is if you need large numbers of servers for a short period and if you are growing faster than you can order hardware. It's also great as a fall-back plan and to create redundancy. ~~~ timwiseman You have a good point, but he at least partially addressed this in the article when he said "First, I really like the use of the article “a” in reference to cloud as it speaks to all models of cloud: private, public, external, internal, and hybrid." A company that cannot or will not put their data on the internet and "The Cloud" could at least in principle build "A Cloud" within their own intranet and host there, still gaining the flexibility of focusing on applications rather than servers. Still, I think you have a good point with _cloud computing makes some servers obsolete_. Some data not only cannot leave the company intranet, but must be segregated strictly from other data within in the same company. This will require focusing on the server. Also, it can (in some cases) be harder and slower to write in such a flexible than to let it be tied to a single server. Doing that makes no sense if programmer time is a precious asset in that organization and you will have a need for massive scaling in the foreseeable future. ~~~ jacquesm I think you meant to say 'will have no need for massive scaling' ? ~~~ timwiseman Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for the rather major typ-o. ------ asciilifeform There is no "cloud." There are only other people's hard drives. ------ dan_the_welder Nothing has ever made anything obsolete. ~~~ jshen This is true, but I don't choose to use cobol for new projects. In the same way I don't choose to buy dedicated servers any longer. ------ vicaya Cloud computing provides service abstraction at different levels. You don't need to think about servers at SaaS (Software as a Service. e.g, Google Docs/Apps) and PaaS (Platform as a Service. e.g. Google Apple Engine, Windows Azure; Amazon S3, Elastic MapReduce etc.) level, but you do have (virtualized) servers when you need IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service. e.g. Amazon EC2, VMware infrastructure) where you need to put existing/legacy applications that have clear dependencies on explicit servers in the cloud. ------ brutimus I'm all for distributed services, but only when practical. All services go down, heck, even Google services have gone down several times recently. So when your boss is screaming at you "why are we down?!", can you get by with just saying "because X (the _cloud_ ) is down". Highly unlikely. ------ billswift Twenty years ago I was reading about how networked workstations made mainframes obsolete, this is just more of the same. Network latency effects, if nothing else, is going to ensure the continued need for at least some centralized computing resources. ------ wolfhumble Does anyone any information on how to handle security in the cloud? Seems to be easier to find hacker patterns monitoring a (virtual) server.

Ask HN: sensors that export data? - petervandijck I'm trying to manage the humidity in my new house, and have a humidity meter. But it doesn't export data over time. I'd like it to have a usb port so that I can get data over time and put it on my computer. I can also imagine wanting to do this with other data (temperature, walking data, sleeping data, ...) that various sensors gather.<p>Are there any tools like this out there? Open source hardware projects that I can hack? Commercial tools? ====== gsivil We have just used something like that in our lab. You can check [http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail- minigoose_ii-8.htm...](http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail- minigoose_ii-8.html) it is a device connected with air flow/humidity/ Dew point/ temperature sensors and connected to the internet. The basic models starts from 200 dollars I think. If you want to contact me at my username at g mail I can link you to our lab's website to check the interface ------ brk You can buy sensors for things like that, but they'll tend to be expensive for what you get, eg: <http://www.tequipment.net/AmprobeTR300.html> If you like to hack around with micro-controllers then you can build something that does all that more for about the same price, but have a lot more flexibility. Google for things like "1-wire humidity sensor". The Dallas Semi 1-wire bus is widely supported with most micro controllers, and fairly easy to implement. ------ po Check out Bug Labs: <http://www.buglabs.net/> ------ zeynel1 Is this what you are looking for: <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807740> Building Wireless Sensor Networks with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing

Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development - jasonbourne1901 https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35293 ====== Afforess How is lemmy going to avoid the fate of the last reddit alternative (voat)? Voat attracted the communities banned from reddit, e.g the worst of the worst: jailbait, creepshots, beatingwomen, etc. The users most interested in an alternative to reddit are on average, the exact wrong type of user to help with the growth of a healthy community. I don't see any information on how being "federated" solves the hard problem of toxic communities, especially given that is the userbase it will attract. ~~~ yogthos Nothing can prevent terrible people from using an open source project. Meanwhile, Reddit doesn't do much of anything about this problem either. For, example /r/metacanada exists, and white supremacists from there are also moderating /r/canada subbreddit, Reddit hasn't taken any action on that. At least the developers of Lemmy are very clear [1] about their stance regarding nazis, that's more than I can say for Reddit. It's also worth noting that Mastodon has millions of users now, and it clearly isn't attracting the worst people. In fact, I find it's a far healthier and friendlier community than Twitter. [1] [https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286](https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/34286) ~~~ trackofalljades The situation on /r/canada is heartbreaking. Over recent weeks, almost every attempt to post a news article involving civil rights or anything overtly related to Black, LGBTQ+ or Indigenous issues has been immediately zeroed down, and in many cases then removed by a mod (their favourite method is to just hit the "dupe" button on all posts about a given news item or opinion piece, claiming they're all dupes, and not leaving one up). If you make the mistake of discussing this on any other Canadian related sub where the /r/canada mods frequent, they'll ban you for life and say that _you_ were "brigading." ~~~ adtac in case you didn't know, come to /r/onguardforthee, the sane and inclusive Canadian subreddit ------ TulliusCicero I have to say, at the very least, the UI is a breath of fresh air compared to new Reddit. New Reddit is just...I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just feels awful to look at. ~~~ ehsankia While I agree that new reddit is awful, I still much prefer old reddit to this. Also what's up with this new trend of having the main content width- restricted, but not the header [0]? The new GitHub UI that went live this week has the exact same problem on wide screens. What kind of UX designer ever approved such a mess and why do so many sites do this? The main UI itself, again very width restricted, but also has strange paddings [1] which limit severely the area for the title (which is the most important UI element). Doesn't really make sense to me. The vertical centering is a bit of a mess, and the size of icons is also either way too big or way too small [2]. [0] [https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png) [1] [https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png](https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png) [2] [https://i.imgur.com/XZPToxy.png](https://i.imgur.com/XZPToxy.png) EDIT: Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. I actually don't hate it as much, it looks much closer to old reddit now, with full width content and much less padding [3] [3] [https://i.imgur.com/c1QBucR.png](https://i.imgur.com/c1QBucR.png) ~~~ hanniabu > Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and > it seems like it has improved significantly. The UI itself isn't horrible, it's the UX. It's incredibly bulky and slow, and some user links have been hidden while others completely removed. ~~~ 9HZZRfNlpR New reddit must be the slowest website out there, on mobile where I'm not logged in it takes ages to load. Then ages to kill all sort of pop ups that force me to use their app. I believe they don't care about UX and speed of the site, it's all about the app. They measure app downloads, not the experience on the site. ~~~ alpaca128 I still am in awe regularly at how damn sluggish the site is. Even with an ad blocker it is at least an order of magnitude slower than every other website I've seen. ------ as1mov One thing that stands out to me is lemmy has public modlogs[1], this is a great feature in my opinion. Something that should be more common. Quite a few people on reddit are frustrated by how opaque moderation is, but looking at the meta community of power users that seems to mod the bigger subs, I doubt the devs will ever copy this feature. [1]: [https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog](https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog) ~~~ TulliusCicero I moderate a couple of subreddits and agree moderation is a disaster. For popular subs, moderators are basically swamped in a never-ending avalanche of shit. Even if you want to be a good mod, doing so for the long haul is an insane time commitment. The fact that being banned from one sub doesn't usually get you banned from another sub is totally understandable, but combined with how easy it is to make a new account, in practice it's just never-ending whack-a-mole with shithead posters. ~~~ justAnotherNET The mods only have themselves to blame. They create insanely broad rules allowing them to ban anything and then limit mod positions to concentrate their power. The role of mods is to delete off topic submissions and remove illegal content. Nothing more. ~~~ chowells The role of mods is to establish and maintain the community they wish to have in the space. That takes a lot more than deleting off-topic submissions and removing illegal content. ------ rolleiflex We have something similar to this, Aether. [https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net). (code at github.com/nehbit/aether) Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance: \- Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ as servers that talk to each other. \- By proxy that means we can’t really have a web app unfortunately (working on it by the way of running a daemon on a raspberry pi) and they can - we need a native app running on your machine and seeding context to the network. \- By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ in the form of the ownership of your home server that federated networks have. You are the home server, so no one can control what you see. We call this user sovereignty \- In Aether we have elections which elect mods based on popular vote and you control who is a mod, precisely because the ‘social compiler’ runs on your machine and allows you to compile it however you want. Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities \- We have a mod audit log and have had it for a while - everyone’s mod actions are visible to everyone (this I think they also have) \- Lastly, we have made the decision to not monetise Aether itself and create a team communication app called Aether Pro, and monetise that. This creates a ‘Chinese wall’ between where we make our money and the P2P network, which means it’s a shield against drifting towards trying to make money from a social network. The code bases are separate but similar, so that also means work done on the Pro helps Aether as well. We have gotten some funding for the Pro, and we consider the P2P version a ‘marketing / goodwill expense’ in the context of that funding. That aligns us towards making sure Aether is long- term viable, well maintained and monetisation-free. In contrast I think they’ve gotten money to work directly on this, which has both good and more hazardous sides. In summary, we opted for a long term structure that has less moral hazard (in my opinion, of course), in favour of a more stable app without a need for monetisation that has fewer, more stable releases. For context, here's how a recent thread looks on my Aether client: [https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png](https://i.imgur.com/45tXQEO.png) ~~~ rglullis > By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle > management’ (...) so no one can control what you see. This _right here_ is the main thing that will never let any fully- decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems: \- Most people _do_ want "middle-management". They don't want to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score points with their social peers. All they want is to open their browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done with it. \- This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control _does not exist_. A federated system can degenerate into a fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: _they just run their own instances_. Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of pushing it except for buzzword investors. ~~~ TimJRobinson The trade-off is that when you run your own instance you have to then attract users to it for it to be useful, which burdens others. In a fully decentralized network you can meet new people and moderate your own view of the world without putting any burden on others to adapt to what you want. Moderation can be done with a system like this: [https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and- moderati...](https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderation- system-for-the-decentralized-web/) ~~~ rglullis Sorry, either you don't understand the concept of federation, or you are bullshitting me. I can run a single-user Mastodon instance and follow people from any other instance. They can follow me as well. I can send emails from my personal server to anyone on gmail, and vice-versa. Where do I need to "attract other users" to my instance? It's quite the opposite! ~~~ TimJRobinson I thought you meant similar to hosting a forum or Lemmy like site. With Mastadon if say I'm on another instance and the host of that instance blocks yours (because they don't agree with your politics or whatever) then won't I be unable to see your feed? I'd have to setup my own Mastadon instance to get around this? What if I'm not technically inclined enough to do this? Then I'm subject to the whims of the moderators of the instance. What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate? What if an instance of Mastadon crashes and the admins can't be bothered restoring it. As a user on that instance haven't you lost everything? These are the problems decentralized networks are solving, being subject to the whims of other people. ~~~ rglullis > With Mastadon (sic) if say I'm on another instance and the host of that > instance blocks yours... First: Mastodon, with an "O". Second: I already had this discussion before. This "blocking" of instances is something that is going on only on Mastodon, AFAIK, because most of the current members are conflating the idea of _federation_ with _tribes_. They _want_ to be insular at this point. This will change as soon as there are more people using ActivityPub like email or Matrix and stop associating the instances with the identities/ideologies of its members. So, no. You won't _have_ to "setup your Mastodon" instance to get around this. You _can_ do it, but you also _can_ just find a more professional hosting provider that is not managed by a fourteen year old or tweenagers that love to spout their love for diversity and yet can only tolerate any conversation that is exactly aligned with their existing preconceptions of their uniform peer group. > What if I live in China and they block access to the biggest instances so > I'm cut off from all the big communities and can't participate? What if you live in China and they block the decentralized service altogether? What if they use the decentralized nature of the service and set up honeypots to find dissidents? "Decentralized" != "Private" != "Secure" > What if an instance crashes (...) the admins can't be bothered restoring it. If it is important to you, _then_ (a) you run your own service or (b) you pay someone that actually cares about this. With a decentralized service, the only alternative you have is (a). Then not only _you_ have to make this choice, but also _everyone_ that you would like to join the network. My point all along is that federated systems are already enough for those that do not "want to be subject to the whims of other people", while decentralized systems shut out those that don't care about it or would rather trust/delegate these concerns to someone else. "Decentralized systems" bring no benefit that can't be had by federated systems and remove all sorts of free options from the potential users. It is limiting instead of liberating. ------ badrabbit Sorry, don't like the name. Also, when you say a reddit alternative, to me it gives the impression that the redditor culture will remain so why would I sacrifice the content rich reddit for a new platform? Federation doesn't mean much to me as a user that justs wants [social]entertainment and news (and commentary on them). There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die on against you. As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads? If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy reddit is better. ~~~ mahathu >There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. I'm not trying to play the devils advocate here, just genuinely curious: Why do you (or anyone else) have such a strong opinion on not using emails for signing up? Usually, when a service requires me to enter an email, I have no issue with using a service like 10minutemail and never checking that email account again. ~~~ badrabbit I have spoken about this many times on HN. It comes down to this: email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an ancient protocol with many insecurities. Anonymous email works for a bit but then every service worth using starts banning the providers. Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email, that should tell you a lot about how horrible it is. It's on the same level as social security numbers being used as a secure secret that identifies a person. Email was not meant to be abusef this way, and I have seen first hand how it can be used against people so I have chosen it as my figurative "hill to die on". Now, if I can give a limited use address that cant be tied to me as an individual,expires after a period of time and messages are E2EE encrypted with no metadata leakage I don't mind that. I have spent almost an entire day trying to sign up to one service withour having to give up my phone number,real IP,creditcard or real email address to anyone as a challenge. I have tried countless anonymous email providers and sms code receiving services. I failed. Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me. ~~~ judge2020 The problem is always 'how do i allow this user to reset their password', or more 'how do i verifiably contact the user'/'how do i verify someone emailing support is who they say they are' \- without email, it's completely on the user to know and remember their password, something a lot of people can't do (and most don't use a p/w manager). HN does fine here since it's a 'tech' community where the majority likely does use a password manager, and Reddit gets away with it since their UI is so quiet about the email being optional - almost everyone thinks it's a required field since other websites require it and it looks just like the u/p field. ~~~ badrabbit If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to opt out of email support and being able to reset passwords via email. Two factor auth solutions let you store a one time recovery code for example that you write down or store somewhere safe, that's one option if you care to support it but I wouldn't mind losing the email only features you mentioned either. ~~~ TulliusCicero > If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to opt out of email > support and being able to reset passwords via email. And the users will get mad and blame the service provider. That said users are dumb/wrong or whatever is irrelevant, what matters to the business is that they're pissing off users and getting a bad reputation. Thus, requiring emails from the user is entirely rational and in fact is a good business practice. ~~~ badrabbit No, making it a default makes sense. Users will not get mad if they get a warning telling them email support will no longer be possible. Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password. The only time you can't turn on email on your account is if you lose the password. Email is not secure, a user that has their login compromised is very likely to also have their email compromised. Moreover, if their email is compromised this completely silly dependence on email will get their account on your site compromised as well so you should be using a non-email means of authenticating users for support or account recovery!! Email must die. No buts or ifs. It must die. You are a poor or ignorant engineer and architect if you build new things that depend on email in 2020. If you give the most mediocre hacker 100 emails of users of your service that depends on email for account security, I am confident he/she will compromise at least a 3rd of accounts. ~~~ TulliusCicero > Users will not get mad if they get a warning telling them email support will > no longer be possible. Yes, they will. Most will not have even noticed the warning you put up. ------ TulliusCicero Neat, but the big test for a discussion platform like this is what happens when they get big enough to matter, to get the attention of journalists looking for a scoop. It's easy to slide by with haphazard (or no) moderation when you're small. Discussion extremists (trolls, bigots, and the like) are less attracted to smaller platforms; they'd prefer bigger ones, if any would take them. I'm curious what will happen with the central listing of communities if a particularly vile community gains popularity. If there's a community unapologetically dedicated to, say, neo-nazism, and they like to do things like praise Hitler or discuss ways they can kill racial minorities, do they still get listed? How will others feel about that? ~~~ kixiQu why are there so many comments assuming that the point of this project is to facilitate lighter moderation than Reddit has? the code of conduct on the site is pretty clear, actually. now, can you start a federated instance with that kind of content? sure. but just like how none of the normal mastodon servers federate with Gab, no one would have to federate with the cesspool. ~~~ TulliusCicero I think that sort of technical distinction might be lost in many when there's a news report on how [platform] 'allows' bigots to spread hatred. ------ fernly So sad, nobody remembers Imzy, the "nice reddit" founded by Dan McComas. It really was nice, had highly varied, friendly communities and a pleasant UI. Couldn't get traction, apparently. [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/imzy-the-nice- reddit...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/imzy-the-nice-reddit- alternative-is-shutting-down.html) ~~~ zem I was unaware of imzy, but reading between the lines of that article the cause of demise seems to be "not enough traction to be successfully run as a business". sounds like there were communities there who were using it and enjoying it, so the real failure was the expectation that it would get as large as reddit and sustain a business model, not in the lack of usefulness to its users. ------ mfkp Not a good sign when the website doesn't load: [https://i.imgur.com/Us1mwrD.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Us1mwrD.jpg) ~~~ bo1024 I had several problems trying to get the page to load. After allowing it to use lots of javascript-related resources, it eventually loaded but took a while to display the actual text, on a fast internet connection. Unfortunate. ------ nickdothutton I’m hopeful something good will come of this. I wrote this about LinkedIn but most of it could easily apply to a Reddit alternative, I love HN but would love to see a broader platform that didnt become cancerous. [https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better- linkedin/](https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/) ~~~ ativzzz > didnt become cancerous Ultimately any platform big enough becomes cancerous unless it has sponsors who are willing to fund the platform without turning a profit, like HN is funded by ycombinator (though notice how over time there are more and more hiring advertisements for ycombinator companies). The bigger a platform becomes, the more expensive it becomes to maintain; the people who were volunteers at first have to either monetize to be able to continue supporting the platform, or they have to sell the company to someone who can support it. Once money is brought into the equation, a community starts to slowly deteriorate, as money slowly starts taking over all aspects of the platform, which is nothing more than human nature. ~~~ Can_Not The hiring ads here seem completely relevant and appropriate for this forum. Very few other websites can say the same for their ads. YC saves money on recruiter fees and job listing fees, you reach your target audience, and you don't need tons of analytics. ------ mrfusion I think simply having a Reddit clone run by a non profit (or owned by the members themselves) would go a long way in promoting freedom and fixing the issues. I guess use a people solution instead of a technical one. ~~~ tennineeight There is one made by previous Reddit admin/dev who understands how reddit works. It is nonprofit, developed in open and all policy discussions go through community. [https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/) ------ stormdennis I'd like a "reddit" that wasn't a confusing mess to navigate on a browser on my phone and wasn't always trying to get me to use the app. It could do worse than take lessons from the design of HN. A separate HN clone for each subreddit. ~~~ holler check out the site in my profile, brand new and under active development, but it's a responsive web app with goal of simplicity/low-friction ------ superkuh > JavaScript is required for this page. Yeah, I'm out. That was a problem with the federated reddit-alike notabug.io too. It was just one giant javascript application, not html. And doing "pre- rendering" of the javascript on the host machine made the VPS costs too much to be tenable for people to federate. ~~~ LockAndLol Prerendering of the JavaScript? What do mean by that? Don't you mean prerendering HTML? ~~~ superkuh I do. I just worded it badly. I meant "pre-rendering of the javascript" to mean executing JS on the server and then sending the resulting actual html/css. ------ MattGaiser How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat? Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned. ~~~ holidaygoose Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented? Is it because: \- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet? \- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values. \- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population? I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public. ~~~ winstonewert I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left. Consider two possible statements: 1\. Hitler wasn't that bad. 2\. Stalin wasn't that bad. I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin. This has two effects: Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked out of communities. Far-left people are not. So any new unmoderated community is going to attract these "refugees" Secondly, nobody notices or cares when a community goes far-left. But its far more noticeable when a community goes far-right. ~~~ rsynnott I think both of those examples would provoke a pretty extreme response in most people, but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common, at all. You see a _bit_ of "Stalinism was actually good" stuff on the internet (weirdly, occasionally from the right; some more confused Russian nationalists have a bit of a Stalin fetish), but you'll see a lot more holocaust denial. ~~~ devcouvert >but sincere Stalinists just aren't very common Maybe the figure-head isn't en vogue anymore. The methods are always popular. Leftists(Socialists, Communists, Anarchists) often publically revel in the idea of when "the revolution comes" to put anyone dissenting up against the wall or sending them to a Gulag camp of some sort. I don't find that exactly reassuring. Seeing how "protesters" in the US and Europe act like chinese Red Guards during the cultural revolution, this day doesn't seem far off. I'm reading the "Three-Body Problem" right now and the first chapter eerily reminded me of the current situation where not being enough of an "ally" to the racial BLM movement is a thought-crime punishable by having your life destroyed. ------ ScottFree I'm extremely disappointed your icon isn't a picture of Lemmy from Motorhead. ------ bitL Is it possible to make fonts smaller to resemble old.reddit.com? My perception field is vastly larger than the amount of text displayed (i.e. my brain can search for keywords without actually consciously focusing on them). ~~~ t-writescode command / ctrl + scroll-wheel? ~~~ bitL Did you even try it? Give it a go and enjoy unexpected UX, then come back... ------ solarized I hate when reddit insist us to install mobile version from play store. Why you guys follow the mainstream ?. Browser version just enough. ------ readnews1 "Reddit alternative" "open source federated" What is the difference between this and usenet ~~~ takeda I agree with you that Reddit basically overlaps this area, but I don't think access to Usenet is easy these days (ignoring paid services that are optimized for downloading files). Although if anyone knows good servers (ISPs no longer seem to offer them) or even better a way to connect own server to Usenet, I'm interested. ~~~ u801e There are still a few servers that allow one to access usenet to access text based groups without a monthly fee. Barring that, you can access usenet newsgroups via Google Groups (groups.google.com), but only via HTTP. ------ cateye There is huge need for such an application. Hope that it becomes moderately successful. If it becomes too successful, it will become victim of it's success like Reddit. ~~~ notkaiho It will absolutely need popular support to attain some sort of critical mass, and not just among the cast-offs from other platforms, such as Gab, Parler etc. ------ retpirato The fact that Reddit is an echo-chamber is one reason I never joined, & never will, but there are some communities that would be useful like the android & kustom subreddits, the former of which already exists on Lemmy. I'm only holding off with Lemmy because they don't (yet at least) have a privacy policy, which to me is essential especially considering the nature of the site. The fact that they didn't at least put up some sort of template of a privacy policy before the site was ever available to the public when that's a common part of any site that provides accounts, as a way of informing you how they will handle the data you give them, is very troubling to me. ------ benbristow Looks nice. Really fast webapp too. Congrats team! Looking forward to tracking this project's development. ~~~ vinay427 You're not kidding. This webapp is so fast (after the initial load) that I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit mobile website intentionally adds sleeps/delays as some have jokingly suspected in the past. On this site, I can actually scroll through posts or collapse comment threads without wondering if my touch input and/or browser are frozen. ~~~ bserge New Reddit doesn't need sleep/delays, it's already slow as molasses heh. If not for old.reddit.com, my time on Reddit would've gone way down :/ ~~~ takeda My understanding was that s/he was referring to the new UI. Actually Reddit makes it hard to be on the old interface, I have to use browser extension to completely avoid the new UI. ~~~ bserge There's a setting in preferences - as long as you're logged in, www.reddit.com links will still load the old design. Logged out though, yeah, I manually replace "www" with "old" whenever I open a link... Reddit is unavoidable these days since everyone's moved there and there's a lot of good content :/ ------ erulabs Congratulations! Just discovering Lemmy! Federated software is excellent - I’ll have to write a home-hosting tutorial for this! ------ u801e I'm surprised not a single comment discussing Reddit alternatives mentioned Usenet (especially in terms of federation). ~~~ zzo38computer Well, now yours does, and thinking of federation, that is what I thought of, too. And, I think also, to be based on NNTP. I think at at least what should be done includes: Use NNTP, and avoid namespace collisions if you are defining your own newsgroups. I don't know how to request adding newsgroups to Big 8, or to the alt hierarchy, or others, but I invented the "Unusenet" convention for avoiding namespace collisions, which I use on my own NNTP server. Make the web pages contain the message ID, newsgroup name, and information to connect to the NNTP server, even if JavaScripts are disabled. Users who want NNTP can use it even if they do not have a compatible browser. If you want to use Markdown, add a "Content-type: text/markdown" header to articles that use Markdown (and do not try to render articles without such a header as Markdown), and preferably using a subset of Markdown without HTML. ------ thereyougo I tried few Reddit alternatives, most of them had the same problem: They attract many people who got banned from Reddit. A good solution will be to not allow (at least at the first few years) to open a sub around politics. ------ markdown So many noob mistakes in the UI and I haven't even started using the site proper. I see a link "Create Community", this takes me to a form where I get to create a community. I spend time naming and describing this community, and then click the Submit button. At this point it decides to tell me that I need to use lowercase for the community name. So I fix that and hit Submit again. At this point I'm told I have to create an account first. WTF, why didn't you tell me earlier? If I leave this page to create an account, will you preserve what I've filled into this form for when I get back? Why didn't you just add the necessary username/password fields to this form at the same time you showed me the error? Anyway, so I click on the link that says Login/Signup and get a popup that says "Are you sure you want to leave?" Now I have to click again to remove this popup. Another wasted click and +1 to the "annoyed" meter. See above for how this could have been avoided by just adding the login/signup forms to the form I just filled out to reduce friction. Anyway, so I create an account. And it turns out the site forgot everything I'd done before that. Why ask me questions (make me fill out a "Create community" form) if you're going to immediately forget all my answers? Absolutely no respect for the users time. Why would you do that when your very existence depends on attracting more users? ~~~ arcturus17 The problems in UX/UI in what I've tried span from fundamental interaction design down to code. I guess it's a young project, so lots can be improved. I think the problems you mention are bad but they sound fixable. I'd think about contributing or at least start by running my own instance and tweaking the interface to my liking. I'll also need to check if Inferno is worth learning. ------ FreeTrade member.cash is an interesting Reddit alternative. Not federated, but all the content is on a blockchain, so comments/users can't be censored, but users can filter them. ~~~ ryeights What happens when illegal content is posted? Is it stuck on the blockchain forever? ~~~ hkt Sure is! ------ Kye This has ActivityPub (AP) support on its roadmap. I wrote a well-received[0] argument that AP could be the future: [https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the- futur...](https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-future/) I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (write.as/Pixelfed/PeerTube/Mastodon) and the next round will take a while as people who got on later get ideas and develop them into something like, for example, Lemmy. [0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864029) ------ bennysonething The Reddit redesign made Reddit ridiculously unusable. Also like the web in general the more users it got the horrible it became. The stardard of content fell through the floor. The stanard of comments did the same. It went from be a pretty free market liberal types to angry left wing reactionaries over the course of a few years. It felt like the users got younger and younger until one day I saw a pic bunch of high school students egged on by their teachers holding a "socialism now" banner, this was front page. ~~~ antepodius I think the lesson might just to move on from sites whenever they get too big and cancerous. ------ kenrose “Open source federated Reddit” Maybe I’m old, but isn’t this what Usenet was / is? ~~~ risho I'm not sure that usenet could scale to the degree that reddit has. Part of what reddit does that makes it good(though it's both a blessing and a curse) is that a lot of the curation and moderation is handled by the community via the upvote downvote system. That means that you don't need as much dedicated moderation handling things which at the scale that some of the subreddits operate at is huge. ------ OptionX "This is an Antifa instance" stickied on the front page by an admin no less. If I wanted a politicized cesspool reddit-clone I would just use Voat. Fail to see the point. ------ dependenttypes There is also [https://notabug.io/](https://notabug.io/) for anyone looking into decentralized reddit alternatives. ------ jwilber Nginx bad gateway when I visit. Reassuring I guess that I’ll face the same down issues I do now with or without funding. ------ frankzen I'm convinced that implementing so-called "free speech" sites in public doesn't work. Real free speech happens in closed networks, invite only. The only downside is those take more time to grow. ------ shse Another poorly crafted SPA app. Click on a post then go back and it jumps to the top on its own. Sometimes there is just a blank screen. Please make it a simple MVC app without JavaScript BS. ------ Aeolun Their 500 Exception homepage does not exactly inspire confidence. ~~~ MattGaiser I don't think it is reasonable to judge whether a product in development currently scales well. ------ embit Once upon a time, open source federated reddit was called Usenet. ------ oskenso I currently use this to host [https://emulator.news/](https://emulator.news/) the docker support is on point :D ------ highmastdon Please, allow non-ws connection or fall back when it fails and stick to that alternative. When behind proxy/in VPN, I'm not able to use your website. ------ appleflaxen For anyone looking at this type of web application, I believe dev.to has similar functionality and licensing, but also has a mobile app on both iOS and android. ------ cuddlecake I wonder why the developers of Lemmy decided to perform all the content requests via WebSocket instead of HTTP. Is there anyone out there who can answer this? ~~~ holler Obfuscation? I've seen this in other sites (discord comes to mind). Maybe there's a hypothetical efficiency from reusing the websocket connection for all requests? for the site sqowk.im Im working on I use http for content requests and websocket for realtime stuff ------ orthecreedence I think Lemmy needs to address this before it will get any wide acceptance: [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816) ~~~ 0x6c6f6c A profanity filter? Seems at best make it an optional preference, but why would you _want_ to see offensive slurs by default? ~~~ orthecreedence > why would you want to see offensive slurs by default? If I don't want to see offensive slurs, I won't associate with people who use them. Let me decide what is a slur or not, and let me decide who to associate with. ------ shawndumas The “forgot password” link does not work. (On mobile so I did not dig in and see if there were any errors in the console.) ------ Ericson2314 NLNet, the source of funding, is a truly superb institution that should be better known in the US. ------ saltedonion Um. CSS isn’t loading on safari mobile. I hope this isn’t the actual experience ? ------ IgorPartola The problem with Reddit isn’t the technology. I mean, yes open source is good, and I want more of that. Even Android is a good thing even if only one company actively contributes to it. At least when you hit a bug or don’t understand how something works, you can go read the code. But the problem with Reddit is community management, and re-writing it won’t solve that. Reddit has been a mostly free for all in terms of moderation, and it is explicitly set up to allow thought bubbles, which gives rise to communities that dox activists, that incite violence, that promote conspiracy theories, etc. I love Reddit’s good parts and really detest its bad parts. Problem is that you can only solve that with strong application of content guidelines, or by not even pretending to be a good place a la 4chan. There is no model as far as I’ve seen, not even an academic one, that allows for mostly moderation free or self-moderated content while also not prominently featuring at least one neo-Nazi group using it to communicate and coordinate. ------ aabbcc1241 How does Lemmy compare to Mastodon, Zero Talk, and ZeroMe? ------ proc0 Love the name, love Motorhead. Here's a Lemmy quote: "Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. " ------ est I think it tries to solve a problem reddit doesn't have. Reddit has a content parity problem, by making content distributed just makes the community stops growing. A new reddit alternative should think what makes Reddit useful in the first place. A community drive social bookmarking. Today's Internet have large volume of info hidden behind paywalls and walled gardens, something like Thread Reader App could replace Reddit from ground zero. ------ imrelaxed Seems to be crashing on my end. ~~~ sq_ Same here. Must be getting the HN hug of death. ~~~ gpm > dessalines (mod, admin, creator) 23 minutes ago > We have > 2200 connections to the server right now, its a DDOS. Rust seems > to be handling it fine, but the nginx is having issues. [https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712](https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712) Sounds about right - I'm amused that whoever saw this thought it was a ddos though. dessalines - if you're reading this - I expect looking at referrers would be a good way to (manually) diagnose real attacks vs people becoming interested in your site. ------ omnimus There is also [https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/) that is also open- source. ~~~ LockAndLol Is it federated though? ------ ms4720 I still miss nntp ------ paulcole Ah, Diaspora 2.0. ------ rospaya All this trouble instead of just ressurecting usenet. ------ companyhen I'm a fan of [https://tildes.net/](https://tildes.net/) \- created by an ex- reddit employee (creator of AutoModerator) ------ secondcoming As an non-American, Reddit is in general, awful. It's all "Trump, Trump, Trump" and tolerates anti-white sentiment. Actual conversations are rare, it seems to mostly be impressionable young people trying to out-do each other in taking offence to things and being angry. It seems you can't block subreddits like r/politics without making an account. /r/cpp has some good stuff sometimes. What would a reddit alternative bring? More of the same? No thanks. ------ artembugara The website is down only for me ------ taurath A federated reddit system needs ways to lock down user accounts. That it’s basically 4chan in terms of anonymity gives too much of an open door to extremists and trolls. I don’t see any difference between this and voat except the assumption of goodwill rather than being centered around right wing extremism. ~~~ posguy The fediverse has proven quite resilient to trolls, bots and numerous other challenges as users and instance operators can block other users and instances, (or mute/content warn media) among numerous other moderation tools to prevent bad actors from destroying the signal to noise ratio of each instance. ------ jari_mustonen I hope that this will democratise political discourse. At the moment, people having opposing view to the main stream opinion are having exceedingly difficult time sharing their content. Reddit's main fault is their willingness to participate in politically motivated banning. I'm talking about the fate of The_Donald. (There are also other examples.) Reddit first persecuted and then effectively banned The_Donald because, in my opinion, Reddit is run by people who hate president Trump. It's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy. It's driven by political tribalism, not Trump. As basically all social media platforms are doing the exactly same thing as Reddit, we are not in a good place. We really can't allow our political discourse and views to be dictated by a handful of group thinking denizens of Silicon Valley blinded by political tribalism. ~~~ sneak > _It 's important to understand that the hate is not something that will go > away after Trump but it will be replaced by hate for the next guy._ This seems to presuppose that all presidents are equal in terms of the acts they perform that generate hate or upset in the supporters of their political opponents. I don’t think that is true. Not all presidents have been, or need to be, culture warriors. Indeed, it would appear that Americans are way more united on a number of _huge_ issues now more than ever: COVID response, racial equality, economic recovery. Just based on circumstance, I think whoever next holds the office of POTUS, regardless of party, stands to polarize people less than they have been in the past due to the fact that many, many people are in agreement about federal government priorities right now. That seems, to me, relatively unprecedented in recent times. ------ mynameishere So, on my first and last visit to "Lemmy" I observed the admin "nutomic" providing the world with his political philosophy: _Any platform that emphasises “free speech” will be full of fascists sooner or later_ No, I don't want to have anything to do with a website controlled by an unusually foolish five year old.

Mac OS X for .NET developer? - goorion http://foreverframe.pl/mac-os-x-for-net-developer/ ====== tracker1 Grr... looks like this doesn't work in any of the major caching engines I've tried, and can't get to tfa. :-/

What are your favorite about:config tricks for Firefox? - known Mine are layout.spellcheckDefault = 2 ssl_domain_display = 2 browser.search.openintab = true ====== jmount network.prefetch-next = false (stops sites from being able to tell your browser to pre-fetch links, which seems like a large possible vulnerability, also may skew visit statistics as Google uses it. my article on this: [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom- use-g...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-google- search/) ) ------ bakkerBart network.http.proxy.pipelining = true Seems to make browsing through a Squid proxy (3.1.*+) much faster. Tried it with Polipo too, but I've been experiencing crashes (of polipo) with proxy pipelining.

Would eating heavy atoms lengthen our lives? - bd http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026841.800-would-eating-heavy-atoms-lengthen-our-lives.html ====== pg It's kind of funny that the related articles include another one with a completely different thesis: Has universal ageing mechanism been found? A protein that causes yeast to age seems to have a similar effect in mice too – the finding might lead to drugs to reverse age-related diseases" ~~~ bd It's actually complementary, aging has many factors. Heavy water is supposed to make harder for free radicals to do damage in the first place. Sirtuins should help with switching on repair mechanisms after damage is done. And then there are telomeres, our natural kill-switch. There is another article, linked from the sirtuins one, about a possible way to slow down telomeres shortening: [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16035-elixir-of- youth-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16035-elixir-of-youth-drug- could-fight-hiv-and-ageing.html) BTW All three anti-aging approaches have companies working on the products to commercialize the research (Sirtris was recently bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720M). ~~~ kajecounterhack Wasn't there also some article about how people don't get dumber as they get older, rather, their focus is less and less? Sort of strange, but if that and all of this really turn out to be true, extending the human lifespan might not be as difficult as we make it out to be. ------ dcurtis Show me the study where a researcher feeds some animal deuterated water and then show how its life is extended by a statistically significant amount. Before you can actually produce such a study, this entire article is sensationalist and the editors at New Scientist should be embarrassed to publish it. The article says that up to 35% of body water can be heavy, but after that point it becomes "lethal." What exactly happens to make it lethal, and why has the author assumed that it is "harmless" to drink small amounts? Where's the study showing that small amounts are "totally harmless?" ~~~ ars Normally isotopes don't cause chemical changes, but with hydrogen they do. Deuterium is twice as heavy as hydrogen, so it moves slower, and is less reactive - for some reactions this can make a big difference. With the other isotopes the change in mass isn't anywhere near that. ~~~ dcurtis This makes sense. But has any human being-- or any animal in nature-- ever ingested deuterium in any significant amount? How can you not know if this will change ever-so-slightly the way DNA transcription takes place, or example? I just think it's kind of irresponsible for a reporter at a science publication to make cavalier statements about things like this-- "It's completely safe..."-- without having any science to back them up. ~~~ wheels It seems like you didn't read most of the article. They specifically talked about its effects on lab animals, including rats which had been brought up on heavy water. ~~~ dcurtis The author never describes the results of those studies. ------ zby Articles on health are the worst. The pattern is so repetetive - first comes some study that under some circumstances some substance or excercise of something would cause something - then comes the refutations and even articles about the reverse effects. It is alwasy so sensationalistic and so unfounded. What I would like to read is a study about that effect - it has some pretty obvious causes - after all healt is something that everyone is very intimately concerned about - but still I would like to read a detailed analysis of that mechanism. ------ 13ren _Deuterated bonds can be up to 80 times stronger than those containing hydrogen._ That seems likely to alter chemical behaviour (as researchers found). I'm not a chemist, but it seems reasonable to consider compounds with such bonds as different compounds. Why should we think of carbon-12 and carbon-13 as variations of carbon, instead of distinct elements - if they have different _chemical_ behaviour? The blackbox testing tells us that 35% heavy water is lethal, but doesn't tell why. It's possible - and even likely - that it is the very bonds we wish to protect that become lethal if strengthened 80 times. The final "heavy babies" grayed paragraph at the end is fascinating (in case you skipped it: babies have more carbon-13, and their mothers are unusually depleted with it around the time of birth.) ~~~ yummyfajitas They are both variations of carbon because they have the same electronic structure, i.e. the configuration of electrons about C-12 and C-13 is identical (or similarly H-1 and H-2). I'll make a bad analogy now. The electronic structure is like a set of hooks attached to the atom. Hydrogen has 1 free hook, carbon 4, and these hooks form chemical bonds. Hydrogen and deuterium have the same set of hooks, as do C-13 and C-14. But deuterium is heavier than hydrogen, and this makes it harder to unhook it when it attaches to another atom, even if the set of hooks is identical. ~~~ 13ren Sorry, that was a suggestion phrased as a question (i.e. I know what isotopes are). I was suggesting a name that signifies operational properties rather than "the" definition of what it is. If heavy water became commonly available, this would undoubtedly occur. It's like features vs. benefits, which I've been working with over a few weeks, to understand the need for my product, and the gaps left by existing offers in the marketplace. Quite possibly, I'm thinking _too much_ in those terms :-) ------ jhancock I prefer them because they have more crunch and don't get as soggy as the lighter atoms after 5 minutes sitting in milk. ------ earthboundkid This is an idiotic idea and will lead to a) expensive piss, sweat, and breath or b) some horrible disease caused by overly slow chemical reactions. Maybe both. ~~~ mindslight Could always recycle ... ------ ryanb Sounds like a neat idea worth experimenting - this is obviously very early on in the process though. ------ lst I prefer Eternal Paradise to some other decade on this violent Planet. ~~~ lst P.S. In case you are atheist: if you can scientifically prove that Eternal Paradise does not exist, I'll be glad (or so) to hear from you! (Side note: the current situation on our Planet is still that much more than 50% of currently living souls actually do believe in God/Good/Heaven/Paradise; and the already gone ones, actually already _know_ _exactly_!) ~~~ mindslight Sorry, science doesn't work that way. It's your job to give evidence that some sort of afterlife exists. ~~~ lst (There was a message hidden in there!) To _not_ believe in afterlife, you explicitly have to _not_ believe it, so even the denying of afterlife is based on a (negative) _faith_. Atheists don't seem aware of being their position a simple _negative_ faith response to a _positive_ faith. ~~~ mindslight If you're talking about "strong" atheism (asserting that no god exists) then yes, this is an act of faith as well. But "weak" atheism is merely a rejection of theism. It is not a proposed hypothesis, but a rebuke of unsupported hypotheses. ~~~ lst Sorry, but this is already sophistication (in the archaic sense). All things that happen _must_ have a cause. Even Big Bang had its Cause. And since the exact definition of God is: "The only one not caused by anything, but simply 'cause' of Itself", there's no escape here...

Markdown CSS styles - bretthardin https://github.com/mixu/markdown-styles ====== jasonm23 Would be nice if Mixu had provided some credits for those who he's appropriated from.

Don't make me choose my country: Add geolocation to forms with three lines of JS - ascorbic https://mk.gg/add-geolocation-to-form-elements/ ====== ascorbic I was inspired to write this by a comment on HN. It's super-easy to progressively enhance your address forms.

How to Reinstall macOS on a Fusion Drive - kartickv https://medium.com/@karti/how-to-reinstall-macos-on-a-fusion-drive-73713b97183f ====== jjjbokma Related: [http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/06/08/clean-install-mojave- fu...](http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/06/08/clean-install-mojave-fusion- drive.html)

Blog subdomain or subdirectory? Hint: one is 40% better - mymmaster https://buttercms.com/blog/blog-subdomain-or-subdirectory-hint-one-is-40-better ====== numberwhun The link is already down with a 502 error. I guess they are using the one that isn't 40% better. :) ------ mymmaster Ha. Looks like it's back up.

Ask HN: Organizations keep trying to give me money for a thing I made - rianjs tl;dr- How do you engage with VARs in a way that will get their attention?<p>In the last two years, several organizations has asked to license a medical spell check dictionary that I made years ago. After exchanging emails, I lost two of those, because I priced my product too high, and the third I landed (Indiana University School of Medicine), but I charged too little. (I&#x27;m OK with this, because it helps with credibility.)<p>I&#x27;ve got my pricing hammered out now, and I have a designer working on a home page, which should make it easy for individuals to buy. It comes with a real installer and works with Chrome, Firefox, and Windows &amp; Office in a way that would be difficult to do by hand, and in a way that the competitors don&#x27;t (despite their WAY higher prices).<p>- Much more competitive pricing<p>- Updates at a regular cadence with discounted yearly contract pricing. (= recurring revenue for me)<p>- Existing penetration is very high (tens of thousands of downloads), and most inquiries occur because their employees or students are asking for it<p>- Tooling geared for enterprises (deployable MSI)<p>- More features: works with all the major browsers, not just Windows&#x2F;IE&#x2F;Edge&#x2F;Office<p>Well I got an email out of the blue the other day from a middleman in the UK who wants to license my product for use with computers that they distribute. (They&#x27;re a distributors to other distributors, I believe.) They do quite a lot of disabled student allowance stuff, and they liked my pricing much better than the alternatives. I have a meeting with them next week.<p>They&#x27;re VAR-ish, and it got me wondering how I could establish relationships with VARs here in the US as well. Do you have any advice on how to get the attention of a Staples or WB Mason or other VARs? ====== 11thEarlOfMar Assuming that $5.99 is a license that you get for each user... \- For outbound marketing and finding VARs, I'd do some research into the wide variety of software that hospitals and health care facilities use and then look into the channels they are purchased through. Follow the chain back to the devs and it is likely that one of those intermediate businesses would be interesting to talk to as a VAR candidate. Then it's a matter of phone, e-mail, tweet, or whatever works to get through and talk to them. \- For inbound marketing, your web site and standard SEO practices should suffice. \- Look for trade shows to attend both to identify software in the domain that could use your dictionary, and also identify VARs and distributors. \- If you find a large enough variety of companies to target, focus on the ones that are 2-5 times larger than your largest to date. I.e., try to catch larger and larger fish until you're knocking on the doors of the biggest catches. And in any case, don't be surprised if you catch the eye of someone in the largest ones who is willing to sponsor you at that business. Once you've found them and they are interested in signing up... \- Be sure your VAR agreements give you solid protection and a clear way to terminate. \- Ask for an annual unit estimate. \- Require a minimum payment that represents an amount that is worth your time to support that VAR. Get that minimum payment at the beginning of the year. (sounds like you're getting recurring revenue for updates already, so maybe this is already handled) \- Figure out what it would cost for them to make it themselves or have someone else to make it for them. If they do a lot of business with you, at some point, a VP or GM is going to look at the amount they are paying you and say 'why are we paying so much for this, we should build it ourselves and reduce cost'. For example, if your feature took you 1 man-year to develop and a customer is buying 20,000 license/year, they are paying $100,000/year. They may figure they can pay someone to build it for them for $100,000 and see an ROI beginning in only one year. \- If getting 'designed out' is a realistic outcome, offer fixed annual pricing below that threshold (with payment at the beginning of the year), or, offer a buy-out where they pay a large amount one time and then a small annual fee for updates thereafter. \- If the revenue amount is large, look into copyrights and other IP protection. \- If there is a low barrier to entry, be alert for competitors. Bank a portion of the revenue. Be receptive to exiting. Hope that is helpful. Good luck! ~~~ rianjs > I'd do some research into the wide variety of software that hospitals and > health care facilities use and then look into the channels they are > purchased through I've done a little of this, and it's surprisingly difficult. :) > Follow the chain back to the devs and it is likely that one of those > intermediate businesses would be interesting to talk to as a VAR candidate. Hmm, this is an interesting idea. I bet systems like EPIC have use third-party subcomponents. It's quite likely that it would be less expensive for them to use my product than maintain their own. (If indeed it's an in-house effort.) > For inbound marketing, your web site and standard SEO practices should > suffice. I'm already #1 on Google for most of the common search terms, using an anonymous browsing window. So I could do more of that, but I think partnerships is where the actual money is. I think selling to individuals will basically be small potatoes by comparison. > focus on the ones that are 2-5 times larger than your largest to date. Good idea. I have quite a few friends from pharmacy school that work for large pharmaceutical companies, and we're all old enough now that a lot of them have purchasing power. :) > Be sure your VAR agreements give you solid protection and a clear way to > terminate Another thing to learn about. > Figure out what it would cost for them to make it themselves or have someone > else to make it for them. If they do a lot of business with you, at some > point, a VP or GM is going to look at the amount they are paying you and say > 'why are we paying so much for this, we should build it ourselves and reduce > cost'. For example, if your feature took you 1 man-year to develop and a > customer is buying 20,000 license/year, they are paying $100,000/year. They > may figure they can pay someone to build it for them for $100,000 and see an > ROI beginning in only one year. This would be hard, because health care changes all the time and new words are quite literally invented daily. I have largely automated the ingestion and filtration of new words, but it does take a few hours of effort every week to keep on top of it. (At the end of the day, a human has to determine what's real and what isn't. There's a surprising number of typos and misspellings in peer-reviewed journals.) So it's not necessarily a set-and-forget, but the data gathering, normalization, and sorting basically is. It would make virtually no sense for even a very large company to develop this internally. In fact, most large companies don't pay for spell check software at all. (C.f.: lots of misspellings in peer-reviewed articles.) But there _is_ a market for it. An EMR company was the first to contact me; I suspect they don't have existing solutions, because the alternatives are $60/seat and up. I WAS thinking about an unlimited site license. Say you're an EMR company, and you have 300,000 licensed installations... you pay me I dunno $50K/yr max, and you can integrate it into as many instances of your software as you want. Exact figures would need to be thought about more. > If there is a low barrier to entry, be alert for competitors. Bank a portion > of the revenue. Be receptive to exiting. I've thought about the exit angle. I would consider offers. But this is actually just a hobby. I have no intentions of quitting my day job anytime soon, because this project is so low effort. I wrote software to automate most of the annoying bits, and I wrote more software to make the annoying-but-cant- be-automated bits less annoying.

Lambda Tutorial (2016) - ziyao_w http://www.nyu.edu/projects/barker/Lambda/ ====== eindiran The author of this tool is Chris Barker -- back in 2015, I took his course on "Continuations and Natural Language" at the LSA. He's working on a lot of really cool stuff, so its fun to see him pop up here. The class was a summary of the research he had been doing at that time; the central idea was that some constructions in natural language can interact with their own continuations[0], dynamically changing their scope and arguments in much the same way that continuations in e.g. Lisp work. Here is a paper where he introduces the idea quite clearly: [https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~hxt/cw04/barker.pdf](https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~hxt/cw04/barker.pdf) [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation)

Show HN: Remod, like chmod but for human beings - skainswoo https://github.com/samuela/remod ====== stephenr Really? What is hard about “u=rw;g=r;o=“ etc - literally no calculations involved. This “reinvent things that already work fine but in javascript” is getting old. ------ helb I've never felt the need for chmod UI, especially with ZSH's Tab completion ([https://asciinema.org/a/249373](https://asciinema.org/a/249373)), but… well, why not. How does it handle multiple files? edit: oh $ remod tmp/* Unexpected arguments! ~~~ skainswoo Hi @helb, author here. ZSH's tab completion looks awesome! I'm not a ZSH user so I wasn't aware of that but I'm happy something similar exists in that ecosystem. Re multiple files: I've thought about this a little, but I'm not sure how the UI would best represent the (potentially conflicting) permissions of multiple files. Open to suggestions however! In those situations I personally use remod to remind myself of the proper chmod command, and then copy-paste-run the chmod command with whatever edits are necessary.

A Panoramic Tour of Factor (2015) - kencausey http://andreaferretti.github.io/factor-tutorial/ ====== polm23 I was under the impression Factor had been abandoned, but it seems things are pretty lively on git: [https://github.com/factor/factor/commits/master](https://github.com/factor/factor/commits/master) ------ agumonkey Oh so slava pestov is not in Swift's team [https://github.com/slavapestov?tab=contributions&from=2016-0...](https://github.com/slavapestov?tab=contributions&from=2016-02-05) ------ Avshalom I haven't played with it in years... I forget how seductive Factor is to think about. ~~~ eggy I always go back to it to try something I've done in another language. I have not attempted anything big with it, but that is due to my concatenative language skills rather than any limitation by Factor. ------ kencausey Another take on this (for Forth and concatenative languages in the abstract): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377604) ------ Chris2048 Is Factor similar to Q or KDB, ie APL-like?

Summer of Design: "Design for Hackers," week by week - ph0rque http://summerofdesign.com/ ====== bbalfour I really like these week by week courses that are coming out. I have a lot of things I want to learn, so the cadence and content size of the weekly chunks is perfect. I'm looking forward to this one. I'd love to hear what other courses people have come across around different subjects.

MIT Expert Highlights 'Divergent Condition' Caused by 737 Max Engine Placement - chethiya https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/04/02/mit-expert-highlights-divergent-condition-caused-by-737-max-engine-placement/#697103940aab ====== cjbprime I agree that there should be three AoA sensors, as Airbus already has, if you're going to connect the AoA sensors to a control surface. But Hansman's comment seems (very surprisingly) inaccurate, because my understanding is that the MAX is not actually aerodynamically unstable: the lift from the nacelles results in a non-monotonic backpressure on the yoke as AoA increases, and that violates airworthiness regulations on yoke handling. But the plane isn't going to fly itself into a stall. The pilot has to do that by pulling back on the yoke at high AoA (and with less backpressure than a 737 pilot would expect). That's not an unstable plane, in the sense that the B-2 bomber is unstable. It's just a plane that handles differently to pilots who originally trained on different but related planes. ------ chethiya So this aircraft is more prone to stall and crash compared to other aircrafts after this update?

US debt default and what it would mean - eande http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/what_a_debt_default_would_mean.html ====== eande Just reading that article turns my stomach. Personally I can not believe this will happen, but just the pure fact that the Congress is talking about it tells the story how serious the situation is.

Amazon Said to Plan Premium Alexa Speaker with Large Screen - kjhughes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-29/amazon-said-to-plan-premium-alexa-speaker-with-large-screen ====== zitterbewegung I wonder how they are going to adapt the API for screens ? Maybe expand the card API ? ~~~ payne92 That's my guess. If you check out the Alexa that's built into the current gen Fire TV stick, you can see how they are already offering visual responses to go with the audio. ------ dwyerm I am super excited about this, but I'd be very cautious about expectations. I've already gotten torn up in social media for trying to explain how an ambient information display is a Good Thing (think a clock or a calendar or a thermometer), without being something you necessarily interact with. The second someone asks, "Why don't I just get a tablet, then?" you know they've missed it. They need to build a Chumby, not an iPad... but if the market is expecting an iPad, they're going to be sorely disappointed. ...and if the market is disappointed, then I'm going to miss out on a great replacement for my long-in-the-tooth Chumby8.

Microsoft brings Google war to Kansas - maudlinmau5 http://nz.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-brings-google-war-kansas-010115788.html ====== eliben TL;DR Microsoft, who's forgotten what innovation is in the past 10 years and is hanging by a thread in a declining market, engages in the one thing it still knows and loves to do - FUD campaigns against their more successful and innovative competitors.

Washington Post Site Hacked After Successful Phishing Campaign - jessaustin http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/08/washington-post-site-hacked-after-successful-phishing-campaign/ ====== jessaustin Ha-ha, way to throw the sportswriter under the bus: "...I never entered any creds, I’m stupid, but not THAT stupid."

Rebasing Is an Anti-Pattern - smartmic https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md ====== hinkley The elephant in the room with SVN was that merging two branches repeatedly was fraught with errors that just seemed to grow quadratically. It was part of why we were on the verge of assigning dedicated maintainers for each release branch so that people only had to recall how the code works now and on their release. I think people see rebasing as a way to subtract from N. If you have another way that everyone can be trusted to handle 3+ way merges handily and unconfusingly, then it’s a matter of retraining people. If not, well...

Google Eyeing 10% Market Share For Chrome. - edw519 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/16/google-eyeing-10-market-share-for-chrome-mac-version-due-by-the-end-of-the-year/ ====== buugs >While I think I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Chrome I have and they aren't always firefox extension users. ~~~ enomar What specifically didn't they like? I'm sure you can find someone to dislike just about anything. ~~~ dantheman Chome slows to a crawl when you have a lot of tabs open >70 in my personal experience ~~~ ujjwalg i love the fact that how innocently you mention >70 tabs ~~~ redorb yeah please give me a real use case for 70+ tabs that doesn't involve a PHD research paper :) ~~~ derefr TVTropes. (Or Everything2, or Wikipedia, or...) Basically, using the tab bar as a "to read next" queue as you spider a heavily linked graph. The real solution to this, though, isn't reducing memory usage, but rather avoiding preloading tabs opened in the background once you hit a certain threshold. ------ Eliezer 10% they say? And internal projections are even higher? This sounds like a use for corporate prediction markets to me. I'd bet against that. ------ known At present Chrome has 2.84% market share. [http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qp...](http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=0) ------ tocomment It sounds like a minor thing, but I hate when I highlight text in chrome, right click and select to search, it opens the new tab in the forefront. I want it in the background like Firefox does.

The Secret Life of Time - sergeant3 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/the-secret-life-of-time ====== empath75 It might be interesting to consider how and whether time is relevant to computation. For example-- does time have an arrow on a computer? It does, for at least two reasons: 1) Computation physically produces heat and increases entropy. 2) Many operations lose information -- for example XOR's can't be run backwards to reproduce the original inputs. People have tried to tackle both issues with reversible computing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) Someone even wrote a programming language that was (logically) time- reversible: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(time- reversible_computi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_\(time- reversible_computing_programming_language\)) ~~~ azeirah Does having a time-reversible programming language mean that if you start with the output of a given program, you can run the program backwards and get the input? This would be useful outside of research. Though, I expect the memory usage will be ridiculous. ~~~ conistonwater Isn't that already a thing, if you really want it? [1,2,3] [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroactive_data_structures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroactive_data_structures) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yzrZL1py0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yzrZL1py0) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqCWghETNDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqCWghETNDc) ------ gloriousduke Still working through the article, but it reminded me of the presumable fact that everything that happened before the first conscious entity existed in the Universe was essentially instantaneous. Same goes for time's forward direction. Without consciousness, i.e. with a perfect form of stasis, one could time travel to just before the heat death of the Universe in an instant. John Archibald Wheeler took this idea even further with the PAP, the Participatory Anthropic Principle. ~~~ eternalban You are asserting that "the Universe" can exist without a "conscious entity". ~~~ dboreham A Whale, of course. ~~~ eternalban Or a potted plant. ------ lisper The passage of time is an emergent property of quantum entanglement. Yes, I know that sounds like new-age hooey, but it's actually based on solid science: [http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and- ar...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-arrow-of- time.html) [UPDATE] I would really appreciate if those of you who are downvoting this comment would tell me why. ------ sjbase “Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” It might be a stretch, but this seems like a small glimpse of the concept of a time differential ('dt'), a thousand years before the math existed to describe it explicitly. ~~~ Retra Most ideas don't have explicit mathematical descriptions. Why would this one be more notable than any other? ------ krzrak Fascinating article. Great, long read.

DNC Staffer got pop-up messages alerting of “state-sponsored actors” - Shank http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/dnc-staffer-got-pop-up-messages-alerting-of-state-sponsored-actors/ ====== tonysdg Putting aside the politics of the situation, how exactly does the DNC continue to get hammered by apparently-malicious actors without making major changes to their information security practices? My understanding is that the hacks are on-going and persistent - after several weeks of this being in the news, and possibly being aware of it for months, why haven't they been able to harden their systems enough to repel at least a few of these attacks? Or am I completely misinterpreting the news reports I keep hearing from the NY Times, ArsTechnica, etc.? ~~~ yompers888 It's most likely that people with authority in the organization refuse to acknowledge the scope of the problem. People get upset about having to reset passwords, so imagine how they feel about being told to reformat or get entirely new machines. And frankly, those may not be viable options, because a competent and well-backed adversary will probably find their way in, even if you set them back at the starting line.

Ask HN: Your stack of choice for web development? - glazskunrukitis I would like to know what <i>stacks</i> are you using for web development. Things are changing fast and new technologies are emerging every other day so it's interesting to watch what comes out of it.<p>Node.js + NoSQL? Go? LAMP? ... ====== mindcrime Most of the Fogbeam Labs stuff - that's web based - is built using Groovy/Grails, with PostgreSQL as the persistent store, and HTML/CSS/JS on the front-end with JQuery and Bootstrap. Lucene is heavily used for search. Looking to the future a bit, I'm sure we'll be gradually introducing more HTML5 stuff, and might start looking at angular.js or ember.js for some of the javascript centric front-end stuff. On the backend, there will probably be some places where we introduce a graph database, perhaps Neo4J. We'll also be doing more and more with Hadoop, Mahout, OpenNLP and UIMA in the not-too- distant future. ------ EnderMB I am both a front-end and back-end coder for a digital agency. We have some huge clients that require legacy browser support (IE6 and above) so it's a mix of typical front-end stuff, a ton of VM's for testing and if we're working on a new build website with no history or few existing users using legacy browsers some Backbone.js, Modernizr and LESS/SCSS. Like most developers, we use a lot of jQuery and custom JS on our sites, but we also make sure our sites function correctly when JS is disabled. The back-end stack is ASP.NET using C#. As we have a mixture of inter-agency work and our own stuff we use a bit of everything really. Sometimes we use Entity Framework, sometimes we're limited to .NET 2 and sometimes we're working on large-scale websites using Sitecore. The main CMS of choice is Umbraco, and over the past couple of years I've really started to enjoy using it. The IDE of choice is, obviously, Visual Studio 2010, and with ReSharper installed I'm yet to use anything even remotely as good. For personal projects I tend to use Python and Django. I've toyed with writing some tools using Google App Engine as the primary store, but I usually work with PostgreSQL. Version control wise, at home I'm a Git guy, whereas at work we use Mercurial. Most of my code is written using Komodo Edit and PyCharm. I've got a few desktop projects I'm looking to start soon, and I'm hoping to either use F# or Haskell, depending on whether I can fix my Ubuntu box or whether I'm limited to my Windows 7 box. ------ aqsis Depends a lot on the needs of the client. Some have preferences on the development language, deployment setup, etc. I tend to mix and match the following... Groovy/Grails, Java/Spring, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django|Tornado|Web2Py, Node.js, Meteor & MySQL|PostgreSQL|Sqlite, MongoDB Haven't had to do anything requiring significant amounts of message passing yet, so no ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ yet. ------ etats Proudly still using lamp. I don't see the benefits of switching to something new outweighing the enormous learning curve. But lots of people who choose these new technologies are brand new to development, so they don't have a learning curve. ------ jeromche Also using LAMP. For small websites/campaigns I tend to use a CodeIgniter back-end with jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap front-end. For bigger things a separation into an API and a client helps to keep it clean so a Kohana RESTful back-end that communicates through JSON with a Backbone front-end. ------ ing33k In my current project, we are using Symfony2 ( PHP ) + MySQL, Redis, Neo4j in the backend and recently started to use Angular.js in the frontend. frondend mvc is taking a lot of our time. ------ iends Startup I formerly worked for: Python/Django Current fortune 500: Java/Dojo Personal Project #1: Python/Django/Backbone Personal Project #2: Node ------ Devlin_Donnelly HTML/CSS/JS + JQuery on the Front-end with Perl and my own custom Web package using XML files for data storage on the backend. ------ ravikishore1993 HTML , CSS , JS -> JQuery for front-end . PHP , Phpmyadmin + PDO for backend ------ willfarrell AngularJS + RESTler (PHP) + memSQL ------ eterps RESTful backend in Sinatra+ROAR ------ br0ke freebsd, apache, sbcl, ucw, postgresql/cl-store, bootstrap, jquery ------ tferris node + express ------ mouseroot python + web.py

Mobile Banks in the Developing World Prove Simpler is Better - philf http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/09/mobile-banks-in-the-developing-world-prove-simpler-is-better.html ====== known Why don't we see mobile gas stations?

Glass discs that can store 360TB and remain intact for billions of years (2016) - elorant https://www.disclose.tv/these-5d-glass-discs-store-360-tb-of-data-for-138-billion-years-370041 ====== YayamiOmate I dunno, but it seems to me universities increasingly focus on press releases and marketing departments... 5D and 13.8 billion years? Phony. I know no sane scientist or enigneer that would say they use more than 3D physics. Sounds like catch phrases to sell. With such logic plain old HDD is at least 4D, because it uses CHS coordinates and magnetic orientation, to store data. To me such communication style undermines the real scine behind it. Do they have nothing better to brag about than excuses to call invention 5D? Why introduce such noise? ~~~ lvh Yes, 13.8Gy is the approximate age of the universe and yes the researchers used that number. But it's not like they made this up ("phony", as you put it)! Turns out the biggest decay factor is nanograting and the biggest contributing physical quantity is temperature. They plotted what decay would look like on an Arrhenius plot. They both computed estimates and measured to confirm: the measurements are quite accurate. The specific claim is that they computed that it would last 13.8Gy at a some reasonably high temperature (462K). They could've picked any other point on the time/temp scale, like "here's how long it would last at room temperature" or "here's how hot you could store it if you only cared about it for a billion years". They did not, however, simply make up a number with no justification, let alone commit straight-up academic fraud, as you're implying. The paper is here: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297892219_Eternal_5...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297892219_Eternal_5..). ~~~ gnode I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding. Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics. ~~~ lvh And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise? (I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished scholars :-)) ~~~ sombremesa The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal... ~~~ lvh "The paper isn't a real academic paper and itself also marketeer noise" is one of the options I've outlined as a debate position. But let's be clear: we started by calling research "phony" over something that would've been trivially clarified by reading a short paper. In order to even get to that point, I have to acknowledge that maybe you get to call research "phony" without seriously implying fraud. I have a hard time taking that as a serious, bona-fide argument. ~~~ airesearcher There are actual papers. Press releases and popularizations are not the same thing. If you look you can find the actual papers. ~~~ lvh It appears you’re agreeing with me? I’m suggesting the confusion would have been alleviated by reading the actual paper. ------ notacoward There's a long and mostly bad history of claims around 3D storage. About twenty years ago I followed a company called Constellation 3D, later Terastor. They made many strikingly similar claims, smaller absolute numbers but a similar multiplier vs. what was already in the market. At least they only claimed three dimensions. I can sort of accept orientation as an effective fourth dimension, but size seems like a real stretch. In any case, C3D/Terastor struggled along for a few years, with more claims and more excuses, before they turned into the predictable smoking crater. I've seen several more _just_ like them come and go since then, so I think I'll wait for more concrete proof that this particular technology can work at scale in the real world instead of just once in a lab. BTW, if you want to go even further back, who else remembers the promises about bubble memory? ~~~ Robotbeat Or what if it's a niche technology that works just fine at scale in the real world but nobody cares enough for super long lifetimes to pay the higher price for the equipment? No "bad history of claims," just niche technology. Not everything has to be "fake news" or "phony" just because it doesn't take over the world. I can't help but think we're cheapening the idea of fraud when we accuse every company or technology of fraud just because they don't wildly succeed. ~~~ notacoward I think you're overreacting, or perhaps going off on a bit of a tangent from what I actually said. I didn't accuse anyone of fraud. I even offered kudos. I'm just trying to adjust expectations because the history is indeed bad even if nobody did any wrong. Would it have been better if I'd said "sad" or "unfortunate" instead? A medium that really has these kinds of density and survivability traits is indeed a great thing, but "niche" is a bit of an understatement. Adding it to the payload of a multi-million dollar rocket is _definitely_ a publicity stunt, so I think it's entirely fair to point out that it might be good for little else depending on how further development plays out. ~~~ kragen If you don't launch it into space, it will be destroyed when the sun engulfs the earth in only six billion years, if not earlier. There's a dismayingly large chance that the only thing surviving from our entire culture in only a few million years will be a mass extinction in the fossil record, a halo of geosynchronous metal debris, and whatever data is encoded in such stable forms as these glass discs. In that context, describing it as "a publicity stunt" seems short-sighted to the point of self-parody, like a small child who thinks that the main distinguishing feature of money is that you can buy candy with it. In a very short time, it is likely that the only things humanity has done that are even detectable are the launching of satellites, a mass extinction, and the launching of such archival media. ~~~ notacoward I know it's fun to call people short-sighted and compare them to children, but grow up yourself. Sending something in _this particular medium_ was a publicity stunt, and it worked. You think we're talking about it here for any other reason than Elon Musk was (tangentially) involved? Sending some sort of beacon or memorial into space is such a great idea we've done it many times before, with better-tested media. If we wanted to try something newer, a Rosetta Project disk would have been a much more obvious choice. Practicality wasn't the point. Publicity was. ~~~ hilbert42 "Practicality wasn't the point. Publicity was." The real issues involved here are the Laws of Thermodynamics, Entropy and 'Glass' (Crystals) being the the most stable state of matter in the universe. All of these indicate that such longevity is possible (see my main post). Clearly, the reason that '13.8 Gy' is used here is that it's a well known time interval and it puts the longevity of this technology into perspective in ways that many will understand. If actually achieved in practical terms then we ought to be hailing this work as a remarkable effort—not quibbling about trivia and silly incidentals. ~~~ kragen Glass is the opposite of crystals. Crystals would presumably be longer-lived, but their anisotropy makes them somewhat trickier to work with. Otherwise I agree, and like you, I'm profoundly disappointed by the level of "notacoward"'s comments in this thread so far. ~~~ hilbert42 You're right of course. I've assumed the stuff would necessarily be crystalline (and would have to be to have such longevity). The word 'glass' here being used for easier digestion by the public. (See my longer post for more details.) ------ toyg Seems a bit of a waste to dedicate an entire 360TB disc to a single text document like a bible, which is probably just a few KBs... /s More seriously, they don't talk about reading capabilities (retrieval speed etc). And what if it gets scratched? What is the error tolerance? At that density, a single speck of dust could have dramatic implications... I hope this reaches industrial viability, because we desperately need a digital format that can approximate the lifespan of simple paper. At the moment we are chained to a maintenance nightmare of periodic hops between formats, with deadly consequences any time we miss a single jump. ~~~ orbital-decay Yeah, actual museum-grade archival is so much more than just having an aging- resistant media. You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee - you can't assume the future generations will know how to make a reading device and remember your formats/encodings. So it's a bit like _unzip.zip_ problem. ~~~ mapcars >You also need to be able to read and decode it many years into the future, which is really tricky to guarantee Not really, those future people don't just come out of nowhere. It's a gradual, incremental change as there are still systems using tape storage the technology or formats are not lost but migrated. ~~~ orbital-decay That depends on the time scales we're talking about. 30 years? Probably (and even then there are problems with abandoned/little-documented formats like Word 3.x). 300 years, and a historian will have a hard time decoding a digital file from the year 2019, even assuming the media is still intact. 3000 years and a nuclear war can make a weird shiny disc appear as a currency or a cult item for an archaeologist, not as a knowledge storage. ------ Robotbeat A small prototype of this technology already flew in the glovebox of the Tesla Roadster launched to deep space on the Falcon Heavy’s inaugural launch (third launch just succeeded this morning): [https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-mission- foun...](https://medium.com/arch-mission-foundation/arch-mission-foundation- announces-our-payload-on-spacex-falcon-heavy-c4c9908d5dd1) ...it (appropriately) contained Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. > _The Arch library that was included on the Falcon Heavy today was created > using a new technology, 5D optical storage in quartz, developed by our > advisor Dr. Peter Kazansky and his team, at the University of Southampton, > Optoelectronics Research Centre._ ------ theclaw Link to source (University of Southamton): [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data- storage-u...](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage- update.page) ------ totaldude87 This keeps repeating every few years i guess. [https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data- storage-...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage- glass) [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160928-five- dimensional-...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160928-five-dimensional- glass-memory-can-store-360tb-per-disc-rugged-enough-to-outlive-the-human-race) [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92892-five- dimensional-g...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92892-five-dimensional- glass-storage-could-revolutionize-medical-imaging-computing) or did we capture its evolution :) ------ rolleiflex Interesting side effect, this also gives us some clue about what kind of ... information storage devices we should be looking for in other heavenly bodies. Had we found a bunch of silicate glass pebbles in Europa, we'd have considered them a curiosity. After this, we have good reason to find a way to ship it back and have another look. ~~~ tokai Somebody should take another look at those moon glass beads. ------ SoylentOrange I have a question for anyone here who understands how this works: is the glass from the article resilient to physical shocks like falling/shaking/heat/other mechanical stress? Documents that are meant to last a long time used to be written on vellum because it is a very physically durable material. I understand that this glass method beats existing digital storage methods for resilience, but does it best traditional analog/legacy techniques? ~~~ kragen Yes, fused quartz has roughly the mechanical durability of granite, and it doesn't melt until a considerably higher temperature than ordinary glass (though lower than the 1650° temperature at which crystalline quartz melts). Vellum and other leathers have a lifespan of under 10000 years under ideal conditions, like those under which Ötzi was preserved. Under such conditions, the researchers extrapolate from accelerated-aging measurements that their medium will last 3×10²⁰ years, which is 3×10¹⁴ times as long. That is, this glass disc will last 300,000,000,000,000 times as long as a vellum document will, unless it's subjected to high heat. They also extrapolate that at 462 K (189°, or, in obsolete units, 372°F) it will last the current age of the universe, some 10–100 billion years. At 189° I think vellum's lifetime is a few minutes. ~~~ SoylentOrange Thanks for the answer. Can the durability of the fused quartz be compared to the durability of this storage format though? (from a more detailed article [1]) > The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and > orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these > nanostructures. Is the idea that these nanostructures are themselves hyper-resilient? Or would a significant impact alter them so as to render them unreadable? [1]: [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data- storage-u...](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage- update.page) ~~~ kragen Well, there are a couple of different questions here. One is about resilience to physical shocks such as falling and mechanical stress, which could destroy the disc but won't do anything to the nanogratings. The other is about gradual, continuous decay processes — over a sufficiently long period of time, random thermal fluctuations will destroy any solid object, and analogous but larger-scale relaxation processes will destroy galaxies as well. Such processes could cause the nanogratings to decay long before the fused quartz itself evaporates. The nanogratings do have a certain amount of built-in redundancy; they're holographic phenomena. ------ kijin It looks like somebody just said "it will last as long as the universe" and someone else translated it into an actual number using too many significant digits. How long can we realistically expect glass to last, judging from e.g. beads of volcanic glass embedded in the geological record? ~~~ lstodd Not much, regular glass transitions to crystal quite fast compared to those geological timescales. And who knows what the transition will do to the data stored at these densities. Nothing in the article states what kind of glass is used (which blows the bullshit detector right there). If they use crystalline quartz, it should last indefinitely. If it's regular glass, then 50 years if you're lucky, controlled conditions, etc, etc. ------ hmhrex I just mentioned this to a co-worker last week. This was news here 4 years ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11140033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11140033) ------ nitin_flanker I don't know but the article does not talk about the credibility of the claim. I mean even the way they have described the whole thing feels more like a marketing attempt than an actual scientific breakthrough. If you look at other articles of this website, they will seem more like a lame attempt at getting traffic than to provide something useful. They have articles titled like - "Ladies Get dose of Radiation From Government UFO" and "Hackers, UFO's and Secret Space Programs - Oh My!" I mean, this does not feel like an information source I'll trust. Edit: As others are mentioning in this thread. From a researcher's perspective, they should have also talked about the read/write capabilities. ------ lwhi I remember chatting to someone working on the project at the University of Southampton years ago .. I think it was back in 2004. Great to hear it's come to fruition. The length of time this type of project takes amazes me. ~~~ yorwba This is about research published in 2013: [https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/364916/](https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/364916/) It was recycled for a university press release in 2016: [https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data- storage-u...](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage- update.page) Then that press release was recycled for this HN submission. ~~~ lwhi In that case, I'll be amazed about the lifecycle of a news release instead ;) ------ bastawhiz These articles pop up every few years, and it always makes me shake my head. Such storage solves no market need. Technology hardly lasts five years let alone fifty years let alone five billion years. Virtually nobody is worried about being able to read their media 500 years out. And even if that was a reason to pursue a technology, the actual storage capacity is meaningless on its own. 360TB of spinning disks isn't very expensive to buy, rack, or run. And you can read and write to them at a decent clip. Managing failures is fairly predictable. What benefit does a magical glass (or, in previous incarnations, quartz or other crystal) disk have? Optical media isn't known for its amazing random access speeds. Write-once media has very limited use and is almost never fast to write to. So who's buying this? Who has data that needs to last that long, or needs to store lots of permanently immutable data that's read back sequentially? I honestly can't think of a market for this. The article says "museums" but I don't know of any museums that would prefer glass disks for their backups over an S3 bucket. This is "on prem backup" taken to a comical extreme. I can see the academic value of exploring the technology, but this space has been exhausted many times over. I remember seeing similar articles in Technology Review and Scientific American about identical developments twenty years ago. It's just not a good idea. ~~~ gnode Being able to store data densely on a commodity material such as quartz is great for archival storage (e.g. Amazon Glacier). If the storage media is cheap, then it tends not to matter if it can be reused. For random access, rapidly created and destroyed data, SSD and HDDs will continue to dominate. But for the growing use case of hoarding data forever, this is a good fit. ------ fredsted What happens at 13.9B years? ~~~ simonh I'm guessing that's the estimated time it would take for entropy in the material to render the data unreadable. They specify at room temperature, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about entropic disruption of the structure due to thermal effects. Note that 'glass' is a hugely varied class of materials, so without knowing much more we can't make spot judgements about the validity of the claim. ~~~ kragen No, 10–100 billion years is at 462 K, which is a lot hotter than room temperature. At room temperature the estimated lifespan (or, really, the time constant τ) is 3×10²⁰ years. ~~~ simonh That's really great, precise information. Where did you get it from? Also which exact material is that for? As I said, there are a lot of different things called 'glass'. ~~~ kragen From the paper: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ausra_Cerkauskaite2/pub...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ausra_Cerkauskaite2/publication/297892219_Eternal_5D_data_storage_via_ultrafast- laser_writing_in_glass/links/59fb2de00f7e9b9968b962dd/Eternal-5D-data-storage- via-ultrafast-laser-writing-in-glass.pdf?origin=publication_detail) They're using fused quartz, as one does. I'm guessing it would be a bit easier to use soda-lime glass, and also reasonably stable, but considerably _less_ stable. ------ gpmcadam Hello people from the future looking back at this thread reminiscing about the old days when this claim was incredible to us. ------ Dangeranger Does anyone know a resource which explains the theoretical limit for retrievable, durable, information storage? I would assume the most dense medium possible would be a collection of neutrons, since neutron stars are the most dense object other than a black hole, but retrieving information from them doesn’t seem feasible. ~~~ bookofjoe "'Dragon's Egg' is a 1980 hard science fiction novel by Robert L. Forward. In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think, and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg. "The novel is regarded as a landmark in hard science fiction. As is typical of the genre, 'Dragon's Egg' attempts to communicate unfamiliar ideas and imaginative scenes while giving adequate attention to the known scientific principles involved." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg) Superb. ~~~ dotancohen I absolutely loved this book. However, isn't it curious that the humans arrive just as the cheela are reaching the level of technology needed to communicate? In terms of human time, they could have come a year earlier, or a year later. ~~~ slm_HN As I remember the book it was the humans probing the neutron star with something (x-rays?) in order to survey/study the star that triggered the evolutionary advances in the cheela. So no, it wasn't curious timing, the humans precipitated the rise of the cheela. Great book btw, hope I'm remembering it correctly. ------ leshokunin Interesting. If we ignore whether or not this specific implementation will work, this would actually be a great way to store data for the Permaweb. I would imagine such resilient data would be a great asset when combined with content hashing! ------ vmurthy Given that the sun will die in about 5B Years, this is a bit of a gimmick :-D ~~~ JulianMorrison By then we could probably tow Sol over to a comparable system using a Shkadov thruster and jump ship to a new sun. ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife _After one billion years, the speed would be 20 km /s and the displacement 34,000 light-years, a little over a third of the estimated width of the Milky Way galaxy._ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine) ------ 13of40 So if one of these discs was dug up by a civilization with the level of technology we had in, say, the 70's, would they be able to tell what it was, much less make something to read it? ~~~ sudhirj They'd likely know it had information on it, even if they couldn't necessarily read it immediately. Anyone storing information is likely to mark it or arrange it in some non-natural way, otherwise it'll just look like rocks. ~~~ chii so how do you know that the crystalline structure of some rocks aren't encoding some information? Alternatively, information encoded in rocks could've been encrypted. And encrypted information should be indistinguishable from random noise. ~~~ jdironman Our bodies are coded with DNA and rocks and geo formations are encoded with the earth's history. ------ supermatt Im always sceptical about these claims of archive longevity. IIRC when CD-Rs were first available, they were touted as suitable for century long archives. The reality was far from that. ~~~ simonh High quality discs are capable of that, the problem is the drives to read them all broke down. For an ultra-long term storage medium like this that's moot. If someone wants to read one of these in a billion years, they'll just have to develop the tech, but that would be true of any such long term mass storage medium. It's not necessarily a strike against this particular implementation. ~~~ Wowfunhappy > High quality discs are capable of that, the problem is the drives to read > them all broke down. What are you referring to? I assume you're not just talking about "high quality" compact discs, since we have plenty of readers for those. ~~~ chii The OP meant the drives would've broken down before the disks would degrade. ~~~ simonh I think the original comment about optical disks was talking about very early formats, before CDs were standardised, such as the drives used for the Doomsday Project. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project) ------ ksec Facebook uses BluRay RW Disc for Cold Storage ( Not sure if that is still the case ). The question is nearly 4 years later are they anywhere close to production? ------ iandanforth I guess I'll have to buy the White Album again. ------ JVIDEL Is this another tech that's "just around the corner" like holo-memory from the late 90's? ------ myfonj TIL glass is not supercooled liquid after all. ~~~ wongarsu There's a good Veratasium video about that [1]. But the short version is that glas is pretty much a solid, and lead is much more liquid at room temperature than glas. 1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wuh0NRG1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wuh0NRG1s) ------ RenRav How does glass being amorphous affect the data integrity? What 'glass' specifically is being used? ~~~ kragen Presumably the amorphous nature of glass lowers the energy barrier to disrupting the stored information. They're using fused quartz glass, as one does. ------ jody2 article from 2016 [https://petapixel.com/2016/02/16/glass-disc-can- store-360-tb...](https://petapixel.com/2016/02/16/glass-disc-can-store-360-tb- photos-13-8-billion-years/) ------ nmstoker Looks like we need a bit more clarity on what they mean by "glass". If you look at glass in medieval glass windows it's heavily distorted by gravity (fatter at the bottom than the top) and that's after ~900 years, so presumably they're actually meaning something more robust than that! ~~~ keiru Turned out it was a mistaken belief. Basically, thickness invariance in medieval glass had to do with the manufacturing process, and the viscosity of glass is not observable in a human timeline. [https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/glass-viscosity- calc...](https://ceramics.org/ceramic-tech-today/glass-viscosity-calculations- definitively-debunk-the-myth-of-observable-flow-in-medieval-windows) ~~~ nmstoker That's great - I hadn't heard about that, thanks for putting me right. ------ tudorw would this offer a safe haven for instructional code on a space ship? ------ camillomiller Why is this here now? The piece of news is from three years ago ------ ConfusedDog The pitch sounds very cool. For all the information given, it could well possible take 13.8 billion years to write 360 TB of data and always in the lab environment that needed to be funded. They seem to be avoiding specifics. ------ meerita I wonder how many years our file systems will remain usable. ------ social_quotient So it’s like a Craftsman tools warranty. ------ schpaencoder I still remember the promise of the CD-Rom. Billions of years. ~~~ wongarsu You could probably build CD-ROMs that last millions of years if you really tried. You can buy regular CD-Rs that are estimated to last hundreeds of years. But of course most people buy whatever is cheapest, and the cheapest CD-Rs won't last you a decade. ------ masters3d Minority Report? ------ ChrisArchitect please add (2016) to this title, old news ~~~ ChrisArchitect [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11140033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11140033) ------ mrmondo dd if=/dev/data | tee >(dd of=/dev/glass1) | dd of=/dev/glass2 20:20 optical replication ;) ------ benj111 Can I rant about the 5D? "It's been dubbed five-dimensional (5D) digital data because, in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation are extremely important too" Orientation is inherently important anyway. Have you ever tried reading a book upside down, and what does size bring? Other than lowering density. And obviously position is important, it's the difference between data and randomness. ~~~ simonh Books only have one orientation, so they're not actually making use of that dimension to encode data. The rest of your points... oh my. None of the dimensions count at all, really? So rant away, but it's nice if the sound and fury at least signifies _something_. ~~~ benj111 No 2 dimensions are important at least :) Regarding orientation, are you saying they printed half the book over the first half, but at right angles over the top? Ie you _see_ different data from different orientations? Ps I've seen old (18th century?) letters where they wrote at 0, 90 and 45 degrees to get more on one page. Postage was charged by the page so it made sense. Newspaper also used to be taxed by the page (in the UK at least) so you had origami like folding of one sheet of paper into a newspaper, not aware of them 'double printing' in this way though. I assume that's why 'broadsheets' were so massive up until relatively recently. ~~~ simonh I think they encode the data as asymmetric marks in the material, with different orientations of the marks corresponding to different values. Imagine you could print a page containing just a grid of 100x100 numbers. If you can orient those numbers so the top of each digit could be facing up, down, left or right and use those 40 different glyphs to encode in base 40 instead of base 10, now you can fit 4x as much data into the same two dimensional area.

Foxconn to employ 1 Million Robots - avjinder http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/30/2355258/Foxconn-To-Employ-1-Million-Robots?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29 ====== ColinWright There are two stories on this currently posted to HN, this one, and the one at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827882> I have no idea which will get the discussion, if either, but it might be worth trying to make sure any discussion doesn't get unnecessarily split. As I type this, the other submission has a useful comment. ------ satyajit Oh well, at least Robots can't commit suicide.

Our Best Entrepreneurs Should Be Solving Real Problems, Not Creating Apps - jsherry http://www.businessinsider.com/entrepreneurs-should-be-solving-real-problems-not-creating-apps-2012-3 ====== talmand I would say the best entrepreneurs should be out doing whatever it is they wish to do. If they want to work on creating the next fad app in the hopes of making money then that's their business. If the market wants a crap app that does something incredibly silly for no real benefit to society then there will be someone to make it for them. This isn't always a bad thing. James Cameron makes millions from movies that adds little to society and then uses it to build a submersible that takes him to the deepest spot in the oceans. Maybe the world's mysteries/problems can be solved with money made from useless entertainment? As for the hardware innovations coming out of China and the area; I would think part of the reason is they don't have a government with increasingly tough regulations to deal with. Take for instance the recent policies of the US government towards internet-based companies or its tough stances on pollution-creating energy production which could provide power issues for manufacturing. Granted the tough regulations could be considered good in some cases (look at the beating Apple is getting on labor treatment) but if it's possible to leave for easier/cheaper areas, companies will leave. Griping about the lack of hardware innovation in one area when it's easier/cheaper to innovate in another seems kind of missing the point territory. ~~~ yew Ease of innovation does not _necessarily_ correlate with value (in a long- term/social sense) of innovation. As you point out that can be worked around by taking profits from easy innovations and using them to fund hard-but-valuable ones, but people like Elon Musk and James Cameron are notable because of their rarity. A lot of the money just dilutes and/or vanishes back into the pot. A certain amount of entertainment is necessary (even good!), of course, but we only have to look at the drug industry to get a picture of how bad things can get if people stop solving hard problems. The 'everything done ahead of time' nature of high-technology civilization just exacerbates things. ~~~ eli_gottlieb >The 'everything done ahead of time' nature of high-technology civilization just exacerbates things. Could you elaborate? ~~~ yew High-technology civilizations rely on a more-or-less constant stream of innovations (or solutions to hard problems) in order to maintain a reasonable equilibrium in all sorts of areas (economy, environment, society). That reliance increases with the degree of high-tech, but also provides the _benefits_ of high-tech. A failure of that system can lead to much worse than just a lack of progress. ------ delinquentme Hacker news needs to see more of this. "I believe this current crop of entrepreneurs might actually be hurting America - and perverting the very idea of innovation in the same way Beyonce’s Run The World is like kicking Aretha Franklin in the ribs…repeatedly." Realize that this _IS_ the issue of the fortune 500 companies. Too busy worrying about small returns to dig in an innovate. ------ eli_gottlieb > _The latest US generation has led a life of leisure. Arab protesters carry > swords and machetes, ours carry iPhone 4S’s in pink, personalized cases._ Look dude, if it wasn't quite explicitly against Massachusetts weapons laws, I would go protesting carrying a sword. Also, if someone would teach my swordsmanship. And if swords were actually viable weapons in modern times, rather than nice symbols of Arabs' chauvinistic, honor-based culture. > _From computers to desks to chairs used by cute digital startups like Oink > or Bizzle or FoSchnizzle, – it’s all made possible by better, more > substantive innovators. This superior breed of entrepreneurs and inventors > toils away in relative obscurity, often in Asia, solving real, complex > problems. They squeeze 32GB onto something the size of mint strip. Or, they > make un-killable batteries that let us Tweet deep into the night. They make > solar cells worthwhile or water out of thin air._ Did you know? There's actually a whole economic sector to this stuff. It's called _research_ , it's practitioners are called _scientists_ and, often enough, _grad students_ , and the United States of America treats them/us like _crap_. Science is _chronically and endemically_ underfunded in the United States relative to most other developed countries, _and_ several less developed countries such as India, China, and Israel. Come on, people. I agree VCs are too quick to jump for the cheap, easy trivial "innovation" rather than the fundamental invention, but if you want fundamental invention, stop kvetching and figure out how to fund a university lab for the next 6 years to work on your truly important, fundamental scientific problem.

Ask HN: Be honest; Why do you want to achieve something? - spartan37 According to George Orwell - Sheer egoism (be popular etc), Aesthetic enthusiasm (art), Desire to discover something and boast about it, Desire to change the world - are the only motives for achievements.<p>I will add a few more: Make lots of money and join elite club, To help the needy, To make your people happy, To get yourself out of misery, To have some pleasures for yourself. I hope I haven&#x27;t duplicated the motives.<p>So, which of these push you and how much? ====== lsiunsuex Money. I hate to be so cliche but money is the absolute #1 driving force for everything I do / learn / work towards. People say money can't buy happiness, and that may be true, but money can help buy life. Without money you can't see doctors, you can't receive cancer treatment, its more difficult to get a good education without money, it's difficult to do fun things without money. Yes, we're programmers and you don't need to goto school to learn a language, but my kids may not necessarily be programmers. Hopefully they want to become doctors, or dentists, or lawyers or engineers. And those jobs require degrees and those degrees require money, sometimes, lots of it. Can they earn it on they're own and get school loans like everyone else? Absolutely - but if I can help them accomplish their goals, all the better. Having my name known in some obscure group only known to programmers - meh. Walking into a room and people recognizing my face and coming up to talk to me? meh. Putting snow tires on a $250,000 sports car and driving around in a NY winter? hell yes - because I can and because I earned it. ~~~ spartan37 I think your priorities are closer to what they should be for a natural biological being. Also, I think people who work extra hard to just to move from their ordinary social circle to elite circle are missing the point. The goal is not to change from being an average person in one social circle to being an average person in a higher social circle, but to stay in the same social circle and become the best in that circle - doesn't matter which circle it is. ~~~ lsiunsuex I don't know what "I think your priorities are closer to what they should be for a natural biological being." means. Social circle is of no significance to me - having a nice house and car in the city or suburbs (where I live, the suburbs are the place to be, not the city) wouldn't matter to me. The upper class here lives in the suburbs, but to have the same house in the city would be ok with me, so long as it's a house that I like. A nice car was specifically mentioned because I'm into cars. Some people love sports; I love cars. To own a hand made Ferrari or Lamborghini or ... is a great achievement IMO. Some people and some I know could care less - they strive to go on great relaxing vacations. Some strive for security with money in the bank. Everyone has their own goals. These are mine. ------ groaner Honestly, it's the growing realization that despite all of my efforts, I haven't done anything worth feeling proud of. To me that feels like I've lived a waste of a life. As you can tell, this is an ineffective strategy for motivation. ------ onedev Because it's a fun game to play. I view life as mostly a game. I like seeing how far I can go. I work hard because it's fun. I also like the feeling of helping people around me. It's a great feeling to teach people something they don't know or pulling people up with you, or simply inspiring them through my actions. Really I don't have any specific motive like "success" or "fame" or "money". I barely even look at my bank account tbh (though I should probably sit down one of these days and analyze my financials and do some stuff I've been putting off). I'm generally a pretty zen guy these days. I haven't always been like this, but I really really like my current state of mind. I'm enjoying life a ton, because I removed all external expectations. How did I do it? Exercise, Diet, and Sleep. That's really just it. ------ BjoernKW For me it's a desire to change the world and to some extent aesthetic enthusiasm. Wanting to change the world always sounds a bit grandiose but the most significant changes are brought about one step at a time through everyday effort. I try every day to make the world a better place in various, sometimes mundane and often tiny ways. This doesn't mean I don't care about money. Quite to the contrary. Money up to a certain degree is a more or less accurate gauge of the value you create. It buys you freedom but it is no end to itself. So, making money for buying luxury items? I couldn't care less. Making money for the purpose of being able to do what I care about? Absolutely. ------ andersthue I read Simon Sinek's book "Start with why" last year and realized that my why is "happiness". This made it much easier for me to choose what to work on, and currently I am using my time and energy (and all of my surplus money I get from my consulting business) to create and spread the word about TimeBlock - a new way of working that has made me happier, my employed Makers happier and our customers happier! My goal is to help Makers, Managers and customers become just 1% happier if I can do that I will feel very priviliged. ------ bbcbasic My reasons to achieve a given goal X are to follow a vision that I have of my future. Those visions if I follow their reason, probably come into all 3 of the orwell categories. Which I guess is a good sign - it is very motivating if you can make your own life better, and others, and at the same time it feel like you are creating (being artistic). The downside is I find it very hard to achieve a goal Y that has been pressured on to me by someone else. I just try to find ways to avoid that goal, or just passably do it :-) ------ nicholas73 I want success so I can have a more interesting life. If you are stuck in the rat race, you are a chess piece. If you have made it, you are the player. ------ kluck To create something that survives me and a couple of decades after my death. Something that brings computer science forward (just one step on the ladder though). How much does it push me? Not much, but enough to get my ass up every other day and program on some projects. Because I do realize in the end everything will disappear. ------ tmaly I enjoy creating, it is sort of my way of proving I exist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum) ------ MichaelCrawford So I can make my Mama proud. She and Dad were heavily into that I did some of the work on the Mac I gave them for Christmas back in the day.

House of keys: 9 Months later... 40% Worse - robotdad http://blog.sec-consult.com/2016/09/house-of-keys-9-months-later-40-worse.html ====== robotdad The initial report from last year has interesting, if sadly unsurprising, background on how/why so many of these embedded devices have wound up this way. [http://blog.sec-consult.com/2015/11/house-of-keys- industry-w...](http://blog.sec-consult.com/2015/11/house-of-keys-industry- wide-https.html)

Mastodon 101: A Queer-Friendly Social Network You’re Gonna Like a Lot - smacktoward https://www.autostraddle.com/mastodon-101-a-queer-friendly-social-network-youre-gonna-like-a-lot-390948/ ====== smaragd Mastodon is federated, not decentralized. There's nothing decentralized about it unless you're an instance admin, or both savvy and popular enough to run one alone.

Is The World in a Technological Inflection Point? - azewail https://www.chaino.com/pulse/this-article-is-imo-extremely-important-at-this-time-the ====== azewail The world is experiencing an inflection point. It will emerge 10 years from now very different from the world we are in now. This article sheds a lot of light on the world that will emerge on the other end. Thank you, Vivek Wadhwa!‎

Why 'noncompete' means 'don't thrive' (2007) - hga http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/12/30/why_noncompete_means_dont_thrive_/ ====== hga Echoing an observation from this interview by the chairman emeritus of Greylock Partners (the Boston area's premier? VC firm, first limited parter VC firm, etc.): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547204> The hook of that article is Greylock moving their headquarters to Silicon Valley a bit more than a year ago....

Lunar Lander 3D in 5K - nreece http://www.sebleedelisle.com/?p=428 ====== madmotive Seb presented the story behind this at the 5K app competition final (<http://fivepoundapp.com/wiki/5kapp/>), held in our coworking space (<http://theSkiff.org>) in Brighton, UK last week. Absolutely brilliant!

TextSecure is becoming Signal - qznc https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/just-signal/ ====== etiam In the short term, as someone running without Google Play Sevices, I'm curious to see whether this just gave me access to the functionality of TextSecure again or broke RedPhone. Regardless of which, I'm optimistic about the long term support for my own use, and I think the unification is going to be good to help the program spreading. Now for the people who don't really get the point of protecting our privacy but are just going along anyway I'll be getting calls _and_ messaging for one round of persuasion. Much rejoicing. Thank you Open Whisper Systems! ------ Johnny_Brahms Now just so some UI polish (or maybe calling should be a part of the texting UI. Who am I to judge) and a better audio codec (say, CBR opus) and Signal has everything I could ever imagine wanting. I have had a rock solid experience, and the simplicity is amazing . My whole extended family is using it, and a couple of them are computer illiterate. ------ secfirstmd Great work Moxie and all the folks at Whisper Systems! I was actually in the middle of re-writing a lesson on mobile phone security for activists in the field that I am giving in about an hour when I saw the new blog post. Never have I been so glad to be scrapping parts of a presentation and lesson plan at the last minute. There will be another 20 vulnerable human rights defenders in the field using Signal by the end of the day :) ------ alpek Is this app widely considered safe? It seems to ask for an awful lot of permissions and is definitely communicating with a server while it operates I'm aware of who Moxie Marlinspike is and have seen the Open Whisper Systems testimonials, I was just surprised with how much it asks for, has anyone dug through the code to get a feel for the risk profile of letting this app into everything on my phone? ------ termolo Poor choice. They should've gone with "TextSecure". "Signal" is too generic, and I don't see any security aspect related to it. (But who am I to complain, I'm using Threema, anyway.) ~~~ Nexxxeh Frankly it is a stupid choice. "Have you got signal?", "Get signal so I can message you!" It is already a widely used word relating to cell phones. Even with context, it's not obvious which "Signal" one is necessarily referring to. ~~~ celticninja 'Have you got the signal app?' \- solved. ~~~ Nexxxeh The signal app, the one that shows me how strong my mobile signal is? Yes. (Annoyingly only for one SIM though.) "The app called Signal" would be the only sensible way to do it that I can immediately see, but it's still clumsy and daft.

U.S. Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Sharply, but Deaths Are Still Down - sxp https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/health/coronavirus-mortality-testing.html ====== DeonPenny This just means that testing was limiting factor before but thats not a surprise based on the papers coming out. We even see this is data like cases/per test. We get far less case per the test we have now because we've tested all the obvious people. In all actuality way more people were infected before, the deaths per infections is much higher and virus is much less deadly than the 3.4% the WHO quoted or the .5% we thought it was in NYC. ------ canada_dry Really, this shouldn't be a surprise. Epidemiologists note that successful viruses _don 't_ kill their host. Covid-19 has all the hallmarks of a virus that will evolve into a strain (or strains) that will be part of the regular flu season - marked by severe symptoms. Of course the elderly and immunocompromised people will always be at greater risk of death due to any form of the flu. When hospitals and first responders began using PPE to handle all virus patients it isolated the most lethal strains of the virus and significantly reduced the spread in the general population. In addition, critical care units now have the ventilators and protocols needed to more effectively deal with the virus. ------ eganist Just means healthcare providers have used the time to ramp up. If the acceleration of the infection rate continues at a pace that would eventually surpass the scalability of healthcare provisioning, we're back in the pits. A lot of local and state governments are trying to balance these two in order to keep some semblance of normality while enabling healthcare providers to manage caseloads and keep deaths down. ~~~ mcnamaratw No, no. The virus is over. The pandemic was multiple news cycles ago. Say the death rate doubles 2-3 times a week, but deaths right now are very low. In that case we're fine. Forget about exponential growth, that's so March 2020. EDIT: Folks have already raised the following objections: (a) My sarcasm above is lame and pointless, because we all know some people take the position that the virus is much less dangerous now. (b) My sarcastic comment above is an unfair straw man argument. (I.e. nobody really takes that position.) (c) The virus really is less dangerous than it was believed to be in March (though nobody has so far questioned the fact that death rates were doubling every 2-3 days back then). (d) The virus has changed. It is actually different and less dangerous than it was in March. ~~~ mcnamaratw Someone saw fit to downvote, which is part of the process. But I'm curious. Does that mean you see that I intended heavy sarcasm, but you disagree with my actual position (i.e. that we're still in danger)? Or that you disapprove of sarcasm on HN or w/r/t COVID-19? Or the sarcasm didn't come through in what I wrote? Something else? Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide. ~~~ boredpudding It means that your sarcastic comment didn't add anything to the discussion. We know people behave like that, however, jokingly imitating them doesn't add anything to the thread and is just a lame joke. ~~~ mcnamaratw Thanks. Since HN is overrun right now with people who are more or less denying that the virus is dangerous, I have to disagree with you. But it's nice to know what you're thinking. ~~~ salmon30salmon I am probably the archetype of the straw man you invented in your comment regarding people saying the virus is not dangerous. Let me make a few things clear to you and the others who see this as a binary proposition. This virus is _very_ dangerous to specific groups of people. We know this not only through observation but also through a more complete understanding on its spread, mechanism of action and cross-reactivity. We also know, with a good deal of certainty, that there are also groups who are at a very, very low level of risk from this virus. What the people you so easily disparage are arguing is not that the virus is not dangerous, but that we are not responding to the actual threat, but rather the perceived threat based on data that is now 5 months old. And that by making this mistake, we are increasing danger to not only those at risk to the virus but also those who are at low risk through our obtuse response. There are facts which can't be denied. The IFR is NOT anywhere near as high as we once feared. This is good news! We have two treatments that seem to help. This is good news! We understand that a majority of those infected will exhibit minor or no symptoms. This is good news! But we are still _acting_ as if this has a 2% IFR and no treatment. We have less certainty, but are still researching the following. There is evidence that cross-reactivity in T-Cells with other coronaviruses is helping reduce the impact on a large portion of the population. We see evidence that _something_ has changed in the virus in the past 6 months. Genome sequencing hasn't revealed if this is true or not, but the research is ongoing. We see that outdoor spread is very unlikely. We believe nosocomial spread is a primary means. We see that super-spreaders may account for more of the spread than asymptomatic incidental contact. We have contradicting evidence of lockdown efficacy. And most importantly, we have not seen a TRUE 2nd wave. What is going on in the USA is not a 2nd wave at the community level, no community that had a large first wave is currently seeing a second wave. Finally, there is debate around whether the herd immunity level is far lower than once thought. Michael Levitt and others are postulating that around 20-25% of the population needs to be infected to see a sharp decline in infections. This has played out in a lot of continental Europe, NYC and the UK. So it isn't as simple as your snide sarcasm would have us believe. This is why actual debate is needed, not dismissive arrogance as displayed by your comments. ~~~ mcnamaratw Thanks. That's a good example. Three months ago deaths were doubling every 2 to 3 days. That's some of the little data we really have. Same virus (although there are speculations that perhaps now there are multiple forms). We're being more careful about transmission ... except when we're not. We seem to be better at treatment. Vulnerable population is unchanged.

Startups: Get Funded with Extreme University - AlexBlom http://alexblom.com/blog/2010/05/startups-get-funded-with-extreme-university/ ====== faramarz Thanks for the reminder Alex. Maybe I'll catch you at the next Sproutup, good to see locals here. ~~~ AlexBlom No problems. Shoot me an e-mail /w the details listed in my profile. Would love to connect with more locals!

Hive: Open-source Crowdsourcing Framework - danso http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/12/09/hive-open-source-crowdsourcing-framework/ ====== pedrosorio "Hive is free and open source" Indeed: [https://hive.apache.org/](https://hive.apache.org/) ~~~ yarrel The link is in the article - [https://github.com/nytlabs/hive](https://github.com/nytlabs/hive) ~~~ sanswork I think the OPs point was that there is already a popular open source project named Hive. ~~~ weego Which is quickly becoming a tedious exercise in cheap point scoring. People go for names that reflect the intent or otherwise associate with the system they are building. They also prefer existing words. Sometimes that will mean reuse of the same words. Lets accept that and move on with our lives. ------ issaria The are so many names available, why choose this one? ------ vander_elst "hive" really? google the name first?? ~~~ tosh Sooner rather than later it will become impossible to avoid naming conflicts for open source projects (or any projects) if you want a meaningful name.

When Node.js is the wrong tool for the job - vmware505 https://medium.com/@jongleberry/when-node-js-is-the-wrong-tool-for-the-job-6d3325fac85c#.gwnpqr3qs ====== klodolph It seems like a lot of JavaScript developers are repeating things like "more people know JavaScript so you don't have to learn a new language, which saves you time". I don't get it. In my experience, if you find a good developer, they can pick up C#, Swift, or Go pretty quickly, and if you can't find a good developer, the fact that they already know JavaScript is not much of an advantage. Even if the developer you hire already knows your language, they're going to be spending time learning your code base and how your organization works (shared repo? PRs? Feature branches? Code review? Coding standards?) That, and nose.js developers seem to repeat the claim that node.js makes delivery faster… but is it really any faster than ASP.NET, Rails, Django, or Go stdlib? Those frameworks are so fast for prototyping and delivering bread- and-butter apps as it is (and some of them let you do multithreading to boot). I'm also really not interested in how things work for "typical CRUD apps" because those are so trivial to write in any decent environment. I'm worried that node.js articles are the same kind of echo chamber that Rails articles were 10 ago. ~~~ mgkimsal > I'm worried that node.js articles are the same kind of echo chamber that > Rails articles were 10 ago. I tend to agree. > That, and nose.js developers seem to repeat the claim that node.js makes > delivery faster… The qualification was "if your team already knows JavaScript". OK... If the team already knows Java... building something like this in Java would be faster to deliver, and wouldn't hit some of those issues the author brought up (4 vs 1, single vs threaded, etc). And the whole "oh, you know language X" \- means almost nothing when the project is more than trivial hello world. Every project I've been brought in on, the qualifier was "must know tech X". And _almost_ always (there were exceptions) I knew more about tech X and software dev in general than the original developers, and the crunch was not "how do I do XYZ in this tech?" it was "how do I get the other developers to actually use version control?" or "use version control sanely?" or "document anything?" or "write tests" or "have test data" or "have a repeatable build process"? Knowing ASP or PHP or Ruby or whatever, but going in to a project without repeatable build process, tests, documentation, requirements or version control, is a recipe for disaster. Stressing the "deliver quickly" aspect of any language, if you're actually trying to deliver for a business or with a team of people, is extremely destructive short term thinking. And yes, sometimes, in rare cases, it may be a necessary evil, but I think it's become the norm with words like "agile" being thrown around as synonyms for "don't have to write anything down". ~~~ astinit As someone still studying and not in the workforce yet, are there really teams out there that don't use version control? ~~~ the_af Yes. Also, some huge multinational companies you're very likely to have heard of don't do automated testing of any kind, as least for non-critical software (source: my own experience). I'm not talking about TDD or any fancy agile technique; I mean any kind of automated testing whatsoever. If you're just out of university or read tech blogs or hackernews, you'd think everyone these days is doing TDD, pair programming and agile. The reality is that a lot of major businesses do _none of that_. ~~~ Roboprog Re: automated testing. This can be quite time consuming to set up in many environments. Step one: get an Oracle database instance/schema that you can snapshot and roll back to a known starting state at will. Step two: get multiple connected app instances into a state to support each test run. Step three: just drop it, those things aren't gonna happen before you update your resume :-) I'm ignoring the approach that says: Let's just spend a LOT of time writing mocks that stub out 90% of everything that matters, and pretend that the tests actually show something that matters. ~~~ the_af Agreed about integration tests sometimes being a pain in the... neck. However, note I'm talking about something way more basic: many business don't do _any kind of testing at all_ that isn't done by people manually trying the system. In the case of internal tools, this "testing" is often done directly by internal users trying to use the tool. This is way more common than one would suspect from reading tech blogs (unless one reads TheDailyWTF, of course). ~~~ mgkimsal I try to stress to clients that testing will always be done - we have a choice how much we do up front, behind the scenes, vs out in public, with real customers, money and data on the line. Still people choose, for a number of reasons, to have some/most/all of testing just be 'throw it out and see what happens'. ------ smokeyj > As node.js is not multi-threaded, we spin up 4 instances of node.js per > server, 1 instance per CPU core. Thus, we cache in-memory 4 times per > server. And why not use a shared memory server? > Operations started adding rules with 100,000s of domains, which caused a > single set of rules to be about 10mb large ... If we weren’t using node.js, > we could cut this bandwidth by 4 as there would only be one connection to > the Redis cluster retrieving rule sets. _Maybe a 10mb json string isn 't the best design decision_..... Or you know, you could have one node process connect to the Redis server, and have the local processes read from a shared memory server.. Or you could not store your rules as a 10mb friggin JSON string.. > When rule sets were 10mb JSON strings, each node.js process would need to > JSON.parse() the string every 30 seconds. We found that this actually > blocked the event loop quite drastically Well then do it in another thread and save it to shared memory. Maybe, just maybe, JSON strings aren't the tool for the job here. ~~~ leopoldfreeman NodeJS is a multi-threaded process. You can verify it with top or ps command. Async methods to decode JSON: [https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/issues/7543](https://github.com/nodejs/node-v0.x-archive/issues/7543) ~~~ tayo42 The thread thing in nodejs seems very misunderstood. Only the javascript runs in one thread. I think its libuv that uses 4 threads to do most of the work in node. ------ rodp While I agree Node.js isn't the right tool for any job -- just like anything else, really -- after reading his description of the problem, I can't shake off this feeling that the main issues he has with performance in this case have very little to do with Node itself. Parsing a huge JSON string in any language would block CPU for a while. This JSON then becomes a huge hash table in memory, so no wonder each process uses up a lot of RAM. I don't know how these rules are then used but it seems to me he might be better off trying to rethink how to do shared memory in this case before he simply blames Node for blocking CPU and wasting memory. That said, I can imagine other languages (like Java or Go) could still end up being more efficient than Node. ~~~ jonas21 The issue isn't that it takes a long time to parse the JSON. It's that the server can't do anything else while it's parsing. In Java, for example, you could parse the JSON on a background thread without affecting your ability to serve requests. Similarly, the memory issue isn't so much that a single copy of the table takes a lot of space, but rather that they need to store 4 copies of the table -- because they're running 4 different processes in order to utilize multiple cores. Both of these issues are specific to nodejs. ------ tyingq _" Operations started adding rules with 100,000s of domains, which caused a single set of rules to be about 10mb large"_ There's not enough detail to be sure, but this sounds more like _" when a relational database would be a better idea than redis."_ Edit: That is, pushing the evaluation of the rules down...rather than pulling a kv and walking 10MB (of JSON?) to get to the small number of rules that apply for the transaction. ------ binocarlos This is an excellent article which really highlights the underlying trade-offs when you choose node for your service (i/o bound work vs cpu). Unless you know for sure what limits you will hit - it makes sense to iterate quickly and find out. Then, if the service is actually hitting limits (and probably not the ones you thought) - re-write it in a multi-threaded concurrent language like go, elixr etc - or a language designed to solve the actual problems the service is hitting (which might be disk i/o or other infrastructure level things not language choice) ------ dlojudice They could have fixed part of the architecture by having a "cache service" process (4 cpus: 3 for proxies, 1 for the cache service). With that they'd have a single point consuming their limited resources (memory, cpu and socket for redis connections), using IPC to communicate between process. ~~~ gaastonsr I thought the same or even the same 4 cpus for proxies and a shared 1 for the cache service. ------ neebz JSON.parse() is one issue we faced regularly. Any large amount of data fetching could block the event loop and the whole server slows down. It's very unforgiving. We go great length to figure out which attributes to fetch and add limits to all our sql queries. These are best practices but with node they are must. ~~~ beejiu Node.js isn't great for CPU bound tasks in general. ~~~ danenania Parsing json is sneaky because it can show up in apps that are otherwise IO bound (where Node shines) and don't seem like they should be CPU intensive on the surface. ------ wehadfun JavaScript is my first non-mathematical programming language and I haven’t found the need to expand my programming skills to more -Having a hard time taking anything this guy says seriously ------ yahyaheee I debated between learning Node and Go for my latest project. I took a couple days doing beginner tutorials on each, and Go was actually a lot easier for me to learn. Could just be my background, but I know a couple other people who picked it up in about a week too, it's surprisingly simple. ~~~ Slackwise > it's surprisingly simple. Actually, that's its fundamental design. They reduced everything down to a very small core with very little features, so things would be obvious and you don't have to learn or remember much. It's refreshingly simple! With that said, I'd say they reduced it _too_ far down. There's no generics so you end up using `interface{}` everywhere which often leads to issues due to its late binding. Or you end up just using codegen tools, IIRC. Also since there are no exceptions, you end up with constant checks for error code returns, which end up usually just being strings and not much else. Not saying exceptions are the best way to approach error handling, but they do allow you to reverse through an entire function call stack and clean up any state along the way, along with adding more granular error information you can write handlers to react to. Go reminds me of the pain that was C error handling and juggling error codes. ------ suzzer99 > On each server, rules are retrieved from Redis and cached in-memory using an > LRU-cache. As node.js is not multi-threaded, we spin up 4 instances of > node.js per server, 1 instance per CPU core. Thus, we cache in-memory 4 > times per server. This is a waste of memory! This is completely standard and the only way to do node in-memory caching. Think of each worker as a completely independent node process, which is only bound to the cluster by a master process which has the ability spawn and kill child cluster processes. ~~~ vkjv > This is completely standard and the only way to do node in-memory caching. This isn't accurate you can use shared memory. There are a few modules that implement this. In addition, you can offload the JSON.parse to the dedicated "caching" process that updates the shared memory. ~~~ suzzer99 Do you have a link that describes an example of this? Ok nevermind, google is my friend: [https://github.com/PaquitoSoft/memored](https://github.com/PaquitoSoft/memored) I can see where this would come in handy. But at 240MB total resident memory per CPU across 4 node workers that OP describes, I wouldn't hassle with it. ------ stevebmark re: multiple processes duplicating memory, would a single menmcache instance or similar solve this problem? I don't have any perspective on how that would perform at scale vs individual programs reading from application state. Although thinking about it, each process would probably have to store all that data in app memory anyway... ------ cbem It was an very unfortunate decision for Node devs to deep six multithreaded web workers. A pull request implementing it was ready to go with an optional flag to enable it but they did not want to support it. So node will be forever more compute bound to a single thread blocking all I/O. ~~~ gaastonsr > So node will be forever more compute bound to a single thread blocking all > I/O. I don't think I understood your point. But is not Node.js supposed to not block long lasting tasks? ------ tannhaeuser I'd also add that node.js might not be the right choice for complex backend business logic with lots of service calls because of. Node.js' always-async execution model tends which tends to make things more complicated than need be. ~~~ tps5 I think "always async" is the main advantage of node. My general (perhaps wrong) impression is that other languages commonly used in backends are moving toward async io, usually through maturing libraries. ~~~ tannhaeuser It's not that I don't like async (I think it's a defensible choice for JavaScript), but that in my experience backend logic for e.g. e-commerce apps doesn't benefit from using it. Projects which expose services to web frontends are often implemented in an architecture where only one-shot, aggregated service calls (and often times REST-y services) are exposed to Node.js, with the actual business processing and granular service calls being implemented in eg. Java web services in a synchronous programming style. I actually like that architecture because it gives front end devs leaway to define their browser- facing head server backend, rather than enshrine a dogmatic frontend/backend architecture upfront. It's true that other languages add async models (or emphasize those that they already have), but eg. in the case of Java you're sitting on 20 years of synchronous library and custom code, and it's not clear moving to async is worth it at this pont. ------ donatj "Usually" /snark ------ hitgeek good detailed write up. There were probably opportunities for the author to architect the system in ways that were better suited to node (given that was the chosen platform), but the architecture choices were not unreasonable by design. These are some good things to consider when architecting a system, and considering node as the platform. I'm not sure I agree that node is the "perfect for simple CRUD apps" though ------ leshow I think it's a lot closer to 10x as fast for Rust and 6-7x for Go. ------ BuuQu9hu When WebAssembly comes, what will that mean for the node.js ecosystem? ~~~ kowdermeister Nothing, WebAssembly targets the browser. Devs who already understand JS could just easily pick up Node. ------ hmans Always.

Staffed by mimes - ColinWright http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/11/staffed-by-mimes.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter ====== zimpenfish If you use words, you have to have them translated into N languages. With pictograms, you likely don't need any translation. ~~~ ColinWright If you only use pictograms, there are some that _nobody_ understands. ~~~ zimpenfish But at that point, the customer has likely already paid for the item, you've saved countless translation costs, and what do you (as a company) then care?

Calliope mini - Tomte http://calliope.cc/ueber-mini ====== gus_massa Look interesting, but this is an English speaking forum and post in other languages are usually ignored or flagged. Do you know an official translation to English? How is this different from an Arduino? Autotranslation: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fcalliope.cc%2Fueber- mini)

8 secrets of success in 3 minutes - mariusc http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_s_8_secrets_of_success.html ====== idlewan Has anyone read the book ([http://www.amazon.fr/Traits-Successful-People- Common-ebook/d...](http://www.amazon.fr/Traits-Successful-People-Common- ebook/dp/B003URRRT2)) ?

Yelp casually exploits coronavirus with charity scam - Zenst https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIYrjBEczE ====== Meph504 I like Rossmann, but I should have focused on staying on target here. He starts with the info about the shitty fundraiser scheme. But then drifts into a talking about them not removing fake negative reviews of his business. Though the second part is a valid complaint, just seems you shouldn't use this coverage to talk about your personal issues with them. For the record, Yelp has been a scummy dumpster fire for years, they try this shake down shit with so many small businesses here. ~~~ Zenst Whilst you may view them as personal issues - they are experience and not unique to him. Yes, does seem many are aware of Yelp being scummy (nice way of putting it), but only those who are more technically aware to see thru their scummy bully tactics, tactics that hurt and can destroy a business. Many who are not technically minded and they equally suffer at their hands without knowing why as many users out there are not technically aware and with that will blindly trust those reviews and Yelp and those users are the majority. Now they are abusing a pandemic to be even more scummy, they need to be held to account and shown to those common users what they are about and stopped. I just want to see fairness and with that, really want to see the word put out so those lessers users start to see the truth as we all know, they have been allowed thru whatever reason to carry on doing this and are not improving, indeed - getting worse.

Fcgi vs. gunicorn vs. uWSGI - jgalvez http://www.peterbe.com/plog/fcgi-vs-gunicorn-vs-uwsgi ====== timf Make sure to look at this more comprehensive review: <http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers> ~~~ sibsibsib While gunicorn isn't necessarily the fastest according to Nicholas Piël's tests, I like it for its ease of use. It is very simple to get up and running and has some features like the ability to ratchet up and down the number of worker processes on the fly, or automatically reload them. When gunicorn's performance becomes a problem, I will re-evaulate and consider something like gevent.

Elon Musk Q&A 'Hyperloop' on KQED - palidanx https://soundcloud.com/kqed/musk-mp3 ====== palidanx Starts at 1:00min.

NBC Olympic Tape Delays - cisforcody http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/olympic-tape-delays-roil-fans-but-for-nbc-its-good-for-business/ ====== mynameishere I wanted to see some event online, but they wanted a cable-provider password. Umm, I don't have cable. If I had cable I wouldn't be watching TV on my computer. ------ Nwallins I would really like to see a free market in Olympics coverage, rather than the monopoly we are stuck with. I don't understand why we don't have as many channels with live coverage as there are simultaneous events. I would think that the Olympics group could make more money auctioning off each event's coverage rights freely, rather than negotiating for a huge payoff (per region) from a single huge network. It would certainly increase viewership and the customer experience. Having to watch a very limited set of events on tape delay, subject to some editorially milquetoast attempt at appeal to the lowest common denominator, is a disturbingly negligent delivery of quality goods. Improving the experience should pay off in spades in the long run, even if I'm too optimistic in my analysis so far. Produce something valuable for your customers. The current Olympics TV experience is a joke: Despite my love for winter sports, I am not engaged. I watched _SNL's Best of Chris Farley_ last night on Netflix. ~~~ pedalpete I wouldn't be surprised if this was the last Olympics without web broadcasts, but as far as auctioning off each event individually, I think that would be a 'usability' nightmare for fans. Now, it is pretty simple. I want to see Olympics, go to NBC. In Canada we have about 5 channels that have the Olympics this year (maybe it's just in BC), and it is actually a bit annoying to have to figure out what channel is covering which events. In the past it has always been CBC I believe that had the Olympics. Now we've got CBC, CTV, SportsNet, APTN, a chinese version, OLN, I'm sure there are more. Is it bad form of me to mention that we have 5+ networks showing live Olympics while Americans are complaining about not being able to get one? :) ~~~ Nwallins > _I think that would be a 'usability' nightmare for fans. Now, it is pretty > simple. I want to see Olympics, go to NBC._ Respectfully, I must disagree. Sure, you can go to NBC to see "the Olympics". That won't change in any case. However, instead of being stuck at Ice Dancing or Biathalon (or whatever), you could switch the channel to a live event that you want to watch. I envy your five channels. Here in Brooklyn, we have two: NBC and CNBC (Time Warner Cable). ------ pedalpete For years Americans near the Canadian border have been tuning into Canadian CBC for live coverage. Canadian CTV is streaming from <http://www.ctvolympics.ca/tv-online-listings/index.html> (not sure if you can get it outside of Canada). Hate to rub it in, but nothing like being here (I live in Whislter)! ~~~ inklesspen Eeeagh, silverlight. Is there no other option? ~~~ stse You could try watching SVT (Swedish) at <http://svtplay.se/t/126795/os- sandningar> ('okommenterad' means 'without commentary') ~~~ kierank Eurovision Sports (from the European Broadcasting Union) is pretty good if you can bypass the GeoIP. <http://www.eurovisionsports.tv/> Commentary free and 6 live streams (and one in HD) ------ smokey_the_bear Why don't they just broadcast it live and then again later? They repeat it again at about midnight anyway.

IPad Teardown - tomerico http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/1 ====== tomerico The most interesting thing in my opinion was the fact that 80% of the space was taken by two large batteries. No wonder thae battery is irreplaceable. ~~~ jrockway Open the battery door of your phone and you'll see a similar phenomenon. Except that you can replace the battery. ~~~ axod I'd really love to see some startups working on Battery technology. Batteries don't seem to have improved at all in the last 30 years. They absolutely suck. Surely someone out there can do better :/ ~~~ jrockway Uh, you don't remember the NiCd and NiMH batteries from a decade ago? I do. Those _really sucked_. ~~~ axod But the advances in battery technology are lame compared to CPU / memory / disk. In the last 30 years, we've gone from having a room full of hard disks storing 32GB, to a memory chip the size of your fingernail storing the same. In that same time period, batteries have improved a little bit. I understand it's a "harder" problem, but it'd really be nice if people were working on it. ~~~ berntb >>but it'd really be nice if people were working on it. Are you joking? Consider that electric cars are using similar tech as laptops; there is a _lot_ of battery research. (Google e.g. lithium air, I believe that is the latest great hope for getting rid of the oil dependency...) ~~~ axod I'm sure a few people are working on it ;) It's just depressing how much batteries suck. Why can't we buy AA batteries that last a month constant usage now? Probably because then we'd buy less batteries, and people are unlikely to buy more expensive batteries. Anyway, some new startups working to shake things up would be cool IMHO. ~~~ Daniel_Newby 50 milliamps for a month is equal to the energy produced by 50 grams of TNT. OK, so not kilotons, but not something you want to carry around either. ~~~ jrockway Current isn't energy, so no. ~~~ Daniel_Newby In the context of a ~1.5 V AA battery (the grandparent comment's lament), current over time is energy. Regarding internal resistance, the resistance of all materials drops when they get sufficiently hot, and even a volt or two is enough to get an arc going. Once that happens it will spread until the entire battery is converted to plasma. Given the energy densities the other commenter hoped for, the propagation rate is likely to be at the speed of sound, in other words a high- order explosion. Which is not surprising given that such a battery would amount to a stick of dynamite with electrode layers spaced every few molecules. ------ natch Sweet! Thanks for posting this (an hour before the other submission that hijacked your link by pointing to page two, I might add). The only bad thing is it was a bit deflating to see the thing disassembled while I'm still waiting for UPS's very slow (in subjective terms) delivery today. ~~~ alanthonyc I got a knock on the door a few minutes ago...it was the FedEx guy with my iPad _dock._ Still no iPad. ------ nnutter Guess we can own it? ------ PopScreenTeam That's cool. Very efficient assembly. ------ sahaj 2GB of RAM was what impressed me the most. I was expecting 1GB at the most. ~~~ pieter It's 256MB, apparently. The article says 2Gb(256MB) per die, for a total of 512MB, but <http://furbo.org/2010/04/03/benchmarking-in-your-lap/> tested it and it's 256MB. I'm not sure where iFixit gets the idea there would be two dies. ------ ck2 How long do you think until someone accidentally shorts or punctures those massive Li-Poly batteries. Isn't that battery type particularly prone to explosions (seriously!) ~~~ snom370 I guess that is one reason why the front display is made of quite thick glass (it seems) and the back is made of aluminum. You would need to give it quite a beating in order to damage the batteries. ------ pak Intriguing. Somebody secretly took apart the 3G model and found this: <http://i.imgur.com/It9To.png> ~~~ angstrom 4 iPads to a workstation. It's iPhones all the way down.

Microsoft Is on Its Way Bringing Internet to 3M People in Rural America by 2022 - rbanffy https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/12/microsoft-its-way-bringing-internet-3-million-people-rural-america-2022/153264/ ====== Bucephalus355 I watched a video of Nancy Pelosi speak to Google after the 2008 election. For every problem America had at the time, it seemed like her solution was “rural broadband!”. Not saying that’s bad at all, but this has been promised for a while by many people.

Andy Rutledge Redesigns NYTimes.com - ecaron http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php ====== faramarz Obviously he's not a NYT reader. I love the times. It's not broken. Their website is fantastic in every way. You can spend hours upon hours on it and digest more content, in whatever style you wish to navigate. It has a certain unity within the chaos. But it's not really chaos. The content is the layout. You won't find any other News organization who understands design more than NYT. They let the content design the layout, not the other way around. Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :| I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche. cc: Khoi Vinh ~~~ scott_s I feel the same. I think the NYT's online page is fantastic - so much so that I pay $16 a month for it. I think they do an excellent job of laying out pages online yet still feeling like a _newspaper_. I _like_ looking around the page for different stories, just as I would in a newspaper page. It's engaging, and I can't help but scan the whole page, read the headline, check out the picture captions. When I look at his blog-style page, my eyes just glaze over the headlines. The NYT App on the iPhone is basically his mobile mockup. And I've found that even on my iPhone, I'd rather look at the proper front page. ~~~ rationalbeats I thought it was $8 a week? ~~~ jonknee That's for the "All Access" package which nets you a tablet app and a smartphone app. The cheapest package is $3.75 a week. I would have subscribed, but they gave me a free year after introducing the paywall. ~~~ rationalbeats Actually I did not realize that. Thanks for that clarification. ------ adamhowell I know everybody hates ads, but it only reinforces the "naive businessmen" stereotype of designers when people say stuff like this: "Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages." That's like saying because you pay for magazines they also don't need to have ads. That's in no way at all how the content business works. ~~~ joeybaker Newspapers made the mistake of devaluing their ad inventory by increasing their supply. There's a really good – business – argument to be made for cutting the number of ad slots on the page. ~~~ mrkurt You shouldn't underestimate how much newspapers know about the economics of their inventory. In many ways, ad slots are price discrimination. Companies that want 100% share of voice (ie: no one else gets ads on the page) will pay a premium to get it. A small company may just buy a cheaper ad slot at the bottom of the page. They have thousands of permutations on how they can sell ads, and they _will_ shut off as many slots as necessary to get a premium campaign going. ------ patio11 It is easy to create a redesign for a website. It is less easy to pivot a billion-dollar business which has the agility of an aircraft carrier while she is sinking. If your answer to that question is "What do we really need the planes for, anyway?" and "I think the conning tower would look much better in teal.", you might find a wee bit of difficulty getting taken seriously. ~~~ revorad Exactly. One thing the author conveniently forgot to take into account is the performance of the current site. If you don't have access to actual usage data such as heatmaps, click rates, page browsing times, you are quite likely shooting yourself in the foot just for the sake of beautifying the website. He could argue that he was consciously only looking at the design aspect and that would also be a mistake. You can't isolate performance and design for a site. And when it comes to business, function takes precedence over beauty. ------ dotBen I was involved in a major redesign of the BBC News Website - when it went form a sigle column approach to the current two-dimensional layout. What is interesting about Andy's designs is that he's basically taken the current thinking in 'modern' news website design (two dimensions) back to the single column layout. I think this is a fundamental flaw in his design. People come to a news front page to see the editor's prioritization of the days news agenda. With a single column approach it is very difficult to editorially prioritize stories of similar importance. It works for blogs because they don't have an editorial prioritization as they usually sort by chronological order. Two-dimensional layouts, like NY Times and BBC, allow for editors to give several articles (perhaps a politics story, a business story and a sport story) equal visual importance. If you have a mainstream appeal you need to be able to give different audiences something of relevance. ------ arn The final result looks nice, but I hate these exercises, because if you are not fitting the same number of ads in the page, then you are not actually solving the same problem. You are solving a much easier problem, as almost all sites look better without ads. Also, there's a major divide between what people seem to think looks nice and what seems to succeed. The Huffington Post is the biggest example of recent success in the news realm. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/> Is that despite of its design or because of it? I don't know. It's hard to separate out the effect of the editorial content from presentation. ------ dredmorbius I don't like the final result, and Rutledge dismisses many of the realities of site design. I think the existing NYTimes site is among the examplars of good Web news site design. My principle gripe is that there's too much whitespace around the primary content. That's probably a consequence of both a 1920x1080 display (laptop), and highly aggressive ad blocking. (Yeah, yeah. I'll stop blocking ads when advertisers stop being complete f _ckwits about making annoying ads, and/or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.) There are a few valid points Rutlege makes. Many of the navigation elements are little (or never) used by me, including the left and top sidebars. _I want my microcontent.* That means a brief story summary. I have an RSS reader and subscribe to the NY Time site on it. I rarely read it. Why? _Because there's no microcontent._ For most news stories, the first paragraph is all I need (actually, in all absolute truth, the headline itself is far too much). If I want to read more, that paragraph really helps make the decision to do so. Jacob Nielson's covered this topic very well. Presenting the content on the homepage, while making for dense page, does make a good jump point. My eye can scan far more quickly than I can click back and forth through pages. The classic wastes of time for me on the Times are: \- Video content. Really, text tells the story far more quickly most of the time. A video feature can be a benefit (and for some rare stories it's hugely useful), but I _don't_ think it belongs on the homepage. \- The "Talking Heads" features. There's something in how these are set up that frequently makes for a compelling lede, but fails to deliver. The format just doesn't work for me. \- The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me. Rutledge has succeeded in vastly simplifying the Times's front page. _By removing most of the informational content and utility from it._ His design works for mobile (and as he notes, the Times has a good mobile site). It's not a good full-featured site design. ~~~ rjd Video content brings in 20x the ad rate of display ads. The news agency I worked for had a "push video for all content" stance because of this, I assume all other news sites have the same stance. You bring up the biggest argument of them all, I had it every day with the site I was responsible for. I'm a minimalist myself, and the person I reported to was a everything and the kitchen sink guy. We had some heated arguments followed by days of ignoring each other LOL I hated his approach, but our numbers did suggest many people landed to the front page each morning and read the whole thing. So having a lot of information and links on the page is very important. So assume your behavior validated as normal viewing behavior. Behavior changes through out the day though which sucks LOL And the most amazing thing was user testing is near useless, the demographics, experiences, behaviors are so vast. Even as noted the time of day has a huge effect on readers. So no matter what you do you isolate a community, so you compromise and compromise, and produce the most average pile of junk anyone has ever seen. But people understand it, sure they moan, but they get it. Go for the lowest common denominator. The times uses the motif of a news paper online, I guess because it's contextually people understand. I don't know if by design or accident, but there is a level if usability there because of the fact. Its messy but its reliable, and sometimes thats what design is about, not a great looking product, but something that does its job. ~~~ dredmorbius The lifesaver for me has been the "Remove This Permanently" Firefox plugin (well, that an the Flashblock plugin). If something's sufficiently annoying, I just find its xpath and remove it. Does this put me in the top fractional 1% of browsers? I have no doubt. Does this work for me? Yes. Does the 1% bit bother me? Not in the least. If anything, it's the final trump card in an argument I've had with web-design geeks that the end-user ultimately trumps style. Video very likely does bring in the money. I can live with that. But so long as I can rip out the offending content, I'm cool with it. I've also seen some other good/bad paper designs. In the Bay Area, I'm continually amazed at how good the _design_ of the SF Chronicle is (the content's of course gone fully to crap), and how poor that of the San Jose Mercury News (in the capital of Silicon Valley) is. I actually did an analysis of how much (and respectively little) content was presented above the fold in each design. Sadly each, even in their online incarnation, is becoming increasingly irrelevant and local-focus blogs/news services are emerging. On the topic -- if you haven't read John Sealy Brown's _Information Rules_, I'd highly recommend his section on the community-binding element of newspapers (and sports teams). It's a strong indictment of micro-targeted / individualized news streams. ~~~ rjd I've found ghostery and ad block plus do the trick for me :) ~~~ dredmorbius Cool, I've added ghostery, will play w/ it. ------ sjwright Andy's redesign is a disaster for various reasons stated by others, but this is possibly the most important and underlying reason for its failure: The existing design _visually demonstrates_ that _'there's a lot going on here'._ His does not. He failed to communicate the _good_ type of busyness in his re-imagining -- the redesign makes the site look like a five-articles-a-day blog. ~~~ snorkel Exactly. nytimes.com gives the visual impression of being dense with fresh content and that's what keeps news junkies coming back for more. His redesign not only lacks compelling visuals (huffingtonpost.com wins that category, sorry but tabloid style is here to stay) but also advertising: still a necessary evil, got to make room for the ads. ------ rjd Well having been in the person in charge of a major news website myself I can say we all have lovely designs like this pinned to the walls next our desks. And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique... I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really. Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news. And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business. He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next. The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack. ..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching. The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages. We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;) Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you. The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself. But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer. Infographics takes time, and its something that Google and Twitter have taken away from news journalists by the creation of an attention economy. You need to break a story immediately or you run the risk of not covering your production costs. You don't have time to crunch numbers, you are literally scrambling for eyeballs to stay in business. You can do it with editorials fine, and one trick I learnt quick was guest bloggers are GOLD. They often bring a crowd with them, they often have great researched stories, infographics you name it. So it became my goal to build those relationships. But alas 3 months without weekends, high pressure workload, high pressure targets, unyielding worldwide competition take a toll. So I quit. Theres still an open position for me if I want to return, but I don't think I'm ready just yet ;) EDIT: I don't mean to be harsh towards Andy. I love his work, and his intellectual exercise into improvement is great. I even forwarded it onto my old team for review. But what I guess my point is sometimes there a reason why things are crap, and fixing may be a hell of a lot harder the moment you try than you expected. So don't judge people/teams to harshly, instead offer a hand like Andy has done, sometimes they need it (especially in big media) ~~~ rjd Also probably worth mentioning while on the subject all my research and experience added up to designs that are very close to Al Jeezera. Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: <http://english.aljazeera.net> Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well. Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good. If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos. ~~~ alphakappa One of the best online newspaper designs I've seen recently is the Indian paper The Hindu (<http://www.thehindu.com/>). While most Indian newspapers will give you eye-cancer just by looking at them (ex: The Times of India, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country also has one of the most horrible online editions, plastered with spammy ads and horrible layout). The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. (The original design was like a 1995 webpage) Also up there in my list is NPR (<http://www.npr.org/>) and PBS (<http://www.pbs.org/>). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery. ~~~ nrbafna The Hindu looked bad too, a couple of years ago. They started testing a new interface at beta.thehindu.com for sometime before using the new interface for everyone. _The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign._ True. ------ donohoe Dear god, where to start. I worked on the Times web site for 7 years (dev, not design). Before I even saw his "redesign" I read his preamble. First, lets be clear, he is working from the wrong assumptions. He demonstrates clearly what is wrong with many news outlets but then he lumps the Times in with them too. Since his piece is about the Times I have to feel all assertions he makes are about that too, and not just media in general. Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. No its not. The business model is broken. Print is declining. Online revenue is being experimented with. Could be better, could be much worse. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. Please don't lump the Times in this category. They have a small amount of clearly stated _Editorial_ content. Separate from that is the _Opinion_ pages, and what is completely separate from that is _News_ (thats the bit where they try their damnedest to keep Opinion out of it and cite sources, provide analysis and present facts). And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days. We'll get to this part... In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise…which they call content. Actually that "broken profit model" isn't broken for some but thats another argument. If you have ever sat in a newsroom meeting, or a design review, or a meeting where product people spar with editorial who spar with developers you would realize that dignity is a big deal. A big _FUCKING_ deal. You might not like the fruits of that but don't never say they don't give a shit. The Times prizes content to a fault. In an effort to disguise and mitigate the fact that they have little idea how to publish digital content properly—often sneakily called "differentiation"—some news outlets release apps for digital devices. These apps typically (but not always) do a better job of presenting content and facilitating navigation, but they’re a band aid on a festering abdominal wound. Digital media is simply digital media; if you do it right you publish once and it works anywhere. If you’re using an app to deliver content, you’re doing it wrong. First, its not clear that this criticism is Times specific. However its still wrong. I've been in plenty of meetings with bright people from inside and outside the company where we started off with the goal that, as he put it, "if you do it right you publish once and it works anywhere". It didn't work. These were not just "old media" types either - these are talented people, some of whom who don't even read the print edition. _gasp_ Its something thats very easy to say - hell I wish it were true. It is not. Devices, apps, platforms, whatever. They have strengths and weaknesses. You can not have one magic solution for all. This is a crappy comparison but its a bit like saying you have one single car for every type of terrain - same car for soccer-mom and deer-hunter alike! Sweet! Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc...) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, ...oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually. Sadly, this is very much an example of a person looking in. I'm not sure how to counter this. Its simply a matter of not knowing what happens on the 7th floor of the Times Building. Nor could he. However I can only assure you that a very dedicated group of Designers are actively working on NYTimes.com and they know their shit. There is definitely a crap load of work to do to fully redesign a web site that was last done in 2005 - but it does happen. A couple of URLs come to mind which are not illustrated in his piece: _Opinion_ (redesigned last year) <http://www.nytimes.com/opinion/> [http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/25/how- budget-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/25/how-budget-cuts- will-change-the-black-middle-class?ref=opinion) <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26brooks.html> _Times Skimmer_ <http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/#/Top+News> _Books / Best Sellers List_ [http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/combined-print- and...](http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/combined-print-and-e-book- fiction/list.html) _T Magazine_ (CHECK THIS ONE OUT - you seem to have missed it Andy!) <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/t-magazine/index.html> <http://www.nytimes.com/gst/tmagazine/video/index.html> _Dealbook Blog_ <http://dealbook.nytimes.com/> _Business Day Sectionfront_ <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/index.html> _LENS Blog_ <http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/> _Times Machine_ <http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser> _Opinionator Blog_ (my favorite design) <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/> Slide Show (Great Homes) [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/20/greathomesandd...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/20/greathomesanddestinations/20110721_eastberlin.html#6) So whats next... well too much actually. I do not have the time nor the patience to dig at all of Andys points. Im sure not all of them are bad, but there is enough there to make me wonder whats wrong with this guy. Again, he is a professional. I am sure he has had critics of his work, and he knows that there was an inner process where a lot of those points were brought up and shown not to hold water. He is now doing the same thing. So I'll leave it on one final point. Mobile Sites. Its an example of what happens when you don't know that the Times is aware of his point and we discussed it and there was a damn good reason we made the decision that we made. What am I talking about? He shows the iPhone with the full NYT homepage and has the caption "Um, are you frisking kidding me?". In other words why not a mobile site. Well, very simple. The iPhone is capable of rendering and interacting with the full page. It was the first browser to do so - it don't require a lite version. You could tap, zoom, pinch, drag and get the full depth of the page. Other browsers - like those for Nokia, RIM etc couldn't handle that. This was talked over to death. There were compelling arguments about going down this road - or not. In the end, the decision was made to NOT redirect those advanced browsers to the mobile site. You can still go to m.nyt.com if you like, we just wont force you too. but it should not require anything more than a media query fetching different CSS and perhaps some additional scripting so as to simply restyle the content experience Andy does say that all you need is media quires for the CSS and such and bingo. Well, no. No its not that simple. If you want to redo the homepage for a specific mobile experience then you probably want to serve different sized images, maybe not have some Flash stuff on the iPhone, maybe drop the bandwidth intensive stuff that works well on desktop. CSS media queries does not solve the problem. It is never that easy and shame on your for saying so. You are a professional. You should know better. Bad Andy. Bad. No biscuit for you. Man, this makes me bitter. _RANT OFF_. ~~~ palish _"In the end, the decision was made to NOT redirect those advanced browsers to the mobile site. You can still go to m.nyt.com if you like, we just wont force you too."_ Thank you so much. Seriously. It's extremely rare for it to ever be enjoyable to use a "mobile" site on an iPhone. At least for me. I feel like sending you a cake. I wish there were some way to disguise the iPhone as a PC, so that no website automatically redirects me to any mobile version ever. EDIT: For example, I just got an email saying I've been tagged in a photo on Facebook. So I go to facebook.com on my iPhone, and they've managed to _completely break scrolling_ in their mobile version. I literally cannot scroll down on any page. 100% certain, and 100% aggravating --- and as far as I can tell, no way for me to get to the full site. ~~~ donohoe I agree completely. I'm not sure its best for everyone but that is also my preference too. Send a cake. I'm in Seattle now but you could send a cake to the designers on the 7th floor. NYTimes.com Design Group c/o Angela Rutherford The New York Times 620 8th Ave (7th floor) New York, NY 10018 Tell them to invite the Developers from the 8th floor too, and the Interactive News Group on the 2nd. Add a brief note on any design/ux tweaks you'd like :) _Cake = (!Lie) ? Motivation : Lie_ ~~~ graupel Wouldn't it be even better if we could send the cake to one floor, and have the designers, developers, and content team all work together? :) ~~~ donohoe I couldn't agree more. If we had that I might have stayed - or gotten a hell of a lot more done. ------ lukeschlather >The Times politics page. I think the object of the game must be to fit as much “content” onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information. If only the reader could learn to ignore 60% of what’s here, she might have a chance at a pleasant experience. Please stop helping. What you’ve got here is not content, but noise. You can't get a good coverage of world events in the number of items that Rutledge wants. The world is noisy, and what Rutledge is suggesting vastly oversimplifies. I'm sure it would convert wonderfully, raise ad revenue, all that. It wouldn't be good journalism. Even if the NYT is full of pointless noise, it's still better than a handful of painstakingly crafted articles. A handful of pretty, well-formed articles cannot accurately reflect a disordered world. If the NYT isn't noisy it's not doing its job. ------ jamesteow As one of the designers of a major news organization redesign, it's very nice to do a pretty page but to honestly think you can get away with no ads is a not only a losing battle but one that doesn't take the needs of the client seriously. I also like how the NYT's website looks like a newspaper with a variety of content. The redesign looks like a Wordpress template. ------ natesm The iPhone example is funny because Apple themselves used the New York Times as the example in their "it's not the mobile Internet ... it's just the Internet" advertisement. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzV-W_6WOm0> ------ catshirt so, remove the ads... and replace them with infographics? forgive me for being crass but this whole post seems naive. don't get me wrong, it's pretty; but we're talking about the new york times. i think this is more accurately "andy rutledge redesigns nyt for andy rutledge". which is fine, but not at all the same thing. "broken news" is a big claim. i'm not sure a sleek blog theme is going to fix it. ------ verisimilitude I really think this looks amazing. It would likely function amazingly well, too. However, for this to work, you have to eliminate the space for ads. To deal with this, Rutledge suggests "Quality news is subscription only. You pay for valuable information. Fluff you get for free." I somehow don't think it's that simple. If you slam the digital door shut (much more than it is now at the Times), and only allow subscriber access, you'll do two things: (1) vastly reduce your readership; if you want to go back to showing ads, you can't, because you no longer can brag about the vast numbers reading your website daily (2) create a hyper-focused pirating scheme around disseminating NYTimes content for free I love news. I love good reporting. When I'm no longer a student, I'll pay to get the Times at home. BUT, we've got a serious problem here; this design, while well thought-out, fails to acknowledge that it can't exist (eliminating ads) without changing the industry (changing readership drastically). I very much look forward to seeing this movie: [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/page_one_inside_the_new_york...](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/page_one_inside_the_new_york_times/) which touches on these issues. ------ rayboyd Martin Belam (IA guy at the Guardian) wrote an excellent rebuttal to this yesterday. [http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/07/andy-news- redux.ph...](http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2011/07/andy-news-redux.php) ------ josscrowcroft Am I the only one who thinks his 'redesign' just looks like any other blog? ~~~ parallel "Newer isn’t better. Better is better." Sometimes it takes courage to put forward a design that doesn't have the glamour of the new. Things that work well can often be boring. EDIT: quote is from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2803681> ~~~ int3rnaut As a total noob in comparison to most readers of HN, I have to totally agree with this sentiment--not that it's a noob idea but I feel like there are very skilled and brilliant people here that want to show the world their amazing talents and sometimes lose sight of things. It reminds me of what I always see on that show with Chef Gordon Ramsey where he's always telling these hot shot Chefs to stop being so cocky with their creations and that simple is often better; no one wants a 58 flavour chocolate creme brulee steak muffin. Better is Better, but again I think we have to remember, that it's all subjective. P.S. Don't let the down votes discourage you. :) ------ prayag The problem with such a post is that it violates the first principle of user centered design. _Talk to your users._ Did anyone tell him that NYT is broken? Did he go and ask a single user who goes to NYT everyday to figure out what his problems are? Or saw him use the site. It's easy to re-design something from outside in. It's much harder to design it inside out when you have a more complete picture of what users are doing and have a rough idea of what they want. ------ solipsist Popularity has nothing to do with news If you've been on the internet before, you'll know this is not true. ------ flocial The design has its moments but I actually like NYT. The only thing I would like more is fixed dimensions for items on the front page, maybe 2 column layout with both sides perfectly aligned per item. The draw of newspaper sites is both the quality content within articles but the curation of articles themselves so having everything in uniform lists is too confusing. Additions I wouldn't mind are most tweeted or tweeted by your friends type social media integration. If design was the only thing killing the newspaper industry their problems would be solved. ------ tjogin I think Andy's design is very stylish and presents the content in a tasteful way. I have no significant qualms about his design in any way. When he goes into business territory, however, he loses his shit. This is the money quote: "Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully- presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times." People didn't pay for news in the olden times. They paid for printing and distribution, and then the advertisement covered the rest, with some tiny variations on that theme. Not significantly different from today. If you were to make the content subscription only, and some publications have tried this recently, you'd lose 90% of your readers. That means also losing 90% of your ad revenue. Now the remaining 10% of your readers need to make up for that loss. That makes it a rather expensive subscription, losing a lot more subscribers, and around it goes, the vicious circle. That doesn't mean digital news isn't horribly broken, it is. Just that making it subscription only isn't the solution. ~~~ jonknee ... The NYT uses a subscription model these days (though you get a handful of articles for free every month). That's what he was talking about. He was still wrong from a business point of view though. ------ yarone Andy's designs look beautiful, but I'm reminded of the old saying: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy". I'm afraid that if you take his designs as a starting point, and revise them based on the needs of the NYTimes and the expectations of its millions of visitors, they would require a large number of changes and would more closely resemble the current NYTimes.com ------ brownie The one thing I dislike (on the main page at least) is the separation of news and opinion/analysis. I can't think of many times where I've visited a news site and wanted to read only opinion or only news, but I can think of times where I've visited a site to read about a particular story - and read related articles that happen to be opinions/analysis. ------ petercooper I suspect that while this is a reasonable and logical redesign, it misses out on some non-rational behavior of the majority of people who read news. I know that, non rationally, I quite like a bit of "jumble" from my newspapers and news sites so I can just "wander" around from thing to thing for a while. The redesign showed here turns it more into a blog and I think I'd have trouble wandering around it.. I'd need to know what I was looking for. I dislike the Daily Mail but I know their site is almost entirely driven by numbers and what catches on (and what doesn't): <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/> \- it has a certain formula to it but it still has an element of randomness and chaos because, I suspect, that's what readers are going for, whether we like it or not. ------ webjunkie He designed a blog... the whole of NYTimes ist not a blog. ------ dasil003 Andy is a talented designer, but his style shows through a bit too strongly here. He knows how to utilize whitespace to create an aesthetically pleasing visual flow, but I don't think he pays enough respect the essence of a newspaper—namely _density_ of information. ------ newhouseb To me it is incredibly important that an abstract is presented up front before I click through to the article. For other news sites (like CNN) that are more about breaking news and less about well written and researched journalism - just the headline is fine (because chances are the article won't say much more than the headline). NYT's strength is that it is a professional journalistic organization and thus taking words _off_ the page would only serve to betray the value that the NYT offers. ------ rs Not to be a pain, the design is good, but there's no place to actually put an ad, considering the advertisements are one of their sources of revenue ~~~ code_duck Indeed, tastefully weaving ads into a design is on of the prime challenges of web designers in the real world. ------ ImperatorLunae _I think the object of the game must be to fit as much “content” onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information._ That's just what paper newspapers look like. I don't think that's an accident, either. ------ danso "Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages. Story pages could still have one or two tastefully- presented ads, but preservation of the content is what will keep readers happy, engaged, and willing to continue paying their subscriptions…just like in olden times." Rutledge hasn't apparently visited the NYT often and maybe hasn't picked up a newspaper in awhile. 1\. Not all of the NYT's traffic is through subscribers: it lets the average user access at least 20 articles a month, and its "paywall" is very permeable. 2\. Even when you pay full price for an issue at the stand, that newspaper still comes with ads. Subscriptions have not accounted for the entirety of newspapers and magazines revenues in a while... ------ niels_olson A few years ago, I laid out head-to-head comparisons of the top newspapers in the US with and without adblock and noscript. NYTimes, on a screen, is easily the best newspaper. Unfortunately, the pressure of jamming more and more links and stories above the fold seems to have eroded the NYTimes usability. [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0002nk#above-fold) We should do a poll too: I think a lot of netizens would support NYTimes to the same degree they do NPR, but I don't think the average netizen donates $260 to NPR annually (the price NYTimes is asking for their tablet app). ------ MrAlmostWrong There is no need to redesign when you can read the NYT in basically any format of your choosing with the NYT Skimmer: <http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/?pagewanted=all#/Top+News> ------ prawn Design is always so much easier when you don't have to incorporate ad spots. Very naive. ------ code_duck This is in the vein of just about every 'xx person redesigns yy site'. The elaborate comments from others have done a better job than I could of laying out the details. I don't know why people insist on publishing articles such as these. Oddly, as in in this case, often they end up with a pleasant, but rather common looking, design which is blissfully unaware of all the different constraints and special issues that guided creation of the original. The conclusion of this article is a rather bland design, in my opinion, which looks like 50 other sites out there and has no space for ads. Hardly worth the wall of text created to herald it. ------ RossDM Those look nice, but I still prefer Google News' two-column layout. I can't stand when news organizations try to force everything into a single Twitter- like stream (Google News included). ------ spullara Not entirely different than Yahoo! News is designed on the desktop and on mobile. <http://news.yahoo.com> ~~~ acqq Exactly, there is already a news site that functions very good on mobile, and it's named Yahoo News. I'd say it's very probable that the author was aware of it. ------ spacemanaki "If you’re using an app to deliver content, you’re doing it wrong." He's completely wrong about this. I love the NYT Android app. I can start it at home, while I have decent coverage, and am then able to read the paper any where I am throughout the day, including the subway, because it caches every story on sections you open, even if you don't open those stories. It's one of my favorite Android apps because of this. ------ sgdesign While we're on the subject, I recently did a news site design myself, even though it's not my main area of expertise (I'm more of a UI designer). I can attest that news sites are probably among the hardest sites to design, since there are so many parameters (and yes, ad units are very important!). Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback on the design: <http://thejournal.ie/> ------ prawn Khoi Vinh's just responded with, in part: "I’m purposefully not identifying this person or the project or providing a link back to the redesign itself, mostly because I think it’s counter- productive to continue to reward this effort with more unwarranted attention. To me, it felt less like constructive criticism than link-baiting, and so I have tried to avoid making any public comment." ------ Jason757435 Anyone else see the irony in the fact that the very bottom of Rutledge's web page where this article is found is improperly formatted on the iPhone (background color not extended far enough to the right to cover all offered links). Petty? Yes, but if you're going to blast away at NYT, you better make sure your house is in order. ------ antidaily _Digital news is broken_ /rolls eyes. ------ TamDenholm Got to say that is a really beautiful redesign. Someone go and make this functional or i will... ------ karl_nerd Oliver Reichenstein, a swiss/japanese news designer, has been writing about some similar thoughts: <http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/business-class- news/> ------ benjash Seems odd that he points out that the business model is broken. Yet, doesn't make any room for advertising on his redesigns. The main source of income for most newspapers. ------ robgough Why haven't news sites like this tried the "spotify" model. Where you can pay to have the ads removed? ------ AverageAtasi Looks ok, but I'd rather them use shitty design than take advice from a right- wing asshole. ------ bryanallen22 For very brief, clean, non partisan news check out 24in60.com. It saves me lots of time and makes news fun for me to read. ~~~ bryanallen22 Hm. This must have looked like self promotion or something -- it wasn't. (It does sort of read that way.) Sorry.

Your Product Needs a Soul - enra http://www.arcticstartup.com/2010/02/12/your-product-needs-a-soul/ ====== skmurphy "Even with its limited use in actual warfare, the katana was the most valuable possession of a samurai, the customer." reminded me of a quote by Fred Brooks (of author of Mythical Man Month): "A toolmaker succeeds as, and only as, the users of his tool succeed with his aid. However shining the blade, however jeweled the hilt, however perfect the heft, a sword is tested only by cutting. That sword-smith is successful whose clients die of old age." ------ cwan A similar but a bit less abstract post from Seth Godin: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/the-brand- th...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/the-brand-the-package- the-story-and-the-worldview.html) ------ jdietrich I'm sure there's a great insight in that article somewhere, but I stopped reading as soon as I spotted the words "soul", "katana" and "zen". It's just more cliché than I can bear.

An idea (to fix public transport schedules). - sahillavingia http://sahillavingia.com/blog/an-idea-to-fix-public-transport-schedules/ ====== andrewem Boston's MBTA seems to be leading the way with this kind of information, and with making it open to developers. <http://mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/> lists dozens of web sites and mobile apps which use data about the MBTA's buses and trains. The MBTA's bus data (via <http://www.nextbus.com>, the giant in this industry) tends to be pretty good, though sometimes buses disappear from listings and reappear, and sometimes the predictions aren't very accurate, but they're definitely useful. Subway train data is only fed into the system once a train leaves the end of the line, so there tends not to be data for inbound trains for the first several stops. Commuter rail data is still different, because trains are so much less frequent and people tend to aim to be on a particular train which they know based on its scheduled time. Other transit agencies are much more closed about their data. For instance, DC's WMATA requires you to sign up for an API key and access all data using their web services, even though their bus data comes from NextBus so you'd think they could let you hit NextBus's web services for their data. There's also the brand-new GTFS-realtime spec from Google, which is a Protocol Buffer format for getting vehicle positions and so on very efficiently. The idea is that you'd be able to get the current locations of all the vehicles in a large system, like the MBTA, in a single request. (Shameless plug: one of the MBTA apps listed in the app catalog is my web site <http://www.mbtainfo.com>) ~~~ pavel_lishin The DART in Dallas allows you to look up the real-time location of the next bus inbound to your station. Combine that with a public transportation system that actually goes somewhere useful in a reasonable amount of time at useful times, and you might have something interesting. ------ yellowbkpk Just about every bus/train will already have a GPS device on it (to help dispatchers and for safety), it's just a matter of convincing the transit authority to release that data into the public. Minneapolis's MetroTransit, for example, has the ability to do realtime tracking but chose to go with a "n minutes until next bus" system rather than show moving dots on a map. ------ jrockway This is done in many cities with Chicago being one of the largest: <http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp> It really changes how you use public transportation because now you don't have to stand around waiting for the bus or train. ------ singingwolfboy Nextbus.com already does this with several public transportation systems, including Boston and San Francisco. I'm actually in the process of putting together a service to alert riders when the bus is about to arrive, based on that data. It's still in beta, it only supports Boston, it's ugly as all hell and probably broken in places, but if anyone wants to look around, it's live here: <http://www.buscalling.com> PS: if anyone wants to beta-test, let me know! ------ thingie Well, if our local transit company has a GPS module in every its vehicle on a route and can watch all of them nearly real-time ("nearly" is something like updates every 30 seconds), and we are in Eastern Europe, then any transit authority can. There is no need to "crowdsource" it. On the other hand, they aren't very good in communicating the information they have. The best thing we have is this: <http://idsjmk.jrbrno.cz/> and Google Maps. There are another problems that are not mentioned at all in the article. Service irregularities, either planned or not. There are frequent tram track repairs, street closures… So, what changes are there on my route, if any? Was the stop that I'm planning to get on moved behind the corner? Where _exactly_ can I get on? And exactly means exactly, cellphone GPS can't tell you decisively if you are at the right side of the road, for example. And that is a crucial difference if you are planning to get on a bus. And what if I'm waiting for a tram, and there was an accident somewhere and all the trams are delayed. What now? Was a reserve bus dispatched to replace it? When will it arrive? And where, if it's a segregated tramway and the bus can't use the stop? ------ alephNaught This was done at univ. of michigan as a student project: <http://mbus.pts.umich.edu/> ~~~ iqster Thanks for the link to this. Very cool! While the OP describes a crowd-sourced solution, this seems to be a setup where 1 GPS is attached per vehicle. On seeing this, I have a reaction that I'd like to share. Someone at this University had vision. They seem to have less than 20 buses in their fleet. However, we're still talking about a serious investment (It isn't just the phones, it is also data plans. They might be using their campus wifi network which would significantly lower their costs). I've tried doing this in _other_ places some time ago. However, it was impossible to get anyone to invest in such a thing. What do you do when you are in this situation? I've done mock-ups, buying initial hardware with my own $$, but still. I guess in our society, pretty much everything comes down to economic value. On one hand, it makes sense. On the other, it makes me sad. </rant> ------ antpicnic In the Seattle area, we have OneBusAway. You can access it from the web, by texting, phone, and via apps for Android,iPhone, and WP7. OneBusAway started as a graduate student project at the University of Washington. <http://onebusaway.org/> ------ gavreh This already exists in Chicago <http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/eta/eta.jsp> / <http://www.transitchicago.com/traintracker/> ------ nomatteus Toronto has this for streetcars and buses. It's run by NextBus, which seems to run GPS for a bunch of cities (<http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/agencySelector.jsp>). They offer open access to this information through an API (see toronto.ca/open). I built something to watch the streetcars on a map using that API: <http://totransit.ca/> My coworker and I were talking about letting people "check in" to specific streetcars, and tag variables such as "how full is the streetcar?", but I can't see many (any?) people actually doing that. ------ darklajid I thought about this mobile solution as well, as a way to get at data that in my (not humble anymore. Geez, just open up) opinion should be given away by the companies running the service. I like the UK datasets. I'm coming from Germany. Although everyone complains about public transportation (and the Deutsche Bahn especially) it generally works. If you're at a bus stop, you generally get a nice timetable with all stations and arrival times for each of them. Now I'm in Tel Aviv: If I'm lucky I've got a plan that shows me the route and ~maybe~ when the bus leaves the first stop. If I'm far away, this is useless.. ------ wallflower Ljuba Miljkovic wrote an interesting thesis for his iSchool and implemented an app which I think is one of the best designed out there. [http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Trans...](http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Transporter_Thesis_1.pdf) "Transporter: Real-time Public Transit Designed for the Bay Area" [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time- public/...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time- public/id373726282?mt=8) ------ brianbreslin I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this. I see the transit company/department as the customer. In reality they already gps track all their fleets in the US, its just a matter of exposing the data in a digestible format. If they opened up APIs, some enterprising individual could build apps on top of it, and sell the apps or run ads across. Sidenote, what about the security issues related to sharing this data? Are there any? ~~~ pavel_lishin > I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this. People whose jobs are relatively inflexible when it comes to arrival times would pay. My girlfriend basically has to guess and hope that the train runs on time in order to make it to work - it would be super nice to pull up a site when we wake up and see the current locations of the trains, and an estimated arrival time based on actual data, rather than the MTA's dreams and wishes. It would also be great to know whether a train has recently left the station at night - should I wait 2 minutes for the next train, or should I just start biking and arrive at my destination before the train even shows? ------ mojotoad For the Pittsburgh region (currently) there's the Tiramisu iPhone app: <http://www.tiramisutransit.com/> ------ Benjo The Metro Transit system in Minneapolis/St. Paul realtime info: <http://www.metrotransit.org/nextrip.aspx> The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do. ~~~ yellowbkpk What would you want it to do? I may know some people that could change it... ~~~ Benjo I use it to check bus times on my way to and from work. There are two different buslines I can wait for, and no easy way to check which one will be coming first - I have to load each page and compare. Also, loading the site on my android phone almost always results in an error the first time - forcing me to load the page again. I haven't taken the time to debug this yet, but it's always annoying when I'm trying to check the bus times on the go. ~~~ yellowbkpk Try using <http://metrotransit.org/map/> to solve your first problem (click a stop and it will show NexTrip for all the bus routes that stop there). That doesn't solve your second problem though: I have the same problems (and my wife does on her iPhone). I have an Android app started ... maybe I should finish it. Is it worth $0.99 to you? :) ~~~ Benjo The two routes don't come to the same stop. I'm looking for an easy answer to "Should I wait on Hennepin or Nicollet?" without waiting for multiple pages to load on my phone. I'd definitely pay $1 if I thought the app would address those two problems. Someone has on open source site for just the NexTrip API, but I haven't had success with it yet: <http://metrotransitapi.appspot.com/> ------ Triumvark After reading the problems, I expected we were looking for dynamically generated transit maps (excluding all lines/stops that aren't directly between you and your destination), coupled with a statistical curve of actual arrival times at each stop. GPS is useful, but when planning a route in advance, I'd prefer to know the above. ------ untog There's a pilot trial going on in NYC, too: <http://bustime.mta.info/> Has API access and everything. I look forward to it being deployed further, though I suppose it won't make it to the subways owing to them being underground. ~~~ dmbass There are a lot of stations (numbered lines only, I think) that have "time to next subway" signs which I've found to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if there is an API for subway info, but they run so regularly (~5 mins or less during the day and 30 mins at late night) that it's generally not that important to get that info. I'm not going to take a taxi because the subway is 15 mins away. ------ cpeterso In the San Francisco Bay Area, BART has excellent (and accurate!) real-time schedules and APIs: <http://m.bart.gov/> <http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/> ------ whalesalad <http://hea.thebus.org> \-- honolulu does it! Try stop ID's like 2088 or 297 (right by the university of hawaii) ------ kolinko There are quite a few solutions like this already. Warsaw/Polend has that in some trams and in Subway. I also something like this in Hamburg... ------ tantalor UCSD's shuttle service has a nice example of this: <http://www.ucsdbus.com/>

Front Toward Enemy – When a “Killer Feature” Becomes Friendly Fire - tygertec https://medium.com/@tygertec/front-toward-enemy-when-a-killer-feature-becomes-friendly-fire-972021d00ab3 ====== tygertec For those without a Medium sub: [https://www.tygertec.com/front-toward-enemy- killer-feature-f...](https://www.tygertec.com/front-toward-enemy-killer- feature-friendly-fire/)

Ask HN: Register Delaware C corp electronically? - EleventhSun Clerky say that they can register Delaware C corps electronically, however on the site corp.delaware.gov, I can only find some pdfs to mail in, and those pdfs don&#x27;t seem to render correctly.<p>From the Clerky site: &quot;In order to ensure reliability, we electronically file your certificate of incorporation with the Delaware Secretary of State. We typically return the filed certificate of incorporation to you within 2-3 business days.&quot; ====== swampthing I'm pretty sure that isn't available to the general public, unfortunately.