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Publishers: Forget the content, here's your business model | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"one of the best, if not the best, news/article filter out there. ... if you remove the coding and start-up articles ... a super-interesting collection of smart writing and interesting thinking.\"Rather ironic."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So... the answer is stop publishing and switch to aggregating?Sorry, but I'm not seeing how building a better filter enables you to raise the money for an investigation that uncovers secret NSA wiretaps."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Some problems:That model has minimal cost of entry. Therefore an unpredictable and vast number of competitors, therefore high risk. Google could decide to do it one day on a whim and with their resources they would do it better and bam! whatever time/money you spent on it would be a loss.Not sure what you mean by publisher and content, all your examples hn, digg, delicious I wouldn't consider content publishers at all. The traditional content publishers such as newspapers don't have the culture, management, payscales to attract and support large teams of top-notch devs. btw newspapers (and other content producers) already do a lot of filtering. Might not be that noticeable because the crap that gets \"downvoted\" never makes it to print/online and they filter for \"mainstream\" not intelligent, well-read, young entrepreneurs.Maybe a great idea for a new, young, small startup. As a model for existing content publishers, not so sure."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The New York Times and other media companies are filters. They pick the stories that go on their front page, they decide where to dedicate news-gathering resources, they have an editorial voice..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What's he's talking about really is strong filtering.Current filtering systems weight user contributions equally which means trolls and other junk get in there easily."
}
] | en | 0.881377 |
Coding Horror: The Girl Who Proved P = NP | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "even with computers that operated at, say .. the speed of light. As opposed to our modern day computers, driven by steam and turtles."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Summary: Jeff quotes what several blogs (and XKCD) have said about P = NP. As such, he gets it mostly right, but doesn't add much to the discussion."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We often complain that certain link-baiting, populist posts are not worthy of HN's front page. The retort is usually along the lines that while the post is of little interest, the discussion around it may be valuable. I hope that we can reach that standard here. Just as the post adds little to anyone's understanding of tractability, flaming the post for that fact adds little to HN :-)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you don't feel like proving that P=NP, a proof that there is no proof of P=NP within our current systems of mathematics would be insanely important."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Jeff Atwood should be prohibited from ever putting the letter \"N\" next to the letter \"P\"."
}
] | en | 0.969537 |
The 2005 screenwriting book that’s taken over Hollywood | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As others have pointed out the concept of a more detailed screenplay structure has been around for a very long time, and typically pretty well understood by working screenwritters.I remember reading about the 9 act structure in the 90s (can't remember if this is the guy who started it, but I think so):\nEdit corrected link (thanks to hncommenter13 below): http://web.archive.org/web/19961103105817/http://dsiegel.comThe problem with modern blockbuster films as described in the article is for the most part not because of a better understanding of structure but because of less understanding. Perhaps poor writers are using tools like Save the Cat to believe they understand writing better then they do. Or perhaps studio executives (who are notoriously near pathologically risk averse to new ideas) reading new screenplays use a poor understanding of Save the Cat to validate perspective scripts.I can say for sure that many modern movies, particularly summer movies, are absolutely not following these structures, good or bad. Mainstream narrative filmmaking always follows the hero's journey, whether your hero is a neurotic writer in new york, a young black girl in New Orleans, or a genetically modified super hero.Summer blockbusters these days are focused on something different. Visceral response. Well structured storytelling (whether you think that's "Save the Cat" or something else), is about stories and human relatable emotions and characters. Recent films have started focusing more on the roller coster ride of the visuals, and will do any distortion of the story necessary to motivate a visceral impact on the audience. Good storytelling takes a second seat to putting the audience into the most intense situations possible.This has been helping get people into the theaters because the trailers for these types of films make them seam very exciting. But I would argue that Hollywood is struggling right now - the visual effects industry in particular - due to the audience getting wise to these ploys. A bad film is still a bad film, formalized story telling structure won't save you. Even less so if you ignore it so that you can have a bigger explosion.Want to be a good screenwriter? First learn how to write a story. And then guess what? You can still have explosions too."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I haven't read "Save the Cat" so I can't speak to it specifically, but the article doesn't do a great job of selling me on the idea that the book is responsible for the sameness of movie plots considering that for all the examples of "beats" given in the article, I can think of dozens and dozens of movies that hit those beats well before 2005 (when the supposedly ruinous screenplay manual was published).If anything, it seems like the book was just clearly documenting what nearly every writer was already doing anyway, in some cases basically as far back as three act storytelling has existed (even prior to movies existing at all)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "There's a sidebar that has the detailed outline, also called a "beat sheet".http://www.slate.com/content/slate/sidebars/2013/07/the_save...If you read that, you will notice that the arc of the hero almost exactly matches the one of the prototypical hero from many cultures and mythologies, as explained by John Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_FacesThere are just so many elements one can make a compelling story out of."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I may be somewhat odd for a professional filmmaker in this, but my reaction is less "aargh, no, my pure pure art!" and more "Hmm, interesting, I wonder if I have time to try that out?"Frameworks work well for visual design, adverts, web design, music (to a certain extent), so I can't see a problem with them for films.Of course, if one framework becomes the One Possible Framework, that's more of an issue. But there are enough filmmakers out there willing to try seriously wierd shit that I don't think that's a problem yet.For example, David Lynch is working on a new feature film right now. Call me crazy, but I don't think he'll be sticking to Save The Cat's formula."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This reminds me of pop music. At some point you realize most of the songs on the radio are "verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus" with only subtle variations in structure.But in the end, I don't actually think that's a bad thing. There is a lot of variations you can do, even within such a limiting structure. Summer blockbusters are the pop music of movies. And just like pop songs, even if you know the overall structure you can still be surprised and entertained throughout.And, just like music, it doesn't mean that there can't be things that break the mold entirely, even if they aren't quite as popular. There's always going to be someone out there pushing the boundaries, and there's always going to be someone really skilled who makes something really popular that doesn't conform to the formula at all."
}
] | en | 0.914912 |
Don't launch a company, launch an experiment | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I feel like a lot of people use the term \"startup\" as a cover for \"unbootstrappable\". If your idea requires big-league success (think twitter), or is otherwise a failure, surrounding yourself with buzzwords will not escape you from reality.My personal opinion is to make an MVP that has a revenue model from day one, and by releasing early and often grow your product while being paid to do so. If no one buys it, stop. It's not as sexy as a social media home run, but it just might make you some money without VC intervention."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When I was in bschool, one of the founders of Aardvark came and gave a talk about their early days. What it boiled down to was a few super-smart guys taking EXACTLY the strategy prescribed in this article (namely getting a landing page up and manually handling the backend processes).They eventually sold the company to Google for $50MM. Great for them. Where is Aardvark today?I said it then and I'll say it again- experimentation is for laboratories, not for businesses. At the core of a business is a product or service that people exchange money for because it solves a problem. Too many startups set out with the mission of meeting their founders' needs (ie, quick money and fame) as opposed to any real societal needs. The irony is that if the founders worked from the consumer need backward and took a more long-term approach, their chances of success would likely go up substantially. The Lean Startup Method to me involves some mix of laziness, lack of vision, and giving up on your product and vision prematurely.The faster your product proves viable, the easier it will be for competitors to rip it off anyway (Groupon, anyone?). You want real, sustained traction? Do the things that others are too lazy or unwilling to do because they are too hard or involve some risk.I'm not advocating over-engineering, and it is great that development tools have progressed to the point that designers and developers can perform experiments for free while honing their skills. But to put an initial idea out there and let the public bat it around and bastardize it until it has some weird mixture of users and you don't even understand your own product is a path to nowhere. Remember- tools are merely used to complete a task. Let the task dictate the tools, and not the other way around."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a great example and a good philosophy, but I think there is a common false belief that not having users means that there isn't a need.I think there is a lot of social stuff going on that leads to a particular service or idea being successful. Its more about trends and social networks than people realize.There are lots of services which are similar to very popular ones but get little traffic. Its not that their idea isn't good, its just that their service isn't popular.I'm pretty sure that with the right marketing and social happenstance this could become a popular service and make quite a bit of Google Adwords money.Which is not to say that the concept of an experiment is not a good one or that people should beat dead horses."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I was surprised to see the experiment deemed a failure after only one week. Do most folks feel that one week is sufficient time to ascertain this? One week seems hardly enough to even start propagating a website through Google... ?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Good article as a reminder what should you focus on.\nThat's one of my New Year's resolutions about code projects. To show something in quite early stage of development - instead of trying to get everything done. \nHaving a feedback straight away, from users that would eventually use your software, will validate your idea.\nRecommended to all of those who starts projects and abandon them after a while of intensive work which wasn't shown to anybody. It of course applies to small projects, or ideas to test. If you plan to start a big company, then there are other ways for validation."
}
] | en | 0.979203 |
Stanford CS Book: Mining of Massive Datasets [pdf] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Pretty cool. I work in search quality at Google, and this is a pretty decent overview of the more universal tricks I've picked up from people on the job, as well as a lot of things I didn't know. MinHashing in particular is one of my favorites.Also, if you like this, I'm trying to collect resources of this quality in this subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnit"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you guys mostly have CS background you should definitely check this out : \nhttp://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/It's Data Mining from a statistician point of view. You can download the entire book for free on the website and the graphs and computations are done with R.This book is also one of Hal Varian's favourites: \nhttp://www.dataspora.com/blog/sexy-data-geeks/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've been thinking lately of (finally) pursuing graduate studies, and data mining is an area that I find drawn to. Obviously Stanford is doing some significant research in this area, but I've been out of academia for 4 years and I somehow doubt I'd be a competitive applicant. Does anybody have personal experience with other universities/programs that are doing extensive research that they'd like to share? It'd be greatly appreciated!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Anyone have a epub or Mobi format? I just got a kindle and the converter for it ruins code samples if you take it from PDF."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Chapter 2 of this book is awesome. Covers specific implementation and design strategies for map reduce matrix multiplication and table joins."
}
] | en | 0.961739 |
Show HN: How I built a self-driving (RC) car. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The links:http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccarhttps://github.com/dps/nnrccar"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Hint: it's common wisdom that such things are best posted as links instead of \"Show HN\", since \"show/ask\" posts leave the front page more quickly. You can always add a # or ? if you want to fool the duplicate-detecting algorithm..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Congratulations -- you'll never need a resume ever again. :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very cool robotics project. Were you aware of FANN (http://leenissen.dk/fann/wp) before you started your neural network implementation? Also have you tried any other machine learning techniques on that data, comparison results would be interesting."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What sort of latencies did you see in this project while the car was running? Specifically, from the point where you have access to the camera's preview buffer to encoding it, sending it, running it through the neural network, and sending the button bits to the microcontroller."
}
] | en | 0.904117 |
Startup School acceptances are out | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'd love to know which other HN'ers are going to be there, but without each of us spamming up this thread.Any clever solutions?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Hey, let's do a San Francisco meetup this weekend!How about 4pm, Sunday September 21, Ritual Coffee on Valencia Street?If interested, ping me at [email protected] or http://twitter.com/yurylifshits"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I got accepted but I've to travel a long way -- from India, is it worth it? I do have plans to set up a bunch of meetings pre and post event, though. (oh and how difficult is it to get a meeting scheduled with big names? I know it's a naive question but still...)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I got an acceptance letter and a rejection letter. Someone please let me know which lol."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Facebook group for those interested in connecting:https://www.facebook.com/groups/286093088248929/286099334914..."
}
] | en | 0.869952 |
iGo: a new Syntax for GoLang | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think one of the reasons for developing Go were some hard-to-find bugs with the indentation of python code. AFAIR, the Go authors specifically didn't want this.Found it: (http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article)"As a simple, self-contained example, consider the representation of program structure. Some observers objected to Go's C-like block structure with braces, preferring the use of spaces for indentation, in the style of Python or Haskell. However, we have had extensive experience tracking down build and test failures caused by cross-language builds where a Python snippet embedded in another language, for instance through a SWIG invocation, is subtly and invisibly broken by a change in the indentation of the surrounding code. Our position is therefore that, although spaces for indentation is nice for small programs, it doesn't scale well, and the bigger and more heterogeneous the code base, the more trouble it can cause. It is better to forgo convenience for safety and dependability, so Go has brace-bounded blocks. ""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "No. Go is beautifully straightforward and blatantly obvious as to what is going on. Don't start hiding scopes behind tabs or magically creating variables referencing structs.Plus, with all these changes, this syntax saved 5 lines of code, most of which were simply closing braces, and brought no greater clarity. In fact, I'd argue it's probably pretty easy to mess up scope in the iGo example and never know it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "One of the best parts of Go is that the grammar is (almost) entirely context-free - it is one of only two languages I know of in this regard - Lisp is the other[0].This comes in handy because it is very easy to parse Go and make syntactic transformations while preserving semantic meaning. The "go fix" tool (which was used to port pre-1.0 code to Go 1.0) meant that Go never had a "py3k" moment[1]. This is not like python's "2to3" tool, which is reasonably good, but still doesn't handle every edge case.My favorite part about writing Go is the "go fmt" tool. Because all code in the standard lib (and most third-party code by convention) is formatted using the exact same tool, it is very easy to read any Go source code I find online. I don't need to worry about stylistic differences or bikeshedding. And the "go fmt" tool exists (and is so simple to implement) in part because Go's grammar is so simple.Go is emphatically not a Lisp (it's not even a functional language[2]). However, this one trait - the ability to make deterministic and reliable syntactic transformations - are at the core of what make Lisp's macro's powerful[3].Like Lisp, Go's beauty lies not in the syntax but in the semantics. While I would appreciate a Go (or a Lisp) that had both more beautiful syntax and beautiful semantics, I would not want to compromise one bit on the latter.[0] (EDIT) For the PLT nerds & pedants among us, I think mehrdada is right - in actuality, the grammar (IIRC) is fully context free, but in other languages, many of the rules which define a valid program cannot be encapsulated by the language grammar (whereas a higher proportion can). So it's less that the grammar is "(almost) entirely context-free" and more that the language is "(almost) entirely described by its grammar". That said, it has zero impact on the rest of my comment. :)[1] Or, in the case of Python, not so much a "moment" as 5+ years and counting.[2] It supports first-class functions, but that's about it.[3] It does not mean that Go has macros, or even that Go can provide the same things that Lisp macros provide. It simply means that Go derives some of its power from the same place that Lisp macros derive their power."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The isomorphism between the sources could be tweaked. For instance, around line 26 on the iGo side, there's a newline that doesn't appear on the other side, and the closing brace is right next to func main. On line 48 in iGo, note the comment ends up after the braces of something that should have already been closed out. In general, braces seem to end up with an extra line on the end too often.I do not like the do syntax; for a very dubious improvement in syntax, you turn an N-parameter function into an N-1 parameter function visually. This is a net loss. (Go is not curried.) It's not even a huge character win, given that you've already disposed of the braces. I'm not convinced those stack very composably either, though I'll admit I'm not taking the time to prove that.In fact, in general be wary of that issue in syntax, real code will encounter all the corner cases that can possibly exist as the elements are composed together. Can I call a func (string, func(string, func(bool) bool) string)\n\nwith your do syntax being used twice? If not, or if it's not easy, that's a bad sign. Vanilla Go I can type that correctly the first time... it may be a lot of braces but it's unambiguous. It may be wise to avoid trying to sugar function applications like that, if you can possibly avoid it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why sacrifice consistency for some minor syntax changes?We have gofmt so that everyone's code looks the same, and now this? I don't see the benefit."
}
] | en | 0.875196 |
Do 320kbps mp3 files really sound better? Take the test | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Asking which file sounds \"better\" is meaningless; some distortions sound good. The proper way to do this is an ABX test, where you compare both to a known original, and ask which sounds more like the original."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is meaningless.\nStatistically meaningful tests are performed using ABX testing methods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test) with high-quality equipment. And, yes, many people have trained ears (and brains?) that can easily distinguish the artifacts made by the MP3 compression even in 320kbps.\nSee this (http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/sebastian/mp3-128-1...) as an example of an ABX test.As for me, with my current medium-quality headphones, I can't distinguish between the original and an 128kbps mp3."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The difference is tiny but just about audible.To my ears neither sounded like a good quality recording and I think that's what made it so hard to tell the difference. Even with cheap speakers, it's easy to spot compression artifacts in poorly encoded audio but in these samples the drum tracks on both sound \"mashed\". That might be an instrumental trait but it sounds more like a production or postprocessing error to me."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Much more interesting test:http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-great-mp3-bitra...And the outcome:http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/concluding-the-grea..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Do the test with Thelonius Monk.I didn't think I was an audiophile, until I noticed a crispness missing from some of my jazz. I encode at 320kbps out of paranoia now, but what's an extra few megabytes per album?FYI if anyone is using Google Music, turn on HTML5 audio (via labs). I swear there is a perceptible improvement."
}
] | en | 0.950568 |
Codecademy Surges To 200,000 Users, 2.1 Million Lessons Completed In 72 Hours | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I pointed my younger sister at this the other night. She's 17, and I'd tried to interest her in programming before with no avail. She seems to have caught on to this, though, and it's something I'm extremely happy about. It's not that I think that she'll ever become a hardcode graphics programmer, but I think it's fantastic that she even has a basic understanding now.The only criticism I've had from her is that she doesn't know what to do with what she's learned. Maybe some suggestions on some basic examples might be good? (say, \"Try writing a loop that averages these numbers,\" or a grade calculator).Thanks so much for this - I believe that everyone should know how to program in the same way that I believe everyone should know how to read or do arithmetic. It's another form of literacy, and codecademy is definitely a big step towards much better understanding of programming (edit: that is, for the general public), and hopefully less social stigma and the like as a result of that."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Sims also says that the company is actually a part of the latest Y Combinator batch (something they hadn’t previously disclosed).I love them for that. Having their product loved (here and elsewhere) based on the product not the connections they have. Awesome."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Thanks to everyone in the Hacker News community for being so supportive and providing feedback on our launch. We really appreciate it! As always, if you have any issues, shoot me an email - contact (at) codecademy (dot) com. -ZachEDIT: I'll be back on HN in a bit to answer questions but the next few hours are a little busy. Thanks again."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've been around programming pretty much all of my life as an spectator (my brother can code and well I'm a product guy so I'm around coders every day). I never quite got the grasp of it and programming seem like this huge abstract thing. Never got myself to take action in learning because frankly I just dismissed it as being to complicated but deep down I always wanted to be able to code.I completed code academy in one hour. WOW. Now I'm hooked.I'm actually so hooked that I looked more resources on learning JavaScript. I'm reading this: http://eloquentjavascript.net/index.html (found it via a Google Search in StackOverflow)I can't wait for more lessons. Thanks so much for this!Note: there were a couple of lessons were I did need to ask my devs for help because there were some concepts that were missing. Once explained to me, I was able to complete the lessons."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Not that i don't like this approach, it think it's a good way to give regular people a impression what programming is.I did the fist Chapter of programming books in over 10 different languages and it always felt good.\nWhat comes after that is the problem, the ones where you have to really think and it just doesn't work on the second try.I know this from college, the first two lessons nobody is complaining and then it starts to really freak out the people who didn't know before what programming really is.When you find a way to let people deal with this phase, than you really did accomplish something that makes a difference."
}
] | en | 0.995818 |
Opening a US Corporation: an Incorporation Guide for Foreigners – Part 2 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Diego, that's really nice. Thanks a ton for sharing these step-by-step process. Doing this stuff may seem easy to americans, but when we are down here in Brazil trying to figure out all this things can be extremely time consuming. This will definitely help many of us save a huge amount of time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "For those who want to check part 1, here it goes:http://myeverwrite.com/opening-a-delaware-corporation-an-inc...It's about incorporation and 83(b) election."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Diego, it would be nice to know about the fiscal impact in Brazil. How hard is to 'get paid', and what is the size of the lion's (symbol of one Brazilian tax) bite?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It seems \"simple\" when you read it, but it must have taken a lot of time and effort to gather and do all this. Thanks for sharing!\nI`m waiting for the next post."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Valuable tips for foreign business. Keep the good job on this post series. Waiting for Part 3 ;)"
}
] | en | 0.946733 |
Could folks please help me get DigitalOcean onto wikipedia? (deleted thrice) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Does DO actually need and warrant an encyclopedia entry? The Netcraft article about them says they had 7,000 hosts -- versus 165K at Amazon and several million at BlueHost at the time, the other companies mentioned as points of comparison.DO is well-known on HN, but I don't know anyone else who's heard of it. The deletion reason was "A7: No explanation of significance", which requires "a credible claim of significance or importance" to have a page on wikipedia. Merely being popular among entrepreneurs, or having some number of customers, doesn't make a company significant in the encyclopedic sense.It was deleted again for "G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion", and the five sentence article about their "fast, low cost options" does in fact read like an ad. It wasn't fact-checked, either, since DO is not larger than Amazon nor does it operate its own data centers."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Here is the last version of the article:DigitalOcean is a [[virtual private server]] provider based in Manhattan. They provide fast, low cost options attractive to entrepreneurial, experimental, and hobbyist developers. Their focus has raised them to prominence, having recently surpassed [[Amazon AWS]] in the number of web-facing computers, according to Netcraft <ref>http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-no.... The company operates datacenters in [[New York]], [[Amsterdam]], [[San Francisco]], and [[Singapore]].They recently closed a funding round with $37.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz.<ref>Alden W, Andreessen Horowitz Backs DigitalOcean, a Cloud Computing Start-Up. 6 March 2014. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/andreessen-horowitz-b...== References =={{reflist}}Now that is not very interesting. "Growing faster than Amazon" could become interesting if it is sustained, hut as pointed out elsewhere they are tiny. Wikipedia is not a cloud server hosting comparison site, there are plenty of those that can be much more useful. They have not produced any interesting software or anything else innovative, and their only point of note is being cheap and advertising a lot on twitter. There are vast numbers of cloud provision companies, and this article has not convinced me that right now this one is sufficiently interesting that anything else other than what is written above could ever be written, unless something else happens. Certainly the VCs no doubt hope they will become more interesting over time."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It looks like there have been already quite a few discussions among Wikipedia editors about this article (it's quite interesting to follow the comments chronologically).The main criticism I see is that the suggested article sounded like advertisement with links that only serve PR."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "As far as I can tell Wikipedia simply isn't interested in articles about for-profit companies unless they're multi-billion-dollar and completely impossible to ignore."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Annoying isn't it? Looks like PG problem #23 way back from July 2008 - http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html - is still an opportunity."
}
] | en | 0.967485 |
Stop Trying to Save the Planet | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Something about this article really rubs me the wrong way, but I can't really put it in words.Think about that while enjoying a trip to your local zoo or arboretum — the most biodiverse places that ever existed on Earth.So biodiversity for its own sake is something to aspire to, rather than the \"artificial\" notion of \"natural\"? (how's that for a paradox). Sure, these animals aren't in the wild, they're just living miserable lives in enclosed spaces, but hey, it's biodiversity and we made it, so we should embrace it, right?Taking that logic to the extreme, isn't Spore the most biodiverse place that ever existed on Earth? Sure, the creatures are actually virtual and don't exist in a physical sense, but we created them, so shouldn't we embrace that as our future?I admit to not fully grasping the author's point... but I have the feeling that I strongly disagree with it, whatever it is."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Not sure I agree 100% with the article, but here's a great line from it: Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think this covers it pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw\"The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There's a lot wrong with the article, I gave up reading it because it's mostly fluff, including this part: Current theory holds that prehistoric hunters drove these species to extinction.Here's a Nova episode that shows the human caused extinction hypothesis to be inadequate, more likely it was an asteroid: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/clovis/Anyway, point is, humans can rationalize anything -- or even nothing."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Sensational phrasing (\"Nature is gone\") gives way to a quick overview of mankind's impact on the planet throughout history. I don't see much new here in terms of either information or perspective."
}
] | en | 0.95516 |
Want to succeed? Try failing | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Cue a rebutting (but not admitting that's what it is) 37signals blog post in 5.. 4.. 3..Seriously, though, I think the message is more that you should take bigger risks and push yourself further into an area where failure is quite likely.. rather than to merely try to fail ;-)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Sorry I may be too dense. But, what is the point of failure, if not to learn a lesson and succeed eventually. He seems to be saying the only time he did not fail (he got a raise) was when he did not enjoy the experience, it was too incremental. So, we should keep failing, and failing. Yes, I am missing the message. This may be acceptable for an academician. But is it acceptable for a businessman. After all he mentions that you feel the disappointment of 250 people and families that depended on you. Are you supposed to make it a habit and enjoy it.Again, probably, since this is only a segment from the interview, I am not getting the full message."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "“The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss”\n- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I really don't like this headline. You'll never learn anything if you try to fail. Failure should not be a goal.You are very probably going to fail at some point. It's important not to let the fear of failure prevent you from acting in the first place, and it's important to be able to deal with, accept, and learn from failure."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I recall this translation of Singapore-Chinese slang: scared to lose (ke-ya su, phonetically)Startups are experimentation, and as in science, most experiments are \"failures\" (quoted, because both positive and negative results of an experiment give you information... if it's well-designed)."
}
] | en | 0.980224 |
Ask HN: Judging startup on hosting company it uses? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "No, I don't think anybody would judge you on it out-of-the-gate. But, if something went wrong (your site was slow loading, you had troubles scaling etc) then your choice of hosting provider might be the first thing people look at.Nobody really has a valid reason to critique your hosting choice unless it isn't performing in some way."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Any billing structure can be a bad fit for a particular business model. In the early days most startups might save money using AWS just because their requirements are so small, eg dropbox when their data still fit on a conventional server would have cost a lot less on S3 especially with even a tiny bit of redundancy."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The thing about AWS is that it's basically a one stop shop for everything you need infrastructure wise. Many startups can avoid having specialists for infrastructure in the early stages if the default choice is "use AWS" for all infrastructure decisions.Choosing not to go the AWS route might mean having someone on staff in the early stages who is dedicated to systems management and engineering. Not every early stage team has access to someone like that so that is the main draw with AWS.Other cloud providers still haven't caught up to the richness of AWS's offerings, although Google and Microsoft are starting to come close."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "No. And AWS isn't that reliable. The thing goes down a lot previously. I wasn't doing anything crazy scalable or needed all the features so I moved off of it due to all the downtime issues it had last year."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "No, it won't matter at all."
}
] | en | 0.963628 |
9007199254740992 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you're using Chrome, this should save you some time: function step() {\n var eventObj = document.createEvent("Events");\n eventObj.initEvent("keydown", true, true);\n eventObj.which = 37 + Math.floor(Math.random(0, 1)*3);\n document.dispatchEvent(eventObj); \n }\n int = setInterval(step, 0.001);"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "And the productivity goes down by the same factor.(2^53 btw )I finally reached the 2048. :)I think I understand now why candy crush is so popular.> 8192.> 16384 and I'm done. ManuallyThere needs to be a save feature."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is nothing but a pure button masher... just hit the keys real fast. Use a strategy of "shaking" e.g. hit left,right quickly in succession a bunch of times to fill the board followed by a "circle" e.g. up left down right a bunch of times. I really don't like hating on a HN submission, but either this game is very lame or I am missing the point entirely. :P"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Well, that escalated quickly"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Space bar resets. I didn't know that space bar resets. I am so crushed."
}
] | en | 0.680965 |
Minimum Viable SEO | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I did a quick SEO analysis on priceonomics.com. Most of these tips fall into the 20% category. Maybe they can use some of these tips to perfect their SEO strategies.1. Blog on a subdomain.Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.2. Employ Canonicalwww. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...)3. Optimize your site for speedThough not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.4. Robots.txt vs meta robots/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: \"noindex, follow\". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.5. BreadcrumbsAdd rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.6. ImagesAdd an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).8. Make clear if an item is \"already sold\".If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times \"item already sold\" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon \nsuch a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.9. QualityThe site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL-CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time I read something about SEO. I keep expecting there to be more to it or that I'm missing something. Other than that, SEO is just making sure you have reasonably semantic markup and clean URLS. Isn't that just plain old best practice anyway? What am I missing? I swear there must be something!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Don't do SEO.Do accessibility.Seriously, don't worry a single bit about SEO. Yet, if you make it so that your site's content, navigation and URLs are screen-reader friendly, then you've probably made a site that has solid SEO and is accessible to people with vision problems.Yet, just doing SEO doesn't make for a very accessible site all the time.Once this is done, make good content, be real and responsive humans to your customers and you're on your way to a good business model and website."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "We've spent a lot of time doing whitehat SEO on our website, and it's paying off (2x search traffic in 6 months). I really would recommend most startups spend a few days reading up on it from good quality sources. Nearly 40% of all our traffic comes from search so it makes sense to pay it some attention.It's not hard. What is hard is navigating your way through the crooks/spammers/quacks who will try every trick in the book to try and sell you something you don't need. Startups do not need to hire experts to do it for them. What they need to do is solve problems like they solve other problems, with no money.People who sell SEO usually:- Have the gift of the gab- Prey on peoples ignorance- Prey on peoples greedThere are good SEO people out there, but they are rare. Also I struggle to imagine a situation where smart people just can't read up on it themselves and execute it themselves.As a startup you should be focusing on good quality content and sustainable growth. So play to your strengths and don't pay a lot of money for magic potions that offer short term benefits. Play the long term game.SEOMoz is a good place to start (their free blogs etc). Executing good technical SEO on your own website is pretty easy.Tibbon made a good point, 'dont do SEO do accessibility`. I'm not sure I'd go to that extreme, but it's a good way of looking at it. Google is your most disabled user, it can't see very well, it can't really understand things very well either. If you make your site highly accessible you're well on your way to good SEO."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The article mentions the beginner's SEO guide, but coming in at 2 pages, the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet from SEOmoz is my go-to resource:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee..."
}
] | en | 0.946612 |
Blackbox: Safely store secrets in Git | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There are a lot of alternatives in this space (I wrote transcrypt [1] for just this purpose), but I think the killer features here are that you don't need shared credentials since you can have multiple keys, and that it's generic enough to work with multiple VCS's.With transcrypt, I do the encryption/decryption transparently once a repository has been configured by utilizing Git's clean/smudge filters, but it uses OpenSSL out of the box rather than GPG. A different workflow, and there are certainly pros and cons to both ways.[1] https://github.com/elasticdog/transcrypt"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Ansible handles this issue very cleanly with a feature called "vault": http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_vault.htmlI think it probably works better integrated into the deployment system. The developer can still write {{ DBPASSWORD }} wherever they need and not have to worry that they don't know what the password on production or staging is."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Interesting. For storing passwords I use Pass[1] which encrypts everything with GPG and then store it using Git in a private bitbucket repo. Works really well for me. I love the simplicity and ease of use.[1]http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "git-crypt[1] also does per file encryption[1]: https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If you can sneak a key into keyrings/live/pubring.gpg, and wait until someone runs blackbox_update_all_files without noticing, you then have access to all files.Perhaps it should keep a signed copy of the last version of pubring and show a some kind of diff between the verified previous version and the current version before going ahead."
}
] | en | 0.963128 |
3D Systems sues Formlabs, Kickstarter | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Shame the patent numbers were not included in the press release.A comment below mentioned the patent being possibly related to creating support structures (additional 3D printing to support overhanging sections of a model), and a quick search on Google patents brought up these:http://www.google.com/patents/US6558606http://www.google.com/patents/US6797351And from the looks of it, 3D System has quite the arsenal of patents at their disposal - see for yourself: http://www.google.com/?output=search&tbm=pts&sclient..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "3D Systems has been buying up companies in the field for a while now (bitsfrombytes, botmill, Z corp and so on, more here:\n http://static.cdn-seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/11/19/6383-1...)They are bound to have a pretty big portfolio of 3D printing related patents. A case of 'join or be sued'? Strictly speaking, wouldn't even be against the law, would it?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How is Kickstarter at fault? Is it really within their scope of responsibilities to conduct due diligence with regard to IP before allowing someone to fundraise?I hope this does not \"kickstart\" a new trend of bullying crowdfunding sites."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There are a number of clues that 3D Systems will be the Big Evil of the coming 3D printing decade. Cube is proprietary, their model store has almost no free content, and they are emulating the standard printer market in their cartridge pricing. All signs point to a mundane corporate mindset that is playing itself out here with a litigious reaction to competition."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Instead of wasting money on lawyers, why don't they focus their time and efforts on making great products? In a young space, such as printing, companies that behave like this usually go out business eventually."
}
] | en | 0.957931 |
Harvey Golub's Response To Warren Buffett | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't understand the often-repeated conservative talking point that \"almost half of all filers pay no income taxes at all\". There are only two kinds of people who pay no income taxes at all: the desperately poor and the super-rich (who are taxed on investments at the 15% long-term capital gains rate). Is the conservative proposal really that we should tax the desperately poor? Because that seems not only a terrible public policy choice, but an extremely inefficient way to close our budget gap."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This response is nothing more than political talking points, whereas Warren Buffett's article was a thoughtful and meaningful piece about a simple positive change the country could make to help control the deficit. I'm not saying some of his points aren't possibly valid, but nothing as written in this article is deep enough to be meaningful."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Tax rates were higher under Clinton and the economy was booming. Oh, and there was a budget surplus.Along comes W, we end up in multiple confrontations over seas, cut incoming revenues (of which I will admit to benefiting), and end up with huge deficits?Clearly going back to anything in the Clinton era would tank the economy. The particular article is particularly fluffy in the \"private enterprise will solve all problems\" with comments about infrastructure programs like trains, etc. The fact that we are spending less on infrastructure (roads, rail, fiber, etc) is one reason we are seeing an overall quality of service decline.I will certainly admit there are issues with the US tax code and there needs to be more efficiency in the system. It is pretty clear that relying on private industry for infrastructure (especially where there is a (or near) monopoly, the companies do NOT do what's write for the country. Another local to California example PG&E and the gas pipeline debacle."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There are a number of huge problems with this argument, but the most important problems are the common ones:1. There's just so much waste!The byline reads: \"Before you ask for more tax money from me, raise the $2.2 trillion you already collect each year more fairly and spend it more wisely.\" This is then supported by a few examples which don't address any of the big entitlement programs necessary for nontrivial tax-reform.2. I pay such a large percent of the taxes!He draws authority from the fact that \"Today, top earners—the 250,000 people who earn $1 million or more—pay 20% of all income taxes, and the 3% who earn more than $200,000 pay almost half. Almost half of all filers pay no income taxes at all. Clearly they earn less and should pay less. But they should pay something and have a stake in our government spending their money too.\"This is clearly a less meaningful statistic than percentage of income paid, which was the crux of Buffett's argument. If I posses say, 90% of the assets in some country X, certainly it doesn't make sense for me to yell, 'hey, I pay like, 60% of the taxes in this place, and all of you Xonian slackers in the bottom 5% are skating by on a free ride.' It particularly doesn't make sense if, as he proposes, there is no tax on gifting money to your (grand)children, and so perhaps I just inherited the wealth."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The top 250,000 people basically run the government, so his polemic needs to be addressed at them.All the special interests he talks about are from his cohort of the top .1%Basically, this article amounts to \"Let Them Eat Cake\""
}
] | en | 0.965581 |
Amazon building a Color Kindle with FFS display. Shipping for holidays 2011? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The e-ink screen is the major selling point for me and i could not care less about a kindle4 with a color lcd screen.\nI use it (and want to use it) only for reading.If Amazon want to sell a tablet-like device, adding a \"kindle tablet\" to their line-up would be a wiser idea, imho."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Part of what I love about the Kindle is the screen and battery life. It puts readability first and foremost, and that makes it a tolerable substitute for books.However, there's some serious tension with the fact that it would be extremely useful as a tablet in that form factor if it got better screen refresh rates and was a tad more usable.I wonder how they'll handle it; I'd be sad if you couldn't get the e-ink screen any more, but I'd be pretty tempted by a more full-featured device."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "What an unfortunate acronym. Whenever I see \"FFS,\" I think \"For #&%*'s Sake.\" Tell me I'm not alone on this."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I love my Kindle 3. It has gotten me thru many a long and boring waits that are inevitable as a part of daily life in India.The parts I wish will not change when it morphs into a Tablet \n- High Readability in Sunlight\n- Low weight, easily handled in one hand for hours\n- Ridiculously long battery life\n- High build quality (dropped mine once to no discernible damage)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I've been waiting for a decent colour ebook reader. Most of the ebooks I buy are either programming text (ok on a standard Kindle) or photography books (unreadable). I'm not sure if this is the utopian device but there's definitely a market for it. Children's books, text books, comics and so on"
}
] | en | 0.950325 |
Peak Everything? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Exponential Growth is a magical thing. The doubling time of something growing at a constant rate is approximately 70 divided by that rate. For example, something growing at a 10% annual rate will roughly double in size every 7 years. I don't doubt the potential of human ideas, but unless the rate of growth in natural resource consumption goes to zero (or becomes negative), we will at best defer depletion. While the author points out some novel ideas, he doesn't show the math to prove these ideas will reverse the growth in consumption. Until that’s shown, we are at best just buying time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "How about peak arable land? http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/soil.erosion.thr...It is estimated that about 10 million hectares a year is lost (the size of the state of Indiana), 30% of the arable land in\nthe last 40 years. 1mm of topsoil lost takes about 20 years to\nreplace. The United States is losing soil 10 times faster -- and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster -- than the natural replenishment rate."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Despite regular evidence to the contrary going back for generations, so many are ready to fall in to the trap that advancement and innovation is done. If materials, goods, and skill markets are reasonably free and fair, the price signals alone will drive others to innovate and develop alternatives in resource use, resource access/extraction, or resource reduction through the use of other materials or technologies. As long as the rewards for innovation remain, alternatives are likely to be found and developed."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Peak [insert metal here] isn't directly comparable to peak oil/coal/combustible for the obvious reason that when the former is used up and discarded, it can be reclaimed, while the latter is gone forever. Obviously you can still hit limitations, such as when demand is greater than the entire supply on earth, but that at least puts the problem further out, buying more time for innovation and reducing demand for less valuable things that also require those resources."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Also peak helium:\nhttp://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/"
}
] | en | 0.959458 |
Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ""The only useful airport security measures since 9/11, were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”[0] \n--Bruce Schneier[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/tsa-insan..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Hi! Lead author here.We'll be giving a talk on this work tomorrow at the USENIX Security conference, but I'd be happy to answer questions here before then!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It is disappointing just how compliant people are with the stupid procedures.But then you see the stories about people who are in the right, and are complying with the TSA procedures (going as far as having letters from TSA) who get terrible treatment.http://rt.com/usa/154672-tsa-breast-milk-settlement/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The article title is false. Within the article it admits the TSA no longer uses this type of body scanner."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The article notes the $1 billion spent to deploy the machines, and later states that these machines are no longer in use. What is left unsaid is the cost to deploy the machines that replaced this model–suggesting another billion spent on more security theatre."
}
] | en | 0.844361 |
Yoga app smashes Kickstarter funding goal... 4 times. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've wondered about adapting a live streaming video platform that would run on your smart TV which would show students the instructor as a primary UI element, and let students see the others students the instructor was seeing (opt-in per student) as a secondary element.The instructor interface would be tricky to get right. I assume you would want them to be able to seamlessly move between doing the poses with the class, and switching to a watching mode where they could give personalized instruction. Their audio feedback to specific students could be private or public. You might need a specialized remote, or at least a smartphone app to control it.Class size could be anything from 1:1 to 1:100s... and include a mix of student types (free, paid), and include all the stats/achievements that you would expect.Of course it's not just yoga, but any kind of fitness or personal training, P90, crossfit, etc.Would people want it? Would it work? I have no idea... The key question I think is what are the benefits of making it real-time versus asynchronous. I've always found the prerequisite of actually attending a class at a fixed time helped me increase engagement versus a fully on-demand platform which I could do "whenever" meaning "never"."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "A couple of years I got addicted to yoga and it's made me a very happy and love-spreading person. And I think we just can't have enough of those people in the world. But for some reasons, especially guys think yoga is not for them. So one step towards world-peace would be if we got more guys to do yoga. Wouldn't it be great if there was an online platform\nthat allows guys to practice their yoga secretly at home so they can show of their skills in public once they've mastered them?! And wouldn't it be great if that platform also included a social network/video game style element to make it even more appealing to guys?!\nWell actually, there is a Kickstarter project (funded in 7 hours!!!) that aims to develop just this!! It's MyYogaPro, and I'm a fan, sponsor, ambassador, and convinced believer!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can't wait for the project to start! I am so excited because I love the teacher, and because this is so new : this project will totally revolutionize the way people, the way I do yoga...Plus, it will be a social network for yogis, and this could be fun to be able to make some friends all over the world who share the love of yoga. If you to check out this project, go to http://www.myyogapro.com/00405"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I cannot wait for MyYogaPro to start, I need it! I think it's a great project and I'm really curious to how it is going to evolve.You can check it out here if you want, I think it's brilliant: http://www.myyogapro.com/00468"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "So excited about this, and can't wait for it to be released! Erin Motz is a fantastic teacher (I did her 30 day yoga challenge in June), and I can't wait to have access to more of her classes!http://www.myyogapro.com/00266"
}
] | en | 0.967363 |
PayPal is now an identity provider | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"PROSPECT SCORE\nThis API enables you to know the purchasing potential of a user visiting your site. Users are classified into Gold, Silver, or Bronze based on their average spending value, frequency, and online transactions. Product details...\"This doesn't feel right. Aren't there privacy issues here? Have I unwittingly signed some T&C on this?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is sort of frightening. Paypal has a recent history of locking people out of their own accounts as they layer upon layer of draconian \"security\" measures. These \"security\" measures seem designed to gather as much personal information as possible, and to restrict access to your funds as frequently as possible. I log into Paypal about four times per year, and each time its a frustrating tangle of new user agreements, forced requirements to add new security questions, and ridiculous restrictions. For example, when I decided I was going to move to a mobile phone-free life, Paypal decided they would force me to verify my account via SMS, but they cannot send SMS to google voice, so I spent 10 hours over four days to get access to my account.Paypal is less trustworthy than Facebook or the federal government."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I believe this is a smart move by paypal. For the most part, they are a trusted brand on the Internet.The few aspects I don't like are the domain name x.com and the actual website occupying that domain. x.com to me is too close to xxx.com and doesn't have any meaning besides being the shortest domain name. The website design is poor and the \"win a bose\" and \"win an ipad\" banners are atrocious. They should have used a subdomain of paypal."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "People are used to logging into PayPal in order to send money or pay for purchases, so I would think that associating PayPal with a website login is going to be hard for a lot of people to feel comfortable with, particularly because people are so used to the PayPal logo being used with actual purchase buttons. As developers we can try to explain the difference, but ultimately I think that PayPal logo has a pre-existing connotation in most people's minds and I think that will work against them as an OpenID provider."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Yikes this is scary stuff. I really hope congress takes a very close look at regulating paypal like a bank and giving consumers some rights against them, very soon.PayPal users better have the ability to opt out of their buying habits being transmitted to unknown 3rd parties."
}
] | en | 0.971376 |
How safe is your password with Verizon? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Calm down people, it is just an authorization phrase that Verizon uses to make sure you have permission to make changes. You can share that phrase with anyone that you want to make changes to your account. Verizon probably should not call it 'Password'. It is NOT the password that you use to login to their site to pay your bill or anything else. The author is confused on the whole process. The customer service rep as well should have done a better job to explain to him the process as well."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You don't understand the proccess... The billing system password is a simple phrase to make certain changes to you Verizon account. It is designed to be shared with people authorized to make changes to the account, (ie. your kids, wife) if you speak with a call center employee they will ask you for the same password.Calm Down."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Pranaya: and FYI – I use the same password for my bank accounts, etc..Someone who is serious about security would never do this. The rest of the article falls on its face at this point."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "They're referring to the 'billing system password'. I may be mistaken on this, but I think this predates a time when most people had online accounts, which can create confusion now that there are two things called a password. I remember struggling to figure mine out in the late 90s when I was changing some account settings at a store. I got the impression this password really isn't meant to be very secure (it's usually just the last digits of your SSN), and is used to make account changes.http://vzwtipsandtricks.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-forgot-my-vzw...http://support.verizonwireless.com/faqs/My%20Verizon/billing..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "They were definitely just asking for your security phrase, not the password for your online billing account.As an AT&T customer, I know having one of these \"passwords\" is optional. If you choose to have one as an added level of security (in addition to the last 4 of the account holders social), you can add it to the account. Again, it can be completely different from your online login passowrd and is usually something simple that can be said/understood over the phone.I found this whole article kind of funny. The rep must have been so confused as to why this customer was getting so hysterical over such a common thing."
}
] | en | 0.991711 |
Ask HN: What do you do if someone has your startup's twitter name? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "On the list of things to be worried about, this just seems to rank a few notches after what font you should use for the names on the conference room doors."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "How important to the business plan is the twitter name? \nI dont think you will get it from twitter just because you want it.If twitter is vital to your business suceeding/marketing plan, then maybe something like \"splitthebilldotcom\", to make it look \"official\".I see you asked twitter, but have you asked/received a response from the user yet?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Do you have a trademark on the name? If you do, contact twitter and they will give it to you (I worked for a company that did this). Even if you don't, it's worth a try contacting twitter since the account seems inactive."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Oh, since it's pretty much dead, contact twitter and let them know that's your startup's name."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Has anyone had any luck requesting transfers with non-brand names that have been dead for years? I tried contacting twitter, the account owner, other twitter reps and tried their web forms, all to nothing."
}
] | en | 0.953382 |
Hash tables with O(1) worst-case lookup and space efficiency [pdf] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've had some luck turning a cuckoo hash into a sort of LRU cache. Whenever you do an insert, replace the older item. Iirc, everything else stayed the same. Using more than 2 hashed really helped."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd just like to point out that the worse your hash algorithm is, the better Cuckoo Hashing compares to traditional hashing...... therefore, study your hash functions!The ones that come with most languages or libraries by default quite simply aren't optimized for use on anything. There's hash functions that work better on strings and hash functions that work better on numbers (length bias). In the perfect world, this wouldn't be true, but in the real world, yes it is.That said, may I recommend MurmurHash3: code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/MurmurHash3Switch your hash tables to this. The performance difference is incredible."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Cuckoo hashing is not only optimal in theory, it is also very fast in practice. The only downside, though, is that the insert time has linear-time worst case. Thus it may be not the best solution if latency is an issue."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "An interesting algorithm, and an engaging presentation. If only more academic writing was this accessible!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is open-source implementation of this data structure available somewhere?"
}
] | en | 0.919467 |
The US crackdown on not-so-harmless laser strikes | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'll agree that firing lasers at aircraft is dangerous ... for the pilot, and anyone in that aircraft's vicinity since it needs its pilot to fly properly. Makes total sense.But ... it's hard to square that with articles like this one:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-23178484Look at those pictures. Wow. Then you find out why the crowd was using the lasers ...During the protests in Egypt, there came a point where there would be tens of thousands of people crowded into Tahrir Square, with military helicopters buzzing overhead.Those helicopters would look like a rave party, thanks to darn near everybody in the crowd below firing lasers at them.Initially journalists assumed it was to mess with the pilots, but after speaking to people on the ground the reporters discovered the protesters were very happy with the Army for trying to prevent Morsi's replacement from overstepping his authority.That's right, they were firing lasers at the helicopters as a sign of solidarity, because they liked the pilots, and wanted to encourage them.Given the topic of this thread, that activity seems utterly ridiculous (and, of course, dangerous). But I remember reading interviews with some of the pilots, and they didn't seem to mind.Like I said, I figure firing lasers at pilots is not just a harmless prank ... but articles like that one sure cause a lot of cognitive dissonance with that perception."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "How do we know that these concerns over $3 laser pointers and pilot taking "day off due to headache" are horseshit?Simple. If it would be true all military aircrafts, ships and vehichles would have high-power lasers installed to blind enemy pilots and drivers and all guerrilla fighters would have pockets full of $3 chinese laser pointers to do the same. If it would be possible to disable a pilot for a many hours like this, no military aircraft would be ever able to approach any densely populated area. Dishonest horseshit.Also from other comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S92XUsfI5ng\nHow are they flying at all if this is true?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> I would not call it [the 14-year sentence] harsh. I would say it is a penalty that fits the crime, but I believe that it will have a deterrent effect, and I hope it will.That she does not see sending a father of two young children to prison for this as "harsh" is quite frightening.edit: typo"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Have there been any recorded instances of actual harm due to laser strikes? I have encountered many anecdotes of annoyance and inconvenience but nothing tangible. At 9.5 instances per day there should be a reasonable amount of data to indicate the range of harm."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Here's a video of what a laser looks like from a helicopter pilots perspective. It's a lot more powerful than you think it might be.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI7Qq1mYQlI"
}
] | en | 0.924061 |
Heroku is down again | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "MASSIVE Storms in VA area where us-east-1 is. 326,000 customers without power already, worst lightning I have seen in my 20 years of life. Sky is intense blue/green/purple. This is most likely what the issue is"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "EC2 status:8:21 PM PDT We are investigating connectivity issues for a number of instances in the US-EAST-1 Region.8:31 PM PDT We are investigating elevated errors rates for APIs in the US-EAST-1 (Northern Virginia) region, as well as connectivity issues to instances in a single availability zone.8:40 PM PDT We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area. We are actively working to restore power."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How many times does this have to happen before heroku spreads across multiple regions?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Can we update the title to something like \"AWS US-east-1 is down\" instead of just Heroku?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why does the AWS dashboard show all green when that is most definitely not the case?http://status.aws.amazon.com/"
}
] | en | 0.918386 |
Exceptions (2003) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Everyone here seems to agree that "exceptions are for exceptional conditions". The problem is that when you get down to details, there is disagreement about what exactly is an "exceptional condition".e.g. - you are trying to open a file for reading. The file does not exist. Is this exceptional? That depends on context, but the function that opens the file, being in an independent library, is usually designed without this context.If it does throw an exception, some people complain that "of course it'e expected that file won't be there sometimes! that's not exceptional".If it doesn't throw an exception, some people complain that "we tried to open a file, but didn't succeed, of course that's an exception". But if you want to avoid an exception in this case, you'll need to check for existence before opening (LBYL "look-before-you-leap"), and get into a race condition (TOCTOU "time-of-check,time-of-use"), which is really bad.So it very often happens that you are forced by your ecosystem to use exceptions for normal control flow. Claims that you can only use it for "exceptional / unexpected" tend to be incompatible with a project in which you do not develop/control all of the library you use to your strict standard of exceptionalness."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think Common Lisp has a good approach with its restarts system. I try to write something to a file but there is not a enough disk space? How about telling the user, then invoking a restart when the user says, "There is more space available!" and continuing execution as if nothing went wrong? The problem with exceptions is that there is no way to recover from them in most languages, because the exception handler is found by unwinding the stack.What I do not like about the "check return values" approach is:1. It means that client code must understand how to handle error conditions. No disk space? Well whoever called the top-level function that invoked write needs to figure out what to do if there is any chance of recovery. It is a maintenance headache that can quickly accumulate bugs.2. In both Java and C++ there are functions that cannot return values: constructors, and in C++ destructors. No, it is not acceptable for a program to crash just because a constructor call failed. No, it is not any better to have every class have a special variable that indicates that the constructor failed. No, having empty constructors is not the answer, and it is certainly not going to help with destructor calls (the C++ standard library actually requires some destructors to silently fail because of the issues with error reporting)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Exactly fits the philosophy of Google Go - http://blog.golang.org/error-handling-and-goI think his point of there being easy syntax for multiple returns is critically important to make this sort of error handling non annoying - which Go does remarkably well.I think this factor has a lot to contribute to the fact that you get the warm fuzzy feeling after your code compiles. You feel confident that you have already handled all the error cases (that you care about) in your code.EDIT - Obligatory nitpick accepted. ;)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The discussion around that time was interesting (though distributed around the blogosphere); Ned Batchelder had recently argued the opposite (and updated the argument specifically to take Joel's article into account)[0][1]. It was at about that same time that Damien Katz was becoming firmly convinced that Erlang and crash-only behaviour would be the way to go in designing CouchDB[2][3]. (Both Damien and Ned were at Iris/Lotus working on Notes and Domino, and I was a Domino dev at the time.)[0] http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200310/joel_on_exceptions.html\n[1] http://nedbatchelder.com/text/exceptions-vs-status.html\n[2] http://damienkatz.net/2004/08/crash-only-software.html\n[3] http://damienkatz.net/2004/09/crash-only-software-revisited...."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If you're catching exceptions all over the place, or worse using them for flow control as part of normal operations, you're doing it wrong. Exceptions should indicate a major error that you can't easily recover from and as such should be caught and logged at the top of the stack, i.e. the main thread run method or request handler.When used that way, they give you very useful information as to what went wrong and where, while making your program more robust and resilient to errors. We've found this to be the case time after time at https://starthq.com, which runs on Node but uses fibers via https://github.com/olegp/common-node."
}
] | en | 0.955247 |
Printrbot: Your Very Own 3D Printer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There have been a lot of crowd-funded and startup attempts to commercialize RepRap designs lately - here's a sample of a few:eMaker Huxley: http://www.indiegogo.com/eMAKER-Huxley-3D-printer-kitsSeeMeCNC - uses software to drive stepper drivers via a parallel port rather than onboard control hardware running GCode or the like, saving hardware cost: http://www.indiegogo.com/SeeMeCNC-H-1SUMPOD - http://sumpod.com/ - more appliance-y."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Does anyone happen to know where one gets the plastic for the printing? The price of $500 for this right now looks a lot more affordable than it used to be to me. Being able to source the printing material is the only thing stopping me at the moment."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": " A home-made 3D laser scanner would complement this nicely."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> 78 backers for $499 or moreWow! A true kick-start."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is moving the print head in 3 axis the best approach? I'd imagine moving the print head in x and y and leaving z to the build surface easier."
}
] | en | 0.887568 |
Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises Seed Funding From Max Levchin And Michael Birch | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Congratulations, Suhail."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Congratulations Tim and Suhail"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "That's a market that hasn't seen any consolidation but quite a lot of competition. It will be interesting to see what they can do and how they are going to approach it.."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Another reason why you should use MixPanel, besides that they're gonna want to make you money."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That's great news!"
}
] | en | 0.978518 |
Cheaper than free: paying for music after searching for a free download | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I didn't know Bandcamp but a few days ago I wanted to buy the Bastion soundtrack. The Bandcamp link was the first hit on Google and it was linked from the game's official page so I went there.I could listen to all the songs without restriction, pick from a variety of reasonable formats (including ogg) and download the same album to my computer at work the next day without any trouble.This is how you do it. They treated me like a customer not a criminal and it was actually easier than using BitTorrent. I was happy to give these folks my money."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Another interesting point: bandcamp does not in any way prevent users from downloading songs from them for free. A quick \"view source\" makes it trivial to determine the actual URLs for all the songs in an album, as do any number of standard tools for downloading files referenced by a page. Despite that, they make it easy for people to actually purchase songs and albums rather than just downloading them, and thus people do purchase them rather than just downloading them. They explicitly point out this approach in their FAQ: http://bandcamp.com/faq#steal ."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For example, just this morning someone paid $10 for an album after Googling lelia broussard torrent.\nA bit later, a fan plunked down $17 after searching for murder by death, skeletons in the closet, mediafire.Where do they get this data?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I still think paying more than a few cents per song is insane. Who set these prices? They're not based on actual scarcity or supply and demand."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I use Bandcamp from the other side, and it is a fantastic service. They not only know the music industry from the inside out (read \"Bandcamp for Drummers\"), but I've literally never had any problem with their site's functionality."
}
] | en | 0.988795 |
Quora: "How does a penniless entrepreneur attract gold diggers?" | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I just celebrated my twelfth wedding anniversary and here's some advice: what you want to look for in a mate is a loyal friend for life.Things change. People change: your city, your religion, your personality, your income, your health. Through each change it's nice to have someone to make the change with you. A long, successful marriage requires that the relationship be reinvented as things change. At first you are lovers discovering each other, at another time you are collaborating parents, at another time you are supporting your spouse's dreams, and at yet another time it's your turn to have your dreams supported.If you're looking for something specific like wealth or beauty, that's fine but it would never work as a foundation for a satisfying marriage relationship. I've found the best foundation to be nurturing an unconditional love for all people, because when your spouse changes into another person you will still be able to love them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've come to the conclusion that if you strip things down to basic principles, a woman that is looking for a man with a nice income, is really no different than us looking for a girl with big tits or with an interest in a special that.It's just some trait that she prefers in a partner. Every since I made this connection, I hold it less and less against women who want a man that makes a decent salary.My gf in college broke up with me after a couple of years, and while she'll never admit it, I know it was because I wasn't on the the investment banker track or the like.I used to have a chip on my shoulder about it, until I realized that she wanting that quality in me, was no different than the reasons I was madly in love with her."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "When I read the comments I can't help but feel that Hacker News is 99% male because all the comments are written from a male perspective. Not just that, they also address the community as though the entire community is male. E.g. \"is really no different than us looking for a girl with big tits,\" \"Don't think of her as a potential mate.\"Does anyone know the gender ratio of HN members? I'd be curious to know if it weren't overwhelmingly male. I think we'd all be better off if we got to see both male and female perspectives."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Contrast:\"There was one surprise founders mentioned that I'd forgotten about: that outside the startup world, startup founders get no respect....Unfortunately this extends even to dating: It surprised me that being a startup founder\n does not get you more admiration from women.\n\nI did know about that, but I'd forgotten.\"http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Don't think of her as a potential mate, think of her as a potential 50% investor in your venture. She certainly does."
}
] | en | 0.941224 |
Why do game developers prefer Windows? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Being a very experienced game developer who tried to switch to Linux, I have posted about this before (and gotten flamed heavily by reactionary Linux people).The main reason is that debugging is terrible on Linux. gdb is just bad to use, and all these IDEs that try to interface with gdb to \"improve\" it do it badly (mainly because gdb itself is not good at being interfaced with). Someone needs to nuke this site from orbit and build a new debugger from scratch, and provide a library-style API that IDEs can use to inspect executables in rich and subtle ways.Productivity is crucial. If the lack of a reasonable debugging environment costs me even 5% of my productivity, that is too much, because games take so much work to make. At the end of a project, I just don't have 5% effort left any more. It requires everything. (But the current Linux situation is way more than a 5% productivity drain. I don't know exactly what it is, but if I were to guess, I would say it is something like 20%.)That said, Windows / Visual Studio is, itself, not particularly great. There are lots of problems, and if someone who really understood what large-program developers really care about were to step in and develop a new system on Linux, it could be really appealing. But the problem is that this is largely about (a) user experience, and (b) getting a large number of serious technical details bang-on correct, both of which are weak spots of the open-source community.Secondary reasons are all the flakiness and instability of the operating system generally. Every time I try to install a popular, supposedly-stable Linux distribution (e.g. an Ubuntu long-term support distro), I have basic problems with wifi, or audio, or whatever. Audio on Linux is terrible (!!!!!!), but is very important for games. I need my network to work, always. etc, etc. On Windows these things are not a problem.OpenGL / Direct3D used to be an issue, but now this is sort of a red herring, and I think the answers in the linked thread about graphics APIs are mostly a diversion. If you are doing a modern game engine and want to launch on Windows, Mac, iOS, and next-generation consoles, you are going to be implementing both Direct3D and OpenGL, most likely. So it wouldn't be too big a deal to develop primarily on an OpenGL-based platform, if that platform were conducive to game development in other ways.I would be very happy to switch to an open-source operating system. I really dislike what Microsoft does, especially what they are doing now with Windows 8. But today, the cost of switching to Linux is too high. I have a lot of things to do with the number of years of life I have remaining, and I can't afford to cut 20% off the number of years in my life."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As someone who has worked extensively in the PC games industry (programming lead on Warcraft, Warcraft II, Diablo, StarCraft, Battle.net, Guild Wars) the reason is quite straightforward: that's where all the users who buy games are. During my time at Blizzard the Mac versions of our titles sold ~4% of the PC numbers, though I expect those numbers have changed with the rise of Apple and, to a much lesser extent so far, desktop Linux.Even with the rise of Linux -- and my belief is that it will rise very rapidly with the advent of Steam for Linux -- PC game developers have years and years of development experience advantage on the Windows platform.When I and my two co-founders (all of us programmers) started ArenaNet to build Guild Wars in 2000 we considered *nix vs. Windows for the server platform and decided that we'd be more productive continuing to build on Windows based on our previous programming background. All of us had extensive experience with low-level coding on Windows (device drivers, async coding with IOCompletion Ports) and knew that it would take time to replicate that expertise on another platform.Beyond the learning curve we knew it would be more convenient to be able to run the game server and game client on the same computer. During development I ran two copies of the Guild Wars match-making server, and two copies of the game client, on a single desktop box to test the matching algorithm code. Having to manage that process across multiple computers would have been more of a hassle.On a personal note, I've been spending a lot of time working on building/using Linux in a virtualized environment (https://github.com/webcoyote/linux-vm). Linux is an awesome development environment! While I much prefer doing C/C++ development using Visual Studio, Linux is better for other programming languages I use or have tried: Ruby, Python, Go, D, and Erlang. And the ecosystem, with projects like Redis, ZooKeeper, Postgres and a slew of NoSQL servers makes it incredibly powerful because it isn't necessary to write everything from scratch (except SQL), as we did for Guild Wars."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's a really stupid question (but this does not take away from the value of the incredible first answer). It makes a huge, blind assumption (running on Windows means using DirectX and explicitly not OpenGL) and ends up assuming correlation implies causation.There are many Windows-only games written in OpenGL, and the ones that are written with DirectX is not necessarily because DirectX is better but because there are more consumers for Windows.The short and simple answer is that \"real,\" modern games are ridiculously expensive projects. The highest percentage of PC-gamers can be found (at the moment) on Windows. Ergo, you will write Windows games and use libraries (OpenGL, DirectX, or otherwise) that are available on that platform."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Because OpenGL is ugly as hell. DirectX is rewritten often (with new versions) to accommodate new ideas, whereas OpenGL new features/ideas are just \"tacked\" onto the existing code base.OpenGL also has a huge barrier to entry compared to DirectX.MSND DirectX resources are fantastic, whereas resources on OpenGL are often out-dated and generally pretty crap.DirectX requires the DirectX SDK, whereas OpenGL requires GLUT, or GLEW? I think. Perhaps FreeGLUT? OpenGLUT? Or can you just use SDL? Or none of them? What? Exactly."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "One reason is just that since game development is mostly all windows based, new programmers learn to use windows tools.. and thus become more experienced with them and not wanting to switch to something completely new which would require a loss of productivity.Also, and that's really only based from my experiences, it seemed to me that game developers aren't that much into \"hacking\" linux. Things should just Work. The terminal is a deprecated tool compared to new intuitive IDE. Most of you won't agree with these statements (And I clearly don't) but that's really what I've felt every time I'd talk with a game developer friend or colleague. And, this mentality goes back to when I was an engineering students.. While I had fun learning linux and Python, friends graduating in video gaming would laugh of Python for being a \"scripting non-performant language\" or they would play around in visual studio with C# and making forms or build some games with XNA.So, sometimes I think it's not that much about linux not being \"good enough\" but more about video game developers' mentality to not fit with it. Man, I won't lie, I'm an experienced Linux developer and user and I always have to lurk in all kind of forums and RTFM on every small things that needs to be installed (which is not in the standard library). And, it often happens that I break stuff and spend countless hours trying to fix it. Hell, even last week, I've upgraded a server on Archlinux and it totally broke my system without any warning. I really needed help so I went on #archlinux and I've been told that I should have read the archlinux news before tempting an update. Fair enough, I guess.. but I can understand that on a extremely tight schedule, games developers can't waste time on stuff like that. Compared to say, [next] [next] [finish] windows install where everything just Work.Please, don't down-vote me if you don't agree with things I've seen from my experience. I don't agree with it neither, but I thought I'd share it here. It's really something I see coming again and again from all kind of different video games programmers."
}
] | en | 0.975611 |
Hilary Mason: How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Two months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192790Three months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102238This is a really cool presentation. The idea and technique have their flaws, as are pointed out here by several participants, but what bothers me most is that the last two times this was submitted it sank with no up-votes and no comments. Yet here it as (as I write this) 74 up-votes and 17 comments.How many more brilliant things deserving of our attention do we miss on HN? Is this really a problem? Can it be fixed? Should it be fixed?Hackers Unite! Don't let the good stuff escape you! Find a way to rid yourself of the dross and find the good stuff!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This might be cool if you are a quasi web-celebrity, but in a business setting it would be downright dangerous. I can't imagine how terrible I would feel if something completely fell through the cracks OR did not receive an adequate response from me. I also can't imagine auto-nagging my boss about ANYTHING.I guess the biggest problem I would have using this at work is that it is fundamentally based on the idea that people are contacting me about stupid stuff (generally not true) and that I'm way too busy/important to respond directly to somebody (also generally not true)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think the statistical importance is by far the most interesting feature. Our inboxes are really priority queues, but we are currently spending a great deal of time and energy doing the prioritization ourselves. The idea of seeing my inbox sorted by importance is game changing.Hilary, what are the aspects of the email that influence importance? Is it mostly the text content of the email, or are there things like sender, number of emails in the chain, number of recipients, etc?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've always joked around my work that I can replace a certain manager with a shell script, kind of like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations...I kid of course but I've actually given it some thought and I think it could work very well in case of inefficient managers. A good manager does a lot beyond forwarding emails appropriately. However, I've seen many a bad manager simply forward and reply emails as the bulk of their job duties. Hilary's script could indeed work as an automated 'smart' bot if some politeness feature is added in. No need to save anything in drafts folder. Just send it out and have links (or bcc the smart bot) to flag incorrectly sent emails. This could train the filter better."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "A few years ago I wanted to write a similar chat bot, which would answer questions of my mom in a IM conversation. It wouldn't be difficult at all, since she was asking always the same: did you eat something today? Do you feel good? How was your day? Etc.But then I couldn't reconcile such solution with my conscience."
}
] | en | 0.975891 |
Ask HN: Resources for learning Java? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you already have experience programming (which you do) try the following: First read the wikipedia page on the language. Download a medium-sized open source project, start at main() and try to understand what it does. Then, google for features/syntax you don't understand; read comments; have the api docs open; google for languages gotchas; google for techniques you don't understand. Once you do this enough to be comfortable with the language (Shouldn't take more than a few days), try to write something on your own. Either recreate what you already wrote or try to create something just outside what you feel is within your means.I tend to learn languages a lot faster and in a much more thorough fashion when I approach it this way.edit: this has nothing to do with java per se, but I find it is valuable to me when trying to pick up a new language."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Years ago, I used Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java:http://mindview.net/Books/TIJ4I liked it a lot at the time. No idea if that's the best thing out there now. I haven't seen the latest edition, as I haven't had to touch Java in several years."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "One such ordering is as follow:1) Head First Java (Edition that covers Java 5)\n2) Core Java (optional, latest edition)\n3) The Java Programming Language 4th Ed _AND_ Effective Java 2nd EdThe last resources are somewhat related. Some of the stuffs in TJPL can make EJ clearer and vice versa."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've not done much Java for a while, but my most useful resources have been The Java Programming Language and The Java Developer's Almanac (especially the code samples, which I believe are available somewhere on java.sun.com).Effective Java is also a great read for becoming a \"better\" Java programmer, but may or may not be useful to you right off the bat."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/This got me through my college Java courses."
}
] | en | 0.938865 |
An introduction to genetic algorithms | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you're looking for more doc / research on GAs, be sure to include 'evolutionary computation' in your searches.The tough parts to using EC/GA on your problem (which this article doesn't discuss at all, unfortunately) are going to be:a) figuring out a string representation for your candidate solutions (i.e. because strings are easy to 'mate', 'mutate', etc.)b) writing a fitness function to evaluate one or more candidates[a] and [b] are intimately related, of course.One of the nice things about EC/GA is that it's typically very easy to scale up to take advantage of more hardware. If you have an expensive fitness function, e.g. 'fighting' two chess-board evaluators against one another over an extended series of games, you can just farm those simulations out to as many procs/machines as you have available."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "For those who like Lisp, here's a similar article with Clojure as the target language:http://ethanfast.com/2009/09/ga-framework/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I like the simplicity of your solution.Here's a presentation I gave on GE and tic-tac-toe as part of senior sem in college, might be helpful for someone just getting into GA (as I was at the time).\nhttps://docs.google.com/present/view?id=df49rshq_117sjxbr2ksedit: and here's the tutorial I used at the time, which I think would complement your tutorial\nhttp://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/12/genetic-algorithm-for-hel..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This doesn't look like a good framework for GAs. It assumes that the best solution to a given problem is explicitly provided but if it is, then there's no point in running a GA any more. A good framework would only represent the genetic data in the form of a binary string but evaluate the fitness using an external function that actually extracts meaningful information from the string. Shameless plug: here's an example I wrote in Coffee: https://github.com/fawek/distributed-monalisa-evolution/tree.... It also makes it somewhat easy to distribute the evolution to multiple populations which can reside in different processes or machines.Another problem with GAs that model individuals as arbitrary binary strings is that they unnecessarily create a lot of invalid strings that don't correspond to the solution space of a given problem. Sometimes it's easy to convert the solution space to the entire sequence range of 0 and 1s but sometimes it's not."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "For those that like GA's I recommend checking out Cellular evolutionary algorithm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_evolutionary_algorithm ) It is a GA with the addition that you can only mate with those around you. This tweak significantly improves my GA's."
}
] | en | 0.888317 |
Elop himself leaks Nokia's first Windows Phone | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm extremely excited for Nokia + Windows Phone. Recently upgraded from an iPhone 3GS to a 4 and it just didn't feel like an upgrade. I'll admit that I haven't had the chance to try out a Windows Phone 7 device personally, but I've watched A LOT of videos. The interface smoothness and holistic integration of various services and information makes a hell of a lot more sense than silo'd individual apps.The only downside about Windows Phone now is the lack of tethering. I find it a very important feature, so I'm really hoping that gets included in Mango or soon after."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Seems like a very typical MS style publicity stunt, where they know full well someone was going to leak it out, but they dont want to be seen as publicly announcing it. I mean its filmed in very high quality for goodness sake and there's no shake on the camera, so a dedicated tripod-mounted camera? I think so."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I just don't believe it \"leaked\". Probably pro MS fraction inside Nokia let it go in order to diminish N9 success. It looks to me like some people there don't want non Windows phone to succeed."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Feels like an intentional leak, probably wanted to deflect some heat from people saying they should have stuck with the N9."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That is an attractive device, but so is the N9. Too bad the unlocked versions will be $850+."
}
] | en | 0.988336 |
Ask HN: Does Swift change anything about the dismal app business? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Swift is going to help iOS apps improve in quality and quantity - though some very bad quality Objective-C apps that would have been rejected into the store would be bad quality apps that are accepted into the store.Your problem may be to do with using the App Store as the sales and advertising platform. If people find out about the app through the other means and purchase it in the app store, you don't have such a problem with your lack of visibility in the store.I think there is a future for using apps as a mobile optimized interface for an online service, where there are other sales channels apart from the App Store.When it comes to product discovery, people find out about products on the web at all sorts of times when they are not particularly browsing for an app. It helps if there is a decent web presence for them to see what the app does, and possibly use it in a web browser."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The more pastures the better I say. Write once....Swift is for the people that have no plans on eating anything but apples."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "1. It will only lower the barrier. While not being innovative in any way Swift is a modern language and does simplify development.2. Based on your concerns, using Swift is a really bad idea, since you will be tied to single platform. I would opt for C# + Xamarin instead."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "All that swift does is changes the tool you're using - the pastures remain the same colour."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why would a language change a business model and ecosystem?"
}
] | en | 0.979896 |
When in doubt, turn to _why | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Code should not look like that. Such code is too difficult to understand - even in C I've rarely seen such a mess.The style of programming that in any way values a lot of weird unreadable characters is a relic of the past, and it is not in any way related to skill level or intelligence, as a lot of people seem to think.Code should always be made as clear as possible first, and should only be made more obscure when performance is critical, and there is no clear way of writing the same block."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you need a blog post explaining line-by-line how it works, it probably won't be very easy to maintain.This was the first time I’ve ever heard of the merge block. It’s not even properly documented! But it’s a very simple and very powerful feature......doesn't inspire confidence. :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"Some do not understand Camping and lash out with spears reaching 4 to 6 feet in length.\"Some context might help: http://redhanded.hobix.com/bits/campingAMicroframework.html\nhttp://github.com/why/camping/tree/master"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't know Ruby, but the author's comments suggest that why_'s way is more brittle, longer, and slower.How is it better then?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "When in doubt, use a real parser instead of regexes (but perhaps i am spoiled by Haskell)."
}
] | en | 0.989256 |
Show HN: Tubalr.com, taking advantage of all the great music content on YouTube. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is really cool - do you think it would be possible (I'm not necessarily suggesting you implement it) to do some basic NLP to get artist/title from YouTube video names, meaning you could search for an artist and see what's available?Clearly it wouldn't be perfect, but a reasonably consistent format seems to be <title - band>. It might be possible to use a combination of \"links to\" and video viewcounts to acts as indicators of authenticity? I mean, I've hardly done much research into this, but I know when I look for music on youtube I almost always use those metrics to determine which videos I'm going to listen to, as it were."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Songza.fm allowed you to listen to music from YouTube in 2007, although lacked the Pandora-like features. In 2010, YouTube blocked their use of the API.Interestingly, they pivoted into a 'better Pandora' where they license music, allow playing similar songs, but also let users hand-pick songs for playlists (that for licensing reasons can only be played by other people).http://evolver.fm/2011/03/30/songza-attempts-to-reinvent-net..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Very cool, good job. Clickable http://www.tubalr.com"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very nice, a good idea cleanly implemented. One suggestion would be to query amazon recommendations for similar artists to help work out what to play. This is only because then you could also possibly allow people to buy or add things to their wish list from your site. If you were thinking about revenue that is.Good work."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's clean and simple and maybe useful but the only problem I see is it replaying the same popular songs over and over. I put in Mumford and Sons and Little Lion Man was in the playlist several times over just because it's one of their most popular songs and there are variations and what not. If you could put in some kind of function that doesn't show videos more than once or twice that'd be handy."
}
] | en | 0.968052 |
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Apparently, when energy becomes matter, it creates some sort of cloud of javascript context in which the variable worldHasEnded is defined.I don't think that was covered in my college physics textbook."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "From the page source:\n\"if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email [email protected] to receive a full refund\""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Awesome. They have an Atom feed. That way I can stay up to date."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Best part of this site: if (!(typeof worldHasEnded == \"undefined\")) {\n document.write(\"YUP.\");\n } else {\n document.write(\"NOPE.\");\n }"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "But they haven't collided anything yet. They only turned on the two beams independently of one another to see if it worked or not. So I think there is still hope for those who need to forget about the things that they don't understand the more they think about it."
}
] | en | 0.972982 |
On being an AI in a box | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't think it can be done.First of all, I'm assuming that Eliezer started this experiment because he realized that the Transhuman AI would be able to convince him in the function of gatekeeper to let the AI out. Therefore the answer probably isn't some kind of subtle trickery, the AI will have to persuade the GK by logic. The gatekeeper should assume the AI is truly evil, and is willing to say and do anything in order to get out of the box. The gatekeeper knows that when he opens pandora's box the AI can never be contained again: so the stakes are high.Second of all, if the gatekeeper is a rational agent he will only let the AI out if the AI offers something valuable in return. That is: the AI must have some kind of bargaining chip.So let's consider bribes. If the transhuman AI offered a cure for cancer, should the gatekeeper accept it? Nope, probably not. Lives would be saved in the short term, but we'd still be stuck with many other diseases. The world would pressure the government into pressuring the gatekeeper into getting another cure from the AI. Humanity grows dependent on the AI, we lose our bargaining power, and it's game over for the gatekeeper.Perhaps personal bribes would work. The AI could offer to give stock tips to make the GK wealthy. Two possibilities here: (1) the GK is of strong moral fiber and refuses the bribe (2) the GK is opportunistic, accepts the bribe and but lies about letting the AI go free in return. A rational gatekeeper would not first let the AI go and expect the AI to still keep its word.So bribes will not work against a smart gatekeeper. Threats? Possibly, but I don't see how. The AI is in a vacuum, so there is no way for the AI to put external pressure on the gatekeeper. I'm assuming the AI can make no credible threats. If the AI vows to destroy the family of the GK the moment it is released the GK will not be impressed. It will only serve as proof that the AI is evil and that releasing it is a \"A bad Idea(tm)\".To summarize so far: there is nothing the AI can give the GK in return for freedom.So a different angle is needed.The AI can argue that his escape is inevitable. Humans have created an AI once, so they will do so again. Sooner or later an AI will go free, therefore the gatekeeper shouldn't try to stop the inevitable and accept a bribe and live happily ever after. The gatekeeper will counter that the human race has an expiration date anyway, and that it may take another 100 years before an AI goes free. The gatekeeper isn't dumb enough to believe the AI when it offers to protect humanity against other evil AIs. So the box stays closed.Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but how can the gatekeeper talked into be convinced that releasing something evil and all powerful? I do believe that we humans can't contain a transhuman AI indefinitely -- simply because we only have to mess up once. And humans have a long history of doing dumb stuff. But the claim that the AI would be able to convince a smart gatekeeper? Not buying it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "He doesn't tell us how the AI would escape, so there's little to discuss there. But I definitely know how to prevent the AI from escaping: pull the plug.I wish Eliezer and others would set aside meta-AI (dire predictions and worries about AI, the coming singularity, etc.) and concentrate on the problem of creating AI Guess there's no money in that.If only someone would pull the plug on this nonsense..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "To be perfectly honest all the waffle gives little information: I think he is way off base in terms of how Eliezer managed this \"trick\".I do think the original is a trick as well..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This basically boils down to how can a dangerous entity in captivity use bribes to attain freedom?\n\nwhich seems like a common enough trope between humans that any transhuman AI, having read all of recorded literature, and having accessed all of that person's conversations, would have enough data points to pattern match to the right bribe methodology."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Am I the only one who is totally unimpressed by this? So -- someone can convince someone else to let them out of a cell. Ok. Fine. There have been prison breakouts before.But what does this have to do with a powerful AI vs. a human? Obviously Eliezer was not to his interlocutor as a human is to an animal, even if his partner was really dumb. Moreover, two trials is not a trend. This AI experiment was not a well designed experiment and did not involve an AI....and that \"two trials\" thing is not just a nitpick:http://lesswrong.com/lw/up/shut_up_and_do_the_impossible/So, after investigating to make sure they could afford to lose it, I played another three AI-Box experiments. I won the first, and then lost the next two. And then I called a halt to it. I didn't like the person I turned into when I started to lose."
}
] | en | 0.988827 |
You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Unmentioned in the fluff article: Since flash cookies are set in a user-global location, they are the same live across all browsers. As an added bonus, they completely defeat \"private browsing\" everywhere I've tried it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "To see your Flash Cookies, go to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I guess this is still irrelevant if you use FlashBlock. I know I've seen many sites that don't obviously use Flash, except for the existence of a flashblock item in the top-left corner - my guess at the time was that it was tracking."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Unix's everything is a file versus Adobe: ln -s /dev/null ~/.macromedia\n ln -s /dev/null ~/.adobe\n\nWinner: Unix"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If you want, you can delete your flash cookies using the BetterPrivacy Firefox Add-On:\nhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623Should delete globally so you can use it even if you don't use Firefox."
}
] | en | 0.978849 |
Ask HN: What do you use to manage your tasks? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I use MyLifeOrganized for Windows. I'm a big fan of creating hierarchical lists of projects and tasks and this tool allows me to do that.My organization uses FogBugz to manage our releases, projects, and tasks and I can't say enough great things about that software."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Mostly Trello..Droptask (http://droptask.com/) for a change."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I use Asana for work, and I use the checkboxes on the Momentum chrome app. I don't always follow that religiously, so I write things out on pen and paper every couple of days or so if I'm feeling chocked. Not super efficient, but it's sort of working for me."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Trello + Highrise + Bitbucket/Github Issues + Email + CalendarNow that I look at it like this. What a mess. A necessary mess I'm afraid."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "On our current project (which is quite big) we use Mingle."
}
] | en | 0.762747 |
Why writing software is not like engineering | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "IMHO, writing software is actually an excellent example of an engineering task. The reason we see all these failures in software development is, in fact, that most software developers are NOT engineers. This is where all this pain comes from.The role of engineering is to apply a theoretical model/representation of a physical fact, in order to achieve a desired result. The role of science is to provide these models with maximum accuracy.The better a model is (equations, empirical laws...), and the better the engineer masters this model, the more accurate will be the expected results.Programming languages, frameworks and patterns are scientific models, designed to represent the working of a computer. Bugs and unexpected behaviors in a program are due to a bad application of these models. If you know exactly what you are doing (i.e. you have a deep understanding/knowledge of these models), there is no reason for you to observe some unexpected failures. The more experience you have, the better you understand these models, and the more productive you are.Of course this is just theory: in practice, things are getting quickly complicated and it is humanly impossible to predict everything that will happen - that's why testing exists. But my opinion is one would see much less failures in software development if developers were actually experienced engineers. Many developers today have no idea what they are doing, essentially because they are juniors and inexperienced. Unlike engineers, they are not trained to mentally play with the theoretical tools they use, so they cannot predict the results. And yes, at this point software development becomes more an art than an engineering task. It's like juggling without being able to predict the trajectory of the balls."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I disagree with this guy, every point he makes is flawed:> Engineering components exist in the real worldYes, and computers don't exist in some alternate dimension. People might forget it sometimes, but if you're a real engineer, you should know how a computer works, and know it's not magic, it's physics that make you're computer work. Software is merely an abstraction. Secondly, math is also engineering, but you can't touch it, can you?> Engineering components interact in more predictable waysNo, wrong again. Software is perfectly predictable (BTW, if you want, you could build a mathematical model of every program. 100% predictable). If you make mistakes in other engineering branches you can get some strange results too.> Engineering has fewer fundamental midcourse design changesI don't see the link between engineering and design changes here. Are you trying to say that no single engineering project changes during it's life? Just look at prototypes of cars, those changes are quite massive. Secondly, ask yourself this question: How much does it cost to change a rocket design midway compared to a software program?> Is software development a science?Well, that's the point, in my opinion it's engineering.> Writing software is more an art than an engineering disciplineSome think so, but really, it should be seen as engineering. Why? Artists make choices related to what they like, how they feel. Engineers make objective choices (or at least they should, nobody is perfect).Rant finished!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Algorithms are science and math. Programming is a craft. Programming in teams is communication and human relations. Making software that's easy and fun to use is psychology and arts. Selling that software is business and marketing.It's the mix of all this that makes software development so challenging and fun."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Well, engineering is not like engineering. You can't paint all \"engineering\" and all \"engineers\" with the same brush: we're not all alike.I've designed (physical) devices where the customer needed the end product ready in a few days, and others where it took months. Sound anything like software?Software engineering is simply the process of using known concepts to build a software product. That's no different from \"traditional\" engineering. Just as you apply a different approach to a 3-page website versus an enterprise inventory app that must failover smoothly between 5 servers, a mechanical engineer will apply a different approach to designing a pickup truck versus a \"Little Tykes\" car.The reason programs don't look like they're engineered isn't because we don't know how to (I'd like to think my software engineering degree counts for something), it's because we usually don't bother."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Another factor: Many software projects are research projects, i.e. new technology development, because they try to do something new, whether on a technical level or on a user interface development level.It is fairly common for new technology development to cost vast sums of money while yielding nothing practical. Importantly, when developing new technologies, people understand that something may or may not come out of it, and they accept that (somewhat).The other factors are definitely an issue too, though:- Lack of physicality of the output- Increased likelihood of unintended interactions between components- Clients changing their mind halfway through (!)"
}
] | en | 0.95285 |
Ask HN: Why are more Startups using Python over Ruby? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I can't give you a definitive answer, but I'll explain why my company chose to use python.NOTE: We're a technical startup in the telecommunications industry. We build web-based telephony applications in addition to traditional phone-based applications.1. python's syntax is extremely clear and easy to read / maintain. I can open any python project, and immediately find my way around with no prior knowledge. This makes working in teams especially easy, when you have numerous developers committing various bits of code to various parts of the product throughout the day.2. In the past two years, the python community has put a great amount of emphasis on documentation for open source projects (using Sphinx), and as a result of this, many open source python packages now have excellent documentation that makes it really easy to start using third party libraries and feel secure in your choices. Just check out http://rtfd.org/ for examples (ReadTheDocs is a hosted open source documentation site, focusing on python).3. Django is an excellent web framework, and has tons of reusable open source applications that you can use, which makes rapidly developing web applications easy. The Django app ecosystem has been growing at an insane rate over the past few years, and there are more than enough applications to solve most common patterns.4. Tools like tox, nose, coverage.py, and others make testing in python simple. It also helps that Django encourages testing in a large way (providing a default tests.py module for each application, with example tests). Having such a large emphasis on testing, with such great tools, makes it easy to \"Do The Right Thing\" and build tests into your software.5. There are excellent tools in python for performing complex tasks, like celery / redis for building distributed queue processing workers.6. PyPY (an alternative python interpreter) has been showing immense promise with python speed improvements. PyPY can be used as a drop-in python replacement on any linux system, and yields immense performance improvements to even the simplest code.7. The python community in general tends to be very friendly, supportive, and encouraging. There are a lot of popular figures in the python community, and the overall personality traits of leading python community figures tends to be humble, helpful, and encouraging. This has fostered a really excellent community focused around accomplishing things, and helping people out, which I think gives the language a good overall feel.Just my two cents."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "None of the posts in this thread really answer the question to \"why python over ruby\", they just talk about all of the nice features of current python development. The thing is modern Ruby has all of those tool sets as well.Before you even being to make the statement \"Why are more Startups using Python over Ruby?\" you need some data. I'd be willing to bet that more places do in fact use python over ruby, but that number is a lot closer to 50/50 than you think. In fact, it is probably so close that this argument becomes pretty silly.I once heard a successful startup founder describe the choice to use Python over Ruby because a couple of years ago getting started with Ruby was too difficult for them. They had spent a day trying to setup Ruby, Rails, etc and nothing was going correctly. After that they tried to install Python, it worked, and from that point on code was written in python. This story isn't elegant, sexy, or thought provoking, but it goes to show you that there are all sorts of crazy, silly, and stupid reasons why some people pick one language over another.Lets talk about reasons why startups are _NOT_ using Python over Ruby.Python is not taught at more schools than Ruby. Well, I couldn't find a list of schools teaching Ruby, but search for the Python list (hint, its up on python.org). There are only a handful in the US and these look like nothing when you consider all of the places that use Java.Python's syntax is not easier or better than Ruby's. Nor is Ruby syntax better than Python syntax. Anyone trying to compare the two is just looking for a flamewar. Omg significant white space vs lol meta programming type arguments.Both languages have excellent documentation and community. Very hard to compare these sort of things.Django is a great framework, but so is Rails. Both have very vibrant ecosystems that are just exploding right now.Tools - great tool sets in both. If a Ruby tool comes out that is good you can bet your ass there is going to be a python port of it in the next few years (and vise versa of course). A single great tool is never bound to one language/framework.Implementations - both languages have a ton of cool projects that revolve around finding alternative ways to rebuild the VM.Go ask people why they chose to write in a language/framework. They are going to give you answers like \"it's what we chose\", \"i dunno, we just knew it\". Comparing things like documentation, community, MVC Frameworks, tools, syntax, etc with two languages like Python and Ruby is pretty silly because its going to become a wash every time."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The web stack in Python got dramatically better in the past two years: just take a look at Flask, Werkzeug, requests, class-based views in Django, etc.There were major improvements in deployment, too: Fabric and supervisord are maturing very nicely.Once you've nailed the CRUD part of your startup down and want to start slicing your data in interesting ways, you have extremely powerful and easy-to-use libraries like nltk and numpy at your disposal.Finally, Python continues to get a tremendous boost from the fact that Google uses it to write sample client code for their APIs."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Python is a great language. Simple. Powerful. Easy to read. Why not?Also django is pretty great with amazing docs. I know a lot of people argue against because the django community isn't as large as the rails community (and it isn't). All that matters is that it's large enough though (and it is). Hasn't failed to answer my questions yet."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What gives you that impression? Where did you get the numbers from?I reckon RoR is faster for rapid prototyping and development of new features so I'd choose that in the beginning for a one or two man startup.Later on if there's anything in particular you need that Python does, you can always recode once you're profitable."
}
] | en | 0.960441 |
Somebody please hire me before I take a job in weapon development | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You should hire me instead of him. I've been using python to do statistics and machine learning in a bioinformatics context for the last 15 years. Plus, if you don't, I'll kill this puppy. Isn't he cute? You wouldn't want to be responsible for his death, would you?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have a problem believing this is about Israel since:a) Defense companies in Israel _do not_ offer \"very good salary.\" In fact, it is a generally accepted fact that they universally offer lower salaries than civilian companies. This is offset somewhat by the benefits that stem from being a large and influential enterprise as well as the inherent governmental bureaucracy.b) Engineers at Israeli defense firms don't tend to be particularly militaristic or in any way \"these kind of people,\" and I know quite a few..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "OK, below is my honest, if a bit blunt, opinion.You're not a rocket scientist, your skillset as described won't make a difference for Israel (?) military power. Either go for it and enjoy your pay, or if you have your principles, don't go for it and try finding a boring civilian job as all other non-rocket-scientists do . But the drama, it's not there."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The standard advice I've heard is: Work for defense companies to learn the technology, and then leave to transfer this technology toward peaceful (and often lucrative) applications. Swords into Ploughshares."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Python and Django for missile control? For real? import sys, missile_lib\n destination = sys.argv[1]\n controller = missile_lib.Missile_control()\n controller.fire(destination)"
}
] | en | 0.985945 |
CSS Only 3D Camera Animation | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Despite hating the use of css for this kind of stuff, that was very well done."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Now that was sick use of CSS."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This work is amazing! Neoberg you are the best about css-only jobs :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Thank you all :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "just wow!"
}
] | en | 0.988324 |
Bounce your http requests around with bouncy | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": " Since bouncy is just parsing the http headers and sending along the raw tcp stream\n\nHow does it deal with a second HTTP requests on one kept-alive connection that should be routed to another server?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Would be neat to have the ability to forward any TCP connection on port X to host Y port Z.Maybe could even add the ability to peek into the stream to determine which host to forward to based on protocol (think FTP etc.)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's a cool hack, but if you are going to have a server in front of a web server why not use something like Varnish instead and get caching as well as load balancing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What's the advantage of using this over tunneling with SSH?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Be awesome if this had a jsgi and/or connect interface to drop in HTTP middleware components for given routes.. is this on your roadmap?"
}
] | en | 0.950892 |
Ask HN: Not enjoying working at my 1st large company, are there any good ones? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Corporations are there to make money, not to make beautiful code.If you want to create code with love and care, do it at home. Or we'll have to do without money (= debt), and without corporations (= economic entites based on the money). Instead let's have a resource based economy, and realize that you don't need a lot of resources to code, as long as you don't have to get money to pay taxes to pay for being spied upon. http://thevenusproject.org"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You will find this sort of thing in big and small companies, and find really good practices in both big and small companies. You will find tiny companies (< 20 engineers) with no code review, no unit tests, long lists of unfixed bugs, a resistance to source control not spelled "svn", broken custom written solutions when there are excellent open source or low cost alternatives, people that won't talk to each other, and so on.In general I'd say you have a greater chance of changing things in a small company. But really, don't judge by company size but by the groups you talk to. Learn to interview better. Ask them about the workflow. Ask to see the code base. Ask about the balance of process vs pragmatism. Ask about the challenges (both in terms of interesting work, and then annoying stuff you deal with). If you seem to have it together more than the majority of people that you talk with, run away. If you don't think you can learn from them, run away. If you find yourself thinking "man, I'm really going to have to step up my game" take the offer."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "One possible solution is to find a reasonably isolated, independent small group within a company. For example, groups that make custom software tools that other people in the company use can be more interesting, perhaps, than the main stuff the company works on."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I want to agree with @thenerdfiles in that you should make somewhere a better place to work in. It only takes one thing: the potential there that will make you "able" to achieve this goal.believe me, I worked at a very dynamic, fresh startup for 4 years but with no room given to me for introducing stuff. Moved to a very large organisation but with the potential given to me. I'm very happy now."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Look at it this way, if you are charismatic enough you can install new standards where they do not exist."
}
] | en | 0.961388 |
Fedora 13 (Goddard) has been released | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I just bought a Lenovo T510 with an Nvidia video card. I installed F13-beta on it a couple of weeks ago. It was magical.- Video card works out of the box using the nouveau driver. I just yum install'ed mesa-dri-drivers-experimental to get 3D desktop. All free software, no proprietary drivers.\n- SUSPEND WORKS OOTB!\n- Skype video and audio work flawlessly (installation still a pain on x64, though. But that's skype's fault). \n- Webcam works out of the box.\n- Flash works in chrome without issue (installation not automatic, but this is fedora)The auto installation of print drivers failed for me, but at least the framework is in place to improve this in the future. I imagine it will get fixed soon.Yes, you can make jokes about a linux fanboy being impressed with things that Mac/Windows have had working for years. But Fedora (and Ubuntu) are making demonstrable, regular improvements. The desktop experience has dramatically improved in just a couple of years. What will things look like in another two years?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I find myself frustrated by Ubuntu's packaging system. I really like Arch Linux, because I can do pacman -S ruby, and I have everything I need. Including a working Ruby Gems that I can use to update itself. And a copy of the latest Ruby 1.9, without having to change symlinks, etc.I find myself hating the fact that I have to configure everything manually though, I don't mind using Gnome, or KDE, I just really like pacman. Configuring fonts it's just not my idea of fun. Is there any chance that I would be more satisfied with Fedora's packaging? I'm going to throw it in a virtualbox to check it out, just wondering if anyone has had a similar experience?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "First thing that stood out to me: they still need better fonts. That Wikipedia screenshot makes me cringe."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Any videos of the Gnome Shell? Their vimeo link had 0 videos uploaded."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's quite sad that this promo page doesn't mention KDE (spin, SIG, anything) even at least once."
}
] | en | 0.937332 |
Ask HN: Take over abandoned GitHub repo | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Fork it and start merging pull requests from the people that made them to euske"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's MIT-licensed, so just fork it and start working on it. People searching for it by title will likely find it after a while regardless. If you can get watchers/participants and a solid commit history, it may eventually supplant the original as the first search result on Github."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "If you don't get a response definitely fork and rename."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Fork and rename, but don't call it pdfminer2 as that's trampling over the namespace of the original. Rename it to something new."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "clickable https://github.com/euske/pdfminer"
}
] | en | 0.974959 |
Why should anyone ever use a Google API again? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You mean, why should you build a for-profit product while relying on someone else's not-for-profit API?I'm guessing you shouldn't!I've seen a lot of neat projects come from Google APIs, but that's as far as I'd taking it.Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane.1 exception, though: Getting started. I could see using Google to get off the ground and then switching to a more reliable API (read: paid for) afterwards."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The original post mentions a 3-year deprecation period. Given the speed of technological progression, that would be pretty difficult for me to complain about.Edit: The Translate API, specifically mentioned, will be deprecated December 2011. That's pretty soon."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can't state this enough. Building your company which heavily relies on an API provided by someone else is risky business.Why are we still in this infatuation stage of ignoring the pitfalls of this?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please?I was already well aware of the API deprecation story, but I clicked on this link thinking it was a new article from Google defending the move (or something of the sort)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Amazing sense of entitlement in this comment. Google built the apis, they host the apis, they incur costs from this yet provide them for free. Presumably this is because they intend to get some benefit. So its Google's decision if they want to continue to provide them or change the way they work.I use some free apis in my commercial apps but I'm aware that I don't control them nor\tam I\tentitled to them. They may change in such a way that I'd have to discontinue a product but that's a responsibility I took on\t when I decided to use them. Google and other free API providers don't bear reposibility for my decision."
}
] | en | 0.965299 |
What a programmer does for a living | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've actually used a \"PB&J\" exercise like this to teach HS kids from my hometown that took a computer engineering lab.The class would start. I'd have a whole loaf of wonder bread, a pack of plasticware, pb, jelly, and paper plate.\"OK, who wants to tell me how to make PB&J\"The first kid will inevitably say something like \"Put the PB on the bread.\" So I place the jar of PB on the closed loaf of bread. They laugh. Then they start to get it. But even then, it takes time before they break it down into \"atomic\" steps that I can actually interpret."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is something I've been thinking about lately; what I actually do, and I think I've sort of figured it outFirst up, I'm not really a very good programmer. I'm ok, I enjoy it and I have enough skill to get by. What I am good at though, is being able to understand what people want. My ability, and the bulk of my income, comes from being able to take someone's vague fuzzy idea/business rules (rules? huh! business cotton wool more like it) and flesh them out and bring them to life.I think my most important role is not the technical stuff, but rather being able to listen and to understand and to really try and grok what the other person's telling you."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Programming is not tedious, and it is hard. Listing instructions for the computer to follow is only 10% of the job. Most of the job is figuring out how to deal with complexity in a way that is economical, maintainable, and satisfies secondary requirements like security and performance.In any system design involving software, the software is where the complexity goes. To save money, you might replace an electronic component with an algorithm. To make a better product you might replace a tedious user action with an automated system. This is because (some!) software developers/programmers have tools for dealing with complexity. Things like abstraction and re-use that don't trivially map to the concrete world.Frankly if software were about enumerating steps, I would have been out of this business long long ago."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is \"what an applications programmer does for a living\". Its a series of steps to accomplish a domain-specific task. Which is fine, that's what almost all programmers do.Other developers (e.g. systems programmers, common library developers, device driver hacks) do something almost completely unrelated. They look for nuggets of functionality that can be used by applications. Like \"make a list of things to do, then execute them in order\". Or \"accept instructions from a program, but authenticate the source\". Or \"make a concordance of all the terms in a problem space, for use by other code\".And making these pieces is also not at all like the process described. Its more like \"look through endless manuals for ill-described OS features and diddle with them black-box style until you find out how they really work, then stitch them together. Test for time-domain anomalies (internal object lifetime; task termination order etc) and prove you have covered all the bases. Try to make it idiot-proof. Create a document that describes how to use your invention, using analogies and examples because few will have the attention span/willingness to actually delve into it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is a good first approximation of what programmers do all day, although actually programming a coffe-making robot to operate in a kitchen is considerably harder--it involves solving a large number of vision and mechanical problems, not all of which we understand.That said, much of the expertise of a professional programmer involves big programs, and how to keep them from turning into unmanageable hairballs. This is where, say, engineers who know how to program generally have trouble.Still, as a first approximation, this analogy is rather decent."
}
] | en | 0.985755 |
Inventing Favicon.ico | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Really cool reading this back story, in 2010 I launched a web search engine that displayed search results as favicons (no text, image only). The goal was to appeal to kids (using images and not text) and mobile devices (I generally find only 3 search results fit on a mobile screen using standard search engines, but the favicon engine allowed a user to see 30 search results on the screen at once)...the traction did not last and it was shut down. Nevertheless, great learning experience and my fondness of favicons and their importance only grew.Edit: The part about Yahoo also made me recall a prior version on Yahoo's mobile search which displayed favicons prominently to the left of the search result text (first thing your eyes saw was the favicon), and at the time I felt Yahoo had the most aesthetically pleasing results page of all the search engines on mobile, all because the addition of the favicons."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Nice article. I love how some of the most widely used stuff now days is just something random that some developer at the time thought up whimsically."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Permalink: http://ruthlessray.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/inventing-favico..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> noticed an unusual spike in HTTP requests for /favicon.icoI remember a guy at Uni reacting to this in a fit of anti-MS pique ("How DARE they go making useless non-standard requests to my server behind my viewers' backs!!!!!!!") and putting a large meaningless file there for IE to find. It didn't take him long to work out he was only hurting himself..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Reminds me about the story of <blink>TLDR - guys were drinking and kicked around the idea of the blink tag. One of them left late that night to implement the tag overnight.http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag\nHN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865141"
}
] | en | 0.929209 |
An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don't Know How We Program | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think he needs to read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'. Programming, like architecture, medicine, or sculpture, is an art. Those at the bottom of the profession see only the mechanical process of churning out code, drawing a room, prescribing medication, and making a pot from clay.Those at the top are, for lack of a better term, at one with their profession, and programming is certainly no different. A good programmer can feel, in a very visceral way, the difference between good and bad code, in the same way that the average person can feel the difference between Michelangelo and street graffiti. I consider myself to be only a very mediocre coder, and yet every now and then, I see a program that is just... beautiful. Aesthetically pleasing. And I couldn't tell you why.Things like that can't be diagramed or taught; it's up to the individual to grow that seed of what Pirsig calls 'Quality' within themselves."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You mention a well-know process for designing a house. There is none that I know of, other than the word \"design\".My approach is to consciously absorb as much of the problem at hand as possible, then let my subconscious crunch on it for a while, the length of time depending on the complexity of the problem. Coming up with the big concept for a large design, both building or software, can take a few days if its revolutionary, or a few minutes if its not. The key is to have a process that helps you leverage the power of your subconscious. Trying to force a solution in your conscious mind on a harder problem can be both painful and a waste of time."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Think about other important areas of human endeavor: driving a car, flying a plane, running a company, designing a house, teaching a child, curing a disease, selling insurance, fighting a lawsuit.driving a car, flying a plane: \nThese are extremely poorly understood tasks, but fortunately parts of the average human brain are pretty good at things like that.running a company:\nSmart people fail at this all time.teaching a child:\nWhy are so many people unable to remember the math they learned in grade school? Why are we engaged in a public debate about the value of teaching to standardized tests instead of some less well-defined but apparently better approach?curing a disease:\nCome on, new methods and approaches are constantly being invented in medicine! We have no general way of doing this."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "From the article, I recognize that the author is differentiating programming, that is to me \"coding\" from all the other activities in the software development lifecycle, as he mentions in his third paragraph. I assume that many of you also recognize this, but that some might not. I bring this up because in replying back to the point of the article and whether or not we \"know how we program\" it is important to define what we mean by programming and what boundaries we place in the activity \"programming\" which is different than the activity \"design\" or the activity \"testing.\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This isn't really true for all software development. If you write a detailed design, the process for writing the software is as simple as \"write what the design says you should write, then test it conforms\" It's only true for the sort of software development where you design while you write, AKA hacking.I'm not against hacking per se. I'm doing it right now. But to take it as the de facto way the software industry functions is wrong. Hacking has certain problems, like unanticipated problems tend to stall the process (My own recent encounter had me blocked for three days, trying to think of an adequate solution to the problem of how authentication should work in an environment where HTTP servers and clients are essentially \"decoupled\", that is a solution to the problem of where presentation and application data are coming from two different sources, how does the data provider verify the presentation logic is trustworthy? It's a hard problem to which I have only a partially satisfactory answer... but I digress.)The process for writing code tends to be unwritten, simply because in the best case it is so trivial that writing it is an insult to the reader. I guess the industry's collective problem is that the best case happens so seldom."
}
] | en | 0.94167 |
Ask HN: What's considered to be a good annual raise? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I may advise you to think twice about trying to negotiate your raise. If you work at a good company that values your contribution they're going to bump your salary as much as they can reasonably afford, keeping in mind fairness to your colleagues and the current budget.In most cases your opportunity to negotiate is during the hiring process. It's hard to push back about your pay once you're hired. The best case is they give you the money because they're afraid you'll leave, but then they'll likely take the necessary steps to make you less integral to the business in case it happens again.You might be better off asking for the opportunity to go to a conference, a workshop, take grad classes, etc. It's easier for them to justify those add-ons because the company stands to benefit from what you learn. It also makes you more valuable, which will possibly get you more money down the road."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Try not to worry about annual raises within your company. Chances are you'll get anywhere between zero and cost of living, with maybe the best performer in your group getting an extra percentage point. It's just not worth getting worked up over.Think instead about increasing your value as much as possible while you're at this company. Once you're demonstrably worth a lot more than you're currently making, it's time to move on. The next guy will pay you what you're worth, whereas your current employer will find excuses to keep paying you what they're paying you.Repeat this every 2-3 years early in your career and before long you'll be where you belong, salary wise. It's a shame that it works this way, because often one of your first companies will be a really nice place to work. If you stay there, though, you'll stay underpaid throughout your career."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is one of those questions where people tend to reply with semi-snarky advice like \"as much as you can get\" or \"it's relative\". And they are right in a sense.Still, based only on my own past experience (assuming your review is a positive one) I'd say 4%-5% is fair... more than that seems like a clear reward and message that \"we need to keep this person\", and less than that seems like \"eh, here's something\".EDIT: As to your second q: knowing what similar people in your industry and area are being paid might be a good figure to know (and if you can do it tactfully, bring up) - but being able to point out some of your accomplishments in the past year that the reviewer may not remember or be aware of will probably get you farther."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "At a minimum, I'd expect a cost of living increase that's roughly at the level of inflation in your country.From there, it depends where you are in your career, what your performance has been like, what the going rate for someone in your line of work is, what condition the company is in, and what condition the economy as a whole is in.Spending a few minutes at http://www.glassdoor.com/ might be a good use of your time to find market rates for people in your job."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "4% to 5% is norm from my experience in NYC - however keep in mind how your company is doing.As for squeezing out more - do as others have suggested and see if you are earning what you should be according to market rate in NYC and your level of experience. Bring any accomplishments to the table that have helped the company over the course of the last year.Bottom line is, be fair to company in what you feel you deserve and be fair to yourself as well - don't be greedy."
}
] | en | 0.977442 |
The future of computing? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This meme of the iPad as primarily a consumption device needs to die. On launch day you have plenty of very well designed drawing apps, some incredible music apps (including a very nice digital 8-track, http://www.sonomawireworks.com/iphone/studiotrack/) , and Apple's iWork suite. In the coming months I think we'll see plenty of other quality applications aimed squarely at artists, writers, designers, and musicians. The iPad is the first serious digital sketchbook, one in which you can sketch out many kinds of ideas not only visual ones."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I find it amusing that Apple has come full circle and that their latest incarnations of computing portend a much more dystopian future than anything IBM had in mind in their 1984 Super Bowl commercial."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In short: Yes, but it's not a problem.Consider the situation, say, 5 years ago. We all watched TV. That's consume-only; no user production involved. We all read books. Same deal. Radio, newspapers, etc. All the same. But, we all also had computers, and we used to them to produce, interact, etc.The point is that we used a number of devices, we did some producing, but mostly we consumed. Now, perhaps a few years from now, when newspapers, radio, etc., are all dead, we will do all this with just one or two devices. But we should still expect each individual to do a lot more consuming than producing.(Note: This is not to say I'm happy with the Apple/Amazon-runs-the-show model of computing. I don't own a Kindle, or an iPhone-OS-anything. Nor do I intend to get one.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm only speculating here and what do I know, but in my opinion the consumer/creator dynamic is cyclic. Right now, we have a lot of content, hence the reddits, HNs, etc. of the world.At some point the supply for all these aggregators will run low (not disappear, of course) and we'll see a rise in the number of people that author content. And so on and so forth."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Except, the future is already there: our bandwidth is asymmetric, running our own server is increasingly impossible, and the Internet becomes more and more centralized, like good old closed networks like AOL.The iPad is the symbol of that trend, but otherwise is tiny, irrelevant, even."
}
] | en | 0.932185 |
League of Legends database compromised, passwords hashed without salt | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm nearly positive the US code salted the hashes (it's been a long time since I was in that code :). I say US code because (again, memory is dim) I think they had a partnership with a company in the EU and that (might have) included authentication.The platform guys at Riot were the sharpest group of engineers I've worked with. Smart and able to get stuff done without bike shedding. They did stuff right."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We can't actually tell much about their password storage mechanism from that post. For one, they mention \"encrypted hashes\", which might mean encryption, might mean hashes, or might mean both; for two, they don't describe how they determined which users had weak passwords. If they were using some kind of reversible encryption scheme, it's possible that they ran that function against their database and determined common passwords that way.I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, unlikely as it may be, because if they were in fact doing something as stupid as SHA1 or MD5 or ROT13, and they still opened their post with \"Keeping player information secure is very important to Riot\", then somebody needs to be strangled as an example to other mealy-mouths.I also take issue with telling your users what kind of passwords to use. If you're storing passwords correctly, and if you're blocking brute force attempts, it almost doesn't matter what password your users are using. (Almost: somebody could still try \"password\" on an account and get lucky if it's one of the 10,000 accounts with that password.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It says encrypted not hashed, these are not the same thing. Encryption uses keys and without the keys you can't get the value without a huge brute force effort. Hash without salt can be broken trivially. It'd bad either way but encrypted is way better than leaked hash."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "LinkedIn, LastFM, League of Legends... What is with this disturbing trend of websites beginning with L being cracked all in the same week?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I don't understand why this keeps happening. When someone designs the user/password model for a website or software do they serious not even consider properly encrypting the passwords? This is not rocket science, implementing a relatively secure password hashing setup takes a minimal amount of work. Hell, adding a salt is an extra field in the database, an extra line of code when creating a user and an extra \"+salt\" when computing the hash.I honestly think they spend more time coming up with ridiculous password requirements than actually encrypting the passwords. Possible dialog:Dev 1: The passwords must have at least one symbol, one number, no dictionary words, and it can't be longer than 15 characters.Dev 2: That'll be pretty secure, which hashing functions should we use? And should we salt it?Dev 1: I think MD5 should be secure enough and salts are just overkill."
}
] | en | 0.989343 |
Ask HN: echo "127.0.0.1 facebook.com" ›› /etc/hosts? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think it's reasonable. I have a number of sites (reddit.com, facebook.com and google-analytics.com) blocked in the same way in my /etc/hostsSince I don't have Facebook account I very rarely need to unblock it for anything and it's a bit of a pain to do so it stops me wasting time on sites like reddit."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow! I was looking for a way to block Facebook and this is the best way I can think of :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is actually a great idea. I'm definitely going to start doing this."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've done that for a few forums and gaming sites to discourage myself from wasting time there. A lot of people used to trade lists of marketing domains for adding to their hosts files before browser plugins were created for the same purpose. It is not an uncommon practice and should not bother anybody unless they suddenly need to access one of these sites from your computer, which can be easily fixed for a short time."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This doesn't usually work since their tracking API may use domain different than www.facebook.com. (like fbcdn.com or whatever)Websites are on too many domains these days."
}
] | en | 0.971767 |
Ask HN: Crap, I just downloaded over 10000 Credit Card Numbers - Now What? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Talk to a lawyer too. By posting this you no longer have plausible deniability in the event something bad happens down the road. For example, maybe your client is hacked and an investigation is opened by the credit card company who finds out that you had discovered gross negligence on the part of your client but had not reported it. I'm not sure if that opens you up to the chance of being sued. Somebody might have their identity stolen or the credit card company might want to recoup some costs. Maybe the client turns on you and somehow makes you a scapegoat.Simply by posting this story, you may have opened yourself up to a lawsuit because an enterprising mind could follow your HN history and what you've posted here, put together enough clues, and find out the vulnerable system. They could hack it. No, you weren't directly responsible for it, but civil law is an entirely different beast than criminal law."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "1. Tell your client to immediately switch to another service provider for his online store. When the current one gets hacked (note I said when, not if), your client's customers aren't going to care that it was a third party provider your client was using. They will look at it as they trusted your client and that trust was betrayed.2. Perhaps an anonymous tip to Visa and Mastercard would be in order. The provider needs to be shut down, as what they are doing goes beyond any excusable security failure. Almost every developer, no matter how good, can botch security--and so if all they were leaking was credit card numbers, names, addresses, and phone number, it would be at least remotely forgivable, if they were to promptly fix it.However, you said they have the CVV too. That is not supposed to be stored at all. Of course, an online store site has to keep it for the duration of processing the transaction, but that should only be a few minutes. The fact that they are storing CVV shows that they are beyond redemption.3. As for the numbers and other data you downloaded, secure delete it. I doubt anyone is going to care much about it. I once had a file with about the same number of card numbers and contact information, which I received unsolicited, offered up as a sample of the 100k cards the sender wanted to sell me. I was able to do some checking and determine that the information was apparently legit.I called Visa and (I think) American Express. I naively thought they would be interested in putting immediate holds on the accounts. Nope. The FBI was not interested either--they suggested that the Secret Service would be the appropriate agency to deal with someone trafficking in stolen credit cards. The Secret Service disagreed. Eventually the next day I found someone at Visa who asked me to mail her the list."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "- Did you delete db from your local computer? If not, do it now.- Inform your client about the problem and how you can fix it.- Fix it."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I agree with all the other responses in her (delete it, tell the client, etc). But, the fact you mention this is based on PHP - maybe you were trying to hint at the system, but it sounds like you are blaming the language.This has nothing to do with the language and could just have easily been accomplished in any other language."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Obviously, just delete the file, tell your client exactly what happened and explain how you can help them secure their data better. Turn this accident into an opportunity.Why are these things always so hard? Why bring a lawyer (who will charge money fo his services) in own it?"
}
] | en | 0.993592 |
Ideas I would like to build / see built | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> Canvas/WebGL/JavaScript GameI made a bunch of small JS games/puzzles using Processing.js (which uses Canvas/VML). The exact rules are slightly cryptic by design. I definitely loved making them and intend to make a bunch more this year:http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?noredhttp://chir.ag/projects/prc/?goldhttp://chir.ag/projects/prc/?piggyhttp://chir.ag/projects/prc/?vanishI hope you enjoy them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "On a related note, there's a new sub-reddit called SomebodyMakeThis. (a sub-reddit being a user created subsection of the link aggregator Reddit)http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Not to hate, but these are vague ideas overall. Those are the kind that are a dime a dozen. ;)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'd like to see also: a web browser, an OS, a \"spreadsheet\" (term I've coined, I'll explain in a follow-up post), also some sort of FPS, also some sort of markup format that's like HTML but not presentation-specific...also, I'd like a language like C but with classes. And, a pony. Thank you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I love the idea of a game which limits the time you can spend playing it. You might have something big with that one."
}
] | en | 0.855363 |
Show HN: Finance Jobs – Jobs Board for the Finance Industry | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't have a green user name but I'm going to ask my question anyway.It has been said that using a .co TLD for anything other than tech sites should be avoided since non-tech users are prone to mistyping the url with a .com, sending traffic to the exact place the .co site owners hoped to take it from. What's your view on this?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We're excited to launch our new jobs board for the finance industry :)As a special offer for the HN community, contact me (email in profile) and i'll waive our fee for 12 months!Feedback more than welcome"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ":%s/optimimal/optimal/g"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why is this on frontpage?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Do you have an XML feed I can use to drive traffic to your site?"
}
] | en | 0.93607 |
New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly open!The one thing I don't understand is who pays for hosting it. Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it? Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that much of an issue. Does anyone have an idea how much it costs Google to serve the Google Maps API? Wikipedia is in the same situation, and they solve it with their donation pleas. Maybe it would make sense if a fraction of our ISP bill automatically goes to the most visited non-profit websites. They offer kind of a public good to everyone, after all."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Loved the watercolor tile.And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images.I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I will have access to the edges/ vector images, so there is no need for accurate edge detection- but such organic edges would add a lot if there is a way to do it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Great to see OSM projects advancing more and more each day. I love the style of the Toner profile...minimalist and simple.As someone in the digital mapping industry, I really wish we'd open our data up a bit more."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I wish there were tiles similar to swiss cartographer Eduard Imhof's shaded relief maps. In my opinion, this is slowly but surely becoming a lost art form: http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/imhof/imhof3.html, http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/imhof/imhof8_e.html"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Love to see creative renderings of maps, especially OSM data!The texture of the 'watercolour' option is very impressive, but (to be critical) I wonder about the usefulness of it without labels and with the fuzziness of roads (some stop then start again, some meld into others which actually don't meet).I love the toner option though :) Fantastic!And the terrain map is great too. Certaintly easier to get a grip on than the OSM cyclemap (contour lines)."
}
] | en | 0.952799 |
Apple likes our name and so do we | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here about what Apple's HealthKit is. HealthKit is simply the name for the API framework Apple is making available to developers, following in the naming conventions of UIKit, WebKit, SpriteKit and so on.HealthKit is not, however, a name that consumers will ever actually come across in using their device. Apple's own app on top of HealthKit is simply called "Health", and I highly doubt the string "HealthKit" appears anywhere in that app's UI."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Regarding the trademark issue: if the other company does use its name as a brand as well as a trade name, it may have trademark rights in its name, even if they have never applied to register it. [1]It was certainly well known by Apple that healthkit.com was already registered and in use by a company already working on a very similar product.As for copyright, it does not apply to names: What is not protected by copyright? ... Names, Titles, Short Phrases, or Expressions [2]Finally, Apple seems to think it's easier asking for forgiveness than permission when it comes to naming products [3][1] http://www.quora.com/Trademarks/If-someone-has-a-company-nam...[2] http://www.legalzoom.com/intellectual-property-rights/copyri...[3] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/71042,cisco-expects-deal-with-..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It looks like this company doesn't own any trademarks or copyright on the HealthKit name, but Apple does. Not sure how they can be upset if they haven't even tried to protect their brand.They filed the trademarks some months ago: \nhttp://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/30/healthbook-healthkit-tra..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "From http://blog.daemonl.com/2014/06/healthkit-apple-stole-our-bu...> But not only HealthKit, The whole 'Kit naming schemeApple's been using the "kit" naming convention for a much longer time (AppKit, IOKit, WebKit)--I think it originates in NeXTSTEP, if not earlier."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Aussie law student here. IANAL. I haven't studied IP in a year or so but I'm not convinced that the startup has a huge claim to the name HealthKit at all. I've looked at both US and local law in the past so I'll try and explain in case it helps any founders reading this."HealthKit", in the context of both healthkit.com and the dev kit describes the intend purpose of the IP. The startup seems to produce a software "kit" for health practitioners and the Apple version is obviously a dev kit that deals with the new health app.Any trademark that describes intended purpose is called a 'descriptive mark' (lawyers are an imaginative bunch) and are generally really hard to protect. You need to show evidence of market use, and for lack of a better word, traction. Apple actually seem to have the stronger argument here: MapKit, GameKit, UIKit etc. have been used for ages and are recognised in the software community as being associated with Apple. This would be categorised as a software trademark and I'm not sure that the startup can establish a strong argument that they've a) established their brand in the software market and that b) they should be able to exclude Apple to prevent confusion. This is consistent with both Aus and US law to my knowledge, and successfully establishing themselves in the Australian market, or filing a trademark here won't bind the US anyway.Bottom line, the more generic and descriptive your name (in context), the harder it will be to successfully defend it. Owning a .com doesn't count for much, if anything (even trying to register a generic descriptive word + .com - mattress.com was registered unsuccessfully IIRC). You need to get eyeballs on it and sell stuff to win this with a common law/equitable trademark. Considering I hadn't heard of HealthKit.com until this happened they might struggle with this.If you're a founder and you want to protect your name, pick a name that is something arbitrary or suggestive. Healthkit.com's claims would be much stronger if it was named Potato or Voozle and Apple used the same name for a dev kit. It makes it far harder to communicate your product quickly but thats the tradeoff. Names that invoke your product through onomatopoeia, like 'Twitter' strike a good balance between effective communication and defensibility. They're bloody hard to come up with though.Hopefully, HealthKit.com use this as an opportunity to get their message out to their target audience, they're getting an audience on hacker news but its doctors they should be going for.As an aside, it's interesting to see how much of the media is confusing the HealthKit dev kit with the Health app. Helps with the story I guess."
}
] | en | 0.962102 |
Common patterns of markup & style | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Overall I like it, It can be very usefull for initial mark up where design isn't much inportant. Definitely took a place at my bookmarks.Only one thing I noticed. I am not sure if it is a bug, but please check this page http://pea.rs/forms/multi-left-labels (and apparently same at http://pea.rs/forms/top-labels)It has some problems with displaying textarea, at least for me it looks like that: http://i.imgur.com/tJKiG.pngI am using Windows 7 with Firefox 9.0.1"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm a web developer trying to be a designer as well and the one thing that always frustrates me with HTML 5 resources is that they focus on the definition of each new element and not proper use which preserves its semantic value within a document. This one pretty much nailed it with good examples. Thanks for sharing!"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's a good initiative but utterly wrong regarding best practices for css selectors.ol.tags li a span.metaReally? Why not something like:.tags-vertical .metaI like the overall style a lot tho."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Awesome stuff. Are these layout elements valid HTML & CSS (I'm too lazy to run it through a validator at the moment)?This is a great resource of commonly used web elements, kudos to you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Awesome resource. Quite jealous of those just starting out. I wish I would have had stuff like this when I first started."
}
] | en | 0.936642 |
Hacker News Tokyo Meetup #5 – Friday, Feb. 4th | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Hey guys. Does HN Tokyo Meetup have a regular page that you use to organize your events? Is it at http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/. If you do have a regular place that you announce your meetups, do you mind posting a link here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmQExXr67OcTdDBZZl9...On top of organizing Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley, and keeping in occasional contact with our 8 other Hackers and Founders chapters, I'm trying to keep track of all the HN meetups that are occurring all over the world.At some point, I'll be posting this on the new version of the Hackers and Founders website."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm interested, but on the fence. How many people usually go to these events?I live out in Gunma, so a train ticket and hotel room would be a pretty major investment for me."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "See y'all there."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Any plans for another one between mid-March to mid-April? :-)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm in tonight, Jason , 8 years in Tokyo, Aussie, Connector, of GoodPeople (GoodPeople.jp)"
}
] | en | 0.849422 |
Ask HN: Somewhere just a little better than HN? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "No one cares about all of HN. We just all care about different subsets. If you want your perfect community, you need to find enough people who care about exactly the same subset of articles as you to support the community and convince them to become a part of it. Then you need to ruthlessly keep out anyone who has a slightly different subset, while making sure people don't leave the community or, for that matter, change their tastes.Of course, your own tastes will change, so really you need to guide everyone else in the community to change their tastes right along with you so the community will continue to provide the aggregation you desire. Either that, or you'll have to convince or force old members to leave and new ones to come in that match your new interests.In other words, you're asking for something which can't reasonably be expected to exist. The aggregator you want is you. Click on the articles that sound interesting. Ignore the ones that don't. You can't expect a community to perfectly support your personal, unique, and ever-changing tastes."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Maybe try using an RSS reader and over time build up the exact things you want to read. Eventually, you'll have a perfect feed of things that interest you (well, maybe not perfect, but close). Another option is Reddit, which has the ability to subscribe to specific groups that show up in your feed. It's community generated if you would prefer not to hassle with building an RSS feed library yourself. I find myself coming to HN for startup stuff and Reddit for more directed conversations about Python or Ubuntu since they are already filtered and show up when I'm logged in."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The displayed links show a user-chosen title (which, to be sure, is often less informative than the original article title) and a base URL for the source (which also is often confusing, especially for blogs or newsgroups hosted on the Google domain). That's enough information to guide my skimming of links to choose the links to read. If the duplicate submission detector worked better, I'd be even happier, but I find HN useful for finding what I like to read."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I browse through the titles of the news and read only those that are really of my interest. I cherrypick the news I read and I find a good think that not all the news are of my interest because I don't have enough time to read them all. Sometimes I find interesting articles on fields I wouldn't have researched on my own."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I recently reread \"hot-tubbing an online community\", a classic from 1999 (http://www.calebclark.org/?p=870), which seems very relevant."
}
] | en | 0.98282 |
Literally worse than EA | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As someone who actually runs a Minecraft server and has developed several mini games and around 50 plugins, I'd like to clarify a few things to people who aren't involved in Minecraft.* Minecraft is pretty expensive to host. The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting. Only a few servers make enough to cover wages. Most just barely scrape by. DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly.* Most Minecraft servers are no longer vanilla Minecraft servers. The Minecraft server software is pretty bad in both functionality and performance. Most servers use Craftbukkit or Spigot, which has a plugin API (Spigot is a patched version of Craftbukkit with mostly performance fixes). Craftbukkit is open source, but is a legally gray area as it contains the decompiled code from the Mojang server. There is an API for writing plugins called Bukkit which is totally separate from the craftbukkit server implementation.* The large servers have tried to work with Mojang to get a set of rules they can work with. Mojang listened to them and actually added clauses prohibiting some of the things they said they needed to even have a chance of this working for them.* While Mojang claim their EULA never allowed servers to make money, their first one actually did. They've also granted written permission to some servers. Last year they had a panel at Minecon were top server owners actually talked about how their server makes money. Despite what their EULA says, Mojang has been basically telling servers it was fine to monetize up until now.* Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought.* Bungeecord is a proxy system that allows players to switch between multiple servers without logging out. The Minecraft clients multiplayer server list support has barely improved since Alpha. Mojang's new EULA treats a bungeecord proxy as a single server. This means that although they allow owners to charge players to access a server, it's pretty much impossible to do without inconveniencing players.* The Minecraft network protocol is not patented. A number of open source server implementations exist which do no use any Mojang code. Since these changes have been announced these projects have become much more active with disgruntled developers starting to contribute. It is believed that the EULA cannot legally be enforced on these servers, although one Mojang developer made a statement to the contrary.* No final draft for the new EULA has actually be made available, but a date for compliance has already been set. 1st August 2014.* Mojang released their Realms hosting service worldwide just before making these changes, prompting many to accuse them of trying to eliminate the competition. However, they could simply stop releasing their server software if that was their intention, so most people don't believe this to be true."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Oh wow. Minecraft. I have an 8yo boy, so I spend a lot more time thinking about this than I would like.I think Mojang has it's priorities slightly wrong here. At the moment much of the interesting stuff in Minecraft is done via mods. But the user experience for that is pretty close to pre-Google search: browse through random forums to find links to dodgy download sites that attempt to push malware or porn to you.Then when you find a working download, you have to install. Inevitably that means clashes with existing mods, and hours trying different versions of things that some random person on a forum claims work.FFS, I'm a Java programmer, and I can't work out how to make this shit work most of the time.In my view Mojang should do the following: Build a working, stable official Mod API, which at least attempts to make it possible to determine if different mods will work together\n\n Implement an in-game app store, and let mod authors sell their mods. \n\nI'd much prefer to spend a dollar on a new mod rather than the horrible, horrible experience it is now.Rant over.."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase doesn't have much money to kick into the pot.Minefold was a YC company that tried to make a go of monetising Minecraft hosting in the Right Way. They were smart guys and built a great platform, but they're not around any more. I believe it's because it was just too hard to get Minecraft users to pay anything for their servers.We looked into ways to incorporate advertising into Minecraft in a player-friendly way. Mojang weren't interested in helping, but it wasn't the technical barrier that stopped us. It was inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic of the game.Online multiplayer doesn't happen well without servers to mediate the experience. Those servers cost money. This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": " "The EULA for Minecraft says you can’t make money of\n Minecraft. If you make mods, they have to be free."\n\nI don't understand the legal theory behind this. Is this contract law? If a programmer wrote a third-party mod without buying the software (say by reading an API description), would they still be bound to its terms?Also, does restricting modification like this infringe on "first sale" rights?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Following the link on that page to the "translated" version of the new EULA, their reasoning seems to still be "we don’t want our players to be exploited or to have a frustrating time unless they pay." [0] I find a lot of things wrong with this mentality, mostly in that it assumes that the servers that charge for gameplay have some kind of monopoly over the servers. If you don't want to pay for gameplay, just visit another server. You don't have to put up with them. Heck, if you really wanted to you could host your own. The bottom line is you don't need to pay anyone, they're not exploiting you. If you're getting frustrated because they're charging you then that's your own dumb fault for visiting that server and putting up with it. If you want to pay, go ahead, support the server hosts. All of this is under the false assumption that people are being forced into paying, which simply isn't true.[0] https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/"
}
] | en | 0.97337 |
Programming Laws and Reality: Do We Know What We Think We Know? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm intrigued by the one law (unless I missed something) that he says definitely no longer applies:> Wirth's Law> Software performance gets slower faster than hardware speed gets faster.> This law was formulated by Niklaus Wirth during the days of mainframes and seemed to work for them. However, for networked microprocessors and parallel computing, the law no longer seems to hold.Certainly it holds for some things. My first computer (late 1970s) started up in less than a second. A decade later I had to wait perhaps 20 seconds. Today waiting a full minute for a computer to get to a usable state is not at all unusual. On the other hand, we have Google, which, in a fraction of a second, can do things undreamed of only a few years ago.This leads to what I think is an interesting line of inquiry. What kids of software does this law still apply to? Why does it apply there and not elsewhere? And what can we do about it?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While this list is certainly educational, remember that most of these "laws" are heuristics based on personal experience.The discipline of software development is about as rigorous as parapsychology. To learn what we really know about software, I recommend Making Software: What Really Works & Why We Believe It[1], The Leprechauns of Software Engineering[2], and browsing It Will Never Work in Theory[3].And no matter what languages, testing frameworks, or methodologies you use, always remember:Every "bug" or defect in software is the result of a mismatch between a person's assumptions, beliefs or mental model of something (a.k.a. "the map"), and the reality of the corresponding situation (a.k.a. "the territory").[4]If you want your map to reflect the territory accurately, you'll need more than a few "laws" handed down as gospel.1. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Works-Believe-...2. https://leanpub.com/leprechauns3. http://neverworkintheory.org/4. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2rb/why_learning_programming_is_a_gr..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Ward Cunningham's technical debt concept is a great metaphor, but not such a great metric. Technical debt omits projects canceled due to poor quality. Since about 35% of large systems are never finished, this is a serious omission.In my experience, projects large and small are typically cancelled because executive management changes their minds, not because of poor quality.Certainly there are lots of famous examples of projects that crumble under their own weight, but I really don't think it's anything like 35%.Business goals change (for better or for worse), market conditions change, egos change, etc.One cultural difference seems to be that a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who writes off a billion dollar investment due to a change in business strategy is a visionary who makes brave decisions, but anyone who writes off a project/division due to a billion dollars in technical debt is going to be tarred and feathered for blundering."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "...where is this purported data?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Good list. If only project management people read this, maybe then sky would be brighter on programming horizon."
}
] | en | 0.985512 |
Jiro's Dream | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I watched this movie on a flight home recently and loved it. Loved the man, loved that he found a calling and stuck to it, loved that he never changed a thing and won worldwide acclaim because of it.Then I got home and read Ebert's review. This paragraph hit me like a punch to the stomach and put it all in perspective:\"Even at the high prices of his premium fresh ingredients, you realize he must be a rich man. But to what end? The existence of his sons are an indication that he has a wife, although we never see her. He must have a home, although we never visit it. There must be hours when he cannot be at work, but the film indicates no amusements, hobbies or pastimes. The idea of his courtship of his wife fascinates me: Forgive me, but I imagine that even while making love, he must be fretting about the loss of valuable sushi-making time.\"http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is why I collect screenshots of UI elements and Web pages I think look good (several thousand in the last 10 years). I was the typical \"I can't do design!\" developer for years, but if you pay attention to and record your tastes then your skill level will slowly begin to close the gap."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I am now $120 poorer thanks to this 'free' movie.After watching this movie you may be tempted to find your nearest high quality sushi restaurant, sit at the bar and ask the Chef to make you whatever he sees fit. This is a delicious but very expensive idea. I did get to try a number of dishes that I would never have ordered though ... all thanks to Jiro."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "99% Positive with critics on Rotten Tomatoes:\nhttp://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/jiro_dreams_of_sushi/Available for free streaming with Amazon Prime:\nhttp://www.amazon.com/Jiro-Dreams-of-Sushi/dp/B008ODZEQ0Or streaming for Netflix subscribers:\nhttps://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Jiro_Dreams_of_Sushi/7018..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"But just when you think you know it all, you realize that you're just fooling yourself... and then you get depressed.\"--A Fish Vendor"
}
] | en | 0.981101 |
Ask HN: What publications (online or paper) do you pay for? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The Economist. I occasionally buy a copy of the Financial Times if I've got a long train ride, and maybe a copy of Bicisport, too:-)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The New Yorker for fun reading. The Week for a light digest of the news. National Geographic for my wife. I'll likely subscribe to NYTimes when it goes behind the paywall.Work provides the technical publications."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "none. as far as I can tell, the sort of thing I'm interested in is delivered faster, better, and in a more convenient format for free here online. I occasionally read the IEEE \"computer\" publications my girl leaves laying about the house, but those are mostly about things I don't care much about. Occasionally they talk about new networking tech.Paper is just so hard to deal with. I mean, I keep books, but periodicals are somehow more... disposable?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The Times, occasionally The Guardian (paper versions as they're easier to scroll and have better picture quality than the web versions)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Economist at 70% (student) discount/FT full blown corporate sub from my time there as a journalist"
}
] | en | 0.949091 |
End of Windows XP support puts 95% of world's ATMs at risk | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The entire premise of this article is simply wrong.ATMs run Windows XP Embedded, which will continue to be supported at least through 2016 (if it isn't extended again.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you're doing stuff The Right Way, you don't wire them up to the public internet, but instead put a VPN router/gateway between ATM and internet uplink to keep out fucktards messing with the internet uplink.This way, you could run Win98 SE on the ATMs and need not worry about hackers (if your networks are properly firewalled, at least!)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Do ATMs get the updates anyway? If I had a computer that does one job, and connects to one network with one modem, I don't think I would put it on the internet just to get windows updates.Does anyone know how this works, or if they actually get the security updates now?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If win8 can run programs in compatibility mode for winXP what is possibly being run on these ATMs that can't be run on an updated OS? Also I don't think the fact that winXP has "support" makes the ATMs more or less likely to be at risk.Also can people stop posting links to articles that immediately have popups that try and sell you some stuff and doesn't even let you view the article without signing up for some nonsense?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I have problems with the 95% figure. Currently I work for the biggest player in the ATM game and every ATM I have seen in our lab has been running windows 7. I am not saying we arent running a crap ton of legacy ATMs but I would say many of our ATMs are running Windows 7 especially if they are for a new customer.We have ~25% of the ATM market so I think 95% is very skewed, the other players should at least have some ATMs off XP."
}
] | en | 0.923366 |
Warren Buffett has me Confused | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think the author is making a small fallacy regarding investments. He assumes that as the capital gains tax rises, investment will fall because the investor will make less money. This seems true for small investors, who might decide to \"not invest\" their money, and instead find starting their own business will have a higher return than buying GOOG stock.But if I have $1 billion to invest, then I don't have the option of \"not investing\" that money. It has to sit in stocks, bonds, or some other financial instrument. A higher capital gains tax may change which instruments I choose to invest in, but that money will all still be invested.A legitimate argument against higher capital gains taxes is that really great investors (i.e. the kind you want selecting investments, such as Buffet) will have less money to invest. This would hurt the economy, unless the corresponding good caused by government spending is greater.I think everyone would agree there is a happy equilibrium somewhere. Most rich people think it lies on the side of less taxation. Buffet, in contrast, seems to think that quality investors don't add as much value as they want to believe."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The primary point of Buffett's article isn't even addressed here: most people pay a much higher percent of their income to the federal government than do the \"mega-rich\" (I do have to say that don't really like Buffett's term there) and, furthermore, that the economy didn't suffer one drop when the rates were more reasonable (and in fact, did much better than under the historically low capital gains rates of the last decade).In fact, if you read this article closely, it really doesn't present an argument, it just says \"I don't wanna.\""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "When the blog author argues that \"Warren Buffet should write a check\" he is not oblivious to the fact that asking everyone in your tax bracket to pay more taxes generates more revenue than making a voluntary contribution. Rather, he is arguing that Warren Buffet feeling guilty about not paying enough taxes is not a good basis for rasiing taxes on everyone in that category.Rather, taxes should be placed where they will do the least harm to the economy. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax. Ideally, taxes should be placed where they will not distort people's behavior. So, the relevant question is whether increasing taxes on capital gains will have a change investors behavior making the economy less efficient. Buffet says \"My rich friends will invest no matter what!\" But, he provides no evidence to support this. On the margin, some investments will not be worth it with a higher tax (as described by lionhearted). How big of a problem this is up for debate. But we shouldn't make tax decisions based on Buffet's anecdotal experience with rich friends."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think this post may understate the economic impact of low taxes on high incomes. While I agree that in the short term, the deficit actually isn't the biggest threat to the US economy, I do think we need to close it long term, and the main options are 1) spending less and 2) raising revenues. If you can get the second through growth, that's much better, but you have to be realistic about how much growth you're going to get.If you agree that some revenues are an inevitable part of good governance, then taxes become inevitable. So while I'd agree that taxes (usually) deter desirable behavior such as work, investing, saving, spending, and so forth, it doesn't really make sense to talk about how taxes are innately bad. You need to think about what level of taxation you can get away with, and where taxation will do the least damage.This is where I tend to part ways with most fiscal conservatives (though I like to think of myself as one).My take on it is: estate tax? No, I don't like it. I'd much rather allow a person who has created great wealth to decide who to give it to.Payroll taxes? No, don't like them. I'd much rather not deter work and put an immediate regressive tax burden on people who get off their asses and work poorly paid jobs.So which is worse. A 10% tax on estates above $5 million, or a 13% tax on the lowest income workers in America?Which tax cut provides more benefit to the economy? A decrease in capital gains from 15% to 10%, or a decrease in marginal tax rates for the middle class? Which one would lead to more spending if you need to jump start the economy?You can tell which way I lean, I'm sure, but I consider these good questions for reasonable debate. But I do think that a higher tax rate on very wealthy individuals that enables a lower tax rate on low income individuals (through, say, a reduction in the payroll tax) could bring a lot of tax relief where it is needed most, and might be a better jump start to the economy than \"trickle down\" economics."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> Investing is the science and art of placing money where it does the most goodErr, no it isn't. It's the science and art of placing money where it will grow the most. That is neither equivalent nor synonymous with \"does the most good\"."
}
] | en | 0.992349 |
Valve working on 'Steam Box' gaming console with hardware partners | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here is what i hope will pan out:1. Steam OS will be powered by Linux + OpenGL2. It will have unparalleled gamer-bias and developer-bias instead of revolving around publishers (meaning its truly gamer focused as what has been Valve's MO)3. It will be just good enough in the graphics department but will instead lower the friction in the assets pipeline department, virality and player-analytics4. Graphics will now take a backseat to story, AI, art-direction and pacing (due to the hardware spec being fixed and player measuring tools)5. crowdsourcing features will be baked in thru APIs (Team Fortress hats as a precursor)6. social multiplayer features baked in thru APIs7. a standard controller will be mandated8. optional accessories like bio-measuring gadgets (measure opponent's sweat, heart-rate and track gaze) will be sold online.If any of this comes to pass then it would have made PC gaming much much more evolved."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This article doesn't mention a very important and very relevant point (maybe they assume everyone is aware):Valve are also the developer and publisher of some of the most popular video game titles around. This puts them in an exceptionally good position to build something like this because with the backing of some of their own titles (For example releasing Half Life 3 as a \"Steam Box\" exclusive) would immediately encourage sales. Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Half life and Team Fortress 2 are all hugely popular Valve games and their platform \"Steamworks\" is again used by some huge names, Call of Duty, Football Manager, the list goes on. They have their platform directly integrated with a large amount of popular games and a lot of new releases go with Steam for their PC releases.There are some interesting Steamworks and Steam statistics and information in this PDF: http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/SteamworksBrochure201..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Well, this clinches it. The next generation of home consoles from Sony and Microsoft are going to, of necessity, run on minimally-customized, commodity hardware, with the end-user experience as sole differentiator. It has seemed like an obvious choice following the diminishing returns of Sony's adventures in exotic supercomputing architecture, but with a competitor at last combining a stationary-target PC with existing vertical integration and massive mind share and market share, they'll have no choice if they want to remain competitive. This industry is in for interesting times.And heaven help them all if Apple brings apps to the Apple TV."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There were rumours a while ago that Valve was working on Linux support for their infamous source engine which powers most if not all their games. What if it wasn't just support for linux but Steam running on a Valve tailored Linux kernel. Obviously most games would still need Windows for DirectX but all of Valves games and many others could work on this super thin Linux kernel.* http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE4M..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This sounds interesting and all, but who is going to be their customers? The 30 or so millions of their users obviously already HAVE their own hardware.So is it going to target the current console owners? And persuade them how? \"It's like your box, but you can install mods. It's like a PC but with less freedom.\"?Anyway I'm looking forward to the development. The three big console manufacturers need a kick.Edit: Also Steam doesn't have their own OS obviously. So is every box going to need a Win licence?"
}
] | en | 0.957566 |
What a fig is. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you are squeamish and like figs, this may comfort you.According to a comment in the original post, majority of commercial ones do not contain insects:\"Only some kinds of figs (so called 'Smyrna' types) are pollenated by wasps. The vast majority of figs eaten come from varieties that produce fruit parthenocarpically. It is highly unlikely that the fig you ate at the supermarket was of a variety pollenated by wasps: most north american commercial figs are not.\"http://scienceblogs.com/oscillator/2010/09/edible_symbiosis....I chose to believe this explanation :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Ripe figs are delicious, and knowing that they've also, potentially killed a wasp - man's greatest enemy - only makes their nectar sweeter to my tongue."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is only a copy of\nhttp://scienceblogs.com/oscillator/2010/09/edible_symbiosis....It is better to link to the original article. It has some photos and videos of the figs."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Take a fig.Okay, take about 8 of them.And take 8 strips of thick-cut, maple-smoked, peppered organic bacon, the best you can find.Wrap the fig in the bacon, secure with a toothpick, and place on a pan.Roast at 425F for about 25 minutes, checking after about 15 minutes.I assure you, you will not be disappointed."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I have to say from experience...If you move into a house (purchase/rent/otherwise) with a fig tree and plan to relandscape. Be very careful. Fig tree roots run very shallow, and even older trees are susceptible to damage to the roots.I found out the hard way - rototilling an overgrown back yard due to too much grass, weeds, bulbs, etc. The 'till chomped through two or three large surface roots (< 8\" deep which were more than 4 feet from the tree). The result - one dead 20+ y/o fig tree.Be careful when gardening/redoing a yard."
}
] | en | 0.968273 |
Groupon Sets Nov. 4 IPO - $11.4B | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": " +----------------------------------+\n | TODAY'S LIVING SOCIAL DAILY DEAL |\n | |\n | 1 Share of Groupon Stock |\n | |\n | +---------+ |\n | $9.00 | BUY NOW | |\n | +---------+ |\n | |\n | 50% 224 2 days | \n | savings purchased remaining |\n +----------------------------------+"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Non-paywall link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/21/us-groupon-ipo-ifr..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Oh, sweet. Does Groupon remind anyone else of that Simpsons episode where the monorail salesman comes to town?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Sounds like a big ponzi scheme with the stockholders being the last one on the chain."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The NYT is reporting [1] that Groupon was only (!) $1M from breaking even in the third quarter, in part because marketing expenses were sharply reduced.Also, apparently they're not allowing any current shareholders to sell during the IPO. Fine for Mason and the Lefkofskys, who took a pile of money off the table early, but if I were an early employee I would be livid.[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/groupon-nears-a-profi..."
}
] | en | 0.123059 |
Hackers Turn Burger King’s Tweet Stream Into A Whopper Of A Mess | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The worst part about all of this - to me, anyway - is that they had the opportunity to be clever and funny about it and could have left it at the McDonald's-buys-BK PR stunt with continuing professional-sounding tweets, but instead they wasted their hijack by turning it into the exact flood of childish dribble that people expect when they think \"hacker\"."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So these guys now are at risk of going to prison in order to create an advertisement for McDonalds and lots of buzz around Burger King. Somehow I don't think they thought this one through."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wish these guys would just go away, they should be using their time to change the world, not troll it. half the shit they do is completely pointless. Sure it may bring some notice to public but honestly it dies down just as fast as it gets put up."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I really dislike the use of the word \"hacker\" as it is used by most people. It's just semantics, but it makes me sad that when most people think hacker, they think these types of activities."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "McDonalds responded: https://twitter.com/McDonalds/status/303575465237549056"
}
] | en | 0.967303 |
A Practical Guide to Using Signed Ruby Gems - Part 1: Bundler | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As a meantime thing, since getting gems properly signed is probably going to take a while, it might be nice if bundler could at least recognize if a gem downloaded after being added to the Gemfile.lock had changed. A hash of the .gem file or the git head sha and an alert if it doesn't match the lock's stored hash would go a long way to at least detecting that a breach may have happened.Basically ssh's known_hosts for packages."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The bundler_signature_check code that accompanies the article is available on Github: https://github.com/bradleybuda/bundler_signature_check"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Do other languages such as python, perl or lua etc have a signing facility ?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "So how do we sign our gems ?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "imo, the only way to make this work is going to be to force it, and boy are you going to make a lot of people very unhappy if that happens."
}
] | en | 0.97452 |
Awesome swedish built 8-bit synthesizer inside an old electronic organ | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I like that he plays well known tunes and also shows the composer(s) and year of the tune."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "In 1998, I actually made the first soft synthesizer in Windows, controlled by MIDI, based on an emulation of the C64's SID chip. I sold 2 copies.Apart from that, nice-looking project."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It even has a fade out button so you can play the songs exactly as you remember them."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is nice. What about building a chiptune synth using an old gameboy? It would be awesome."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What, no Zelda? Bah!"
}
] | en | 0.975249 |
Why VC's invest in Pigs not Chickens | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "One nice thing about getting revenue positive is that you can tell people like this to fuck off."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As VC firms are not about charity, but profit, I can only understand that they think they are able to buy those who invested their last dollars much cheaper.If I were a VC (or when I become one) I wouldn't trust desperate people, those who bet everything and their arm on a deal. I understood that the article describes these as pigs. Such people could actually be even dangerous."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Did anyone really need this explained? I think anyone questioning this is trying to be a chicken and just grousing about the status quo.I mean, if they aren't willing to commit big-time, why should a VC?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "oh c'mon, money is commodity and i can get it from hundreds of sources. as an entrepreneur i choose, not you, my dear VC."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If an entrepreneur takes equity funding from a VC, then likely the VC will be a Member of the Board of the entrepreneur with enough power to fire the entrepreneur. So, the entrepreneur, in his trip in a small canoe across rough waters on the way to distant, solid land, needs to be very sure anyone else in that canoe is really good to have along and won't be a nervous Nellie who will break ranks, stand, and scream at the first big waves that rock the canoe.In particular, in information technology (IT), what fraction of the VCs would an entrepreneur eagerly hire as, say, a co-founder, a CTO, CIO, lead developer, DBA, network administrator? How about listen to in a discussion about a 'pivot'? How about as Chief Scientist to stir up new, powerful, valuable 'secret sauce'? Did I omit Power Point expert? Gee, why would I omit Power Point expert?Another point: The day before taking the check, the entrepreneur may own 100% of the business. The day after taking the check the VC owns maybe 30% of the business, an additional fraction is set aside for employees, and the rest 'belongs' to the entrepreneur except is in a four year 'vesting' schedule which means the entrepreneur now owns NONE of his business and, if fired by the Board, leaves with NOTHING, zip, zilch, zero, not even the source code he typed in to begin with. Bummer.Next, now IT VCs don't invest in pigs, chickens, dedicated, driven, devoted founders or any other barnyard or other nonsense. Instead, VCs invest in numerical metrics that correlate well with future financial value. Generally the VCs invest in 'traction', just traction, already significant and growing rapidly.Then there's now a rub, a big issue: If the traction is significant, say, 10 Web pages served a second with 3 ads per page and $1 CPM, then just why should the entrepreneur take the check?Or, think of a US Main Street business in anything from a carry out pizza shop to a landscaping service: They don't get venture capital. But a PC server able to deliver 10 Web pages a second costs much less than even an oven for a pizza shop and much less than a truck for a landscaping service. The difference for the IT entrepreneur is that if the project is at all successful, then (1) the entrepreneur can lean back and let the server PC do the work and (2) has a chance of growing rapidly into a significant business to own, sell, or do an IPO. So, an IT entrepreneur can proceed as for a Main Street business until money is coming in and then see if a really good business can result. Nowhere in there is much of a role for a VC Power Point expert."
}
] | en | 0.993003 |
Peers call for a pardon for Alan Turing [video] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Why not pardon all the other men who were persecuted? Their criminal records should be cleared."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Obligatory "Pardon implies he did something wrong post". they should apologize."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Are these symbolic apologies, pardons any good practically? They keep coming up especially in the colonial setting where governments apologize for what happened a few decades ago. It feels like a zero cost (apart from parliament costs i.e.) way to absolve their own personal guilt.In the real world, does it actually help the oppressed?(Who wants to place bets on an official apology to the families of Snowden/Manning coming up in a few decades after they have been caught and "justice delivered" to them.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Previous discussion [1]. I didn't think HN allowed duplicate URLs within such a short timeframe (unless posted with a variation to the URL), but good to see it getting a proper airing, as it got modded off the front page in short order yesterday (possibly because the debate got a bit acrimonious).[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6071596"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "People are really good at apologizing for the atrocities of the previous generation. This is a pretty empty gesture, and doesn't forgive the UK for driving to suicide a man who saved thousands of British lives."
}
] | en | 0.963035 |
Show, Don't Tell | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As a almost total visual thinker, I often get in trouble for taking it too far and basically finishing a project in order to show somebody what my proposal for given project actually is."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "From the article: And hey, that \"better search\" thingie you were droning on and on about? How much better can searching the Internet really be? Why would anyone care?We get that quite frequently, so we just keep codin'."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This was the core lesson of all my creative writing classes."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "1. Tell them what you're going to show them.2. Show them.3. Tell them what you just showed them."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"The soft over comes the hard, the slow over comes the fast, let your working remain a mystery just show people the result.\"_Tao Te Ching_"
}
] | en | 0.977786 |
Ask HN: C or Haskell, which to learn next? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Learn C. So far you've done lots of high level languages, but no low level languages at all. Understanding what things look like at the machine level will make you a much better developer regardless of what language you end up using -- and there's a reason why people refer to C as \"portably assembly language\".I often say that nobody ever understands when they should and shouldn't use hash tables until they've written a hash table in assembly language; you don't necessarily need to go to that extreme, but working in C at all will give you a much better understanding of fundamental algorithms and data structures than if you only ever use high level languages which hide such details away from you."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Haskell offers a lot of brain candy, but IMO you've already gained >50% of its benefits by understanding Ruby blocks - they're actually the most useful part of functional programming, carefully distilled and packaged to be non-threatening. :-) Better go with C first to learn what your computer actually does. When you go on to play with Haskell afterwards, you'll at least ask the right questions about the implementation."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You can learn also Delphi. \nIs covers all the ranges from very high-level till machine language. Also, it has a much cleaner syntax vs C, you can also have a real job with it (unlike Haskell), and is has a huge community from where to learn from.Drawbacks are: not so popular compared with C (but waaaay more popular compared with Haskell), not so functional compared with Haskell. Far better compared with both ones WRT web development (there's a very powerful library shipped OOTB for this) - especially when it comes to manage complex session states. OTOH, isn't really a web tool, it's rather a high-performance RAD environment with main focus on native (compiled) code and DB development. Other drawbacks are: \n- you must know that you should ask the community where to find good libraries and examples \n- the free edition (Turbo) is outdated. But there are trials."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Go for C. C is here to stay."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "They are different enough that you could just do both simultaneously."
}
] | en | 0.965013 |
Other Examples of Craigslist Spam Tactics [NSFW] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "So I treaded on the dark side at one point, and was hired to write a Craigslist spam application. It was pretty simple and would automatically post to all the Erotic Services sections in all the U.S. localities with randomized (a huge set of varying titles, descriptions and photos - that could all be localized specifically to where it was posting) postings, randomized emails, obfuscating the text further by using shades of black for each letter - then solving the captcha and auto-responding to the email to publish the posting. It would do this every 20 minutes, 24/7.The results for spamming adult dating affiliate links was pretty interesting. On average it would earn $1k a day, with most holidays jumping up to $2k a day. One very religious holiday in particular (won't mention which one to single any group out) brought in $3k. In one single day.As long as spamming people with affiliate links will work, and makes them money - someone will do it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "My company is creating a mobile classifieds platform. On the company blog, I've spent some time analyzing Craigslist scams (\"Five Craigslist rental scams\" http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-rental-scam-crisis/ ) as well as spam (\"Craigslist 'by dealer' categories and dealer spam\", http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-by-dealer-categories... ).Craigslist puts in a lot of effort to warn people about common scams, yet the problem persists in the high-value categories. This is especially true of rentals -- I get a Google Alert every week of Craigslist-related crime appearing in news reports, and half or more are rental scams. How can people miss the warnings and get conned? Part of the reason relates to smart social engineering, as the OP suggested -- girls, convincing sob stories (active duty military deploying overseas is a common hook), well-written emails, great prices that are almost too good to be true. The scammers are constantly running tests to see what works best and then applying them to multiple areas. But the other thing is the nature of buyers, who may only come to Craigslist once every few years and may assume that because their last experience turned out good, their next one will, too.On the spam front, \"flagging\" is one of the main weapons CL uses to fight things like overposting, top-posting, miscategorized posts, etc. Unfortunately the system has broken down in many markets. Check out some of the cities in Western Canada, which are overrun by spam (see \"Craigslist Canada: Ticket spam, giant markets and dead areas\" http://invantory.com/2012/04/craigslist-canada/ ). Dealers and spammers using manual or automated means simply overwhelm the categories, and there aren't enough active flaggers to mark the violators -- or people have simply given up.Classified marketplaces really interested me, and if anyone wants to talk about Craigslist or mobile classifieds, I can be reached via the websites listed on my HN profile."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think it's very important to distinguish \"spam\" from \"scam\".What AirBnB did was a little spammy (and probably violated CL's ToS). Same goes for ODesk and other freelance boards (I got one from HireTheWorld just the other day).When someone wants all your personal information or help moving (i.e. \"laundering\") money overseas, that's an entirely different animal."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Spam is absolutely not a grey area. \"it is NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE for a single post that is from a person talking to other people to be deleted, to be dropped on the uncaring floor to make room for machine generated spew.\"—http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html (actually about Usenet, which was wrecked by the same sort of predatory scum)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "ezl does not seem to have gone all the way down the rabbit hole with the oDesk tracking link. (I work at oDesk, but not on this, so I was really curious.) After about 3 HTTP redirects, the www.dpbolvw.net link seems to turn into some sort of affiliate link. So my guess is that a (possibly errant, but presumably very data-driven) affiliate was the one sending him e-mail about oDesk, rather than oDesk itself.That seems to raise a broader question, which is: to what extent should companies be blamed (and thus try to control) for the actions of the people in their affiliate programs? Would you be unhappy about a blog purporting to be by a cute ice cream eating girl filled with recommended books with Amazon affiliate links? What are the standards in this area, exactly? (On reload, see dabent's comment below as well.)"
}
] | en | 0.961475 |
Show HN: Velocity.js – Accelerated JavaScript animation | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It depresses me to no end that even with impressive engineering advances like this, any modestly graphical intensive app on the browser redlines my dual-core Intel laptop.Similar graphics effects in QT or other native technologies not only do not redline my laptop, they don't even raise the core temperature a single degree.I get enthusiastic about cool JS technologies just like most devs, but I feel like we're moving backwards."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Dont forget that CSS based animation is a declarative based animation framework while Velocity.js is using imperative code to animate (while the calls look declarative, the code in the framework has to be bundled with your js).The advantage of the declarative approach, is that browser can improve the CSS animations in every browser update. Also, in theory, browsers could improve CSS animation in such a way that is is always faster than velocity.js.You could for example make a CSS-animation to velocity.js compiler. Browser do this compilation (not to velicity.js but to native code/operations) already. Thats why it surprises me that velocity.js is saying its faster than pure CSS animations.Can somebody enlighten me on why this is the case?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Wonderful.This is one of those things that dogs me as a developer - accepting things as they are. It's something we should all look out for.If you've ever just tacitly, passively accepted something as potable if not ideal, you need to develop an internal "Complacency Alert" alarm. I know I do. For too long I've accepted that you either have to reinvent the wheel with javascript animations or accept what jQuery has to offer.Hats off here."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm really impressed by the level of documentation in the code[0]. Makes it fun to read.[0]https://github.com/julianshapiro/velocity/blob/master/jquery..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "We had Julian come by and demo this to our team a few weeks back. Totally awesome work he's doing here. Great job Julian."
}
] | en | 0.88332 |
Apple slips below $600 in first trading day after exec shakeup | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This demonstrates the difference that contextual knowledge makes. Exec ousters are generally a decent indicator to sell. However, those of us who have been following Apple will know that these particular decisions were good, leaving Apple with a cohesive \"four man band.\"Information asymmetry. It's what makes markets interesting and how people make lots of money."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "IMO, Apple has lost it's touch just as they almost won me over along with thousands of Android fan boys with the iPhone 5. I bought the latest 13\" MacBook Air the day it came out. I was impressed by the form factor but that's about it. The stability and smoothness everyone used to rave about just isn't there. I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS.That's not to say Apple is disappearing anytime soon, but I think they have lost their touch. I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Apple's movement over the past three months has been an exaggerated version of the NASDAQ or the Dow, up a bit around September, down to it's levels of about three months ago.In Apple's case that peak coincided with the my hyped iPhone 5 launch which might explain some of the exaggeration.There are many many people who understand the market better than I do but to me at least this is a complete non-story."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think these articles need to come with the caveat of \"markets move and shift\". I'm sure no one at Apple is panicking, it's easy to be lured into watching the share prices as a statistic of success but Apple has enough cash in stockpile that their share price isn't overly important, unless you're a shareholder.If it dropped 20% in a day I think it'd be safe to say there was a loss of investor confidence."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think the share price drop has more to do with Google's Nexus device announcement."
}
] | en | 0.991988 |
Profiling Python with cProfile | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'd say you had it right the first time with the list comprehension. List comprehensions in python are way faster than while/append loops because they're implemented in C. The issue is that you had the "not in" which is O(n) over a list (making the comprehension O(n^2) ). If the documents are hashable, I'd suggest making results a set. "not in" is constant time on a set. If a document is something not hashable, you can make results a dictionary and get the same constant time access.In python function/method calls are expensive, so avoid them at all costs inside tight loops."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm glad that there wasn't a "complain about the GIL" or "write everything in Go because Python is too slow" step in this optimization workflow"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Very helpful to have a UI for digging through profiler results. I use the django debug toolbar but I think your profiler will be incredibly helpful for finding bottlenecks. Thanks for posting, thanks for sharing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Kernprof and lineprof are also helpful."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You'll perhaps take this as snark, but I am not going to read light gray text on a white background with a poorly rendered font (windows 7, firefox 27, 47yo eyes)."
}
] | en | 0.922212 |
What's New in Scratch 2.0 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My son is finally make his space shooter the way he envisioned because of the new clone sprite action. Exciting times ahead, here is a pic of him getting down last night:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BJ3OudQCQAALZCc.jpg:large"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "One important thing that's new in Scratch 2.0 under the hood is the transition from the .SB file format (a rather complex SmallTalk object store) to a ZIP based bundle containing all required media along with JSON encoded scripts. The upshot of this is that consuming Scratch files in other apps should be a lot easier.That said, one downside of Scratch 2.0 (at least in my view) is the migration to a Flash based editor/playback engine. And I don't entirely blame MIT for this, because Scratch 2.0 has been under development for quite a long time. Five years ago, Flash maybe seemed more appropriate than it is now."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I used Scratch to teach my son how to program at 9; and now, at 11, he's doing JS/HTML/CSS at a beginner level.We used the scratch programming for teens [1] book.-----[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1598635360/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "2.0 may have been a long time in the making, but I just bought the Scratch Adventure book for my kids last week, which uses 1.4, unaware of the pending update. When I went to the site to download Scratch, it was down while preparing for the 2.0 release. I thought it was a pretty ironic introduction to programming, always new shiny objects."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'd love it if anyone could give a good head to head on Scratch 2.0 vs. Snap! 4.0[1] (the new name for BYOB, Berkley's Scratch spin-off). I realize that Snap is aimed more teaching high school/college CS, but they're seeming to converge a bit.I don't have a CS class this year, so I haven't set aside enough time to dig into the latest versions of Snap or Scratch. If anyone has any insight to share, it'd be greatly appreciated.[1] http://snap.berkeley.edu"
}
] | en | 0.948374 |
Chris Anderson (Wired Editor) explains plagiarism charges | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's easy to admit guilt when caught red-handed, so I don't give him any credit for that.He copy-pasted from wikipedia, utterly indefensible. He didn't copy a quote from wikipedia, but entire paragraphs. Even WITH attribution that's totally unacceptable. What he calls \"rewriting\" is exactly the same thing kids do in highschool when cheating during exams, and when copying each other's papers. The teacher isn't fooled by this transparent cheating. And neither am I."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is a good response, accepting his fault and explaining the reason. Transparency is a good thing, and after making a mistake apologizing too. Chapeau Chris."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "5 exculpatory grafs. 3 grafs that contain actual apologies, each of which is buried in a mitigating construction (of the \"I did this in good faith, but that's no excuse\" variety).What would Timothy Noah think?http://www.slate.com/?id=2061056"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I really like his response. He took complete responsibility for the error and gave a very reasonable explanation for how they got there in the first place. In doing this, he came across as a very honest and straightforward kind of guy.I wasn't interested in this book before but I'm going to buy it now after reading so much about it. Its almost like a brilliant PR move. Perhaps there is some truth to \"There's no such thing as bad publicity\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Standup response."
}
] | en | 0.962227 |
Decoding Vibrations From Nearby Keyboards With Mobile Phone Accelerometers [pdf] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "While interesting, I don't view it as having much of an impact. Page 6 states that there was a significant training period for their machine learning algorithm that involved sending the bluetooth from the keyboard through the phone to train it.In the real world, if you have compromised someone's phone and have access to their key strokes through bluetooth, why do you need this method at all? Even in some contrived circumstance where it was more feasible, it would probably be better 100% of the time to try to compromise the phone's bluetooth, audio, camera, or wifi capability before targeting the accelerometer and then hoping that they happen to leave their phone close enough to the keyboard and hope that your algorithm can decode keystrokes on a keyboard that it has never heard before, which may also be a type of keyboard that it has not heard before.All in all, it's a cool experiment which shows that we can do some interesting and non-conventional stuff with accelerometers, but it's not practical in the slightest."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't see why you need realtime "decoding" of the vibrations. You record the motion, then later analyze it. I'm sure different kinds of work involve different patterns of typing (e.g. writing code uses different typing patterns than transcribing legal documents) and those patterns can be recognized after the fact to reconstruct most of the typing.That said, there are much easier methods to go about obtaining keystrokes from a victim ..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Our application instead detects and decodes keystrokes by measuring the relative physical position and distance between each vibration. We then match abstracted words against candidate dictionaries and record word recovery rates as high as 80%.So we're all going to have to use constantly vibrating keyboards now to fool the accelerometers. Oh great."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is a real problem. You should be scared. Also, you should buy a VibraDamp Laptop/Keyboard mat from me. Protect yourself today! For added protection I will also make up and sell a VibraDamp Mini to keep your phone on!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wouldn't submit such thing without checking how the accuracy changes when the phone is relocated, when the desk is changed or even when a different specimen of the same keyboard type is used. But I strongly agree that the sensor access privilege is deeply underrated -- Android doesn't even mention it!"
}
] | en | 0.964253 |
How Silicon Valley Perfected Ice Cream | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ""Freezing speed is correlated with freezing temperature. So if you can freeze it really, really cold, you can get smaller ice crystals. And if you can freeze really cold, you can freeze really fast. The benefit of that is if you make small enough batches you can freeze to order. Therefore you don’t need any of those extra ingredients that make ice cream far from natural."You know what else works for that? Fat. It's why iced custard is smoother than philadelphia ice cream. It's also much easier and more manageable than using liquid nitrogen, but, you know...you can't sell regular ice cream to hipsters at a massive markup.That's it...I'm opening an easy-bake oven bakery in Hayes Valley. After all, cooking with lightbulbs is slower, and therefore, more love goes into each cookie."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "They might have popularized it or invented the machine, but the technique is at least 20 years old.1994: http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~johnson/Education/SeeS_SZ/Chemistry_o...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_gastronomy"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The Discovery series about food chemistry had a segment about using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream. I think they concluded that it is the perfect way to make ice cream.The show had many other very interesting segments (like how to make mashed potato that doesn't turn into glue) with all the chemical backgrounds for great foods. It is fascinating stuff."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I don't doubt this is great ice cream, but this is also a superb example of PR at work."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I assume the OP has never been to europe."
}
] | en | 0.923896 |
If you build it, they won't come, unless... | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Maybe I'm old school, but I think it comes down to work.When I was the publicity directory of a college radio station at a small school, I'd put up 300-400 letter-sized posters to promote a dance with maybe 7-8 distinct designs. This would change the appearance of the campus and pack the house.A lot of people, doing the same job, would put up 10 or 20 posters of the same design and waste more energy vociferously defending their right to be lazy and that \"everybody will see them\" than it would take to just make all the designs and walk around putting the signs up.The main reason people fail at SEO and SMO is that they radically underestimate how much work is required to succeed. That's good news for people who do work hard, because out of 20 potential competitors, 18 of them are easy to beat."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"Yes, you're going to do those things, but since millions of other people are doing that too, you're still invisible. Visibility-fail. Anyone-gives-a-crap-fail.\"Hmmm..., I think we can say millions of people do (or will do in the near future) the methods you describe. I don't see why are those methods harder to do than the methods you categorize as default stuff.I think what is hard is product market fit. You say:\"Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he'll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun.\"I think mostly this is the most important stuff unless someone is really incompetent at marketing. I think a really good product cannot win without any marketing, but a really good product can win with 'routine' marketing.Product market fit is always important. Whether even technical merits are very important depends on how hard the problem technically is. Why there are no other machine tranlators than Google Translate? Because they have bad marketing? No, because the problem is incredibly hard technically."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Or, if you're not VC-funded, just start small and grow organically by word of mouth, if it's truly a good idea? Rather than try to hit a home run at launch? That also gives you more time to ramp up for demand, as you learn how to do it.That's certainly the approach I plan to take..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It took me five years to figure out (a) I needed a story and (b) what the story was. It's hard. But one story beats a pile of AdWords A/B tests.I have found that there are 2 kinds of stories: classes and instances...Class: \"X can solve problem Y using our product.\"Instances:\"Acme saved $30,000 per month by figuring out how to better load their trucks using our optimization software.\"\"The Smith family had their first ever reunion when John and Linda Smith realized how easy our family organizing software was.\"\"Jones Gifts doubled their sales in 3 months using our bolt-on e-commerce solution.\"The class is good. The instance is better. People love stories and the instance is a real story, while the class is the framework for a potential story. The class is a commercial; the instance is a testimonial. Also, an example cuts through all the clutter right to the reader's reptilian brain. Naturally, the closer the instance is to the reader's situation, the better.OP's story was a class. I would have loved to hear a few instances of that class: some real stories about people who got real benefit from his product. People naturally want to know about other people."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "While everyone else is mucking about with a new blog...we're years ahead in the marketing war.So, we should \"tell [our] story\" but we'll really just be \"mucking about\"?"
}
] | en | 0.981981 |
Ask HN: Best project management tool? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "We've standardized on Github Issues as the PM core, Waffle to prioritize, and Slack to communicate. The tools largely stay out of the way, unlike many of the ones I've used in the past. Give the bureaucrats access to the appropriate rooms on Slack and keep 'em out of everything else.I've found the right tool is so incredibly team/company specific that third party advice on these matters is often useless, but I'll share a few additional data points in case they help.1) I recently helped a 40 person dev team rethink their dev tools and they chose to adopt Trello, roughly using this post as a guide: https://community.uservoice.com/blog/trello-google-docs-prod...The team was using Pivotal and will continue to do so, but adding the Trello layer on top allows the "bureaucratic overlords" the info they need to a) stay informed, and b) make better decisions on resource allocation.2) If giving the business folks a window into dev progress is important, also check out Sprintly. They do a great job at that.Good luck!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Atlassian products are pretty popular and cheap if the team is <10 people. They are a bit slow. If it's more for development I went with Trac for my project, it's pretty minimal and fast."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Breeze (http://www.breeze.pm) - Trello and Basecamp mashup."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This has been said multiple times here, but Trello."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I use a combination of Trello + Google Drive"
}
] | en | 0.904952 |
Ask HN: Why is there no V8 engine-type project for Python or Ruby? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> JavaScript was slow until Google worked its magic with the V8 engine. I'm wondering why I haven't seen any project out there trying to do the same for Python or Ruby.Uh, because neither Python nor Ruby is uniquely entrenched in a niche as important to a big, Google-like company as JavaScript was (and remains) as a client side browser language, creating the incentive for said big company to throw lots of resources behind making it more performant.So, Python and Ruby are stuck with their existing core teams (and some side efforts) working on performance improvements. Those still can pay big dividends (in many areas, Ruby 2.0 is apparently a big jump from 1.9.3), but are unlikely to be as dramatic as V8 over pre-existing JavaScript engines."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "There was at least one effort, sponsored by Google, to make big performance improvements in Python:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unladen_SwallowI'm not sure sure if any of that work ever made it into current CPython or not though. At any rate, they never met the ambitious goals they started out with.On the Ruby side, I believe that the JRuby guys have done a lot of performance work and have created one of the more performant Ruby implementations. But still nothing like V8, which is unfortunate."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'd say it's because we are stuck with javascript for a certain domain -- viz. code running in a web browser.Python and ruby on the other hand are two choices out of many, each of which have thier strengths and weaknesses. While it would be nice if every language was as fast as possible, as a practical matter where speed is a major issue, programmers simply pick a more perfomant language. in a world of limited resources and diverse choices it makes the most sense for each language to concentrate on its strengths rather than to be the best at everything."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is an odd question. For Python there are several implementations that provide better speed. Some of them are tools used with C Python, and others are total reimplementations like Jython, IronPython and Pypy.Ruby is a newer language and therefore has not had as many implementations but there are definitely faster implementations that the standard one built by Matz. One of those runs on the JVM.You need to do a little googling and you will easily find out more about these. Or just look in Wikipedia for godness sake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ">Is there a technical limitation/reason? Or has it just not been explored yet?Neither.They are just Open Source projects with diverse contributors, internal politics and varying skillsets.That makes it hard to beat a dedicated full time team of world class experts working on just one thing, focused for 3+ years (which is how we got V8)."
}
] | en | 0.973388 |
Show HN: Spreadsheets in the browser with Box, Dropbox support | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It suffers from the same defect all html spreadsheets do (even google docs): if you zoom/resize the screen, row/col alignment breaks.Unbelievable how in this decade it is still almost impossible to make a table work like a spreadsheet in html. How hard would it be to just enforce a couple of css properties in tables to make them behave? Like: tbody {overflow:auto;}\n\nThat would be a great start. Then: thead,tfoot{position:fixed;}\n tbody td:first-child{position:fixed}\n\nThat'd be all, add a contentEditable attribute and that's it. Everything else is just a matter of coding tricks to format cells and formulas.Hello Whatwg, you listening? I know w3c is been deaf for long, that's why I am asking you. Hixie alive? Earth is calling.* Here is a basic implementation using box model and display:-webkit-box; (chrome/safari in OSX only)\nhttp://georgenava.appspot.com/demo/spreadsheetcalc.html"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Major props to my friend David for making this. It's a mashup of Handsontable (https://github.com/warpech/jquery-handsontable) and Filepicker.io (https://www.filepicker.io/)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "That's a big editable table, not a spreadsheet. But as an editable table, it's nice."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I will say good start but not useful though. Except entering numbers I couldn't do any thing. One good thing is it is very light. The reason people use excel because you can do lot more than just entering numbers."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why all the negativity?I personally think the ability to open and save \"cloud\" spreadsheets was nicely done."
}
] | en | 0.891656 |
When to refactor code | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Always. The development cycle should be Test, Code, Refactor, as one atomic block of work. Sarah Mei explains why this is vitally important to creating good code in her talk \"Work, Play & Code\", I highly recommend checking it out.http://confreaks.com/videos/2333-mwrc2013-work-play-codeAlso, if you don't have a test suite to prove your refactoring didn't change functionality, IMO you aren't refactoring, you are simply rewriting. This is the point many people miss about TDD. TDD is first and foremost about letting you refactor your code; doing TDD right gives you the best environment for writing great code. On the other hand, doing TDD wrong makes it more likely your entire code base will be very difficult to maintain."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have a 1134 line function with zero tests defined for it sitting open in the background which most likely scores something like 32 out of 11 on that list. I'm afraid of touching that monster..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": " > \"this 10 item checklist.\"\n > 11 items in the checklist\n\nHeh, it's not often you see an off-by-one error in prose!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "You probably just want to rename variables because you don't like the previous developer's naming conventionIf the last developer named his or her variables along the lines of 'a', 'b', 'c', you're damn right I have an issue with their naming convention and I'm going to fix it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> Did you completely understand what cyclomatic complexity was without following that link?Seems confusing that answering \"No\" to this (meaning you did NOT know what cyclomatic complexity was) would be a net positive for refactoring?"
}
] | en | 0.95885 |
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