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All bitcoin private keys leaked | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is why it's a joke: this page is a generator of keys. Every time you load a new page, it gives you another set of possible keys.If you look at the top of the page, when it says "Page 1 out of 904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312", you can get an idea that this is not that useful at all.\nClever.I bet the creator hopes that panic will ensue, and that he/she can buy some extra bitcoins at a lower price. I might buy a few now, shouldn't be a bad idea. :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is how lazy Haskell programmers solve every problem."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I hope you all get the joke. :-)Edit: I'm not the creator."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I just started scraping this site at 100 pages per second. It should be complete in about 2.07896e55 times the age of the universe."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "and on page\n904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312\n(http://directory.io/9046256971665327767466483203803742801036...) you can still click next"
}
] | en | 0.900478 |
A tcpdump Tutorial and Primer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It is not only useful for security professionals. Anybody doing any kind of network programming should have it under their belt. Application level debugging only goes so far. Sooner or later you'll hit a problem like a network card sometimes sending super jumbo frames which the switch cannot handle or some weird performance problems. Packet level debugging is a must in such cases."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "A good tutorial but there some missing options or remarks that are very handy like:- -A is equivalent to -X displaying the payload of the packet in ASCII format. If you want to do some scripting based on a payload, that's very handy for matching specific pattern (don't forget offset notation '[a:b]' is limited to 4 bytes block in the bpf filter)- -tttt if you want to print the complete time-stamp per packet- Don't forget that TCP offloading might have an impact when doing packet capture (and analysis) http://sandilands.info/sgordon/segmentation-offloading-with-...- When capturing on a long period of time, the -G or -C helps to rotate capture files while capturing. tcpdump -i en1 -s 0 -G 60 -w tst%y%m%d%H%M%S.cap (if you want to rotate the file every 60 secs) or -C to do the rotation based of the size of the capture file.- There are many tcpdump forks (OpenBSD tcpdump is slightly different than the tcpdump on Debian)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Nice, bookmarked.This might be a useful addition to the links at the bottom of your page:http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~marios/ethereal-tcpdump.pdf"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Yes, please use tcpdump. To capture stuff. Then you put it into Wireshark for analysis.What is peoples obsession with stretching command line tools? Wake up! We have retina displays now. To display stuff."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Also remember if you're filtering ip/port you may need to add the vlan filter to see packets that are vlan-tagged."
}
] | en | 0.95466 |
Dropbox (YC S07) Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I Love Dropbox. I got in as an early beta tester and have been a paying customer since the day the option was offered.Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home.I use Dropbox to back up my iTunes music library...for some reason I used to lose a lot of my music every time I got a new computer.All my work and personal files can be accessed and emailed right from my iPhone.I sync 4 computers: work laptop, home laptop, a dell zino for my tv and my iPhone. I never have to worry about a thing... Dropbox just works."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Prediction: Dropbox will enter a cloud platform race with a set of APIs in a bid to become a File System of the Web."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Congrats to Dropbox! I wish I hadn't flubbed on investing in them."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think its worth of note how most of the comments they get on techcrunch are people just coming in to say they love the service. A trend I've seen on dropbox that I can't say I've seen with too many other services in the past.I, for one, am one very happy paying customer too, and have said it more than once."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What's the definition of \"user\" here?edit: Not sure why the downvote. \"4 million users\" can mean pretty much anything."
}
] | en | 0.970628 |
Remind HN: iOS 6 Beta 4 has expired ("Could not activate iPhone") | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Would have loved to get a \"push\" notification from AAPL regarding this..Seems like Apple is no longer signing the iOS 5.1.1 ipsw -\nthis is ridiculous..I was hoping on downgrading to iOS5 before hawking my 4S to Google Maps grovelers.On another note..I cannot restore to my iOS6 (beta) backup with the real iOS6..thanks Apple!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Thank you. It was annoying that software update can't differentiate beta and release versions of 6.0. It kept saying \"already up to date\" but I was too lazy to download the IPSW directly. Not so lazy now."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Oh great! And I can't access that!Can someone go the extra mile and post a link to the IPSW please?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Nobody else think its lame that we OTA updates for betas, but not final? Grrr."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "firstly I'm glad I'm not the only one having this problem, \nsecondly I wish I'd found this before renewing my apple dev account :( 60quid down the drain :("
}
] | en | 0.963204 |
Show HN: Who is hiring refugees? Or, hacking visas to help refugees | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Nice idea!Some of your icons aren't showing up for me on Firefox, as FontAwesome is being loaded from a different domain without CORS enabled: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote \n resource at\n http://support.hirerefugees.org/plugins/font-awesome/font/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=3.2.1. \n This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS. \n downloadable font: download failed (font-family: "FontAwesome" style:normal \n weight:normal stretch:normal src index:1): bad URI or cross-site access not \n allowed\n source: http://support.hirerefugees.org/plugins/font-awesome/font/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=3.2.1 font-awesome.css\n\nThere's a ticket for this on GitHub that describes how to fix the problem: https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs/issues/755"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "My girlfriend sponsored a refugee from Darfur. His name is Guy. He's on a student visa and he is currently a student at the College of Lake County just outside of Chicago, Illinois. She is constantly fund-raising his life because he is not allowed to work.\nThe website looks amazing ! I'll show her tonight and will come back to you for more feedback.\nThank you !More info about Guy:\nhttps://www.facebook.com/RefugeeSupport\nhttps://fundly.com/help-a-darfuri-refugee-study-in-the-us"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "http://www.hirerefugees.org"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "On the website, it says Brazil requires a contract with employer to get a work visa. That's not the way it works. Basically, whenever a refugee enters Brazil, the government give him a place to sleep, 3 meals each day and he get not only a visa, but a document called "Carteira de Trabalho", or "Work document" which allow him to work here.Basically, any refugee can just enter in Brazil, get the documents and start looking for work, and yes, we need workers badly."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My mid-sized business does not support visas.I look at it as something so hard and complex that only the Googles and Amazons of the world can play.Are there resources or professionals in the HN community that lay out the process and the costs?"
}
] | en | 0.735721 |
Solar-panel "trees" really are inferior | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought.In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false.How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases.A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Coming back to this almost eight hours later, I ask: What is the problem here? On HN, we upvote articles that are interesting. My idea of a downvote is an article where I felt I lost IQ for reading it. In the case of the kid’s mistaken result, is there any question his research and theory were interesting? Does anyone honestly feel stupider for having read about it and considered the possibility that he was correct?Quite honestly, almost everything that makes it to the front page of HN is wrong. We talk about software development, startups, muse about whether Apple is brilliant or is lucky enough to have lame competition, argue about Haskell and Erlang... All stuff that is non-empirical and therefore unfalsifiable.How does that stuff get a free pass to be on the front page of HN without peer-reviewed research backing it up? I’ll tell you how: We’re smart enough to know that all of that stuff is probably at least partly wrong, but if there’s something in there that makes us smarter, it’s worth reading and upvoting and discussing.If the kid’s ideas had in them just one thing that made us smarter for having thought about it... That’s a win, that’s worth upvoting and repeating. Why wait for peer review? As long as nobody ran out and dropped a million bucks on manufacturing solar arrays, what’s the harm? If anything is wrong with an article, a day or so later, all of the flaws will be corrected. And thats exactly what has happened here.Thinking about this, I don’t see a problem with the “blogosphere” or with HN upvoting and tweeting and repeating the original article. Thank goodness we don’t put everything through a peer-review first. I’d say things are working just fine, and I encourage every other thirteen year-old kid to experiment and publish.No harm, no foul. There’s nothing in there that’s more wrong than anything I’ve ever said in a blog post or a comment, it’s just easier to prove where empirical science is concerned. But even when they’re wrong, my posts are useful if they help people think, and I suspect his post is useful for the same reason."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source (the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the year.It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one-direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was about.Am I misunderstanding something basic?EDIT:Going back and reading the kid's writeup at http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201... shows some interesting details.He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for \"sunlight collected\". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that it was collecting sunlight for a longer period.The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours, not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's refreshing to see a counterpoint to the MSM's enthusiasm for over-dramatization and poor fact-checking; this wasn't a breakthrough in the science of photovoltaics, as some headlines seemed to read. And I'm particularly happy that the author took great care to not target the boy. He should be encouraged to continue this kind of scientific pursuit and not be dissuaded by mistakes in the research. In fact this is a good example of how peer-reviewed research actually functions. That said, I feel the MSM only does him a disservice by misrepresenting the implications of his project as something more than it might be."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "When the blogger used the phrase \"Fibonacci mysticism\" it becomes clear he has far too much bias to pay attention to what the kid was actually doing.He points out that voltage in solar cells is essentially boolean. Ok. That means that the kid has shown a way to orient the cells so they get sunlight for a longer period of time. If evolution is anything to go by, his approach likely reveals a local minima for maximizing the time that sunlight is collected.Is that worthless? No, it is not. It may well explain why trees orient their leaves the way they do, and there could well be practical applications. If your solar array produces more than the peak power you need but the cost and energy loss of storing the power are significant, you may well want to use a pattern like this that mimics what trees do.What impresses me is that the kid noticed something in nature he hadn't noticed before, read up on it to see what was known about this pattern, and then went out and measured to see whether what he had read was accurate. Once he had verified what he read, he then figured out how that knowledge might be applied. In doing so, he discovered something that, while obvious in hindsight, is not something that would necessarily have occurred to someone trying to figure out how to maximize the time for solar panels to deliver energy. I think the kudos are appropriate, even if the stories are misleading.An important point here is that in any news story about something that you know a lot about, there are always errors. Always. We should all keep that in mind when we read or watch or listen to the news."
}
] | en | 0.977257 |
Investor Herd Dynamics | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is spot on. When I found out that a fellow entrepreneur had been pushed and pulled around trying to get funding for months without any solid commitment I put two of the angels involved on the spot in a meeting and asked them if I committed a certain sum of money for how much we could count on them. The round closed with 5 investors within a few days.All it takes is for someone to cross the bridge of commitment and others will follow. The fact that I'm probably two orders of magnitude poorer than the other investors probably helped in embarrassing them to make a move, it was literally peanuts to them and the company went on to moderate success."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Seeing that YC's demo day is coming soon, it's awesome to be able to peer into PG's mind - this essay along with "How to Convince Investors" must be the exact advice relayed on to the current YC batch."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'd always wondered if anyone could upstage PG on HN. Apparently, Elon Musk can."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "After you raise the first million dollars, the company is at least a million dollars more valuable, because it's the same company as before, plus it has a million dollars in the bank.This seems a bit specious. Sure, the lower bound on the pre-money valuation for investor #2 should be the post-money valuation for investor #1, not the pre-money valuation for investor #1; but the valuation per share won't necessarily be any different."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ""[2] Founders are often surprised by this, but investors can get very emotional. Or rather indignant; that's the main emotion I've observed; but it is very common, to the point where it sometimes causes investors to act against their own interests. I know of one investor who invested in a startup at a $15 million valuation cap. Earlier he'd had an opportunity to invest at a $5 million cap, but he refused because a friend who invested earlier had been able to invest at a $3 million cap."I'm not surprised, per se, but rather always amazed whenever I hear stories of rich people acting in ways inimical to their economic interests. One would think that an experienced (I guess) businessman, such as a VC, would be somewhat more rational than that. Then again, this is an article about 'Investor Herd Dynamics', so I suppose that should inform my opinions about human behaviour."
}
] | en | 0.985752 |
Rock Star vs Rock Solid [programmers, and the difference] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "For me, this is the key phrase:\"A joy to manage as they typically do 99% of the job for you\"I don't doubt that managers prefer employees that are easier to manage. But is it really in the organization's best interest?I don't know thte author, but I've learned not to underestimate what a good boss can do for an employee. I'm inclined to believe that maybe if the author gave \"rock stars\" a bit more attention, he might be surprised at what they can do."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I suspect that one source of the \"Rock Star\" meme is an inside joke about rubies being a type of rock."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just because some people refer to themselves as 'rock stars' doesn't mean that they -are-. 'Rock star' isn't defined like that, and so the whole argument falls flat. And if those people start calling themselves 'rock solid', this argument still falls flat."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Rock stars are great when your team is small and tightly-knit. As a rule, they don't scale. Still often worth making accommodations for them as you grow, though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What this guy describes is just like the actual music business as well."
}
] | en | 0.990476 |
Screenhero (YC W13) Gives WebEx And Screen Sharing Apps A Run For Their Money | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What are the chances you would make this an app work for UX research usability testing?With the following needs:2 users:UX researcher (myself)UX study participantRequirements:- Easily send the app to a participant (via an email link) - (you do this?)- Share my screen with the participant - (You do this)- Give the participant access to mouse and keyboard - (You do this)- Allow me to talk to the partipant and the participant to talk to me (like Skpye) - @todo- Record the video of the session - @todo- Record my voice and the participants voice - @todo- Sharing is not laggy (like go to meeting)Currently WebEx is the only app that can do all of the above (that I know of). I would love to stop using webEX. Participants find it impossible to get started."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Protip: \"Revolutionary\" in the first 5 words of a video is a total turnoff. Just say who you are and what you do plainly. If you're revolutionary, your product will speak for itself. No need to tell people you're great."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just tried this last week and have to say that I'm thoroughly impressed. Great work guys! Worked really smooth, even smooth enough for people to see animation hiccups in some apps we were building. Thanks!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Available for Mac. Windows coming soon.Hmm."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Curious about the whole \"sharing apps\" thing. Does this service violate any TOS with say, Microsoft Office?"
}
] | en | 0.874679 |
Show HN: NoobNinja - get and give help for specific coding or design tasks | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Sorry to be negative, but I've personally found that people who offer me prizes, money, etc to help others result in my choosing not to. I have people who are willing to pay me real money to help.But places where I get involved in discussions, I'm willing to offer valuable advice on.Since this draws a distinction between people who get and receive help, and discourages public discussion, I can't see myself getting involved. Sorry."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Looks great! I actually had a very similar idea myself:http://talkbee.heroku.com/Never really got it off the ground because I realized it was too complex of an idea for a single person. Two-sided marketplaces in general are hard, but especially one that involves coordinating people's time like this."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can't sign up as a sensei, Getting the very similar 500 POST error when trying to submit.\"Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error) http://noobninja.com/invites"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Looks really good.I tried to fill out the form to get an invite, but when I pressed Enter, the form wasn't sent, instead it added a new line to the input field.Hope this helps, and excuse me for my English - not my main language :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Error 500 on the submission for being a sensei, with no feedback to the user that it didn't go through: http://i.imgur.com/DHA4w.png"
}
] | en | 0.960957 |
Ask HN: I probably live next door to a drug dealer. Help? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't know whether or not they are drug dealers, but if they are, then unfortunately, I would say that you should be worried about your family's safety.When I was in college I lived in an apartment next to a drug dealer. While my then-boyfriend/now-husband was out of the country, some guys came by their apartment and beat up the guy and shot him in the ear (as he ran away) and held his pregnant girlfriend up at gunpoint and ran away right next to me, because I was outside walking my dog. After that ordeal, they moved but since they still had the lease, they moved their drug dealer friends in. A few months in someone shot into the apartment from the street. We weren't home but the bullet holes actually came in diagonally through our shared wall.We know they were drug dealers because 1) a neighbor of ours bought from them and 2) the cops pretty much told us but they didn't arrest them bc you can't without proof. Like you said, this has nothing to do with doing drugs or legalization, but is about being near criminals who are consorting with other criminals.For me, I would never bother trying to get them \"caught\". For one, it's unlikely you'll succeed. Two, you're just getting yourself more into that business. Lastly, I wouldn't want to piss of a potentially dangerous drug dealer.What we did is move and that's actually my recommendation, especially if you aren't too attached to your house. I realize it's a lot of time and money but it isn't worth your family's safety. It was enough for us to move (and lose money doing so) when it was just me and SO but I would never EVER stay in that situation with a child. Nowadays, I live in a small tight-knit community with an overactive police force. Some people find it restrictive but I find it SAFE."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Why is this on Hacker News at all?And better yet, why is failure to contact a lawyer a recurring mistake of Hacker News posters?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "From my point of view- You don't have solid evidence to back the claim that your neighbour is a drug dealer.- If he is indeed a drug dealer, he probably wants not to attract attention and not to get in trouble, specially with people of where he lives.I think, as long as he doesn't trouble you or your family, that you should live your life and let others live theirs.Of course, if he ever menaces you or your family you should defend your family fiercely, but in the meantime if you care your own business he'll care his."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's illegal in Florida to get a microphone that amplifies sound and point it at your neighbors house in order to figure out if he is or is not a drug dealer.http://www.surveillance-spy-cameras.com/parabolic-ear.htmIANAL, but I believe a conversation in a car out in the open on a public road may be ok. So if you hear \"he was out of OG Kush, so I got some Skywalker instead\", then at least you know for sure."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What's going to happen is that they will disappear in the middle of the night some day, probably whenever some cop they've paid off let's them know they're about to get raided."
}
] | en | 0.994176 |
Google Chrome now works on iOS | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "But, Chrome on iOS will still be a \"second class citizen\" the way Opera mini and the other browsers on the AppStore. If you want to open a link in Chrome, you will need to copy/paste the URL, no \"Open in Chrome\" functionality like Safari has. For better or for worse, Apple has not opened up system-wide integration of third party apps, and I don't seem them allowing you to change your default browser anytime soon."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is a poor decision on Google's part. The end result is it tarnishes the Chrome brand.Chrome's features like private browsing and tab/bookmark syncing are nice, but the defining feature of the brand IMO is that it is a very fast web browser. By linking the name to an app that will always be inherently slower than Safari on iOS, the brand is lessened with no significant upside.I understand their desire to allow Chrome desktop users to have some meaningful interop between their desktop and mobile browsers, but I think they would have been much better served by not pretending this is an actual Chrome experience (much in the way Firefox allows some interop but keeps the distinction clear)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Can someone clarify? I thought replacing the browser (actually even stronger: rendering web content using anything but the browser) was one of the items forbidden by the app store guidelines?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The \"Request Desktop Site\" button is the killer feature for power users."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It doesn't seem to let you set custom search engines, which is a bit disappointing. More options than Google, Yahoo, and Bing was one of the reasons I'd been hoping for this.Even without that, the easily accessible incognito mode (Safari's is through the system wide Settings app), request desktop site, and bookmark sync is still worth more to me than Nitro/V8.On the jailbreak side, Browser Changer doesn't support Chrome yet. Hopefully that will come soon."
}
] | en | 0.948701 |
ORMs vs SQL: The JPA Story | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've been using Hibernate sans Java EE for about four years. I started using it under JPA (again, without Java EE) about two years ago. Only in the last few months have I been able to deploy a Java EE environment, and there, only for a very small project, and the Java EE aspect was pretty minor, although desirable and cool.Hibernate does not require Java EE stuff. The "dynamic weaving" is provided by Javassist (formerly provided by cglib, but cglib is apparently deprecated). No complex setup here. Put the appropriate dependency in your pom and it "magically" works.Indeed, my biggest objection to Hibernate is the degree to which it relies on magic. A lot of that magic is truly magic, in the sense that you are not supposed to worry to hard about how it all works. If it did always just work, it wouldn't be maddening when you try to figure out why it is going wrong only to get slapped in the face by a fistful of hard magic.For instance, the batch annotation, in pure, non-JPA Hibernate, is the fetch "mode." There are several options like "join" and "subselect." Hibernate defaults to an N+1 queries situation, but supplying "join" or "subselect" instead isn't necessarily good enough to get the behavior you want. We had a situation where no matter what we did in the Hibernate config, the behavior was an N+1 query explosion. The problem turned out to be an innocuous-looking log statement in the object model. Tracing in, it turned out that this log statement was being invoked indirectly from the object's constructor, causing the list to be "forced" before construction was complete. For some reason this bypassed Hibernate's usual configuration. The solution was to delete the log statement and take a lot of care not to touch anything that might be a PersistentList from the constructor.That kind of lesson, while trite, is very hard to apply in practice. Especially when you have a set of developers working on the database and object-relational mapping layer and another set working on the model. Hibernate brings a lot of "gotchas." Shield's article hits on one of the more onerous database-side ones, that you are informally forced into using artificial keys, but there are enough oddball ramifications and restrictions to go around that plenty of them spill out into the Java code.I have positive feelings towards myBatis, but I have only used it for a few edge cases in my Hibernate projects. While it is actually pretty easy to trick Hibernate into returning real objects for native queries, the trouble doesn't end there. It's very hard to do a complex SQL query from Hibernate without running into the vague sensation that the Criteria API would be better. A few hours later, you're back to building SQL strings, having read unsettling absurdities in the documentation like "There is no explicit 'group by' necessary in a criteria query."myBatis's major advantage, in my conjectural opinion, is that it does not pretend to liberate you from worrying about the database. As a database developer, I am free to write the best query I can for a given situation, liberally using the most esoteric features of my database. My peers in the model can write exactly the interfaces they want to use. But they are not free to imagine that they have the entire object graph available to them to manage to the minutia at all times, and the ramifications of this loss on a group working solely in the model must be great, and I haven't seen them yet. I see storm clouds looming on that side of this tradeoff. It's annoying when I go to a peer and say what they can and cannot do in a constructor or a bean property getter/setter, but from then on they can still pretend that they have everything, and the worst thing that happens is really untenable performance. But everything works. myBatis, in contrast, is only too happy to give you back an incomplete object tree. There is no "weaving" or "instrumentation" in what comes back to support on-the-fly querying just because you accessed some property. Again, it is a great strength (much, much less magic) but it's also a great weakness. Your model guys aren't going to be able to ignore the database with impunity.I'd like to hear from a group that switched from Hibernate or JPA to myBatis and how it worked out."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I like the newer Scala frameworks, like Slick (http://slick.typesafe.com/). They work with tuples rather than classes. Fits much better with the relational model."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "[2009], for the confused."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Other active threads on this topic :- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17860161/replacing-a-full...- https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/jooq-user..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I loved iBatis the moment I used it (some 8 years ago or so). And yet I always felt like a black sheep because I liked working in SQL and also liked my "ORM" to be a simple translation engine for results into a data structure that can then be used by Java.So I was happy to see this author come to the conclusion that iBatis is A Good Thing, but I do wonder if we are still black sheep in a flock of Hibernate/JPA enthusiasts."
}
] | en | 0.971063 |
Ask HN: I am a PHP Newbie, Why do most developers hate it | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I would keep an open mind. PHP is a stepping stone in the natural progression of a web developer and is a good skill to have.If you are working with websites you will naturally learn HTML and CSS, then javascript, then jQuery.Next you might move to wordpress based websites so PHP and MySQL would be the next things to learn.Next step would be your own web application. PHP and MySQL will work for your own web application. And I would recommend developing a few from scratch with just PHP and MySQL. Creating a login system and CRUD features. Creating these without a framework will give you a good foundation to know what's going on behind the scenes when you move on to a framework. Before developing a web app from scratch it's harder to understand what Rails is doing and why it's valuable.Once you do this then the next natural progression will be using a framework to create a web application. I recommend giving Rails and/or Laravel (PHP Framework) a try. Even though you will know more PHP than Ruby it's a good experience to see how Rails works and why it's so popular. Laravel is a good PHP framework similar to Rails if you want to stick with PHP.I wouldn't limit yourself to PHP though. Once you have been creating web applications it should be pretty easy to learn any framework/language. I prefer Rails and Laravel but that's just a personal preference.Back to your question. Ruby and Python (and their frameworks) are more elegant than PHP. But those choices have positives and negatives of course and depends on your clients as well. PHP is easy to learn so you have lots of bad code and bad practices out there. And there are things inherently wrong with PHP compared to other languages. But I think it's worth learning especially if you're involved with Wordpress.Check out TeamTreehouse.com and you'll learn some good programming practices to get you on the right track. If you're just getting started the Oreilly Head First books are really good for learning HTML and CSS and their Head First PHP & MySQL is good as well.After that you can check out railscast.com and laracast.com.There is lots of tutorials and information out there for all languages.Good luck."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "PHP is not perfect but it gets the job done. The biggest problem with PHP is that too many developer write really bad code with it. PHP is just too easy to get into without understanding how to write clean code.If you follow best practices and use modern frameworks like Laravel, then there should be nothing to complain about PHP."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Some of it is due to age. People like shiny, new things. PHP isn't shiny and new any more.Some of it is due to security. Several of the things which made PHP very accessible to new developers also encourage poor security practices. For example, sending SQL queries to the database as a raw string, rather than a parameterized query, makes for injection vulnerabilities. There are ways to work around it, but often the 'unsafe' way is a lot easier and more obvious than the safe way.Some of it is due to the early proliferation of beginner code. PHP was the language of the web right when every man and his dog were learning just enough code to make something work, then selling themselves as experts. That resulted in a lot of people writing very hacky spaghetti code, which rapidly became legacy.Some of it is due to the switch from its procedural roots to its object oriented alternative (while maintaining backwards compatibility). This isn't really a great thing for a language to do, because it means that people who are less than completely clear as to how to solve problems in both procedural and OO versions of the language often end up writing a confusing mish-mash of code.Most of this should not be a problem for a sensible, well learned and disciplined developer building a new system. (The security thing can still be a thing, but there are ways to handle it now).PHP now has a fantastic culture of building fast, usable systems. Thanks to the big PHP CMSs and frameworks, there's also a lot of great interoperability (and extendability) patterns in PHP which don't really show up anywhere near as much as in other languages. It's extremely easy to deploy, it's well documented, and it's cheap to run.If you like it, and it meets your requirements, then go for it."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The problem with PHP is its design, or lack of it to be precise. It's inconsistent and quite verbose. But it's made for the web, so it's very easy to deploy, and the workflow is straightforward, put file in a folder on a server and refresh the page. If you're new to web development but already have some programming experience, PHP is a good language to learn because it's ubiquitous and very easy to get started. If you're new to programming, I'd suggest you learn Python first; it's a beautifully designed general purpose language, and will guide you through the right path before diving into the PHP jungle."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm a non-technical founder, so I have to outsource my development. I tried to work with Python and Ruby developers, but never had any luck, they seemed like hacks - and I tried to work with several of them.PHP developers, in my experience, have their shit together. This is just my OWN personal experience. I would never hire a Python/Ruby guy again, I'm always going for PHP developers now."
}
] | en | 0.941317 |
Why Yahoo Keeps Killing Everything It Buys | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I cant recall a luckier, more overrated CEO in my career than Marissa Mayer. She shows up right before Alibaba (and wild valuations) takes off. Dan Loeb gets involved to turbocharge the stock, which has done well solely because of Alibaba. She makes a bunch of expensive, terrible acquisitions and insists she didn't overpay for these odd non-revenue generating assets in the midst of a minor tech bubble, while providing no evidence. Yahoo itself, meanwhile, continues to decline and is regarded by most as a structural mess. Management is overpaid beyond the point of reason, the former COO being exhibit A for all that's wrong with management comp and corporate governance. I hope this company goes down in flames."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I really hate Yahoo. When they bought Geocities they changed my user name that had 64 in it to 63 automatically. What a stupid number. Then, because I didn't log into it within a certain time frame, they up and deleted all my content. It was the first (and only, really, besides school requirement...) personal website I ever built, in 6th grade. It had all the cool images, gifs, midis I had gathered on the internet and I even created custom gifs for it. I even copy pasted some javascript code to make my gifs animate when moused over.Even though I only used the email account they automatically set up for me for junk registrations (my main mail was already @home/attbi/comcast before they bought geocities, then gmail when that was created), I ended up making a second yahoo account with a name that wasn't lame (which I still used for junk registrations, and other random things, but moreso than the one automatically created). One day the password on that second email account suddenly changed. I used the same password on both the accounts for years with zero sign of infiltration. I still continue to use accounts tied to the one with the mysteriously changed password. I did everything I could to get that one back with no luck. Maybe I was compromised by some hacker? I do recall during my efforts being asked by yahoo support something along the lines of "is this your main account?". There was never anybody that I could talk to, only text support, and most of my attempts/ticket submissions went ignored. Maybe they think I'm a hacker.In the end, nothing but bitter feelings toward Yahoo for me."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's just sad to see Yahoo! in such a bad shape. I was just talking to a friend about the great Yahoo! in the times of Hack Day! and Brickhouse.They bought some of the hottest startups back in the days (Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming...) only to neglect them, shut them or let them die. These were amongst the first companies that had put the user front and centre, leveraging the fabled user generated content. This was of huge value for any company and they let it slip through their fingers.Also, at Brickhouse they developed Fire Eagle, one of the first services to work with location, and a great take on it too. A central and independent place where you could post your location to and then you'd grant access to other services choosing the level of detail (e.g. you phone was constantly posting your most accurate location and then Twitter could have access to your current City, Facebook to the Country you're in and Dark Sky could access Lat/Lon).And, of course, they once owned Geocities.Then they shut some stuff down, closed Brickhouse and I think they stopped hosting Hack Days. I know correlation does not imply causation but I find it very difficult to dissociate these two situations. How can a technology company thrive if they kill their innovation internal cycle?Yahoo! seems to once have had one of the best innovation cultures in industry only to see it disappear like this. Everything that has been happening since then (like death by acquisitions) looks like part of the plan or the lack of thereof."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Isn't it fairly obvious that there are two categories of companies that they buy: the ones they count on for strategic business (Flickr), and the ones they acquire just for the people? I have to imagine that the latter is mostly just to infuse Yahoo with young, energetic people who are willing & able to work long hours if given a proper vision. Sure you can put out a lot of job reqs, but this seems like the way Mayer has chosen to try to infuse Yahoo with talent & energy."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ""In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups. But so far the only companies smart enough to do this are companies smart enough not to need to."--http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html#f2n"
}
] | en | 0.950584 |
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> so only download it if you need it\n> This dataset may be removed in the next week or sothe latter cancels the former."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've set up a mirror, should be quite a bit faster ;)http://weblava.net/ycombinator-news20080424.tar.gz"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm trying to pull it down to one of our university boxes so we can mirror it. It's going a little slow at the moment though (eta 10 hours).I'll update with the link as soon as it's done."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "cool! why not set up a torrent and seed?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is awesome, thanks.One suggestion: it would be even more useful (for my purposes at least) if you had another version that only included the full posts, rather than having the full posts in addition to having separate files for each comment subthread. The way it is now, there is a lot of data duplication, since a comment of depth n will appear in n separate files."
}
] | en | 0.947254 |
Show HN: ABBA - Beautiful, open-source A/B test calculator | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Great explanations. For people, who prefer excel we have a calculator as an excel sheet: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test...We also have a blog post that explains mathematics of A/B testing: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I would perhaps also have added a calculation of the power of the test. But I really love that they're actually explaining the details behind it, which a lot of other A/B-test calculators out there don't do."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For people wanting the PHP code to do the calculations:\nhttp://abtester.com/calculator/This is something like 25 lines of code."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Mixpanel also has an A/B split testing calculator: https://mixpanel.com/labs/split-test-calculator"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Perhaps lighten up the \"What is ABBA\" section.. it's pretty technical and I can see it scaring people off."
}
] | en | 0.976662 |
Tethr: Getting online in a crisis | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have this functionality in a backpack. The problem is the BGAN satellite link is about $5-10k for the equipment and $3-12/MB for data, so it is effectively short text message and IRC only for me.If you are in specific areas, it probably would be better to use a vsat like wildblue, although far less portable. At that point it basically requires a big car or station wagon to transport all your gear, and a semi skilled operator to set it up."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm the founder of Tethr and am really happy that you guys enjoyed the article. We're planning a lot of new things and hope you'll stay tuned.Feel free to ask any questions you might have."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Tethr is a really cool convergence of open source software and hardware that will save lives. I'm really impressed by disaster response technology. I hope Tethr works well and is widely deployed.Light weight related, the Open Street Maps response to the Haiti earthquake was particularly impressive. Here is a slideshow about that. http://www.slideshare.net/sabman/haiti-quake-public-key"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm surprised to ever say the words, but copy of this BBC page for those of us in the UK?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "seems like a good candidate for Kickstarter"
}
] | en | 0.96608 |
Simple - An Obtvse clone written in Python | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'd like to see one of these clones that more closely resembles the static site generators like Jekyll (http://jekyllrb.com/) or Hyde (http://ringce.com/hyde). Basically, the CMS would just be the interface to create new and manage existing content. It would have the standard static publish function that builds out the pages of the blog as HTML.(NOTE: \"Simple\" is not my project)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Go download Python 2.7+, Flask, Sqlalchemy and flask-sqlalchemy and you are good to go.OP, you should learn about requirements.txt and virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper, it will make your life easier."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Nice work with the Python style, though I believe Simple and Obtvse missed the point as with every clone of something out there that tries to replicate what they could see on the outside. Skipping over Dustin's attitude of the situation, no one really knows how Svbtle.com works on the inside do they?From the outside look and the screenshots (because that's all Dustin showed you) it's a simple design and that's the point; it was never supposed to be a complex work of design for you to be proud that you could replicate it in 1 day in rails. Yeah, Dustin put some work into thinking what could work for the layout but once the application of the design is done, replication is beyond simple.Clone all you want I think it's great but Dustin was really telling the story of the \"network\" the idea of a closely knit community of writers (pseudo-writers whichever you prefer). I look at it as similar to the Deck Ad network or Dribbble (before every desperate Designer begged for an invite). Or when an HN clone comes along, no one ever migrates across, they always come back here.Point is, the one thing you are never going to have is the network, that human element that sets apart the clone from the real deal."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "So much drama around what is basically a skin/cosmetic improvement...Good luck anyway."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think these two packages could become a great learning resource for noobies. I'm a Ruby guy, but am definitely going to take a look into this version, should add usually difficult to find \"context\".Nice work :)"
}
] | en | 0.905294 |
Twss.js | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Now I'm just waiting for someone to make a Twitter bot that randomly samples tweets and responds to them with this..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think your negative sample set is a little biased. Since all the phrases start with verbs like \"was in the car\" or \"went to the park\", these kinds of phrases are given lower probabilities.For example: > twss.prob(\"was on a stiff pole\");\n 0.016050826334564946\n\nOnly 1.6% chance of that's what she said?!?EDIT: Counter example: > twss.prob(\"that's one stiff pole\");\n 0.9767718880285885"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Related: http://www.quora.com/How-would-you-programmatically-parse-a-..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "An interesting (and funny) exercise.For those interested in neural networks and Bayesian classifiers check out the brain.js library: http://harthur.github.com/brain/It works in both node and the browser."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "A while back I was interested in implementing a much less naive algorithm for classifying TWSS expressions, based on this [1] paper. Never actually got around to finishing the work.Interesting problem though, and nice work.[1] - http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/brun/pubs/pubs/Kiddon11.p..."
}
] | en | 0.941873 |
Quick Look plugins for developers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Enabling text selection in Quick Look through "defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE" has been very useful together with QLStephen."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "One more that I like is: http://www.mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage/Shows the contents of any pkg file including scripts"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Ah, very nice! Any commentary on if it affects the speed of Quick Look in general? (I've noticed Quick Look getting slower in the last couple generations of OS X, and don't want to dog it down any more.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I highly recommend this Provisioning Profile Quick Look plugin for iOS Developers https://github.com/chockenberry/ProvisioningIt'll give you information like whose devices have been added to the provisioning profile, the type of profile (e.g. Ad Hoc), the App Name and ID, and valid certificates for the profile."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "These are helpful! Thank you so much for making them available."
}
] | en | 0.881427 |
Weebly (YC 07) Launches Whitelabel Platform for Designers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Weebly is the most under hyped YC company."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow, this is pretty huge. There's a big gap between designers and developers particularly in the smb market. Youll have designers that don't know how to develop make brochure-style sites that business owners don't know how to develop. Or you'll have developers make an editable site that looks like crap. If you want both you have to pay a lot of money.For designers Weebly now takes the place of the developer and gives the designer the ability to make a great looking site that is easy to maintain and manage.This is genius and is going to be very big."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This looks fantastic, just what my company was looking for to quickly develop websites for the small business clients we deal with. They all want a CMS, but the value proposition just isn't there for us for a $2,000 project that requires all custom design work.Nice work! Signed up immediately."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This compelled me to play around with Weebly for the first time.I created a quick landing page (http://prototypecases.weebly.com/). Easy to add built in contact forms, integration with Google's web fonts was nice, built in SEO tags to paste html. Tons of layouts to pick from and a super easy way to add images.I was very impressed by how easy it was to put together and how fast customizing the site is. Classically, when it comes to this sort of thing, I think Wordpress but drag and drop is a very marketable feature for Weebly. I'm impressed.I do have to note that the control panel timed out and the site displayed some sort of app disconnection error several times."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"Weebly powers around 2% of sites on the web\" – wow, really? I did some quick Googling, but couldn't find the survey. Someone got it handy?"
}
] | en | 0.977015 |
10 Reasons Why "Band" Is Better Than MySpace | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "By the way, these guys are going through the HECK of startup right now through bootstrapping and really going garageband with this. I think there's an awful lot that the people floating around here can learn by what they're doing.BRAVO GUYS AND GIRL. You're really doing a great job with what you have.I hope everyone can see the value in such efforts and learn from it. Its the real spirit of entrepreneurship."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So far, 10 of the comments on this article are from accounts created two hours ago or less:randyengler, myxibrium, Mausen, nilio, Trish, BAdairme, Stephanie, yplymale, travis_jenkigs, rbraunfeld"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "i still think the general web doesn't have enough faceted browsing (or something) ... like does youtube have tags yet? are we all overspamming tags? regardless, when it comes to really finding things on a non-regional site, you feel like the needles in the haystack are just that much smaller..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I suppose I use MySpace differently than some. When I hear about a band I do a Google search and their MySpace page is usually near the top. I use MySpace to listen to a few tracks to get a feel for them. I never use MySpace to find new music. For that I use a variety of sources including Oh My Rockness (highly recommended if you are in Chicago, LA or NYC)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "People actually look for music on myspace? Dang. What's the world coming to?"
}
] | en | 0.980357 |
Don't Worry, Time Warner Cable Is Just Having A Massive Outage | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "See here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576399"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Time Warner, like, the movie company? I would never want internet from the guys that are trying to break the internet to enforce copyright."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wish I could read it, but I'm on Roadrunner... 9 out of 10 links don't work for me, including that one."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This should be the outage ticket number if anybody has a need for it.3417269"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Someone at the NSA just pressed the wrong button..."
}
] | en | 0.952098 |
Ask PG: Can you do it again? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You are confident that you can repeat "doing nothing significant in life" again and again? Whoa, you're really setting the bar high, aren't you? :P"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "[I am not PG]In the 1980's PG got a phd from Harvard - rumors that he also helped create the internet DoS attack are however unsubstantiated. In the 1990's PG wrote two books, and started a successful web company. In the 2000's PG wrote another book and started a successful company that launched successful companies. There's fighting email spam, creating a new programming language, developing research on continuation servers, advancing our understanding of the dynamics of online communities and their discourse, and a personal life.Two thoughts come to mind: Chance favors the prepared. If you want something to get done, give it to someone who is busy.PG seems like the sort of person who is busy. Do you think this thread rises to the level of priority? Should he take time away from his family to participate?My take is that PG has largely moved on from HN. In part, that's probably just his change. But in no small part I expect it has to do with the changing nature of HN - an HN that Reg Braithwaite abandoned. An HN where fluff like this question gets double digit points - do you have any idea how hard it is to write a 44 point comment?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think that Paul Graham has great powers of observation. He seems to know what makes businesses successful and what problems in the world need to be solved. I am sure he spends a lot of time thinking and analyzing (whether consciously or unconsciously, I do not know). It is apparent in his essays that he is a brilliant person who enjoys making observations (and he is an artist, which involves like 99% observation).Paul Graham is really great at what he does. I am sure that you have personal qualities that are great as well. You should try to leverage those. It is good to admire others, but you must forge your own path to success. Words of wisdom can only do so much. In the end, it is the effort and strengths of the individual that matters.I don't think that you should care so much about helping people. Before you label me as a bad person, I think that if you think too much about helping people, if you believe that you have a social obligation to do so, it can be very exhausting to the heart. Doctors sometimes face "compassion exhaustion." You should strive to be a good person, give when you can, but to over-exert yourself by making yourself feel guilty for not having helped people or improved the world is counter-productive. I say this because I went through the same thing. There are many small ways you can help people and have a big impact on their lives.I strive to make myself into a person that I would admire."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Taking back everything else? Does that include knowledge, experience and lessons learned? Because that greatly affects what pg would start doing today."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Success and significance is relative and it is important that you see why it is so. I don't know where you are from but opportunity is a big part of the story. A majority of the world does not have the same level of opportunity as the western world. Being in the bay area, being born with the right passport, being around with the right people, right education etc are really big influencers of success and have nothing to do with individual itself.This is not to take away anything from what many people like PG have done, but it is for you to realize that sometimes lots of energy is spent by other people just trying to achieve basic things which are usually taken for granted.As an example, I wanted to travel on a business trip to this country. My partner could go immediately because he didn't need a visa. My visa processing is still stuck and it's been a week now. Lost opportunity and no amount of hardwork and perseverance from my side can fix it. yeah, this is part of the reason that I am writing this comment. I feel terrible about my passport :)"
}
] | en | 0.961126 |
‘JFK Customs destroyed 11 of my instruments’ | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The biggest problem is that there doesn't seem to be any professional risk when customs agents "get it wrong". It seems that the agent could decided that your Sony Walkman is an agricultural product and take it from you and there will be shrugs all around.With no downside whatsoever for overstepping bounds, added with the kinds of people that are attracted to this sort of job, its almost inevitable that bored agents will start hassling people when things get slow."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The (world famous) pianist Krystian Zimerman also had his concert grand destroyed by customs while on tour:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystian_Zimerman#Criticism_of_..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Bamboo instruments are agricultural products. So are the cotton and wool clothing I am wearing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This country is doomed.Even during the cold war, in all the slapstick portrayals in movies and and sitcoms, you would never see Soviet (or Nazi) border or other guard types acting anywhere near as stupid as the CBP officers in this case."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I wonder who actually made the call to destroy these things? Does an individual customs agent have the authority to do this?"
}
] | en | 0.971967 |
Ask HN: Am I being paid fairly? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Do some investigating into the temporary worker regulations for the country you are in.Here in the UK a recent law came into force where temporary workers have to be paid the same as colleagues in the same role after 12 weeks. They should also get the same performance related bonuses too.It's worth checking if your company need to pay your agency a fee if you were to join the company as a perm employee."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Could you please give more context? \nWhich country are you working in? \nDo you have a formal education / certificate for your qualifications?In 2007 I earned about 1.300 Euros net (no perks) as a programmer (Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung) in Germany. \nSo if you don't have a university degree, I would assume your pay to be average.Just my 2 cents"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In our industry, I've seen labor arbitrage ratios as low as 150% and as high as 2000%, so that's not a very good way to gauge pay - it depends on your market, your niche in the industry, and the risk that your employer takes on.You're making a reasonable wage assuming a below average cost of living."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "If you don't get the response you want here, try the Workplace Stackexchange - http://workplace.stackexchange.com/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'll put this in to perspective for you, you earn 4 times the amount I do for the same field."
}
] | en | 0.986392 |
ARM reveals little dog A7 processor | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is binary compatible with the upcoming A15 processor, but lower speed and more power efficient. The intent is that a chip will have some A15 cores and some A7 cores and use them as appropriate to balance speed and energy consumption.It could also be used as a standalone processor where its performance is sufficient and energy efficiency is a win.The \"Cortex A∗\" numbering scheme should not be confused with the \"Apple A∗\" numbering scheme. They are unrelated. There is in fact an A5 in each scheme at the moment."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "How much battery life is saved using an asymmetric multicore design as compared to dynamically downclocking of a \"big dog\" core? The article does not address this, but it does say that smaller die size of the \"little dog\" core uses 1/3 less power."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "NVidia's Kal-El SoC implements this approach, although it uses Cortex A9 for both the Big Dog and Little Dog cores. The Little Dog is produced using low-leakage transistors, which is where their obtain their power savings (at the cost of clock speed). In the Kal-El design, the Little Dog communicates with the Big Dogs through a shared L2 cache."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Reminds me of the old BBC coprocessors, which is interesting as ARM's predecessor was Acorn Computers. Funny to see an idea from the 80's getting a second run out!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_units"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I doubt this will change process model or application lifecycle already present in the major smartphone OS. In the \"always\" on services, long-running background tasks arena the precious commodity is not cpu usually, it's memory. There is no \"swap space\". \nInteresting to see QNX\\RIM listed as an early partner."
}
] | en | 0.956952 |
Fun abstract image generator using SVG and hashes | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "http://blotbot.co/#0ar00k00Whois thebatman.com"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wow, this is sick. I wish it had a \"Print to T-shirt\" or \"Buy Stickers\" feature. I would definitely rock a couple big, blocky tees from this site.It would be cool if you generated red, green, and blue layers and then mixed them for color results, too."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "http://blotbot.co/#1bfac680By the way, \"innate\" is misspelled on the front page."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "That's quite a 'stache! http://blotbot.co/#15ea44f5"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Liked this one: http://blotbot.co/#74f9a42bClearly Elvis lives: http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/04_02/elvis11004_468x3..."
}
] | en | 0.912961 |
UltraEdit text editor for Mac - Now Available | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Why I would take vim or emacs any day:- versions available for many platforms. Your editing skills on Linux are easily transferrable to Windows or Mac, and others.- Free, and Open Source.- Insanely extensible, with a rich collection of extensions and plugins already available.- Large user base, that keeps improving the editor to support new languages (most times before you know about it!), port it to new platforms, and provide more plugins.I guess there is a market for \"easier\" and more intuitive editors, but anyone who seriously plans a career in software/web development (or anything else that involves heavy text editing) will profit greatly (on the long term) from learning well one of these editors.Vim never lets me down :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Isnt $80 a bit too much? Since TextMate sells for $53, and editors which are better than both are basically free. :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just tried it, doesn't have the Mac look, drag control is laggy on my iMac.I think I'll pass."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For the uninformed Vim/Emacs die-hards like me...What's so great about UltraEdit?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Interesting that there are 3 prices for 3 platforms:Windows: $59.95Mac: $79.95 (intro pricing)Linux: $49.95 (intro pricing)"
}
] | en | 0.835655 |
Huawei Says It Would Offer Access To Its Source Code | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think it's a nice political move, but I will be surprised if it makes much difference in the end.It is impossible to demonstrate trustworthiness to someone who isn't willing to believe it.Some issues which would get raised by your friends if they didn't want you to buy Huawei:Firstly, you have the problem of underhanded code (e.g http://underhanded.xcott.com/) e.g. deniable backdoors. Auditing a large C codebase to the point where you have confidence in it is Expensive and Time Consuming.Secondly, version control gets to be a huge problem. If you are going to rely on the results of your audit, now you have to build the firmware yourself with a trusted toolchain. This is going to be a lot of work. Especially since you now have to do this for every firmware release for every product you use. Most organisations aren't getting patching and release management right even as things stand right now.Thirdly: do we need to look at the FPGAs, ASICs and \"auxiliary\" firmware? Are all the parts standard? Where were they fabbed? Can we trust those guys? Is the router we get next month going to be the same board revision, with parts from the same vendors?Fourthly: how comfortable are the players in various countries going to be with a Chinese state-owned company having their detailed network designs for telcos and core networks? (I mean, pretending they don't already ;)Paranoid hat mode: I do wonder whether the huge mistrust of Huawei is standard anti-competitiveness... or because everyone's agencies have been using {backdoors, bugs, info} provided by various companies and \"friendly employees\" for years - and buying Huawei kit just seems like it's making things too easy for certain parties.If you are interested in these kinds of shenigans: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/... is a fascinating read."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "In my opinion it's the right way to address this.They enter the US market to have their reputation instantly destroyed by official US institutions, that are filing concern about possible spying through their products at a moment where they haven't even looked at it, to later conclude that there were security risks found but none of the allegations were true.I don't know how big the final damage for Huawei is, but that in order to avoid this just to let them look at their source code seems like a good way of addressing this.And that is actually one of the big pro free software arguments in general:By having the source code openly* available you know when you are screwed over.Congrats Huawei for an in my opinion right way to address this issue!* in the scenario of Huawei they only want to make source code available for analyzing purposes by governmental institutions. That does not change the statement issued above though"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Still, it would be very hard to make sure that the provided code is indeed the one running on the suspicious machines. The only way I see to make sure of that would be to provide tools to compile and flash the hardware, which doesn't make much business sense. This also gives no protection to silicon based backdoors that has nothing to do with OS code."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Has anyone compared Ericssons tech with Huawei? \nHonest question. I feel like if you're setting up infrastructure, take it from the countries that does it the best. Ericsson is Swedish and _THE_ first country to roll out with 4G (around my parents place, even)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Let's not forget: Aliyun OS is an admitted illegal closed-source Linux fork (And likely an Android ripoff).Perhaps China should comply with basic U.S. law if they want to sell things here."
}
] | en | 0.97218 |
Editorial: Waiter, there's a Nazi theme in my Android Market | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The difference between the App Store and the Android Market is that the latter is not as actively policed. The Android Market has a fairly restrictive content policy, which (among other things) prohibits \"promotions of hate or incitement of violence\". While it's easier to slip prohibited content into the Android Market, it's not supposed to be there and will likely be removed.http://www.android.com/us/developer-content-policy.htmlThe freedom of the Android platform is that you can put what you want on your device. The same freedom does not apply to the Market -- if you want Market-prohibited content, you need to find another way to get it. This renders most of the article moot."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You can choose between censorship and freedom of speech. You can't have it both ways.Offensive speech is the small price you pay for your freedom. Enjoy it.And, BTW, I live in a country where I am not given the luxury of being able to express some impopular points of view without risking being arrested."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"turns up skins which are disgustingly, hatefully pro-Nazism and pro-Hitler. That's a problem, no matter how you look at this.\"\"hard look at what censorship really means, and what kind of role it can (and clearly should) play in the new frontier of app marketplaces\"That's a seriously fucked up view on censorship right there. I hope it's just a troll and author really doesn't believe that censorship is ok, and censoring what they don't like is fine and dandy.Also maybe the reason author thinks \"Jewish\" and \"Hitler\" are unrelated search terms is because the only history they have read had all the \"hate filled\" parts censored."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This link is from when a similar thing showed up in the main Google search results:http://www.google.com/explanation.html"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Even if you accept that it should be illegal to publish certain things, it doesn't follow that everything has to be piped through a censorship authority. Punishing offenders should be enough.Otherwise, where to stop? It is illegal to kill somebody, therefore we need a watchdog to approve our every moves, in case it is a killing move?"
}
] | en | 0.945246 |
AMD Posts A Horde Of New 3D GPU Documentation | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Direct links from http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=58:AMD R6xx/R7xx 3D Register Reference:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/R6xx_3D_Registers.pdfAMD R6xx/R7xx Acceleration:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/R6xx_R7xx_3D.pdfAMD Evergreen 3D Register Reference:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/evergreen_3D_registers_v2.pdfAMD Cayman/Trinity 3D Register Reference:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/cayman_3D_registers_v2.pdfAMD Evergreen/Northern Islands Acceleration:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/evergreen_cayman_programming_guide...AMD Southern Islands 3D Register Reference:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/SI_3D_registers.pdfAMD Sea Islands 3D Register Reference:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/CIK_3D_registers_v2.pdfAMD Southern Islands/Sea Islands Acceleration:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/si_programming_guide_v2.pdfAMD HDA audio verbs:\nhttp://www.x.org/docs/AMD/AMD_HDA_verbs_v2.pdf"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I bought an ATI 5870 a few years ago. At the time, it was a pretty beefy card, and drives my three 23" monitors really well... in Windows.Late 2012 is when I found that enough bugs were fixed in the [now AMD] proprietary drivers to where I could get serious work done in Linux. The crashes were mostly fixed, but there are still lots of performance issues, as well as a lot of fun bugs (like my cursor randomly turning into a 20x50 block of randomly colored pixels when moving between monitors).It's been a dreadful experience. The AMD driver releases stopped coming with changelogs for about 6 months, and they still don't always release them (or when they do, they leave a lot out). When a new version of Xorg comes out, it takes them at least two months to add support (while nvidia often has support ready before release, or very shortly after). nvidia, even with their own issues, shows them up enough to make me envious. Intel is really taking things to a higher level with their drivers + OpenGL performance lately, too.If you have to use proprietary drivers (like I do for 3D/OpenGL), stay the heck away from AMD. They do an awful job with their Linux drivers. Linus likes to bitch at nvidia, but their binary Linux drivers are leagues better than AMD's. They've got issues, too, but are by far the lesser of two evils for higher end GPUs + Linux."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I wonder how much of this is "business as usual" for AMD's GPU team, and how much of it is in reaction to nVidia recently beginning to open up? My limited understanding is that AMD/ATI has been far more more open than nVidia for much longer, but if they see nVidia starting to open up, maybe they're lengthening their stride on these efforts?Either way, my inner optimist/FOSS fanboy is really hoping that there's a convergence of things happening right now (championed by Valve, I think) that will make GPUs become as open and well-documented as main processors. It's rare to see, but I get all excited any time openness is even a minor basis for competition."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A hoard, surely, rather than a horde.Hacker News readers are a horde.\nThe newly-released documentation is a hoard.Assuming this is correct:\nhttp://grammarist.com/spelling/hoard-horde/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Anyone else disappointed that the GPU documentation isn't somehow rendered in 3D?"
}
] | fr | 0.378877 |
At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This stood out to me:\"a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.\"I don't know the backstory here, so I won't jump to conclusions. Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Ex particle-physicist here. Extremely unlikely to be a new force of nature, given the energies that the Tevatron operates at we'd have seen some evidence for this before - and nothing has ever suggested there might be something like this in addition to the fundamental 4. And whilst there might be wild speculation in the press as to what this might be, the research group(s) at Tevatron will certainly know. Given that one of the Tevatron's big hopes was to trump the LHC with a signature for the Higgs it could be something along these things, which would be fantastic. Although it's probably likely to be something more mundane."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Which is the paper mentioned in the article?http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+Punzi/0/1/0/all/0/1http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+punzi+lett/0/1/0/all/0/..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I hope the new force in nature is not this: \"Fermilab’s Tevatron [...] now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "These Particle Accelerators should not be wasted or scrapped! This process could be used to study materials, which could lead to advances in: temperature limits, strength, etc..."
}
] | en | 0.902696 |
"Caffeine" - Google's new faster search engine | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Compare new and old Google Search side-by-side: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/googlecompare.html"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Why is the sentence about Wolfram Alpha in this article?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Does this mean I have to change my username?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "My testing: Similar results. Similar speed."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I still see the same spam I reported weeks ago in the index. The new index even shows it at #1!"
}
] | en | 0.929175 |
GitHub Merge Button - What Were they Thinking? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "That button is a convenience for the \"Hey I fixed a typo in your README\"-type changes. Of course for a major feature addition you'll still want to do it the old way, which is obviously still possible."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "They were probably thinking \"Let's make our product more convenient and easier to use.\""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I used this button 3 times today and am happier for it."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I made these same complaints in their blog post comments when it came out. They made it harder to test code without first publishing it (i.e. welcome to CVS) and in the trivial cases where someone submits a spelling fix to your docs and you're sure it won't break anything, it now introduces two commits to do that, the second (the one showing at the top) providing potentially much less information.I think it's good that they're making things easier, but fork queue (which seems mostly abandoned these days) seemed to solve these problems better. Understanding of course that none of cherry-picking, forced recursive merging or fast-forward merges is always right for everyone."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It thoroughly depends on the use case. If someone's submitting a documentation change, I have no problem at all merging in with the merge button. It's perfect.I think the button should be used sparingly, but I'm extremely happy that it's there.Small changes to a non-crucial project shouldn't be that big of a deal. Bigger projects typically have a more proper master/develop branch structure, and that unstable branch is there for a reason.Also, GitHub is often used privately by trusted teams, so merging a repo from a colleague or coworker without testing first could be proper in many situations."
}
] | en | 0.980231 |
The Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book (with PDF downloads) is out | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "As a special thank-you to the awesome community here, the main story link above contains a Hacker News–specific code for a 20% discount on Ruby on Rails Tutorial PDF purchases, good for 30 days. Here is the code if you want to use it directly: hackernews01\n\nAs noted on the Rails Tutorial site, the online version of the book is still free, and purchasers of the PDF will get unlimited free updates through the final release of Rails 3.0. (The online version will also be updated, of course.)Finally, I'd like to announce that, after the Rails 3 ecosystem and book text have fully stabilized, the HTML source of the online version will be available under a Creative Commons license to allow for translation into other languages. Hacker News readers interested in translating the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book should email me at my personal address (available in my HN profile)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "On a side note, i'm teaching a ruby on rails class based on Agile Web Development with Rails (rail3 beta version) and all of my lecture videos, and slides along with course erata are online http://thinkbohemian.comthe more rails3 the better. maybe my next class should be based on this book instead, let me know what you think."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just bought it. I have a feeling this will be a better value than my $1500 Thoughtbot class. :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Awesome. I'm very glad that there's a free online version, as well. Oddly, that makes me much more likely to purchase the pdf.Now, if only Rails 3 were finished."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Hey mhartl...love that this is finally done.One suggestion I have though, is I feel like you are giving away too much on the site.One point of interest is that I can just simply press 'view all as single page' and then do a Print to PDF and have everything in one nice PDF.Granted, I am sure the official version looks MUCH nicer, but there isn't THAT much difference between the crude version and your version - in terms of content.So one suggestion might be disabling that function. Allow users to be able to see all the chapters and everything, and even if they want to print it all out, they could still do it chapter by chapter, but that is a huge hassle.Also, if you did that, I would love to know what impact it had on sales (if any) :)Hope that helps."
}
] | en | 0.913325 |
My embarrassing picture went viral | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "(this comment got a bit long. tl;dr, the internet is full of insensitive pricks that don't get confronted with their own behaviour)A large percentage of the internet populace is running on autopilot: browse hundreds of random images a day for quick fixes of entertainment, and post the odd impulsive, thoughtless and, most importantly, internet-badassity-enhancing comment.It's much more common to be scathing and hurtful on the internet, simply because there is less of, or none of, a 'society filter' out there. If one were to stand on a soapbox in public and make the kind of remarks people make unashamedly and unfilteredly on the internet, they wouldn't be standing there for long and would in all likelihood get called out on their behavior.Not (directly) so on the internet. I can identify two major reasons for that: One, peer groups. Internet douchebags is a major internet peer group, who will e-high-five each other for remarks outlined in the article. Two: Nobody cares. Scathing remarks are made by anonymous people all over the internet, so a lot of people have been desensitised or simply feel powerless, on behalf of not actually knowing the person making the remarks.The difference for that last point lies in community. A lot of these image sharing sites have a loosely-tied, unloyal random userbase, where most commenters will not or never know or recognise each other from other 'threads'. This in contrast to, say, HN, where people can gain fame and notoriety over time. In the latter category, where comments and the overall mood is much less random and much more focussed at a certain audience, scathing and offensive and plain dumb comments (which is about 99% of youtube comments, for example) will not only be (anonymously, disconnecedly) downvoted, but outright confronted, countered, and the people behind them approached and have their unwanted behaviour pointed out to them.[faux-psychologist]Freud assigned people's behavior as a result of the id, ego, and super-ego; on the internet, shielded by anonymity and a high abstraction and reduction of communication to quickly typed, short messages, the super-ego has little power in the big, anonymous communities; there is little to no society that tells people "No, this behavior is unwanted". This in turn dulls the ego (one's rational mind, conscience, etc), allowing the id (the impulsive mind that screams LOL FAT PEOPLE KILL UR SELF LOL) to write a similar blurb onto the internet. Communities like HN have a much stronger super-ego, and unwanted behavior is put down. When the poster approached the commenters, she acted as the super-ego, and the commenters suddenly snapped out of their autopilot, impulsive state of mind, having their conscience suddenly kick in when they realised there was a living person with real feelings behind the 2D image of a random woman dressing up as a character with a different physique.[/faux-psychologist]"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> I don’t generally view my body size as positive or negative — it simply is. I eat right (most of the time) and I exercise (an inordinate amount), but it does little, thanks to a struggle with polycystic ovarian syndrome and a failing thyroid gland. I’m strong, I’m flexible and my doctor assures me my health is good, but the fact remains: I’m larger than someone my height should be.I feel for her and the negative comments are reprehensible, but what I hear in this particular paragraph are excuses. Having issues with POS and the thyroid gland do not make it impossible to lose weight, just more difficult. My advice: ignore the haters and come up with a game plan with your doctor to lose the weight in a steady and health way."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I admire her strong character. Most people on that situation would stay still and regret about their selves, but she actually did something about it. That's great.Other thing I got from the article is the reminder that I am doing it well in not uploading pictures to Facebook anymore."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is a classic example of open-loop behaviour. People behave like assholes, but don't get the feedback they would be getting in real life.It's like the restaurant in tourist areas. Bad meals? Unfriendly staff? No problem - the customers won't be back, no matter whether the service is good or bad. They are tourists and will go home tomorrow.There's no tit for tat, no negative feedback. This doesn't work in engineering, and it doesn't work in human interaction either."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My favorite part about this thread is people who have abundant energy, high metabolisms, perfect health, who once gained a couple pounds after being exceptionally lazy and indulgent, lost it with no effort, and now think everyone who is overweight is constantly stuffing their face and deserve their plight.Protip: you have no fucking clue what this woman's moment to moment life is like."
}
] | en | 0.926915 |
Ask HN: How old is your computer that you use regularly? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My answer depends in part on exactly how you define "use regularly".If by "use regularly" you mean utilize for direct user interaction with the machine, then that would be a Compaq laptop from 2006 with 768M of RAM and an AMD Sempron CPU.If by "use regularly" mean "use to perform a task" then that would be a Supermicro dual Pentium-2 400Mhz system with 512M that acts as a PVR scheduler/recording driver. I've long since lost track of exactly when that motherboard was purchased, but it was somewhere in the 1998-2002 time frame. That puts it at somewhere between 11 and 15 years.If you'd asked this question last year I could have answered an old PentiumPro box (with something like 128Meg or 256Meg of RAM) that a buddy from work gave me that was acting as an internet firewall. It likely hailed from the 1995-1996 time frame. But I retired it last year in favor of an old Pentium4 Thinkstation that I got from a local store in their "refurb" section. I have no idea of what year the Thinkstation hails from."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "2013 Thinkpad T430s :)But my linux history:- Started with Ubuntu 8.04 on a ~2006 Dell 600m.- ~2010 System 76 Pangolin PanP5- ~2011 Dell 1530 (work laptop, ended up using it for most stuff)- 2013 Thinkpad T430s.I am hoping to stay with the Thinkpad for a long time. This feels like the computer I've been meant to have all along."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I use a brand new MacBook Air. Previously a 3 year old MacBook pro. Only reason to switch: battery life. 12 hours is a major game changer for me. I never worry about running out of juice throughout the day."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "2012 MacBook Pro non-Retina with a 2.9 dual-core i7, and upgraded to 16gb ram and a 120gb SSD. That's my main computer.My college was selling 2011 macs for 1/2 off last April as a "fire-sale" kind of thing where they cleared merchandise before the next shipments of 2013 came in. I bought a Mac Mini for $279 and have put 16gb ram in there to replace the 2gb stock. I primarily use that machine for experimental stuff. I run a couple dev web services off of it for side projects I build, and do some dev on it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "September 2004 Gateway laptop. 14.1" screen. Have programmed with this and used for every other purpose for the past 9 years and 2 months.It has very been counterproductive to use such a device for programming, but I can't say I haven't gotten my $240 worth (since I bought it off my job after I'd used it for 4 years)."
}
] | en | 0.923503 |
Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ">>>So, in an effort to boost literacy, the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s<<<The fact is that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan have a much higher literacy rate than those in mainland China, yet they use Traditional Chinese. Mainlanders' low literacy rate is mainly a sign of lacking education, not Traditional Chinese being a barrier to literacy. Moreover, in a digital world, they make no difference in input speed.What Hong-Kongers and Taiwanese are opposing to is not the communist simplifying Chinese Characters, but simplifying them in an ugly fashion. In most cases, it breaks the consistency in word formation as seen in Traditional Chinese. In other cases, it's not aesthetic and even absurd. There is a joke saying that the word factory(廠)in simplified Chinese (厂) explains why factories in mainland China are subject to collapse.Speaking of economics, simplified Chinese indeed appeals to larger potential customers. However, PRC put lots of restrictions on foreign corporations. That's why even Google and Facebook failed to (and will continue to) dominate in China. On the other side, Hong Kong and Taiwan have the goodies of free markets."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think the article is not a good summary. For translation work for written products, web, apps etc you need to do both Simplified and Traditional. Traditional is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with the rest of the world follow China's standard use of Simplified.For spoken language, Mandarin is the standard, the official one. The rest of spoken languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien etc are dialects depending on your province in China and community.If it is the first time you are learning about Chinese languages, learn Mandarin and Simplified/Tradition written language."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For techies, the font is also an important decision.\nWith Han typography we have: Song(CN)/Ming(TW)/Mincho(JP) ≍ Serif\n Hei(CN)/Gothic(JP) ≍ Sans\n Kai ≍ Script\n\nPersonally I use WenQuanYi Zen Hei\nhttp://wenq.org/enindex.cgi"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Contrary to what the simplified/traditional categorisation might suggest, there is nothing non-traditional about the simplification scheme. Most, if not all, of the simplified characters are taken from existing forms, such as those used in cursive script(草书, aka grass script, cao style) and variants used in certain eras/regions which happen to be simpler in forms. There had being painstaking and rigorous process to validate established usage before any character was approved for inclusion, in order to ensure the coherency and continuity of the whole writing system. During the cultural revolution, there was an effort for further simplification, and in the revolutionary zest, the process was not so rigorous and many poorly designed and indeed ugly forms were invented and included. Thankfully, these late additions were later repealed and are no longer in use.There was (or still is, politically motivated, I think) opposition to the simplification in Taiwan, but fortunately pragmaticism prevails and nowadays, even the current President Ma Ying-jeou advocates \"识繁写简\" (recognize complex, write simplified), because the practicality of the simplified version is undeniable."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'd be very wary of paying any translator who messes up simple translations that they put into marketing materials. \nThis is how the phrase \"traditional characters\" is written in each script:(written in traditional): 繁體字\n(written in simplified): 繁体字Also, the bit about traditional characters being harder to learn reads like propaganda. Traditional character-using areas have higher literacy rates. Also, my own personal experience as a language learner has been that traditional takes longer to write, but it's more systematic in its structure and it's much easier to read.One further thing worth pointing out is that mainlanders read traditional characters far better than Taiwanese and overseas Chinese read simplified."
}
] | en | 0.960846 |
Product ＞ Strategy ＞ Business Model | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Seems to me like a somewhat empty bag of words. My general interpretation is \"walk before you run\"; I don't see the need for working hard to find a rule that applies everywhere. The obvious point is that you probably need to have something substantial (market wants your product, fans clamoring on HN, you have a few initial clients, you make some money.. something) before thinking bigger.If we have to impose a timeline, though, I would say that all 3 elements (market fit, strategy, biz model) have to be considered together, all the time in the leaders' heads (and officially recognized once in a while). Please remember that there is only a single digit (or so) number of Twitter-like stories in the world. Just think of the numerous times that kind of linear thinking (forget about biz. model - let's just pour money into this thing for a long time, or, let's build this cool product without a strategy although I don't even know what cool means without a strategy) approach has failed. In those rare cases, you probably still think about the biz model, as in \"it doesn't yet exist but will exist likely in one of X forms once we reach status Y\".I might have a different definition of strategy, but you need some kind of strategy, which at a high level might even just mean \"approach\", to be able to do anything, including validating an initial market fit. Even starting small, testing/iterating and seeking market fit and later switching gears itself is a form of high level strategy. A ship without a direction gets nowhere, even if you're a small ship in a really-well charted sea.Unless, of course, he means by product-market fit \"an idea for a product/service that the market wants\", which would be just about the first thing to do in any business, as championed by the likes of the book \"Four Steps to the Epiphany\". I suspect those bootstrapping (to at least some degree) would likely know this from deeper in their hearts than others who've had an easier time with plenty of funding upfront. Everything else by definition has the workings of a strategy, whether you admit it or not. If you're not explicit about it though, you're just letting the waves take you places you hope will be good.Edit: The issue I take is that the article puts strategy into a step in the timeline or process, whereas I believe it needs to be everywhere, all the time. You can't have product-market fit without strategy AND/ORD you can't build a solid, sustainable business without thinking about strategy/market-needs/biz model and probably more at the same time, holistically throughout your existence. It's not just that \"don't forget about strategy before biz model!!\". Jumping to biz model without having a strategy is impossible - it just means your strategy implicitly is to \"grab the money in the best way you see possible right now\", without charting a longer term objective."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think the article is great, but I'm not sure about a few particular industry segments. For example, in SaaS, it often may make sense to actually charge for software up-front before even having product-market fit to see if there's even any viability in making it a business in addition to experimenting with pricing. Often times, the drop-off experienced in going from a completely freemium product to a priced one is fatal and gives you inaccurate data about the market's reception to your product.In consumer web, the product -> strategy -> business model approach makes complete sense, but I'm unsure if it carries over to most things in B2B."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": ">> Once you find product market fit and start thinking about business model, I suggest you take a step back and work with your team (and investors) to develop a crisp and well formed strategy for your business.\"and investors\"? This is what annoys me about the VC world. They talk like this but, from what I can tell few VCs will invest in you unless you have product market fit already."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Typical, a VC telling you not to worry about making money. The funny thing is that VCs don't care if a business makes money, only if other VCs will pour millions of dollars into it. A company with a real business model is less valuable to them because it eventually won't need further investment, and more importantly, won't need a tech giant to buy it. Most SV companies are just huge (legal) pump and dump schemes. If a company is capable of standing on its own feet without perpetually breastfeeding off investors, then the chances of an exit go down, and the chances of an investor seeing his/her money again in the short term are greatly reduced.I think business model, strategy, and product are all equally important. You can make a lot of money by making an awesome product and getting a large exit without ever seeing a cent of revenue, but to me sustainable growth based on a real business model is much more rewarding. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but the more abstract \"value\" is, the closer your economy comes to crashing as you're essentially creating value out of nothing."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This article and concept makes no sense.\"moving to business model before finding product market fit can be the worst thing for your business\" What??Product-market fit is a fundamental part of the business model. Determining who your customers are, and why they would buy from you, is what you do when discovering your business model. You cannot separate it out. BTW strategy is such a vague concept that I don't know how it is even in the discussion.Guessing, building an MVP first, throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks, before having a concept of what your business consists of, is what is/was broken about the startup culture. And, please stop this \"but Twitter did it\" nonsense. Unless \"getting lucky\" IS your strategy."
}
] | en | 0.973464 |
How Andy Dunn built a 9M/yr fashion business without a storefront | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "[video]If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When I saw the front page of Grovo, I wondered why the Grovo logo was linking to Dropbox. They're a bit similar, no?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I like their pants. A little pricey but really great looking."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It'd be great if the bonobos logo linked to their site."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Anyone else get turned off by these bold statements such as: \"Interviews with the people who build the Internet\"?"
}
] | en | 0.962435 |
RIP Michael Jackson | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is somewhat hacker-relevant: During a 30-minute window, 22% of all tweets mentioned Michael Jackson (with the correct spelling).http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=michael%20jackson&s...It's the highest peak we've seen for a person since we started tracking."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "That's just so...shocking. It always seemed like these type of people stay around forever to be made fun off and prodded - and then when you read about their death.It brings things into perspective - we're all just blobs of flesh, here by chance, and we will all be gone, washed away and forgotten before very long."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How is this even remotely hacker news?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Never thought I'd see the day when any link from TMZ would be on hacker news."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well, now we know just how famous you have to be for the HN admins not to kill a TMZ link reporting your death."
}
] | en | 0.975619 |
Microsoft's Lame New Anti-Apple Ad: Macs Are For Kids | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's great to try and spin this as Microsoft being out-of-touch, but in this case they've hit the nail on the head. Their previous \"I'm a PC\" and \"Seinfeld\" ads have been terrible - trying to convince us that their computers were cool or every-day machines against Apple's bourgeois style. Those were stupid.These ads drive to the heart of the issue - many people want something Apple doesn't sell (or doesn't sell at a price they can afford). Microsoft has hit Apple where it counts and that's why these ads are great - and I say that typing from my MacBook Pro. I really don't think this should get into a Macs vs PCs are more expensive argument - those never end well. What I can say is that PCs offer more choice - you can get a 17\" PC laptop without having to buy the most expensive processor and the like. In Apple's world, all upgrades come in tandem with things you may or may not want and that makes certain things (like a 17\" screen) start at a whopping $2,800.I'm a programmer. My computer is my livelihood and I'm going to pay up for something because I use it so much. However, Microsoft's ads hit home for many people who go looking for a computer on a budget and don't want to come home with a 13\" laptop when they wanted a 15\" one - and might not need some of the other things in a MacBook. If your budget is $1,500, the only Mac laptop you can get is the MacBook 13\". It's a tight spot for many people buying computers.And this ad puts that tight spot on the screen. It's not going to convince me to buy a PC, but it's going to get others thinking about the features they want and the availability of those features in Macs at a price they'll accept. Again, I hope this doesn't start a Mac vs PC price crap thing because it's really about the customization - aka, why do I need to buy a 2.66GHz processor to get a 17\" screen?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Well, they are better than those atrocious ones with Seinfeld and Bill Gates. But they still have a long way to go to compete with the humor of the Apple ads."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Pro Apple infestation of HN in 3 ... 2 .... 1 ...Seriously, when two spouses bicker, is it ever news worthy ??"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The Bluray! chorus was just hilarious. Boy: \"I'm a PC and I'm 11\"\n Mum: \"And I'm not\"\n\nShe's not 11 and she's not a PC? She has a Mac at home doesn't she! That's my final impression anyway :/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Slightly lame but FAR better than anything they've been running recently."
}
] | en | 0.991356 |
JSIL - .NET bytecode to JS compiler | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There are a handful of projects translating C# to JavaScript:- http://sharpkit.net/ (commercial)- http://scriptsharp.com/ (closed compiler)- http://www.saltarelle-compiler.com/ (open source)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So, if one were to use this or something like it, how would you handle DOM interaction? Write JavaScript by hand for that, and have it call out to JSIL-generated code?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "http://www.playescapegoat.com/I thought this was a pretty cute little example game."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Good approach using bytecode so that any .NET langugage can be supported."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What happens if your program uses classes from the .NET Framework, like List or Dictionary? Does the framework IL get translated to JavaScript and sent to the browser too?"
}
] | en | 0.779673 |
Show HN: What colour is your IP address? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "People are bashing this for being 'pointless', but hey, so is the next great to-do list app you made in 48 hours. This is a fun little experiment.I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a little more classy than a monster.[1] http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This seems to run as a script in your browser, and then calls out to some helper to get your IP address. The original server (the one which hands you the script in the first place) should have your IP address already, and in theory, could create the page on the fly. That would make it work even with NoScript or similar in force.I guess client-side is the way most people do things these days."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "As a follow up to your little project, find out a way to color IPv6 addresses ::]*edit: changed standard smiling emoticon to IPv6 smiling emoticon :P"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Cute little thing :) - but: A pallet is a flat transport structure that supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, pallet jack, front loader or other jacking device. A palette is a given, finite set of colors for the management of digital images."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Neat. This kind of reminds me of something I did a while back: I had a permissions manager that let you drag and drop groups to various actions, but the color of each group was determined by hashing their the group ID into a color.The resulting colors had no special significance, but the important point is they never changed and it let you easily visualize what was going on. I'm sure this had been done many, many times before. The difference here is that the straightforward conversion from IPs to colors means similar IPs will look very similar, whereas hashing some value to a color results in similar values looking vastly different."
}
] | en | 0.941452 |
Algorithms as a Service | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is where I usually draw the line at the \"everything is a service\" world view. It is much better to provide this as a library than as a service, particularly algorithms that run across large data sets.However, the exception I see to this is a service that applies the algorithm across a large dataset that is owned by the service. An example of this is geocoding, where you probably don't want to store the addresses of everyone in the world in your database, but it is easy to reach out to a range of providers to get latitude longitude for your address."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As what we do is effectively a limited case of this (recommendations as a service), I'll give my two cents: This will cause a total nerdgasm, and nobody will buy it.\n\nThere is an inverse correlation for how much abstraction is between our product and our customers' bottom-lines and how quickly they're willing to open their wallets. The proposed notion here is taking a couple steps further away from providing an end-to-end solution to a problem. Geeks love that kind of stuff. It's hard to get people to pay for it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can see this model work for AI problems that depend more on data / trained models than actual code or algorithm itself. It also makes sense for patented algorithms (SIFT maybe), paying per instance solved might be cheaper/easier than dealing with licensing issues.Author is under impression that implementing algorithms is hard. Real problem is analysing and understanding the problem, implementation of the standard algorithms is the easiest part. If your problem is common enough to have its implementation as service, it's very likely there is free library anyway.Seriously, ask Dijkstra's shortest path at IOI (high school informatics olympiad), I'd bet half of students would get it 100% correct under an hour."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A big problem for this would be the transfer of data to and from the API. Imagine an algo to analyze gigabytes or terabytes of data.Also, protection of the data as it is being transfered, stored, and analyzed is an issue. This is both data integrity and also protection for privacy or confidentiality reasons."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is already being done lots of places. And if you take the literal definition of the word algorithm, then all web API services are algorithms as a service. So I don't like the name, but the general idea of the post is interesting.Thinking along these lines, something that I would find more useful would be a web service that makes a well defined managed infrastructure available to me to run my own jobs or algorithms on. For example a service I can use to submit my own map/reduce style jobs to and have it run on a big cluster of systems managed by someone else; Or a service that allows me to submit jobs to run on specialized hardware, like a cluster of systems packed with NVIDIA CUDA cards. Providers of these services could also have a library of pre-canned jobs for common tasks like text indexing, link extraction, parsing W3C logs into stats, etc. With a library like that then you've got what this post is describing and more."
}
] | en | 0.990455 |
[Show HN] Railsonfire - continuous integration for ruby apps in the cloud | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Do you currently support any database? Because according to your FAQ you don't, that makes testing an app a bit hard.But it does indeed look very nice if you can get at least some native extensions working, that would make it very simple to test an app.Are there plans for an web based view on the tests and progress of your tests?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Please add JavaScript and python runtime support as soon as possible. We need something like that. Would really save us time and maintenance headaches. #lean"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We use it at mySugr.Simple and great, no admin crap, no maintenance, less overhead.Works."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Working on a Ruby on Rails project right now. Exactly what i need."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Awesome! This is really going to safe me time! Thanks guys!"
}
] | en | 0.972939 |
New AWS region coming soon: eu-central-1 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Honestly this is great news! As the article says, many German companies insist on their data being hosted in a data center in Germany when buying SaaS (for whatever reason). So far, there haven't been any viable options when it comes to "full-stack" IaaS service providers here (except Profitbricks maybe, which doesn't even come close to AWS in terms of functionality or pricing though), so I'm really excited to see Amazon entering this market.Of course the problem remains that Amazon is a US company and thereby required to cooperate with US authorities and hand them over customer data if requested, so some businesses might still not want to host their data there. Still, I'm excited that they're finally coming to Germany \n!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Note, a region is not a data center. A region is a collection of two or more Availability Zones (AZ). You can think of an AZ as a data center.http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aw..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'll wait to see how this pans out first, thanks...http://phys.org/news/2014-06-microsoft-court-overseas.html"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm excited about the pricing, hopefully it's not more expensive than Ireland... Maybe even cheaper, although I won't get my hopes up with electricity prices in Germany being so high."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I am happy that this is called central. I would like to see more recognition to Central Europe in geo-political world as current line between west and east Europe do not make much more sense anymore. Central europe culture and economy ties makes it strong candidate to new order - West Europe Central Europe and East Europe.\nI am thrilled to see what Amazon will have to offer!"
}
] | en | 0.923162 |
First sign this NDA | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Three words important to business types: Sustainable competitive advantage.Two words important to technical types: Working code.For \"pure\" tech ideas -- where the product primarily consists of software with unique functionality -- these two things are equivalent, and staying in \"stealth mode\" and protecting yourself with NDA's until you're ready for release is important, because it's easier for an adversary to develop an equivalent product than it is to develop equivalent relationships.For more \"businesslike\" tech ideas -- where network effects, marketing, positioning, or inter-business relationships are most important -- the business-side execution is more important than the software details.Of course, your mileage may vary, and most real companies require both technical and business competence to be successful.The more time you've spent on your code, the harder it is for your competitors to replicate it. As a very rough rule of thumb, the time it takes to build a meaningful competitive advantage is probably approximately equal to the time it takes to get a working prototype, so you can stay at least one major release ahead of your competitors, but this can vary a lot."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Anyone signing an NDA without knowing what it is the NDA covers is needlessly incurring legal liabilities. I would never sign an NDA unless I knew what it was covering AND it was properly scoped (most NDAs tend to be too broad).Even then, there has to be a really good reason for doing so - everything you agree to is something you have to keep track of and make sure you don't accidentally break at some point in the future."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "While I can see some validity in some of the points I can't really say that an NDA is a completely useless tool. I have never dealt with one before so I might not be the ideal candidate to talk about them. Nevertheless I think that if the NDA is reasonable and restricted to the matter at hand, in this case it seems to be some kind of consulting for a new startup, then is OK to use one. After all, wanting to protect a cool new idea is perfectly reasonable and understandable, specially in a highly competitive field."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For me, it's gotten to the point where NDAs just scream \"junior! junior!\" about the people asking me to sign them."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This post is right on the money. The very small chance that someone will \"steal your idea\" based on a short pitch is completely outweighed by the much larger chance that the listener will offer useful feedback or that your conversation will eventually have other beneficial results."
}
] | en | 0.910659 |
Pay in Oil Fields, Not College, Is Luring Youths in Montana | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Didn't everybody else know about this in college? In Washington, it was Crab Boats and Canneries in Alaska that people would disappear off to for the summer and come back $40k richer. In the South, I had heard it was Oil Rigs.But the story is the same: Trade a few months of your life (along with a non-trivial chance that you'd also trade life itself) for a healthy pile of cash and the kind of 20 hr/day suffering that only an 18 year old can withstand.Plenty of guys did it, and everybody I knew was aware that it was an option. Nobody, however, at least in my circle, considered even for a second trying to turn that sort of hell into a career.Reading the article, I don't see that having changed. Sure there are people willing to do such work full time. But chances are they're not the same folks for whom university was ever a serious option."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This article and most of the comments ignore a major factor. I suspect that location and lifestyle play as large a roll as salary in this decision. It is hard to give up wide open spaces and recreational opportunities once you are used to them, let alone family and friends. Waking up at 4am isn't even that big a deal when you do the same thing on the weekend to ski, climb, hunt, fish etc.I recently moved to Western Montana to work remotely for my old job (far from the oil fields though some do comute to work two week on week off arrangements). The Northern Rockies are full of people trying to figure out how to live here and make a decent living. For some this means an advanced degree to get them into the medical, legal, forestry, teaching etc fields but the cliche of PHD's waiting tables is common as well.Some companies and the national lab system have taken advantage of this willing work force (there is a glaxo smith klien vacine facility in a small town near me for example) but not enough. It is a pity that fracking technology is booming while improvements to the electrical grid and wind/solar development procedes slowly despite great potential in the region."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "If your idea of what you're going to be doing during college and how it will benefit you is such that getting up at 4am and working 15 hours for $50k/year is appealing in comparison, it most definitely is the right option.Education is expensive, both in actual cost and opportunity cost. If you're not looking forward to applying yourself to four years of intellectual challenges (and hard work), it's a huge waste."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What is wrong with going to a job like that for a year or a few years, then going to school later, with some experience working, traveling, etc. Or then picking up a trade like electrical or plumbing, either in the energy sector or elsewhere?I used to be really disdainful of \"engineering\" vs. science/math/cs, but once I actually started hacking on hardware, I got a lot more interested in ee, mechanical engineering, and even chemistry, plus infrastructure (power systems, physical layers of networking, etc., and logistics)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "$40,000 a year for a job where you \"sometimes\" work 15 hour days and have to get up at 4AM doesn't actually sound that great."
}
] | en | 0.990573 |
Moon Express Lunar Lander Program | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> "Moon Express engineers have combined the latest exponential technologies in micro-avionics with advanced propulsion and materials to create an innovative approach to spacecraft design and fabrication, empowered by leading edge Autodesk digital design tools to help make the impossible possible and reach for the Moon."The web site is filled with vapid copy, but this rather meaningless sentence takes the cake. There are a bunch of interesting XPrize teams working to land rovers on the moon; I wouldn't put any money on these guys."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm skeptical about the stated reasons to go back. The only one that seems of any actual rarity is the moon rocks themselves, but that seems unlikely to be a sufficient recurring revenue stream. Aka, once everyone can get one, what's the attraction?Rare Earth are available, just most terrestrial mines have shut down because there is not a sufficient market place to make it worth while.Helium-3 can be manufactured. So again, terrestrial production can be increased.Not going to comment on platinum.Honestly the most value I could see on the moon is the production of resources to sustain life and fuel to act as a higher orbit refueling platform. Both are critical to get humans and machines active in space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element\n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3\n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platinum\n\nAs to why the Moon would make a good refueling platform http://xkcd.com/681_large/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Space travel (even to LEO) is pretty bloody expensive. I'm not sure any type of mining will become worthwhile or even feasible without significant breakthroughs in equipment/fuel costs in the next few years. Without them, I don't think any costs of going to the Moon are recoverable by mining - unless, of course, we find out the cheese turns out to be a solid lump of Platinum.Of course if the visits are purely scientific, then the costs will be worthwhile. As a commercial venture, I don't see the point."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Reasons they listed for going to the moon seem pretty weak. Need expert opinion on their lander/engine tech for I am no rocket scientist. I find very interesting use of word "proprietary" in design of their lander, why would they emphasize that?All that said I applaud all and any efforts to advance space technologies."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Ok, had to share this. Not sure if these guys have any shot at all about getting to the Moon but they have just dumped a large amount of information about what they are going to attempt on to their web site."
}
] | en | 0.891057 |
Inkless metal pen will write forever | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A case study in solving a problem that doesn't really exist? Maybe this is just me, but it seems mean time to lose a pen is much smaller than the amount of time it takes to run out of ink. And replacement is hardly a pain - it's not onerous to keep a few spares around (and necessary anyway, again, because the damn things get lost)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> "As you write, tiny amounts of this metal are deposited onto the page."Does it also have regenerative qualities that continuously replenish the metal that is deposited onto the page? If not it's an open-and-shut case of a journalist blindly parroting the marketing definition of "forever"."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Their other pens sell for $2046.45 & $1773.59 (US Dollars). I can only imagine what this will sell for. I'm pretty sure that even if I had more money than I knew what to do with... I still wouldn't pay $2000 for one pen."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's a pencil that wears down very slowly and doesn't erase?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "reminded me of this\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilverpointGiven they say"Each pen will be sold with a notebook made of "stone paper""\nI suspect, just like silverpoint, it doesn't work, or doesn't work well, on any random surface."
}
] | en | 0.96311 |
SSH Brute Force – The 10 Year Old Attack That Still Persists | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ""As for protecting your self against these, you need to use strong and good passwords..."I went back to the top to see when this was posted...today. I'm no expert on securing a server, but I thought the common thinking now was to just turn off password auth. The post itself says that all it takes is one weak password to be compromised.Using keys is ever-so-slightly less convenient at setup, but negligibly so. Works on any device I have. Is there a reason one would continue to use passwords?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "There are lots of good guides online on how to protect yourself from this (disable password-based auth, or use 2-factor auth, Fail2ban etc.), but there's one piece of advice that crops up a lot that is probably a bad idea, and that's changing the SSH port. This can give (at best) a false sense of security and (at worst) actually reduce security if you choose a port number above 1024, because then malware could pose as SSH without requiring root access and then steal your password once you've entered it.Just thought it was worth mentioning because I recently went through all this myself to try and secure a Raspberry Pi and it was news to me..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "What sane person would allow password authentication on their servers? Turn it off."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I am very surprised that the OP, and nobody in this thread, has mentioned port knocking.You are absolutely better off / more secure, with port knocking enabled. The scans never touch your sshd, because your server does not even answer port 22. As far as the outside world is concerned, you don't run an sshd.On my own systems, I set up port knocking, I delete the allow rule for the IPs I knocked from every 24 hours (so fresh knocking is needed every day, and I don't leave a trail of "open" IPs as I travel the world) and my .login script spits back at me the current days list of "knocking IPs" so I can immediately note if someone else is knocking."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I usually just limit SSH connections to one of my own static IP addresses, as well as disable password authentication and implement PSK.At first I was shocked by the amount of intrusion attempts my servers were logging, but as time goes on I see that no attempts have yet been successful, so these sorts of intrusion attempts have probably made me complacent. (never a good thing)That said, I found the article to be lacking in listing mitigation alternatives, such as those posted here in the comments."
}
] | en | 0.966488 |
Mike Arrington: Turning the drama down on Y Combinator v. Google Ventures | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There's something ironic about combination of \"Mike Arrington\" and \"turning the drama down\"."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> I also think VentureBeat should fully disclose any other issues they have that might be affecting their judgement about Y Combinator, but I’ll leave it at that.Strong hint that there is more to this."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"Turning the drama down...\" Mike says with a nudge and a wink.Mike knows how to stir the pot in more ways than Rachael Ray."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "An aside – Most stuff like this from Y Combinator doesn’t leak. The fact that this did leak is the most interesting part of all this for me. It may be because there are so many companies coming out of YC now that there isn’t the same sense of loyalty to the program. Or it may be a sign of stress because some of the startups may be finding it much more difficult to raise funding than previous classes.This is the second time I recall seeing any kind of leak from a pg email. The first being the \"warning of bad times\" email in regards to Facebook's IPO.Anyone know if there's any credence to Arrington's theory?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Ha! He's just perpetuating it by giving it more attention."
}
] | en | 0.949321 |
Homemade thermal camera | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Posting this because some people seem confused about IR.I'd just like to point out here that infrared is a really wide chunk of spectrum. It goes from 0.74µm to 300 µm (according to Wikipedia), which is a factor of about 400. By comparison, the visual spectrum has a width of about a factor of 2, and yet our biology still gives us four different sensors crammed within that little sliver. Imagine if you had a rainbow with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and 50 more colors which were just as distinct from each other, and you get an appreciation of how big IR is.Near infrared is the stuff used by artistic IR photographers (film and digital), remote controls, and night vision cameras. Regular CCDs designed for visible light also pick up near IR, so most cameras have a built-in filter which blocks it out. This is what you remove to turn your camera into an IR camera, and it also accounts for why some things just show up wrong in some digital pictures. Maybe you've seen a fireplace with purple flames -- that's because the IR filter isn't getting rid of all the near IR.Near infrared is really just light that you can't see. Most things don't emit near infrared unless they're very hot (like fire) or designed to do so (like LEDs).Far infrared is used in thermal imaging. It is a completely different beast, with much longer wavelengths.1) Thermal infrared is low-resolution. The resolution of an imaging system is limited by the aperture of the lens relative to the wavelength of light that you are using. A proficient photographer with a nice prime lens and a tripod can come close to the resolution limit of visible light with no trouble, but the (much) longer wavelength of far infrared means that the relative size of a lens is much smaller. You simply cannot get a sharp picture of thermal infrared due to the increased diffraction.2) Thermal infrared requires different sensors. Your standard CCD simply does not pick it up, you need something like HeCdTe.3) Thermal infrared requires different lenses. Far infrared does not pass through glass like it does through air, you need to use a different material to make the lens, or just use a mirror.4) Thermal imaging is more sensitive to thermal noise. That's why you cool the sensors. All sensors have thermal noise, even visible-light sensors. You will get cleaner pictures by refrigerating your visible-light CCD too, but it's a much bigger deal in far IR.5) Atmosphere absorbs IR. Well, not all of IR. But the atmosphere is fairly opaque in some IR bands. If you build a sensor at 6-7µm you might as well submerge the thing in pea soup, the atmosphere is that opaque.So [near] IR photography and [far IR] thermal photography are completely different beasts."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Even better: the Thermal Flashlight. Makes a cruder picture, but way cheaper:http://publiclaboratory.org/tool/thermal-photography"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Interesting I didn't think it could be done.From that I understand normal thermal cameras can't have a silicon CCD and need to be actively cooled."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I was under the impression alot if not all digital camera's had a filter for IR that on some is easier to remove than others.Seen many a article on how to convert a common digital camera though have not tried any myself so for example this one http://www.petapixel.com/2010/10/20/how-to-convert-a-cheap-d...Note that removing the IR filter the camera will still pick up visable light so you could add a filter to remove that so you just get IR or if the firmware is hackable then you can could see what opensource flavours are out. Though failing that most photo edit software will cater for that with after filtering. But you will be doing most IR in the dark to eliminate the sun factor, unless you want to see how much the sun warms area's.I'm sure somebody has done this type of hack and can comment better with converting digital camera's to IR and what models are best for the price, possibly ebay 2nd hand DLSR's but who knows?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "So they built basically an IR tracker. Talk about dual use."
}
] | en | 0.970077 |
The Creative Commons of Privacy Policies has come, 5M end users from day one | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It would be absolutely great if you also added icons, color coding or some clever visual convention to make them understandable at a glance.I'm thinking about something like this http://goo.gl/9g7jx or - possibly - even simpler (e.g. like the CC icons)!That would absolutely make it a winner for me."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The next big service on web, that probably will change our interaction with the web pages and content like CC.\nWell done."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I will use Iubenda in my startup :)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very nice :-)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Useful!!"
}
] | en | 0.958383 |
Ask HN: Who keeps you accountable and on track with your startup? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Along similar lines, I had thought of a slightly strange idea for a web app where people could sign up to get a \"virtual boss\" to encourage them in whatever way to be productive (whatever \"productive\" may mean). A lot of people do much better when there's somebody pushing them.These virtual bosses would also be people who've signed up to do so. Communication would be in the form of email, or an internal messaging system. The web app would make the experience more like a game, where bosses get points for having productive subordinates, and the subordinates get points for being productive themselves.This is just a very minimal concept at this point of course. I don't plan on building anything like this, but I thought I'd throw it out there. It could actually work."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I joined a local MasterMind group that meets for dinner every other Tuesday night -- the results have been mixed so far. We generally tend to move forward on things but we're pretty relaxed on documenting things so I'm sure stuff is slipping through the cracks.I'll email you shortly about your new service, I'd be interested in serving on the coach/mentor side. <shameless plug>Outside of MailFinch, my latest startup, I do some consulting for early stage startups on issues related to their back office (billing, provisioning, invoicing, etc) operations and generally keep them accountable through monthly \"Board\" meetings, if they want.</shameless plug>"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Funny you say that. Over the past week, I have been invited to join such a group and on two mailing lists such groups were announced. I actually looked into them a bit and decided they were too expensive for the value I'm likely to get out of them. It's not that I thought they were of no value, it's that the £££ they wanted from me was too much for what I thought I'd get.With that said, I'm happy to help you alpha test your service."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "BTW, my group members were the ones to convince me to post this on HN for feedback, rather than working on the fun stuff like coding."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My customers. Just a few hours ago I had one of them ask me on IRC what the status of the next Tarsnap release was."
}
] | en | 0.976599 |
Linus Torvalds on userspace filesystems | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "\"That's like saying you should do a microkernel - it may sound nice on paper, but it's a damn stupid idea for people who care more about some idea than they care about reality.\"He just had to sneak in a dig at Tanenbaum."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "An approach for this kind of problem: suppose you have a very simple language composed of simple, verifiable instructions, like: block read, block write, read-offset, write-offset, simple arithmetic, simple branching; you could compose programs for various file-system operations and pass them over to the kernel for execution en masse, rather than needing a chatty interface.This basic idea is something I've applied to a file format that stored objects, but where the costs of serializing and deserializing a whole object graph was prohibitive for a request/response round-trip. For any given object path, foo.bar[3].baz, a \"program\" could be compiled that could be interpreted over the file contents and the answer retrieved. All object paths were available for compilation ahead of time (it was a custom language, long story), so this approach could be far more efficient than any serialization story."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't care what he says, I'm still waiting for an inclusion of some kind of union mount functionality in mainline. I don't need anything fancy, just one ro dir and one rw dir. If he can't even get me that in-kernel, I'll stick with unionfs in fuse, thank you very much.Don't tell me about aufs, UnionMount, or overlayfs: aufs isn't up to date because it's not mainlined (for no good reason I can find), and UnionMount and overlayfs are too far out of mainline and too much in development to find reasonable packages.Linus: when you can back up your claims with working code, I'll start listening. ;-)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm beginning to suspect that people report cases of Linus insulting people regardless of whether the discussion was interesting or not.Linus insults someone on a forum -> first page on HN !!Just a thought."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "this reply is a bit more sane - http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-fsdevel/msg46080.htmlglad i don't work with torvlads."
}
] | en | 0.969862 |
Backbone has made me a better programmer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Backbone is one of those libraries/frameworks/whatever that avoids magic. It's just a pile of reusable parts that make building big javascript applications easier. One can't say the same about, say, Rails. There's a lot of magic in Rails.Not that magic is a bad thing. Magic is what makes Rails good at what it's good at. The downside, though, is that magic-ful frameworks often obscure language mechanics that an inexperienced user of the language would do well to understand. Thus, Rails is awesome for a programmer who's already good at Ruby, but super frustrating for someone learning Ruby.On the other hand, Backbone makes idiomatic use of javascript and lays it on the table in a magic-less way. So not only does a new javascript programmer not have to deal with confounding magic, they can also learn from how Backbone uses javascript, and apply that knowledge outside the scope of the library.I'd never thought of it this way, but I think this is probably one of the most important distinctions between opinionated, magic-y frameworks, and things like Backbone."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When we started using Backbone it was good for awhile until there was so much code duplication all over the place. We decided to build a small declarative API on top of backbone that allows us to easily compose views by mixing in common functionality. It looks something like this: AlbumsView =\n bQuery.view()\n .set(\"el\", \"#albums-view\")\n .init((opts={})->\n @readOnly = opts.readOnly or no\n @app = opts.app\n )\n .use(Mixins.bq.init('albums'))\n .use(Mixins.bq.collection\n tag: \"#album-list\"\n createView: (m) ->\n AlbumView = Views.AlbumView(readOnly: @readOnly)\n new AlbumView { model: m, app: @app }\n )\n .use(Mixins.bq.filterable\n pred: (album, ftext) -> album.get('title').indexOf(ftext) is 0\n filterTag: \"#filter\"\n collectionTag: \"#album-list\"\n )\n .on(\"click #addNew\", ->\n @collection.create\n title: \"New Album\"\n type: \"Album\"\n )\n .make()\n\nFor example, the Mixins.bq.collection plugin abstracts away the common task of adding and removing subviews when new things are added the collection. The filterable plugin abstracts away the common task of filtering collections. Our custom init plugin sets up all the events common to all of our views. In the end make() just returns a BackboneView with all the events set up properly. It has saved us so much time we figure people may actually want to use this as well, we just have to write the documentation and some plugins now :)https://github.com/jb55/bquery"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I didn't really like backbone at all. It was a pain. It didn't offer anything to help you build complex UI.I had to use backbone to build a mildly complicated UI - not so complex, mind you, just something that's supposed to be somewhat interactive.Backbone was no help at all. Its \"views\" don't really offer anything.Just about 2 weeks ago I discovered knockout.js, and I felt stupid for spending days building something that would probably take an afternoon to do with knockout.js.Then, a week later I discovered angular.js and felt even more stupid.Now I really dislike backbone.js"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Unit testing will also force to decouple your code in a similar way. In the first example it is impossible test individually test all the things the code should do without worrying about everything else that is going on (e.g. you need make sure all the elements exist on the page). By moving to an event trigger like you suggest, you can then test that each listener does the correct thing independently of the others. You can have a separate test for 'selector' and 'yet-another-selector' and they don't need to know about each other. As an added benefit you don't need to mock out your ajax call either. Instead you can just fire a \"DataModel:update\" event in the unit test.I've only recently grokked this aspect of unit testing and I feel like it's made my code an order of magnitude better and more maintainable. Thinking first about how to write code in a decoupled manner also makes unit testing really easy. After having tried unsuccessfully for years to test my code it was a revelation when I that it was because my code was bad that it was hard to test, not that testing is itself hard.Edit: I've tried to illustrate my thoughts more clearly with a copy-cat post to show the parallels between the two: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427842"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I actually prefer the second (complicated) example: everything that happens on the success of the call is right there. If it were to grow more complicated than that I'd move it to its own function and perhaps break it into a few functions: not into several objects.I find firing events to be useful when I'm writing code that's not meant to be directly accessed, e.g. a jQuery plugin."
}
] | en | 0.978492 |
Things web developers should know | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Sigh. Another fluff piece - n things crap, coupled with the know-all attitude.> I get CVs with people with computer science degrees, AI courses, various media and coding under their belt but there's still something missingYes, sure. If your job is making websites for local boutiques, AI courses aren't much use to you. But there are multiple scenarios where you need someone who has studied, say, statistics and AI for some time, and has implemented a number of concepts. Unlike your \"need to show a jQuery alert when the help icon is clicked\", statistics and AI(and a thousand other things) isn't something you can google and copy paste.> Make them sketch out what they're talking about.I will punch you in the face, plain and simple. I don't sketch, I can't sketch. Never learnt it, have no plans to learn it. But that's not important. The important thing is I am not where to cater to your ridiculous whims. If a mock-up is needed, I will use balasmiq or something. That is my call.> Get them to explain with pictures, objects and (it works) cut outs of people exactly what the system will be like for the humans using it.And here we go from ridiculous to out right stupid. Cut outs of people? Seriously?> I'm going to talk negatively about developers, but I think I'm allowed because I am one.No, you aren't. You are allowed to talk - freedom of speech and stuff. But I didn't grant you the right to spew bullshit about me because we both are developers. Also, if your criticism has merit, it won't matter if you are a developer or not.> Build tools; CI; git for version control were taken for granted, but looking back over CVs these hardly appeared.The day a candidate is to be judged for a programming job based on whether he knows git or any other version control is a sad day. The basic flow(the one we use 95% of the time) is so simple someone can learn it in an afternoon and check-in code before leaving. And concrete experience? What do I write in my CV? I used git for 6 months and expand it using \"my day consisted of git ci, git push; and git branch, git merge; and ...\"?> If it's Perl you use, understand how to install Perl modules and configure them.If it's Perl I use, what are the odds I don't already know how to install perl modules? It isn't something specific to prod(HINT: You do use modules in dev as well).> Debugging and testing is the 99 per cent of a developer's lifeI don't know where you are getting this 99 per cent from, but debugging and testing isn't 99% of my time for sure.> The are many books (sadly, not the one I pitched to the publisher I won't name) on debugging and every developer should read all of them.Why would I do that? As far as debuggers go, I learnt gdb in the beginning, and almost every other debugger is a subset. I use the debugger to see where the error is occurring and what is the error, followed by thorough code scan. Some people check logs followed by code scan. Either ways, reading multiple books isn't going to help.> Developers must be able to draw their ideas on whiteboard, paper and beer mats.And as I said, I don't draw. Even if I did, I won't. When mockups are needed, I do that on a computer.> Don't trust the developer who nods, says they've understands and opens up their editor.If I understood the requirements, I am going to nod and get back to work. If you want mock-ups, provide it or ask for it.> And what if you have to spend 10 hours solving a problem by moving a link around?What if you have to get punched in the face repeatedly? Enjoy it./sI will move that damn link, but am sure not going to enjoy it.PS: Like a piece of chocolate hidden in horse shit, this article does have some good advice. But the horse shit is making it difficult to enjoy the chocolate(fluff headline - n things, patronizing tone, know-it-all attitude). May be I worded it a bit harshly."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The statment \"A really great dev can debug problems on a system without seeing a line of code\" is a bit overreaching. Yeah, \"debug\" as in \"I can tell clicking this button is the problem!\", but nothing specific enough to be truly useful.Also, anyone else bugged when a title/headline sounds like marketing? \"..become truly amazing\"? Sounds like a commercial..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Hmm...Developers definitely need to fit the \"be human\" requirement - that helps you actually converse with users to find what they need. But wants and needs are different - and you need to be able to find what they actually need/want - not what they think they do. Because otherwise you can create a monster system that is incrementally better than what they already have.But CS degree type developers shouldn't be overlooked. It is simply not true that \"everyone can code\" - self taught is not always a good thing. If you're coding anything that needs to properly scale, run on limited hardware etc then you need someone who has a grounding in the subject."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm getting tired of all this huggy feely advice on how to connect with your inner user. I guess if you're a hip and with it developer selling, errr, I mean providing solutions and positive experiences this is all valuable and thought provoking advice.If you're just a simple programmer, turning curmudgeon, you'd rather connect with your database and that's the sort of thing you'd like more advice on."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Meh. The more exhaustive, cannonical list:http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/46716/what-sh..."
}
] | en | 0.952271 |
Google just stole my employee #3 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If someone's on the market, they need to apply to multiple positions to make sure they find something in a reasonable time. You should assume anyone interviewing with you is also interviewing elsewhere. Some of those other companies may make offers, and since they interviewed around the same time as you, they're going to come around the same time as yours. \"Flaking out at the very last minute\" indicates normal job search activity, not a flaky applicant or poaching competitor."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Signing an offer letter, to me, is very old school - it's not a legally binding document that says, \"You must come work for me for x days\" as we all know. The offer letter is really more for the candidate - it spells out clearly what your opportunity is. It's their last chance to have you spell out the job, perks, and PTO on paper. So his/her signing the offer letter is really his/her mentally saying to themselves, \" What he said on the phone and during the interview is represented here - no surprises... This is a good opportunity. It fits me. I'm doing it.\"The part that sucks the most is the you sent out the rejection letters already. I think that's just sort of \"par for the course\" sometimes. It will happen to you always and forever. I had someone sign my letter, show up and work for one day, and then email me at 9:00AM the next morning to tell me that she had re-joined her previous job as the head manager. She had told me during our interview that her boss really wanted to keep her but just couldn't come up with the money. Well, clearly the boss came up with the money and more. What can you do? Nothing. You start over. Yes, you can go back to your other candidates but I tend to not like doing that. After all - this was the best candidate. Why settle for #2? I'd rather just start the whole process over and find someone else completely.My advice: have good training and solid policies in place that help you churn faster. Also have solid hiring plans and work hard to uncover what you can. It will pay off in the long run."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Welcome to the game! :)The good news is that you are reaching high quality folks if Google wants them.Make sure they understand what they are getting into. Google is great (I'm a Xoogler) but they will be toiling in a very large machine and will have a very narrow locus of responsibility. There is nothing wrong with that -- but make sure that's what they want versus a broader startup role."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "My thought? Welcome to the business world. Wait until an employee starts a competing business."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "After working at Google for a while, I think this person, unless he is really lucky, will end up looking elsewhere to find a more satisfying job. You could pick any random Engineer at Google, and end up with someone unsatisfied with what they are doing. If they are good, then you can steal them away. Or maybe not. Maybe they are constantly spammed with job offers."
}
] | en | 0.980865 |
Why Startups Should Try to Hire Women | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This didn't ever really get to the \"Why?\" part. It just basically says that the opposite is stupid.My theory: humans behave differently, and generally more civilly, in environments where they (subconsciously) believe they have a chance of meeting a partner. Heck, part of the reason I went to a liberal arts school instead of a technical school was the fact that 4 years in an 80% male environment (which was the case at the specific school that was in the front-running) sounded rather drab.What's actually unclear to me is if those social dynamics, as opposed to the, let's call them \"football team\" dynamics, objectively produce better results in a startup. It may be that the sort of bravado that emerges in football-team-ish environments is useful to a startup. But then to swing the hypothetical pendelum again, it might be easier to hire for a company that's more enjoyable to work at, even if the things that made it enjoyable would be a net minus in isolation. I'd posit that it is somewhat variable on the specific set of folks working there; i.e. some employees would flourish in one environment and others in its converse."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you're bothered about equal numbers of people in Tech then just hobble men so they don't have opportunity to follow their desired occupations. Voila, equality.>It's probably human nature to like people who are like you , but learning to work with people with different personalities, genders, and backgrounds makes for a stronger team, not a distracted one.People who are like engineers are like engineers. Shocker.Lets get some lawyers and fashion models in there to do the engineering just to mix things up a bit and provide a diverse environment shall we?¹While we're at it lets make the engineers work in marketing to make sure they have a diverse environment too.--¹ - they may be good engineers but I'd really expect most good engineers to have similar behavioural traits. The number of Mathematics students with social anxiety seems to vastly out weigh the number of Art students with the same. Certain personalities correlate strongly with certain subject and abilities, I don't think we should be fighting that."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "My experience is it doesn't matter much. The last startup I worked for had 4 women and 4 men (on average, over time; it varied a bit). I don't think gender was a significant issue to anyone. People were hired for their merits and treated as such.Is that so special?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This isn't something I've said out loud often. However, if I had my own small startup, I'd be worried about hiring young women for one reason: maternity leave.Now, this obviously depends on where you're setting up your startup. However, if I lived in a place where a long[ish] (6+months) maternity leave was the law, I'd be pretty worried about newly hired women going on maternity leave. For a large company, it isn't a big problem, but for a small cash-strapped company, losing a significant % of your workforce for an extended period of time sucks.I've known women who went back to work, or switched to a job with better benefits, because they planned on getting pregnant. And I've known some who just happened to get pregnant shortly after getting a new job.I strongly believe that the length of maternity leave should be proportional to the length of time at the company."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "There's always this study, although it's one of those \"early results, many possible confounding factors, few samples\" cases where the results should be taken with a big pile of salt.http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...Women in tech are also already statistical outliers, so the probability that a random female candidate is good may be slightly higher than for a random male candidate. Tricky to study though, starting with it not being easy to objectively measure how \"good\" a candidate is."
}
] | en | 0.991951 |
Opera embraces Google's open source JPEG killer | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Advantages:Theoretically better compression than JPEG (but ... so was JPEG-2000).Disadvantages:The encoder actually loses to JPEG in many tests and almost everything it encodes looks like a blurry mess.No support for any color format besides 4:2:0.Almost no support in image editing applications.An order of magnitude slower than JPEG.Somehow I don't think this is much of a \"JPEG killer\". Its technology is 10 years out of date, entirely copy-pasted from H.264, and its featureset isn't even close to equalling JPEG's, let alone adding new features that people wanted."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It might be a stupid question, but:\nIs there an example of a hyped \"whatever killer\" that actually killed \"whatever\"? I have the feeling that all those Google, Facebook, Microsoft, iPad/iPad/iPhone killer that sensationalist journalists tend to write about are forgotten after half a year or so."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Too bad alpha channel support is not part of the WebP spec yet (although it's promised). That would have the potential to truly make it a JPEG killer.Currently, PNG24 is the only (browser supported) image format that supports transparency, but the files can be huge.The only advantage over JPEG currently is that the files are somewhat smaller for the same quality. Yes, that's nice, but not enough to displace an heavily ingrained format with 20 years of use."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "JPEG doesn't have to die for WebP to be a success, and it probably won't"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Direkt link to relevant specshttp://code.google.com/speed/webp/\nhttp://code.google.com/speed/webp/docs/riff_container.html"
}
] | en | 0.94136 |
Ask HN: Javascript for desktop apps? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "why not simply embed a web server and connect to the localhost ? That makes your application internet ready as well when the time is right as well as giving the user to connect to your application from other pcs on the same lan.I've built a music management system along these lines and it works quite well. The internet ready part of it causes all kinds of unintended but useful side effects, stuff that I never thought of when building it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "On the windows desktop platform you can use JScript and the .NET Framework to write just about any desktop application you can imagine.This language (which is a good implementation of up-to-date ECMAScript) is somewhat light on texts however. There is a SAMS book by Justin Rogers which does cover the basics.You might be better off looking at something like Adobe AIR which is an excellent approach to making a web style application run like a desktop application - well worth exploring and could be a good platform for developing portable (and applicable) JavaScript skills."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Actionscript 3 is very close to javascript. The Adobe Air framework allows you to deploy desktop apps.Depending on what you're trying to do you might want to try XUL Runner https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XULRunner . It will allow you build an html/js app that can run as a desktop app."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I love Javascript, but I think people who want to develop server-side or desktop apps with it might be better served by Lua. Lua has functions as first-class values like Javascript does, which allows you to approach problems similarly in both languages.Lua has also already been in use as a server-side and desktop language for some time, and while the available toolkits pale in comparison to what's available, say, for Java, Python or Ruby, there are still more options than there are for Javascript right now. Lua is very fast; for most benchmarks at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org it's the fastest interpreted language.Sorry this is doesn't exactly answer the question you're asking but I thought it might be worth mentioning as another possibility to consider."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You could try Rhino:https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Rhino_documentationSteve Yegge suggests it's the next big language."
}
] | en | 0.975913 |
DeepDB – High-performing transactional and analytic database | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "So the team consists of ( http://deep.is/our-invention/ ): 1 CEO\n 1 CTO\n 3 Founders\n 1 Chairman\n 1 VP Product Management\n 1 VP Sales\n 1 Controller\n 1 Director of Engineering\n 1 Architect\n 1 Consultant\n 2 Engineers\n\nYeah... sounds like exactly the company i would never buy from. A company which basically consistes of 80% "upper management" positions and barely any "real workers".. \nEspecially when the website is only about marketing claims and very unspecific details.\nI can't even find downloads or documenation..No, i'll stay away."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Not to be too critical since I like database startups as much as the next guy, but there is almost nothing original in their approach to database engines. Most of their assertions about existing databases only apply to relatively weak open source databases; on the high-end databases don't work the way they are assuming at all, which makes me wonder how much they actually know about database engine internals generally. Architecturally, DeepDB goes into the same bucket as PostgreSQL in terms of capabilities and scalability, albeit a different design.As a more technical nitpick, "high availability" does not mean fast restarts. It means never goes down. The design as described is not a high availability architecture.Bonus observation: if you assert your database engines uses extensive fine-grained locking, don't show a chart with 24 cores at ~100% utilization and call it "efficient". This is what you would expect to see for a poorly designed and very inefficient implementation for this type of architecture. You can be burning all of your CPU and getting very little throughput. A credible presentation would have demonstrated that system throughput scales linearly with the number of cores (unlikely given the description of their internals)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "At http://deep.is/deepdb-genesis-of-invention-iii/, the chief scientist of this company credits the following four "axioms" for his "General Theory of Information":Axiom 1:\nInformation is a sequence of Information (self-similar)\nthat is segmented by consistent (well-formed) order.Axiom 2:\nSegmented Information is addressable by the First where\na sequence of Firsts is a Segment of Summarization.Axiom 3:\nInformation of a Segment is equal distance to the sequence\nof Information between non-associated Summarizations.Axiom 4:\nSequenced Information is in direction relation to former and\nlater Information of which Patterns can be Matched.I don't know what any of that means. Worse, it sounds to me like "cargo-cult" computer science."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> A NEW GENERAL PURPOSE DATABASE DESIGNED FOR BIG DATA\nAND THE CLOUD THAT PERFORMS SIMULTANEOUS TRANSACTIONS\nAND ANALYTICS … IN REAL-TIME, ON THE SAME DATA SETWell they certainly have all the right buzzwords present in their pitch. Other than that there's very little to go on right now as to how much merit their product deserves."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It amazes me that HN users would spend time commenting here before taking a few seconds to navigate a website. Here is an overview of technical information: http://deep.is/knowledge/deepdb-white-paper/These are the interesting things that sticks out to me:The understanding that storage system throughput is maximized by using sequential access patterns led to the creation of streaming, append-only transactional and indexing algorithms. Our approach is unique in that all database files (i.e. transactional state, indexes, and metadata) are streamed, append-only files....The CASI Tree breaks from a traditional b-tree on-disk approach, eliminating update in-place operations on fixed size pages. Instead, the CASI Tree is an append-only Purely Functional Tree data structure....A complete database audit trail is maintained when running in archival mode, making all previous database states available. These states may be queried in read-only mode, efficiently supporting read-only analytics of point-in-time transactional database states"
}
] | en | 0.790884 |
Ask HN: Realization that i am not a "Programmer"... | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My advice: don't write off a potential career based on a few month's experience.It took me several years to decide that I enjoyed software development as a profession, and that I enjoyed it enough to develop an aptitude for it.Also, consider that it may be the environment - product, technology, team, company, existing code - that is putting you off. Even if you decide against what you're doing I'd limit the conclusion to \"I hate my current job\" rather than \"I'm no good at programming.\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Whatever you do, go deep. Be an expert in something. Learn a trade. Don't be \"the idea guy.\" Can your ideas can be prefaced with \"this detailed plan would definitely be very profitable\"? If yes then...work the plan. Otherwise you might want to consider sales, consulting or meta tech stuff like documentation. Strike commentary off your list: the web is awash with tech bloggers. (Just my two cents)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Haven't felt like this, but as sp332 says \"Programming is a big field\". I would broaden that even further to I.T. Is a big field.Why not think about such sub-categories such as DBA, Analysis/Reporting/Sharepoint Services developer, or even pre-sales roles. These involve some coding but a lot of customer interaction, giving advice/ideas, designing solutions and improving the customers business."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It sounds like you didn't study CS or another technical field in school or you would have known you weren't a math/logic person already. I'm curious, what got you into programming (other than that there are a lot of job openings right now)?Regardless, it's pretty common for your first job in any field to be less than ideal, so I wouldn't write off programming just yet. On the other hand, if your company is large enough to offer opportunities to work in other areas, you might dip your toe in and find something you like better without having to look for another job. Desire for change happens to everyone after a while, even if we enjoy what we do."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I really enjoy coding, but i am not a programmer by trade. I also really enjoy many (MANY) other things. Finding a job that brings them all into the picture would be very difficult, unless of course you created the position yourself. Naturally, that would of course depend on you having a clear understanding about what that role would entail. As duncan_bayne pointed out, it can take several years to work out where your strengths and weaknesses lie. There's no 'right path' to a career. Sometimes a job won’t offer you the opportunity to display the strengths you consider yourself in possession of - and to this I would suggest that where possible, try to exercise these in other ways... most likely outside of your job in extra-curricular tasks.You might consider starting a business of your own, which would afford you the opportunity to fine tune and have a go at your areas of strength, and most importantly, keep you relatively interested in day to day activity. If starting a business is intimidating, consider offering your services for free for some small tasks/projects, and treat them as though they were paid and professional. You’d feed your interest and learn along the way.The point I am trying to make is that you’ve plenty of options out there, and they are not very apparent just yet... but from my experience, the more your put yourself out there (particularly in areas that overlap strengths and stuff that is completely foreign) you will start to see some interesting options arise... and you will start to get a better picture of what your interests, strengths and weaknesses are. Best of all... there’s no deadline to work this stuff out... so be proactive and enjoy yourself!"
}
] | en | 0.979544 |
Why a Dead Alkaline Battery Bounces [video] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think one of the bits I liked most was "Romeo (Retired Old Men Eating Out) Club" - looking at its website it seems like quite a large thing over there. I know that my Grandma goes to something similar (restricted to just tea and bingo), but it makes me wonder if a similar organisation exists in the UK; a lot of the older folk I know just aren't very social any more, simply due to the fact that their social groups have died off or are spread out and have restricted travel options. Social interaction seems such a huge part of our existence to be missing for any individual (unless that's what they want of course).Again, anecdotally; I've found amongst the older folks that those engaged in discussion and interaction keep their wits about them longer/easier than those bound by isolation.Anyway, enough babbling on - time to go do some research."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "They could go further with the experiment to check if a material of which the battery content is composed matters or if the stiffness of the content is the only important factor.They could for example check how bounciness changes when a battery is filled with a gel-like substance which could then be frozen."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Here is the transcript if you don't like watching the video http://bit.ly/1uD31Uz"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's interesting to me that using the height of the bounce against the ground for estimating the spring constant is worse than using the height of the bounce against the battery."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What would the inside of a recharged battery look like I wonder."
}
] | en | 0.982726 |
Why did I reimplement Jekyll using NoFlo | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Didn't know about NoFlo before this, previous discussions here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6139509https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6144951The UI looks neat, but the kickstarter video was a mixed bag. Did somebody tell a bunch of people to talk very loudly? Was that the plan to make it "engaging"? Because it did unfortunately have a touch of bro-gramming.*I'm not sure whether it really is the killer approach to writing software. Where I do see it is in customization. A lot of business logic programming relies on offering flexibility on an intermediary level. Providing the right components for software integrators seems like a very good idea. You'll still need text-based programmers to do the grunt- and architectural work, of course. Because no matter what the fancy graphics convey: Somebody is going to need to sit in front of a screen and type text into an editor.Finally - all this and no online demo to check out? Am I missing the crucial link?[Edit] Found this: http://meemoo.org/dataflow/*Not all of it did - I'm not going to call J Paul Morrison a bro-grammer - but I really don't need people to seem worked up in a video at all. It just seems somewhat artificial, like a comedian dying of laughter from a joke they have already told to hundreds of audiences."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Thanks for this post. It's a really cool example of using NoFlo to refactor a project. I'm actually about to start using Jekyll on a project, but since I'm more into Node I might go with the NoFlo implementation."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Repository is at https://github.com/the-grid/noflo-jekyll"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> other data sources that the file systemI think you mean "sources than the" here."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why are they putting that pony-tail dude on every photo? Is he some sort of programming celebrity?"
}
] | en | 0.941025 |
Ask HN: Review my startup, After the Deadline - Proofreading Plugin for Wordpress, TinyMCE, etc. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I tried a sentence at PolishMyWriting.com. The sentence was: \"Onec upon at time, there was a potato.\" It found my misspell, but it: 1) Didn't capitalize the correction suggestions.\n 2) Ate the space between 'once' and 'upon' upon correction.\n\nAnd now that I've given it this reply to proof, it doesn't find the misspelling inside the double quotes. Is that intended?Also, it thinks every first word in 'single quotes' is misspelled."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I pasted in a few pages of my writing from one of my sites into your http://polishmywriting.com and clicked \"Polish.\"It didn't appear to do anything.Apparently it didn't find anything wrong with any page except one that contained the word \"infuriating\", which it felt was spelled incorrectly. I think that's irony. Also, Oxford disagrees: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/infuriate?view=ukSo back to the first point, if you don't find anything wrong with my text after processing it, I'd recommend putting up a note like \"Looks good to me\" or some sort of indicator that something happened rather than the button just being broken."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Hi,Looks really good. I have recommended www.polishmywriting.com to my team before. We would probably be interested in integrating this in our ROR app, as we do a lot of writing. I just put it up on my blog and it does the trick. It did freeze up when I clicked on explain a passive voice (Safari 4).20$ a month for 5 users is ok if all 5 users are intensive users; but, for example, our blog has two regular users and then 2-3 people who blog twice a month. So, what I am trying to say is the pricing structure might need to be tweaked.Otherwise, keep up the good work. How about a French version? Antidote has great software, but no web version.Cheers,Jonathan"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Interesting!A few days ago I blogged how I wished that my readers could copy edit my posts: http://overstimulate.com/articles/readers-as-copy-editors\n\nI'll try this out. (I was debating prototyping a \"copy edit\" feature by hacking my Disqus widget to post changes as comments to a hidden thread)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Pedantic (but so's your product): The caret that indicates an insertion goes underneath the baseline of the text, not above it.http://www.colorado.edu/Publications/styleguide/symbols.html"
}
] | en | 0.902996 |
As a VC, how is a $41 million investment in Color justified? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I really enjoyed Yishans answer if for no other reason than it was positive about Color.I wish Hacker News members, who have zero vested interest in other people's startups, would be a bit more optimistic when it comes to publishing comments. Between Color, and various YC startup launches here - the place feels rather mean spirited, frankly."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This seems reasonable, except that the #1 rule of investing is that past performance does not guarantee future results.If the team is so great and VCs are investing in the team, then why is the UI/usability of Color so bad?I think the reason startup people are so down on Color is that they believe that $41M distributed among many different startups would be better for the tech ecosystem/community as a whole, resulting in more innovation and progress than a single photo sharing app."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "For the Love of GOD who cares about how much money Color raised. It was nice to hear about, oh..the first 4 times here.Deleting the huge rant I just typed up.Anyone want to throw in ideas on why Color is such a hot topic? I might be a little blind to it due to my attitude reading it on here so many times."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Simple:(1) spend 30M acquiring bunch of high-usage apps with lil revenue(2) collect anon user data(3) license / sell data to ad firms on ad exchanges and moreMost of HN has no idea how crazy the ad exchange business is because they are pretty tightly controlled and require high minimums to play. I wouldn't know if I didn't have a brother working inside day to day.Suffice to say, there is a flourishing market where anon user data is bought and sold for millions to improve ad targeting.One great example is rapleaf. When they launched, I was like \"meh, another reputation management co.\" Turns out they are doing alright doing what I describe here. Yet if you simply judged them when they launched or from their consumer front they put up, you'd never know."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Sequoia invested in youtube and it turned out very well for them. Color is more likely the next youtube instead of next facebook.I haven't tried Color yet, but from what I have read it makes it dead easy to share photos and form social groups. Remember the real breakthrough of youtube was you click on a link and the video starts playing, it was and still is the most hassle free way of watch videos, there were no codecs to download, no heavy flash pages to load just fast and easy. People like easy and Color is making it easy to share photos and form social groups.About $41 million, yes that is high but now the company can go to work instead of worrying about the next round of financing."
}
] | en | 0.986835 |
The 7 Habits of Highly Overrated People | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": ">What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation.However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale.The key word is transparency.Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'.Here are some approaches that have worked for me:>Be Bossy and CriticalThis is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'.By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player!> Shamelessly Self PromoteLine up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team.> Distract with Arguments about MinutiaeAcknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort.> Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad)This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps.> Plan Excuses Ahead of TimeI've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%.> Take Credit in Non-Disprovable WaysI dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "For me, what's frightening about this is how often I used to reflect on my own life, and at times, couldn't actually be sure whether I was useful or just overrated. People would tell me what a great job I did and praise the amount of time it must have taken, and while I'd smile nervously and modestly reject their attribution, I'd often be left silently thinking, "I don't think this was as difficult or took as long as you think it did." It took a while to just accept that I did my part.While there is danger in exaggeration, I also warn that there is arguably more danger in being too modest, and understating your own importance and value of your work. I've met extremely talented individuals who were being paid less than a third of what they deserved because they believed that their "work will speak for itself" or because they "don't believe in self-promotion". There is a healthy balance to be struck; remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self.There are better ways to do that than the ways listed here, though. For example, taking credit where credit is deserved is extremely useful, but ONLY when you're speaking to someone far removed, such as at a job interview. On a team, you'll get further by promoting and pushing through other peoples' accomplishments when they are too timid to do so. You'll earn respect from both parties, and you'll breed a more productive atmosphere which can only benefit you in the long term."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I worked with this guy for quite a while who I used to supervise as a developer, being a bit tired of his incompetence but seeing that he still had an interest in helping out, he and I suggested to my bosses that he be reassigned to a position that might fit his profile a bit better. Shortly after, the guy was made systems architect, without my prior knowledge (I was still in charge of devs). I pointed out that while a less hands-on position might be better suited, what he was doing clearly had nothing to do with being a systems architect (in no small part because I was the one taking care of that, if given the time).My bosses and said guy agreed and decided to make him a "business systems analyst". As of today I'm still not completely sure what that position entails. The basic idea, I was told, was that he would discuss and gather requirements from clients, then turn them into a useful set of documents and clear explanations. And this is where this article particularly hit the nail.Not once did this "business systems analyst" produce a valuable document. While he was attending meeting after meeting, going to conferences around the globe to supposedly learn about products he had literally no technical knowledge of, I wondered more and more what his value to the company might have been. He essentially created, with my bosses' blessing and encouragement, a whole confusing layer in the development process.He made a lot of noise, produced extremely confusing (and poorly written) documents turning basic client requirements into any developer's worst nightmare, readily passing the blame around without ever putting his position in the balance. Missed deadlines would be the PM's fault, an incorrect feature would be a developer's mistake, a misunderstood requirement would be the client's fault, and the list goes on. Each and every single project he touches simply becomes an absolute bane, but the amount of fuss generated through useless emails, delayed replies and inconsequential yet time-consuming nitpicking, has my bosses falling head over heels for him.Long story short, four valuable people (including myself) have left the company, and the guy is now "business systems director" (I did not make this up) and is on the board. This is both a sad and terrifying state of affairs..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look.You have to remember if the person is thoroughly incompetent, none of this will work, but imagine if the person is actually pretty smart and good enough to get by, then make them personable and friendly ... and throw in a manager who doesn't really know shit about what you do ... then its a whole new ball game. In fact someone like this could wind up getting promoted over you into a "architect" role or some quasi-dev manager role (bosses who don't really know what developers do, love over communicators). I've seen it happen.Often times, they can gather a mob (depending on their social skills) and push out other engineers they don't like, or completely comandeer the engineering organization into ill-fated directions.What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This article is spot on, I've seen all of it play out in the office environment. I used to work with a guy who had little technical chops but managed to become a department manager through a series of such manipulations.When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work.Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage.I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority.Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology."
}
] | en | 0.929522 |
First Round Capital literally makes all their startups dance | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Startups are stressed. But, they are enjoying them!stress != unhappiness"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Let's hope they code better than they dance..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is great. Stop groaning and start living! Yes, startups are stressful, a roller coaster ride, tough sail all of it. That makes it all the more reason to dance or do anything fun and carefree.Just watching it made the mind so light. I am sure all those startups if they did dance in good spirit they would have had a great happy feeling too which is good. I would want to dance with them in 2009 ;)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "not really news, but it is just to much fun to care about that. StartUps are a tough roller coaster of ups and downs so you have to find little ways to enjoy your ups when you have them. I know a couple of the teams in this video and it looks like a good time."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Oh interesting, I live a block away from Attributor. I always walked by and had no idea what that was."
}
] | en | 0.983321 |
Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Everyone's focusing on the fact that Snowden claims he is torture-proof, when in reality he never said that. He said that he "cannot" be tortured into revealing information he is protecting.For example, Glenn Greenwald may hold a private key which must be used IN CONJUNCTION with Snowden's key to decrypt the information Snowden has. It's possible/probable that Snowden does not have access to the secrets he protects without Greenwald's key, as well as possibly many other keys. He may have a network of people he's made part of the group such that any two of them plus Snowden can decrypt the information, but Snowden himself can't without two keys plus his own, and he could make it such that his key is required in the group of three to decrypt. Hopefully someone else here can provide the name for this kind of encryption (something like n-key encryption, it's escaping me currently) and a link to how it works, but this is all very sound and entirely doable from a math standpoint.So no, Snowden himself isn't torture proof, but his security is, if he's doing something like what I outlined above. They'd have to go after Glenn Greenwald too, or whoever else is involved, before gaining access to the intel.Edit:\nThis link[3] might explain it slightly better, but I once read a great primer on the topic, filled with examples and was pretty simple to understand (the layman could grasp at least the concept). I'll add more links as I find more info.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation[2] http://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2001/20450279.pdf[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem[4] http://www.tcs.hut.fi/Studies/T-79.159/2004/slides/L9.pdf[5] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/CS5430/2013sp/L.SecretSha...(thanks ##crypto for the help!)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": ""Further, no intelligence service - not even our own - has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China).You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture."I am very interested to hear some of his anti-intelligence efforts. I assume he's either talking about the Defense Intelligence Agency [1], or that this is a typo for CIA?Also, everytime I hear from Snowden, I can't help but "fist pump" and cheer for the guy.[1] http://www.dia.mil/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's always interesting to me that as a new statement from Snowden to the press comes out, most comments on Hacker News take him totally at his word, and assume that his interpretation of events and policy is by far the interpretation most likely to be true. Because I was already past Snowden's current age and current experience level in living in other countries by the time Snowden was born, I see a lot of holes and a lot of callow bravado in much of what he is saying. I hope he is correct that the information that he claims to have extracted from NSA servers cannot be extracted from him against his will, but I don't assume that to be true in the absence of evidence. That's an extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence. Some aspects of Snowden's story do NOT look like a thoughtful plan to defend freedom and fair play around the world, but rather a haphazard rash move by Snowden to see what he can get away with. The high degree of cooperation many countries appear to be giving the United States so far in efforts to have Snowden return to the United States for legal proceedings suggests that quite a few experienced national leaders with very different constituencies to represent agree that there is more harm in Snowden being on the loose than in his standing trial to weigh his claims against United States law.P.S. Remember, I was one of the rather few HN members to go out in public to protest the NSA on Restore the Fourth evening here in the United States. I can be appalled by some of what I read about the NSA without agreeing that Snowden is taking the best approach to doing something about that."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Completely off-topic, but oh-my-god if the Guardian mobile website doesn't look so much better on a desktop browser than their non-mobile website... I thought they'd had a redesign for a moment."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Edward Snowden makes me proud of my country, and the people that fight for it. But he also makes me ashamed of my Government and the people that hide behind it."
}
] | en | 0.963986 |
Ask HN: Please Review My Startup -- a SaaS for Local TV Stations | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Most stations in the US are now posting content transcribed directly to their own websites with clips of the appropriate story already. Promotion is the then directed to twitter/fb on an automatic or selective basis. Is this basically what you are talking about? In the scenario above, people find out about the content through search or directed discovery or one of the aforementioned social streams.If so, then please understand that I don't think you've thought through your hypothesis and gauged demand enough. News shows purposefully put the best content at the end of a show because they want people to slog through the 15 or so commercials in the 3 breaks before consuming it. Notice this whenever there is a juicy story or big weather prediction.Enmass show viewership pays more than selectively pulling out the good bits. AftEr the fact, the value of the content would be zero anyway, so it's repurposed for web use.I would validate your hypothesis with both the consumer and customers. If you can't see it working, pivot. Perhaps a subscribable video playlist based on topics (like good alerts) not channels (like YouTube). if you use this idea and it generates revenue, I want 2 percent."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You should very quickly talk to a local station and validate that your idea makes sense with regard to business objectives and content restrictions.Specifically, I think you may find that stations will not let you copy content or ads to clips on your Amazon CDN account as it is not in line with how they manage content rights and restrictions, nor does it allow to them to manage ads and tracking.I believe you can access segment clips on a local stations website - why not do your alerts/preferences as a marketing feature/service that alerts then direct folks to the clips on the stations' site?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think this idea is potentially useful and having a news/tv background, I can see the value both the the broadcaster and to the audience. Have you tried offering this to a large broadcaster, such as NBC, as a test pilot, working together to refine the product and use as a case study? NBC is interested and actively integrating emerging digital tech. Local news is a very tough sell as they don't have much money and take limited risk."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "i really like the idea. how are you getting around the copyright issues of parsing out their shows and displaying it online?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Clickable Link: http://www.newspvr.tv"
}
] | en | 0.921415 |
The Pixar Theory | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Category: Entertaining B.S.Reminds me of Leonard Nimoy in "The Simpsons":"Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is no.""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Having studied literature, I was taken aback by this, as it really is a nice story, that fit the facts after the fact. It is the classical "post hoc, ergo proter hoc", that is so common in (at least German) literature science.Some small factoids are taken from "texts" (or here movies) and over them a nice story is fabricated, to "explain" these factoids.For example the timeline. Does Cars for example mention the time anywhere in the movie? Or is this just a fictional fitting from the maker of this site?Or does Monster Inc. somewhere mention a time, that would explain the position on the timeline?Or the mentioned wars between animals/humans and machines/humans. Where in the movies are they referenced?This (The Pixar Theory) is not a "scientific" theory. It does not in the least adhere to anything remotely resembling a scientific method.Fun to see, non the less, but not explaining anything."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "That all the stories occur in the same universe is a given. Oddly, The Pixar Theory gives no reference (much less credit) to the long-running proliferation of Pixar characters appearing in other Pixar movies. This includes characters from future movies, like Wall-E seen in Toy Story. The Pixar Theory, in its long-history view, fails to address proof most of the movies occur within a narrow timeframe, via facts like Heimlich (from A Bug's Life) appearing in Toy Story 2, and the Pizza Planet truck appearing in every movie (partial exception for Brave, where it appears as a carved-wood toy alongside a bas-relief of Sully).The Pixar Theory takes a vague notion and just, as noted "post hoc, ergo proter hoc", creates an elaborate and baseless theory to justify it a la most conspiracy theories. Alas, there is a great deal of facts available to both destroy the theory as presented, and at the same time prove the "one Pixar universe" premise to far more comprehensive and compelling effect. Instead of a few vapid paragraphs, the website should be a collection of the dozens (hundreds?) of images tying all the stories together."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I read this theory on some other blog site a week ago - can someone confirm what it was?The theory is tenuous as best and not overly convincing. But I love discourse like this. I think that this is the value of art, for there to be more meaning and truth in the work than the artist may have intended.Anyway, a nice looking site. I like the idea of dedicate entire sites/domains to a single article or idea."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This does not even come close to the best tie-in theory of all times, as seen in this video:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fknp2aDXQyU\nIt's subtitled, but trust me it worth every second (especially for tarantino fan bois, such as I)"
}
] | en | 0.896465 |
Facebook Revamps Friend Lists | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I always wondered why they didn't just apply a clustering algorithm on your friends to auto-generate friend lists.If you ever ran one of those \"friend wheel\" apps, it was easy to see that data about interconnections provides an almost-perfect way to group connections from different facets or stages of your life."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The thing that stuck out to me is their move to try and group friends and what they're doing based on location. They already have the ability to add your location on the status updates, and this kind of takes it to another level. Is it just me or are they moving to try and directly compete withe companies like foursquare and other companies like that?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Great and all, but I really just wish FB would stop assuming I need the side/chat bar thing. It seems like every 10th visit or so I have to \"go offline\" and close that damn bar.I really, really feel that it's being pushed on users for no other reason but to force us to realize that, they too, have a chat feature like Google+."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's only going to take a few instances of the algorithm guessing wrong or users not paying attention and having something bad happen IRL before this bites them. At least with Plus it's still a manual association into Circles, which puts the full onus on the user to do it carefully."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I hope i got this right.\nIts possible to create a list and they will automatically put friends inside this and suggest other people who could match too?But they do not force this upon me or change existing lists."
}
] | en | 0.979202 |
Reasons not to buy from Amazon | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Most of these are problems with any large company, not Amazon per se.Yes, companies want to kill competition by any means and do all sorts of bad-for-the-consumer and bad-for-workers things. We didn't just wake up yesterday into the industrial era. That's all of capitalism. Amazon isn't special, just high-profile.> if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no rights.Amazon isn't in the business of granting rights.If you don't like any of the things included in Stallman's list, don't expect change to come from Amazon or some boycott thereof. The change should come from us by way of better governance.I feel like Stallman missed a good time to make a positive point on why we need better governance and perhaps regulation to reign in the much uglier parts of corporations/capitalism/behavior that we might as a society not like. He could have been inspiring and spoken to a much wider audience than the paranoia crowd.Instead he wanted to make a negative piece about Amazon. It made the top of HN, where we'll talk aboutit for 15 hours, and then nobody else will listen.More generally I think its safe to say that people will not listen to a boycott that inconveniences them. They might listen to a positive message on the reasons we should support and enact laws upholding digital freedoms, worker rights, and things to stop anti-competitive practices.There are a lot of digital freedom causes worth championing, but I'm always disappointed by Stallman. It's easy to hate. We need more positive people that can frame causes like this more effectively."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Interesting article. When you make an alternative to Amazon which has a similar selection and shipping time I will consider it.I do not have a local book shop. My supermarket which is strangling farmers, killing off grocers, butchers, video game shops etc only have the best sellers list.I have yet to find an alternative which is consistently cheap and delivers next day or the day after with free shipping..To your points.> Amazon publishes ebooks designed to attack your freedomThis is no different from music. I could choose to buy a physical book but sometimes I feel that my kindle could get it faster and I could save space in my house which already is littered with large books.> Amazon's on-line music \"sales\" have some of the same problems as the ebooksThis is the same as a number of other music retailers. If I want to avoid this I will get a DVD. Just because Amazon offers you a convenient option doesn't mean you have to take it. I would rather save space in my house and save the environment by purchasing digital music than buy a CD which will be scanned onto my computer once then left on a shelf.> Amazon's shipping in the US is done in a sweatshopOh well.. this is something state officials should look into. I have seen the UK distribution center a number of times on the news and it looks alright.> Amazon cut off service to WikileaksOh well.. it is Amazon's service. Wikileaks can use another. I use a service and I cut people off fairly often due to the content they post. They broke my terms -> They go. The end. They can build their own software. Or in Wikileaks case.. find another host / make their own.> Amazon squeezes small publishers.Amazon looks to give the best deal possible to the customer. Sometimes people get trodden on. If Amazon won't do you an agreeable deal go elsewhere. Make an organization with similar companies and reject any deals which you cannot agree to. Throw your weight behind a different ebook reader.> Amazon doesn't just compete with independent book stores, it arrogantly seeks to destroy them.Please.. there are app's like this which compare prices all over the place. Again. Amazon looks to give the best deal possible to the customer. When I buy from a bookshop I know I am paying more. That is fine because I can see the book, touch the book and take it home then and there. Most people know this.Sometimes a local book store cannot sell a book even remotely competitively. An app which told me this would be nice. I don't mind paying a few pounds more in a store. When it is £5-10 there is a problem with the shop.> Amazon appears to treat self-published authors well, but it can unilaterally cut the price of their books. And when it does, the authors are the ones who lose.It is an authors choice whether they use the publishing platform or not. I wouldn't after hearing how Amazon auto-discounted an authors book and the author got screwed.> Amazon censored an ebook that exposed how ebook bestseller lists can be manipulated (and therefore are meaningless).Is this so unexpected? Guy tries to publish book on Amazon about how to game the Amazon review and ranking system...> Amazon was a member of ALEC.Oh well.Amazon isn't a saint. They are responsible for putting a number of small businesses out of business. They damage the high street. However.. look at any major superstore. Its just the evolution of business. I will not be boycotting Amazon any time soon."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Reasons to buy from Amazon:* Cheap* Consistent* Fast shipping* Good product availability* Good return policies* Vendor and item ratings"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Says the man who charges to have his photograph taken by fansIndependent bookstores are nice, but they fail to account for the long tail, that's where Amazon shines.And for the \"common books\" the big chains do an ok job. E.g. Harry Potter(Still, physical B&N stores seem to be going away, Borders is history already)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> Amazon publishes ebooks designed to attack your freedom (PDF[1] or html[2]).This is real. There is something wrong with the way Amazon deals with ebooks, and it is sad to see people backing it up.---[1]: http://stallman.org/articles/ebooks.pdf[2]: http://gnu.org/philosophy/the-danger-of-ebooks.html"
}
] | en | 0.981486 |
Rate my startup: SwipeGood - Roundup every purchase you make & donate the change | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The idea sounds like it might be interesting, but I can't imagine how this works and neither your website nor the facebook page linked at the bottom tell me anything about it.I might suspect that if I signed up with Facebook Connect that there might be more information, but it's not clear whether that's the case - and I wouldn't try it on the off chance.I would suggest that there needs to be more up-front information to explain what happens if I use Facebook Connect to login. How does giving you my credit card work? On the face of it, that sounds like a scam. Is this service for everyone, or only people in the USA? After signing up, how easily can I opt out? etc etc.But I'm curious to know more."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "So does this avoid B of A's infamous Keep The Change patent?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It would be nice to have a how it works page, you must give me a compelling reason for me to signup my credit card, at least I will like to know how it work."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Hey HNers! :)We just launched this first basic version of SwipeGood so we can get some user feedback before we move forward. Right now we haven't got Yodlee implemented so we can't do the monthly transactional data but have to ask the users to estimate the amount of transactions they make on a monthly basis. The idea is all about making change simple, affordable and effortless so more people can be part of it. Any and every feedback is welcome!!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Love the idea -- i used to do this by hand in a restaurant, but that sometimes meant the server wouldn't get a round tip.Will you support the ability for me to save a portion of the money? Put it in my piggy bank for rewards (that you negotiate) so when I have enough money saved up I can buy something cool from you. Plus, you can also make good money if you properly short-term invest the float."
}
] | en | 0.982125 |
AMD Is Fighting For Its Life | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I'm a regular HN community member (under a different account). Coincidentally, I also work for AMD. Everything I say here is my own words and none of this is endorsed/backed by my employer.\nFrom what I can tell, AMD's strategies are more long-term than some people would like. For instance, we're taking time to rewrite software when we could squeak by with just modifying it. We just reorganized my entire building. These things have lots of up-front costs: lost time, productivity, etc. But I would be surprised if they didn't pay off in the future.Until last month, we were in a hiring/raise freeze. Most benefits were frozen (profit sharing, buying stock, etc.) Now that stuff is being lifted. Management believes (as do most employees) that we have passed the worst of the storm.HR and legal can be a real pain (more so than many other companies i've worked at). They can regularly prevent real things from happening. Thankfully, they are physically seperated from the hardware/software boys (literally on the other side of town). They have a dress code; we don't, they have lots of inane security policies (no camera phones, etc.), we don't, etc.The management style is very hands-off (at least for hardware/software boys), which is both good and bad. The \"very good\" developers can really shine. If you want to work on something, just do it. Rarely do you need manager approval, and if you do it's usually just one level up. I've had several ideas that I've gotten a chance to implement in the last few months that have really streamlined the manufacturing process and saved the company a lot of money.On the other hand, average/mediocre software developers are totally lost. Upper-level management communication basically consists of elaborate ways of saying \"Make more money\" and \"make chips fail less\" and that sort of thing, things everybody should already know anyway. How to go about doing any of that is largely left up to the ingenuity of the small team or even individual developer. Great for smart people; bad for mediocre developers.I certainly don't think AMD is in danger of collapsing or anything. It's just not as competitive at this precise moment as it was in 2001-2005. I can say that the company is treating its engineers/developers right--flexible hours, casual dress, nice facilities, all the sort of things that lead to happy programmers/engineers and great products. Most of the employees in my building seem to own stock, so I would imagine they also think AMD has a good future."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "My personal experience with AMD has been pretty miserable. As the proud owner of an ATI (acquired by AMD 2 years ago) video card I've watched new drivers roll out, wondering when AMD would decide to support its product. They even refused for a long time to release APIs so that the opensource community could aid in development. So I can see why these guys are dead in the water. Two questions:\nIs there any chance of ATI not going under with them? Before they were acquired they were good.\nSecond Intel and nVidia might (probably will) simultanously lose their most direct competitors. Is another company going to fill the niche are might they begin viaing for each others market shares?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think Apple + AMD merger/acquisition would make more sense than anything else in this situation. And if it's going to happen, this is the right time more than ever."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "AMD isn't headed under yet, but their Fusion core better kick some serious ass, similar to the release of the original Athlon64.Also, some more good news for AMD:\nhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-ch..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That's a shame. We have to thank AMD for the x86-64 architecture (\"64-bit for the masses\")."
}
] | en | 0.975807 |
Ask HN: How do I get programmers into the college newsroom? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Treat them like you treat your reporters.Partner them one on one with a reporter to create one off stories.Young programmers dream big, find a way to limit them, have them complete something in a week.Not all people who know how to program work in the CS dept. Cultivate those already on your staff who show an intrest in programming."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We used to have this problem at the Minnesota Daily, the U's paper of 40,000 daily print circulation, and found 4 strong sources for hiring.\n1) Craigslist\n2) Talk to the CS profs and ask to promote your on-site event with free pizza to get feedback on what should be done with the papers site.\n3) Talk about the pay, despite objections to keep it hush hush. The recruits need to know they're getting paid a decent amount, like $11/hr (which is still fair for on-campus work with flexible hours)\n4) Find alumni to talk about the experience and how that was worth more than the pay.If you have questions, ping the active staff at the Daily - they're always open to sharing ideas."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Let them work on more interesting problems. The InfoLab at Northwestern had cooperation between the EECS department and the journalism school and managed to build a system called Stats Monkey which wrote automated stories when given a sports data set. Ends up working so well that it's spun off into a startup.http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/http://narrativescience.com/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'd look to the Django community for examples of what hackers are doing in the field--that's been their bread and butter.LJ World, lots of stuff at Washington Post, Washington Times, EveryBlock (who received a Knight Foundation grant and was acquired by msnbc), \"open data/hacking government\" by Sunlight Foundation and others, PBS, etc.I'd think this would interest young developers: lots of things to dig into, your work is seen and has an immediate impact, hone your skills \"with deadlines\" and it beats working on the intranet."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Find a great designer. Great design can convince your editors to keep the solution in house. Great design can attract talented developers."
}
] | en | 0.964128 |
Video: Linus Torvalds on git | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Albeit an old video, a fun talk about the merits of git, I was never really bothered with git before this. Haven't looked back."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Circa 2007. Still a classic though."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is the video that convinced me to switch to git. I had git evangelists talk it up for the longest time before this, but they never laid out the benefits as well as he does here."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There seems to be an abundance of naught-era news here. On the other hand I get to keep making \"200X called\" jokes about Hacker News. I win either way, so I'm not complaining."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great video. There is a transcript for those who prefer to read:\nhttps://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...I'd watch the video anyway, since Linus is awesome on stage."
}
] | en | 0.981736 |
"Please take this down and write your own book." | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a good illustration of how tone doesn't come across well in writing. Reading the comment by the original author, it sounded like a friendly request to please take the content down.The guy whose site it was clearly didn't see it that way and responded as though he'd been viscously attacked. He ends up coming across as quite angry, when more likely he was just rattled and feeling defensive.I guess the takeaway is to always take a step back before responding when you feel attacked. Chances are you're not being attacked nearly as harshly as you think."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The worst part of this situation is how martinemde is portending himself to be a \"translator\" like from English to Spanish, ignorant of the fact that you even need permission to do that. http://twitter.com/martinemdeAlso its pretty crappy how the Ruby Protection Squad came to his rescue with blind hate for Zed throwing comments like \"Wow didn't even know who Zed Shaw was, now the first thing I learned about him is that he's a total d-bag\" - http://twitter.com/PeteTheSadPanda/status/598669095084033Yes Zed doesn't always say things gently, but what he did say was 100% truth. Regardless of if you like what he says you have to respect 1. the truth and 2. who was really in the wrong here.Final note: this guy could have buried it by just deleting the whole repo, but left it up to seem like the \"martyr\" - that is what kills me the most."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Interestingly, Martin has now updated the readme https://github.com/martinemde/learn-ruby-the-hard-way#readmeHe concedes both of Zed's main points:1. That he didn't have a legal right to \"translate\" the book2. That \"translating\" the book from Python to Ruby didn't work all that well anywayThe rest of the message boils down to a complaint that Zed wasn't nice enough in his takedown request. While Zed could have phrased things more nicely, he wasn't especially rude given the context of clear plagiarism and copyright violation."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "At some level, you have to love zed. He gives and gives to the world, and the world just craps on him.Of course, I have a feeling that his personal brand isn't going to be helped by this exchange."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"I'm a fucking Engine Yard programmer for fuck sake.\" - what an arrogant statement."
}
] | en | 0.990405 |
Nine Billion Names of God | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "You know, when I first read this story years ago, I thought it was great and quite clever. I must confess that rereading it now, it strikes me as really dumb. Not only does Clarke spend the interminable first part of the story in crude exposition—'Surely you mean two!' 'I mean three. But that's not important right now.'—but the very premise of the story—there's these Tibetan monks, who have invented a special alphabet and are writing all the permutations of the name of God in order to bring an end to the universe—is completely at odds with any fact about Buddhism you care to mention. Which is particularly depressing considering that three years after the writing of this story, he would move to, and spend the rest of his life in, one of the most Buddhist countries on Earth.It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but when you have a little story like this whose basically only propositional content is, 'What if a computer made the universe disappear after it completed a mathematically intensive religious task,' the specifics that you overlay become awfully important."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This story is reminiscent of and inferior to Asimov's \"The Last Question\":http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Odd, I actually have this book checked out from the library right now (this story, with others, was bound into a collection sharing the same title). Clarke's brand of science-fiction struck me as much more principled and technically interesting than most of his contemporaries. Most of them have the unique property among science fiction stories of actually being possible given our knowledge of astrophysics. The speed of light is a minor plot element in many, especially the fact that it can't be broken (no 'warp drives'). I don't know if it was Clarke himself who said this, but I recall someone stating that many stories break so many fundamental physical laws that they are more accurately classified as \"science fantasy,\" not science fiction."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For a more mind-bending perspective of permutations, look at Jorge Luis Borges. In particular, The Library of Babel[1] and The Lottery of Babylon[2].These two stories are a bit like HP Lovecraft for mathematicians and computer scientists. What starts with a simple premise turns out to lead to an ever-unfolding sense of dread as the story approaches the consequences of infinity.Babylon deals with probability directly, Babel deals with the concept of permutations. Some people say that Babel is outdated in the modern world but I disagree -- the fundamental problems still exist. The library is a platonic version of the \"document-verse\", just as the lottery is a platonic version of ordinary life.I thoroughly recommend these stories and all others by the same author to hackers. Be prepared to be deep in thought for some time afterwards.As for Arthur C Clarke, my favourite story of his was The Food of the Gods. Wonderfully paced and very funny.(edit: linked to better-formatted version of Babel)[1] http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel\n[2] http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/t..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In fact, there are only 21 million names, and the monks have secretly tricked crypto-currency enthusiasts into calculating them..."
}
] | en | 0.973395 |
Ask HN: Review my startup: Cashier Live | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "While I understand the Flash hate etc. that some people have below, before you start doing anything about it do prioritize your features.Who is your real customer, I'm assuming it's small business owners etc. Do they real care about Flash/AdBlock etc. Do they even know about those things?Focus on the real features they care about, do some market research, if you haven't already. Offline backup is a high priority feature. CC fallback on the traditional system is another (which I believe works via phone and not internet).What about touchscreen support and UI to go with it.I had worked on NCR POS UI way back in the '95-'96 and we used to create OCX (remember those?) controls which were huge so that the UI worked well with touch screens."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You guys should look into restaurant POS. The existing systems are horrible and usually require a team to come in and set them up and cost a fortune.Oh and just a quick comment.. I would spell out Point of Sale and not use the acronym. It has a different meaning to most people."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Oh for the pricing. I'd make the free kinda sucky, and have the current basic plan be $5 or $10 per month.My reasoning is that the current free version would meet our needs, but I'm not comfortable putting a free web service into our sales process. When you pay for something you feel like it's going to be around for a while."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm very skeptical of this idea. I don't mean to spread \"negative energy\" or flame but, may I be frank?Walking it through:Let's start with the straw-man that I'm a small single shop and don't want CC processing. Cashierlive will take me as a customer for $50/month - but I can buy a robust cash register that will last years for less than that and I'll probably save more than $50/month using my own in-house inventory management system even if I wind up having to enter journal tape and receipt data into my PC manually. On top of that, the used cash register I buy will likely be a more robust solution.Suppose I'm that same dinky shop but now I want to add CC processing. There already exists a competitive market for low-acquisition-cost, fee-based CC processing - just go into any corner liquor store in a big city. I can either add a service fee to CC and debit card purchases, or set a minimum purchase price for card usage and adjust my retail prices slightly. (Which is right depends on the nature of my products and my customers.)Suppose I'm still a single shop but larger and more sophisticated. I want integration of POS with inventory management. I want CC processing. If I'm setting up for the first time to achieve that state I have to drop a decent chunk of change on HW and I damn sure want to have competing offers from CC processing companies. Yet with cashierlive I'm locked into cashierlive's CC processing partners and any subsidy I'm getting on software or hardware looks like chump change in my larger budget.The higher up the chain my business goes, the less attractive it is to (a) trust cashier live to protect my data; (b) trust cashier live to to remain in business; (c) trust cashier live to keep up with me in feature demands; (d) trust cashier live to avoid massive attacks on their servers; (e) trust that cashier live isn't down when I need to collect reports to file taxes; etc.As a larger, more sophisticated customer - all those unknowns and risks greatly outweigh the relatively modest cost savings.What about if I have multiple stores and am really attracted to the cross-site inventory management features? Or like the \"access anywhere\" features for reporting. At that point I'm sophisticated and flush enough that I can probably do better on my own - with bespoke software if I have to.The low end of the market has plenty of reasons to find a simpler, more robust, cost competitive solution in existing markets. The high end has every reason to run, not walk, from the kind of centralization of control and purchasing decisions that cashier live implies.Cashier Live as a business seems to be essentially a value-added broker of CC processing services. In that sense, it competes directly against the IT/POS consultant that my local accounting firm uses - the guy who actually comes into my shop and connects devices and strings wire. Cashier Live is competing against that with on-line training videos and a help line - which is weak. It's especially weak since, regardless, I still have to hire my local accounting firm.Swapping out my \"small business perspective\" hat for my \"engineer with VC sensitivities\" hat: the centralization of data and services proposed by cashier live are just nuts. It creates a massive and precarious single point of failure in direct proportion to the number of customers it acquires and the number of transactions it processes. Asked to comment on the technology I would be conscious bound to speak out against it. Asked to invest, I would have to decline.BUT: HOW TO FIX IT!!!!Web-based POS, inventory mgt. etc. is a fine idea provided (as noted in other comments) it's hardened against interruptions of net connectivity and avoids centralization. All of the problems I listed above have to do with the unreasonable centralization of cashier live's model: centralization of choice about CC processing agents; centralization of choice about software features; centralization of choice about database structure, backup-policy, etc.; .....I think cashier live would have a chance if it polished up its code, released it under GPL, partnered with accounting firms instead of directly CC processing firms, and went into the premium fee support / consulting business while learning to franchise sales to put qualified reps on the floor of customer's shops to hook things up.I have a hunch that cashier live grew out of doing some bespoke work and then trying to turn that into a commodity service \"web 2.0 style\". Perhaps the better course would be to learn how to do bespoke work at scale, for a premium.It would even be OK for cashier live to resell hosting for the web service provided that hosting weren't centralized and the customer had the option of finding their own hosting."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Way to go. Web based POS's are definitely the future.An online demo might be a good idea. Best of luck. Maybe Intuit will but it :)"
}
] | en | 0.968738 |
Most Popular Programming Languages of 2013 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Dunno what to make of your bubblechart. On the one hand, I should be absolutely ecstatic that I am firmly sitting inside the 0.6% bubble and still making ~200k per year, with complete, total and utter ignorance of the rest of the bubbles that make up 99.4%. On the other hand, I wonder if just like the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble, this 0.6% bubble will also pop. Maybe I should broaden my skillset just a little bit...ah, what's that 0.8% bubble right next to mine ? Closer Clojer Closur ? Where have I heard that before. Oh yeah wasn't that the rival language also hot for data scientists. Hmmm...maybe if I bone up on that..after all, 0.6+0.8 > 0.6 :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm not super familiar with codeeval, but it seems like (from the sample puzzles on the homepage) the puzzles are pretty standard engineering interview questions. That is, they are often short algorithms, which bias towards using scripting and \"convenient\" languages.Still, surprising to see Java so high, and such disparity between Python and Ruby - the increase in C# is wholly expected."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "My blog post (wrote about an year ago) about programming language popularity, based on HN Poll : http://blog.sudobits.com/2012/03/28/top-10-most-popular-prog..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I seems somehow implausible that Javascript is so low given:a) The amount of \"Web 2.0\" applications that are being developed.b) The number of OS/Windowing systems that are supporting Javascript as a scripting/application language.c) The (almost) constant necessity of \"tweaking\" almost any web design at least slightly (using Javascript).d) The number of ready-made libraries to make programming in Javascript more fun.e) NodeJS (Do I need to say anything else?).I'm not a giant Javascript proponent, though I use it where it fits. But this \"survey\" seems to have a pretty significant amount of sample bias."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Javascript just with 3.9% of the share? The title should probably be scoped to \"Most Popular Programming Languages of 2013 on CodeEval\". That's relatively clear from the text of the blog post, but it is still worth re-emphasizing."
}
] | en | 0.904854 |
Show HN: Like SmartGlass, deMobo turns phone into a second screen for browser | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Nice! With DeMobo it seems like even physical objects can have it's own interactive instant app... so long as it has a QR code. I love how you do not have to install anything else once you have the platform up."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Big companies like Microsoft and Nintendo are betting big on this second screen technology. deMobo makes it easy for web developers to add this functionality to existing web apps."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Interesting Idea! I want to see the final product. It could be a great add-on to increase user experiences for my websites"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Very cool technology here. Killer app coming very soon me thinks."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great app! Looking forward to seeing more games on your site."
}
] | en | 0.964156 |
Ask HN: Site is growing over 500,000 users/yr, to VC or not to VC? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Let's be clear, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't have 500K users, you have 40K uniques.When we say users, we mean people who have signed up for accounts. Uniques are unique visitors as measured by Google Analytics and such. Uniques are reported monthly, never annually. The numbers you mention are vanity metrics, the real number is 40K uniques, and it's a fairly low number.For a content site, until you have at least 1M uniques and growing very fast, there is close to zero change you will find a VC interested in you.As to your burning question: until you have 1M uniques/month, you will make low ad rates, perhaps $1 or $2 CPM. Once you get over 1M uniques/month, you could theoretically make higher direct sales ad rates, up to $10 or $20 CPM. But this requires sales people.Advertising on other sites most likely is a waste of money. Instead you should pursue social media and traffic deals for distribution.Good luck!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Quick question: Do you have an email newsletter? I didn't really see anything on your site. If not, start one RIGHT AWAY - and promote it via a popup that comes up after about 10 seconds. Email your subscribers once per week, with links to highlighted stories from that past week.Your subscriber base will start out small but grow large over time, you will thank me profusely when that time comes.P.S - I've created 4 different sites that have each attracted over 1 million visitors per year. Secret weapon in all of them has been email newsletters."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Great job so far!Funding decisions should always be about goals. What are the goals for raising the money here?VC's want to see how a 1x investment turns into a 5x return. If you can't communicate that now, it might be a rough pitch.It sounds like you're on the right path, see if you can squeeze a revenue stream from advertising and continue to iterate on that. If you can prove (to yourself, first) that an investment in advertising your site will significantly change those revenues then you can start considering VC capital.I would suggest reaching out to partners that can help you with traffic first and foremost, a VC will want to know that you can manipulate the growth levers, not just organically.In the meantime, keep up the hunt for an angel who's as excited about the space as you are, they're the best fit because they'll share your vision, invest in infrastructure, and be a little more patient.Remember, funding means added pressure to perform, and milestones that need to be hit. Make sure you're ready for those pressures before you take the check!Good luck!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Wiiliam you should email me at tom at buysellads.comWe can def help you out on the monetization side of things.Plus we are bootstrapped and profitable too. We love helping other self funded startups."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Go it alone as long as you can."
}
] | en | 0.918524 |
Weblog as Website for the Small Organization | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't understand why this is an 'OR' conversation - have your static website, then add a blog later if you want.Businesses need to ask why they want a website before they begin [1]. For many businesses, a static page is more than sufficient - it's a non-confrontational way for them to communicate with a potential client, give that client a feel for the business before the client has to make a phone call. My experience doesn't accord with issues like \"the ISP paid in advance, and the site continues as a zombie\".I'd like to see more businesses with blogs, and they would benefit. But in terms of priorities, I work with several businesses right now where a blog would be detrimental because it would overtake things like 'sales' on their to-do list. More advanced websites exist for other business reasons, but this advice isn't designed for businesses wanting to sell product through their site anyway.[1] http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/171-there-are-only-four-..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I work with small nonprofits and I can tell you that while they are embracing open source tools like drupal and wordpress, many are still not quite savvy enough to run the show themselves. And even the small orgs have annual budgets of around $100k - more than enough to dump $5k or so into a custom design and some integration with their fundraising software."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The general basis of the article should be that Wordpress (or other blog platform) can be used as a CMS for a website, and that it is an alternative to a static site. However, implying that it can replace a designer/developer to represent the business in a professional manner, and it can be done for little to no cost, is way off the mark.The article fails early when he compares a website to a word document or e-mail (more appropriate comparisons would be trade show booths, marketing brochures, and store layout/design), and all arguments he makes against a static site can also be made against the use of the weblog he promotes."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The author conveniently forgets to note that putting the company's visual design in a blog does cost something and requres someone that knows things like HTML and CSS.Using a blog is probably the best choice for many companies, but it's not totally free (unless you want to use on of the standard themes, in which case people who have seen the same design on ten other sites will wonder what's going on - \"is this a serious company?\")."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm a web developer by trade, and even my startups generally at least begin with a wordpress install. I don't agree with their reasoning, but I find it lets me concentrate on other aspects of the startup rather than getting hung up on the design."
}
] | en | 0.979851 |
The Case Against Time Warner-Comcast Just Got Stronger | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here in Brasil, the ISP must guarantee packet loss of at most 2% in 90% of measurements. [1]A public comitee manages servers located precisely at exchange points, and, thus at network borders. These servers are used by applications which anybody can run that are used to measure speed from clients to them.Of course, there's always a chance of selective QoS based in packet origin, but this is now illegal (we have a net neutrality law now) and not that hard to investigate if needed.[1] The speed is also rated, but at 30% at any measurement and 70% at long term average."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "It's kinda depressing that if the FCC acted to rein in the companies that have the lowest levels of customer satisfaction in the country, conventional wisdom is that it would be immediately thwarted by Congress. The same Congress which was elected by those same dissatisfied customers."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't understand the arguments against the merger very well. From what I've read, there is currently very little overlap between the regions of Time Warner Cable and those of Comcast [1]. If this is correct, how could the merger allow either firm to raise the price?There are also arguments that combining the customer base will give greater buying power when making deals over content (ex. complete broadcasting power over local sports franchises). But the combined customer base is supposed to be less than 30% of households that subscribe to cable or satellite TV [2].I understand net neutrality is a huge concern, but that seems to be a separate issue from the Time Warner - Comcast merger. It looks like the problem (which is addressed at the end of the post) is higher barriers to entry from local governments. If that's the root cause of net neutrality, that probably deserves more focus than just preventing a merger.[1] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-13/six-takeways...[2] http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/28/news/companies/comcast-timer..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Net neutrality aside, there's still the separate issue of providers not paying to upgrade their peering equipment. How would that best be handled (assuming that increasing competition will never happen)?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Appears to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699862."
}
] | en | 0.97526 |
Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The UK has a spectacularly weak judicial system for an industrialized country.From the lack of judicial review of primary legislation ([1]) through a huge abundance of archaic haphazard laws, to lack of representative judges, to the ease with each political, police, partisan and private organisations can influence the judiciary, the UK system is ripe for abuse and disruption by any industry. It is also fertile ground at this time due to the dual US/UK government focus around issues of \"Intellectual Property\".From a general perspective, the only saving grace, which is a relatively minor one in practice (by volume not significance), is that EU laws normally have precedence and judges are therefore unable to act completely unilaterally without risking being overturned.Just think: what other industrial country permits unilateral criminal prosecution from private entities with explicit support from one of its judges?[1] Yes, I am aware that without an arms-length written constitution, this would potentially make things even worse."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "That is bizarre. The government is, in theory at least, non biased towards any particular private interests. The fact that a private entity can launch its own investigation using its own methodology and then use said evidence to take away someones freedom is downright terrifying."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I can't believe what I've just read. A civil case yeah why not but criminal charges and imprisonment from a private entity after the CPS have basically said its not worth it? Scary."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Off Topic At the site's peak in mid-2009, STC attracted hundreds of \n thousands of users per day, earning Vickerman up to \n £50,000 ($78,500) per month in advertising revenue.\n\nLet's say he did 999,000 users/day (to stay in the hundreds of thousands). That's still only $30K per month, if we assume a CPM of $1.00, which seems reasonable for a site like this."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Somebody once pointed out that such link aggregation sites that operate outside the US seem to be getting in more legal trouble than similiar sites operating under a US domain and possibly on US soil. Is this true and if so, why?"
}
] | en | 0.949526 |
A 20-Something Makes a Mint (and Sells It to Intuit) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My personal rule is I’m not touching anything I got from the acquisition. I’m just going to continue to live off of my income.Wonder what his plans are. Investing? Funding his next startup? Philanthropy?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Wonder how things will work out for him in Intuit's bureaucratic culture -- kinda surprised how much he publicly belittled their bureaucracy (as deserved as the criticism was)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "A twinge arrogant, a twinge lucky, but I feel like this kid gets it. I mean, it's an easy statement to make considering his success, but nonetheless, I like his style."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "word on the street is he took on his last round of financing at an extremely high valuation in order to drive the asking price of Mint up. Sounds like the investors in the last round got screwed!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ">> Q. Was Mint profitable at the time of sale?>> A. We do not comment on revenues.Odd, surely a simple yes/no isn't giving too much away."
}
] | en | 0.962924 |
Instant Bitcoin Purchases at Coinbase | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Someone credible is finally trying to compensate for the abysmal failure that is Bitinstant (see http://bitinstantscam.com and basically any Bitcoin forum). That is fantastic.However, let's not get carried away. This is not instant for first-time users. You still have to go through verification and wait at least 4 business days for your first purchase to go through before reaching the qualifications for instant purchases. Coinbase really needs to adopt convenient, instant deposit methods such as Western Union and Moneygram in order to reach critical mass."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "To be honest, it's kind of creepy. I just identified myself, and they somehow knew what month and year I purchased my car, a list of names I may or may not have been 'associated' with, a list of counties I may or may not have lived in, and stuff like that. I'm not particularly comfortable with a company knowing that much about me, but it's already complete so... horse, meet barn door?I wish they would at least tell me what sources they're getting this information from."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Different strokes for different folks, but I'll never understand why someone would want to buy bitcoins with their personal info attached to the coins. It seems to defeat the purpose of a pseudonymous, decentralized currency."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've wondered about starting a service to sell bitcoins via credit card but the catch is he service holds your coin for you for 6 months or whatever the period for chargebacks is.Is that a viable idea?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "How can I see what level my account is at?What are the limits for Level 1?"
}
] | en | 0.951142 |
Sarah, We Got Your Memo | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I can think of 100 things a startup founder should be doing before writing a public reply to something Sarah Lacey said."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Even Google didn't become Google until they hit upon the whole adwords/adsense idea which wasn't even an original idea of theirs. In the early stages, world changing ideas are probably more found by intuition than logic."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The reality is that the trailblazers tend to take it in the shins. Google just got search right. They were about the zillionth company to try. Facebook seems to have gotten social networking right, also at the zillionth variation on the theme. Nobody talks wistfully about becoming the next WebCrawler or Friendster."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Really? I would certainly say Google and Dell were revolutionary. Now, they may not have been the first to do it, but they were early, and they were the best (at that time). Facebook and twitter, get a little bit of a \"meh\" from me, they more or less took an existing concept, spun it their way, and got lucky. Microsoft, paypal and Youtube (if the article is correct about the last two, I had never heard that before) apparently significantly altered what they started out doing. While not revolutionary, it certainly is a very impressive thing, to completely shift your focus as a business.Now, my idea for a startup is really just a twinkle in my eye, and some big talk around the water cooler, but I can tell you this: I don't just want to make it into the next computer security company, I want to change the way computer security is run as a business. I've been working on it in my spare time for almost a year now, and am bordering on having a working model of stage one, which I know will be revolutionary, but won't shock anybody. That's what I look for when I see a new start-up, someone who isn't just trying to start a business, but someone who is trying to change the very rules that type of business runs by."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "heh, Yahoo did try to acquire Google early on actually. Trying to find exact link."
}
] | en | 0.983947 |
What I Learned About Entrepreneurship From Watching the World Series of Poker | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is probably the dumbest article I've read in a long time. Rant with lots of poker terminology on the way:Where to start:> Both [poker and entrepreneurship] rely on acting strategically under conditions of extreme uncertaintyThis is true in a sense, but only in the shallowest sense. In entrepreneurship there's real uncertainty, having no idea what you have to do, and knowing that there's no real way to determine if you're even on the right path. Often, you're just in the dark. With poker the uncertainty only applies on the scale of a single hand: \"Does he have it?\". Even then you know almost exactly what your equity will be against the range (possible holdings) of the other player. So when few chips are at risk you optimize for equity, and if almost all your chips are at risk you better have the nuts (best possible holding). The uncertainty that remains is of the \"dice rolling kind\", not of the \"what is this guy up to\" kind. Since the \"dice rolling kind\" of uncertainty is beyond your control there's not much to learn from it.> Why are some terrible entrepreneurs so successful?Is this even true? I can't think of any terrible and successful entrepreneurs.> In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven yearsOkay, so what are the characteristics of the World Series of Poker? Starts out with a reasonably deep stack (skill matters a lot), takes days (endurance is crucial), ends with short stacked play (lottery). You can get through the first stages with luck, and since the amateurs outnumber the professionals there are no surprises here: a lot of amateurs make it far into the tournament. You have to have endurance, which favours the young. And in the end very little skill is involved, because the mathematically correct play is to put all your chips in (to maximize fold equity) and often you're only a 2 to 1 favourite when you get called. So only if the final table consists mostly of professionals can we expect a professional to win. I argue that the middle phase (endurance) is the most important, and that therefore one of the 21-25 year old internet players will win most of the tournaments in the next few years. They have millions of hands of experience, which means they're far more likely to intuitively do the correct thing when tired and worn out because of days of play. They're almost as good as the TV pros, but younger. They also have as advantage that they can recognize the TV pros, but the TV pros don't immediately know which of the young players are the sharks and fish.> Yet the Main Event has been won year in and year out by a complete unknown player.Last year it was won by an unknown but incredibly skilled internet player. He probably played more hands in the last 5 years than almost all TV professionals.> a given pro will play thousands of poker handsThousands? Haha.> Similarly, given enough amateurs in the field, the law of large numbers means that at least some of them will get lucky enough times to outperform even the best pros.Not neccessarily. In a deep stacked cash game an amateur will _never_ win over a pro. Not ever. Real amateurs have a chance only because of the lottery aspects of the world series. This is by design: it makes for better TV.> and, if you find advice that seems to work, be ready to go all-in.What does that even mean in the context of entrepreneurship? How do you go all in with a company? By signing a 10 year lease on office space (just stupid)? Is there ever a good reason to go all in with your company if you don't face certain doom?> Take any advice (including mine), and think it through for yourself.Why? Most advice is terrible, or simply not applicable to your situation. And it's almost impossible to distinguish between good advice and bad advice (by definition). And since two people always argue the opposite, how can you possibly agree with them both? I think a lot of interesting things can be said about how to best take advice, but the solution probably isn't to listen to everybody and then go all in.To conclude:Poker is zero sum. Entrepreneurship is not. Poker is about exploiting mistakes, entrepreneurship is about creating value for your customers. Poker has known optimal strategies, Entrepreneurship does not. You could just as easily compare entrepreneurship to chess or monopoly, and the comparison would be just as shallow and meaningless."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The author has a depth of understanding about poker that's surprising, coming from someone who has only watched on television.I've been playing seriously for a decade, and this is the most insightful breakdown of the game I've read. Kudos."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "\"In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven years.\"This just isn't true. Last years winner, Peter Eastgate, was a professional poker player. In fact at last years final table there was 6 professional poker players, an accountant, a student and a trucking company manager.Just because they're not one of the big-name TV-pros that get promoted by ESPN as big names doesn't mean that they're not professional. In fact many of the big-name pros are not actually very good in comparison to the online pros."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"Over the course of a year, a given pro will play thousands of poker hands, and so this shift in probabilities adds up to dramatic winnings.\"I don't actually know if that's true, but my impression is the exact opposite - that pro poker players have basically parlayed a bit of initial luck into a lucrative career that really has little to do with differential skill and more to do with self-promotion.Which, to my mind, is just as useful a perspective on entrepreneurship."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "As I was reading, I was so sure the big lesson was going to be: Pros don't want to all-in coin flip against a no-name amateur. Therefore, a startup should compete against big companies by taking the battle away from the incumbent's comfort zone.I guess I was surprised to see for once an article advising us to act more like the Goliaths and not the Davids."
}
] | en | 0.935433 |
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (December 2010 Edition) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "CHICAGO, ILLINOISWANTED --- Girl about 13 to help during day. Apply 238, Kilmore streetWANTED --- a general servant for the country. Apply T.B. Williams.SUDDEN CLIMATIC CHANGES give you \"that tired feeling.\" The real cause of rheumatism is disordered blood. Dr Williams' Pink Pills make rich, red blood and invigorate the system, so that rheumatism is dispelled. By their tonic action on blod and nerve they also cure anaemia, debility, liver trouble, dyspepsia, sciatica, consumption, rickets, ladies' ailments, etc. Sold by chemists and storekeepers.WANTED --- a cook for the Newmarket Hotel. Apply at once.WANTED --- energetic and intelligent persons to lead and commence at once the design and construction of ingenious new search engine contraption for MATASANO and SONS, reputed software security concern, to be used and appreciated by banks, manufacturers, and all manner of heavy enterprise. A1 references & experience required. A SOVEREIGN OPPORTUNITY FOR ENTERPRISING SOULS. Inquire with \"tqbf\" at Matasano.F. J. PETHERICK has commenced business as a SADDLER and HARNESS-MAKER in premises next to Messrs Gorton and Son's, Fielding, and hopes, by strict attention to business, combined with moderate charges, to merit a fair share of patronage and support. REPAIRS OF ALL KINDS UNDERTAKEN AT THE SHORTEST NOTICE. A trial solicited!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Forward Internet Group in London, UK: http://www.forward.co.ukWe're a young entrepreneurial company that bootstrapped its way from its founder bedroom to a 150-strong company with very healthy profits in 6 years without any external capital.We are behind uswitch.com, getinvisiblehand.com, omio.com, justcages.co.uk, petvillas.co.uk, forward3d.co.uk etc.You can take a look at who we are and what we do at http://www.forwardtechnology.co.uk.One of our guys created statefulapp.com during the recent Rails Rumble (been on the frontpage of HN recently), many others contribute to open source.We have been doubling our revenues every single year (up to £100m in 2010) and plan to continue to do it as long as possible. So, we need great people!We're looking for great developers (and many other roles too) to work on a variety of exciting online projects. We use Clojure, Ruby, Hadoop, Node.js, Sinatra etc.Above all we're looking for smart, ambitious, entrepreneurial people. Full job spec is here: http://www.forward.co.uk/careers or here: http://www.forwardtechnology.co.uk/And it's fun to work here: you choose the hardware you want, you buy the books you need, the hours are flexible, no dress code, the people are reasonable and the entertainment budget is generous: for example the entire company hangs out in Las Vegas night clubs and casinos for 4 days every December (meet us all there next Thursday) and we've recently returned from Disneyland in Paris (birthday celebrations).To find out more email me at [email protected] with your CV.p.s. sorry, all our devs are on-site, we don't hire remote devs. Also, given the recent changes to the immigration laws in the UK, it will be very challenging (maybe even impossible) for us to arrange a visa unless you're an EU national or already have a work permit."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Delhi, India. We're looking for a Software/Support Engineer (everyone in our startup does support). Remote work is a possibility.http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ (no jobs page yet)Contact [email protected] if interested.EDIT: Added location at the beginning"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "MongoDB (10gen)New York City and Redwood City, CA.Looking for software engineers, QA, support engineers, interns, and more: http://www.10gen.com/jobs. Working remotely depends on the job.Working on MongoDB is great: there are tons of interesting programming problems, an awesome community, my coworkers are brilliant, and you get paid to work on open source software."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Pittsburgh, PA (no remote) \nhttp://pikimal.com/jobsWe're looking for Semantic Web and Ruby Developers but if you're a strong developer who doesn't know Ruby yet that's no obstacle. We have extremely flexible hours, collaborative coder DNA, and we provide good tools, lunches, and great health care.Pikimal is working to change how people use the web to make decisions. Once users tell us what's important to them, we can tell them what's best for them. Since all of our recommendations are based solely on facts, users receive results separate from marketing.Please include a link to public code you've written or your Github repo when you apply. Feel free to reach out directly to my first name @pikimal.com"
}
] | en | 0.960159 |
Diaspora website redesign, now with more info about the project | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here's the question I'm left with which has no answer on the site: how will a distributed social network keep my private data private?I understand how one can build secure communications. That part is easy. So, I have a Diaspora account with \"Awesomea\" and you have a Diaspora account with \"Crapula\". It's easy to have communications between Awesomea and Crapula be secure. However, when you visit your Crapula page, you want to see my updates which means that Crapula needs to be able to decrypt my updates. Even if you have a different key for each user (ala public key encryption), for wide adoption the service providers (in this case, Awesomea and Crapula) need to be able to encrypt and decrypt that information (which means they hold the keys).So, if I friend you and you're using Crapula, I need to trust both you and Crapula that you won't do bad things with my data.Part of this is that the Diaspora project doesn't seem to have any technical information. They have lofty goals like, \"you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity.\" However, they have scant information on how they plan to accomplish that. They say they're using GPG, but are they going to have a browser plugin with locally stored keys to decrypt the information? That's the only way I can see this being secure. If you're storing your key with Crapula and it's decrypting my information, it can store is as well as show it to you.Even if the design is to use locally stored keys, what's to stop a provider from offering a \"better\" (better, in this case, means easier for non-tech-inclined users) Diaspora-compatible server which stores them on the server? And then I have to audit my friend requests to see how their server has set up security?It's kinda like handing a friend a classified document and a photocopier. You tell them \"please don't copy this\" and they probably won't. But in this case you're handing that classified document to Crapula and saying \"pass this along to my friend and don't copy it along the way\". Yes, Facebook has that ability too, but it's one company that has a reputation to defend (to an extent) as well as a legal presence in the United States (which is good for me as a US citizen) and by posting in the first place I'm trusting them with that data. With Diaspora, I could start getting friend requests from all sorts of services run by people a lot shadier than the Facebook folk and I now have to deal with dozens of privacy policies rather than one.BTW, this is probably the comment that I would most like to be proved wrong on. I want distributed, secure social networking that puts me in control of my data. It's just that I don't see how it works and the Diaspora website doesn't have any information on it either. If someone here knows how this will work, I'd love it! It's an exciting prospect, but I feel like it's the same as DRM: if people can read it/see it/hear it, it can be copied. Likewise, if a service provider is printing it on screen for one of their users, they can store it. If anyone has technical information on how this works, it would be really awesome!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Let's just focus on one thing that many people are used to: the news feed.Say I want to find out what all my friends are up to lately. Since this information doesn't live in a (more or less) central place any more like it used to on Facebook, I need to go out and contact each node (in an encrypted, secure way) that my friends run/pay to host on an ISP and ask them, what they're up to lately. That information then gets merged by my local node (that I presumably access to view a news stream) and displayed to me.Isn't that more than a bit inefficient? Hundreds of friends, means hundreds of connections going out, to grab friend updates, each with encryption overhead. And all those nodes have to be up and running of course.OK, so let's assume your own node is smart enough to cache these updates. Maybe it even gets updates pushed to it when my friends update, so it's not constantly polling all of them in search for updates. That means if my friend withdraws permission to see their updates, I still have access to their cached info local to my own node.So perhaps there's also a push update system that handles revocation. You remove permissions and send another message to those affected to forget your info. But what if I run a modified node that chooses to ignore this information? The whole thing is open source and anyone can tinker with their node code. Say I friend a malicious entity, decide I don't like them anymore, and take back their access. It could be too late.See, this is the kind of technical detail I was hoping for. Real life examples and a vague outline of how they're going to tackle them."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've been particularly impressed with their amazing ability to avoid mentioning any details about the projects implementation.The following is a list of features the future might bring (if I understand the project page correctly: http://www.joindiaspora.com/project.html)OpenIDI assume this is the standard they will use for authentication? What about this encryption business? Do they intend to modify the OpenID protocol to do some sort of challenge/reponse step and exchange keys?Voice-over IPI'm at a loss for what this means or how it is important to the project. Are they implementing a specific protocol, using a particular libary, or are they going to attempt rolling their own system?Distributed Encrypted BackupsBackups of what? Distributed why? How?Instant Messaging protocolThere are a plethora of existing protocols they could use. Since they haven't specified a particular one, does it mean they haven't decided which one to use yet? Are they planning to build their own \"encrypted\" protocol? Magic?UDP integrationWhoa. Integration. With UDP? Mind-blowing. I'm assuming that they'll be building the broad-casting bits of the P2P architecture on UDP. It's what most distributed, encrypted P2P networks do.Oh right, there are already dozens of them and have been for years. I guess these kids are just too young to remember:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE -\n- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/default.aspx (before it got bought by MS and turned into corporate turf)\n- soulseek, gnutella, freenet, etc.Wonder how they're planning to break that extra 10x"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia. The internet is a canvas – of which, we paint broad and fine strokes of our lives with. It is a forward extension of our physical lives; a meta-self comprised of ones and zeros. We are all that is digital: If we weren’t, the internet wouldn’t either.sounds like pr-speak."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What people here might really wanna know it's that the source code will be released under AGPL (you must let your users download the source of the program they're running).In my opinion for boosting commercial adoption, a MIT license is truly needed. I know it's not in their interest to do so (they plan to build a wordpress.com-like hosting)."
}
] | en | 0.958354 |
Worse Than Useless: Personal Security Images | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Security is not about guaranteeing anything, it's about making it more difficult to break in. The lock on your front door does nothing to guarantee a burglar won't enter your home, it just makes it more difficult to do so.The examples he gives either have the potential of alerting the user to the spoof (via the missing image) or require significantly more work to spoof the user (via a complex proxy at the router level or obtaining a homographic URL).Either way, the barrier to stealing users credentials has gone up, which is exactly what security measures are intended to do. Hardly useless, and definitely not \"worse than useless\"."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The article fails to recognize the value of the \"security images\" to the banks. The banks have used these images to satisfy the requirements of the FFIEC guidance \"Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment\"[1].Any complaints about the value of the security images should not be addressed to banks. You should direct your complaints to the FFIEC and/or to your banks regulator (OTS, OCC or NCUA).[1] http://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/Auth-ITS-Final%206-22-11%20%28FFIEC..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "BMO, Bank of Montreal uses these along with a security phrase. Its absolutely ridiculous that this is mandated by some standard, but there is no guidance on password strength itself. BMO has a strict only 6 characters (no more, no less) policy. Oh yeah, before anyone asks: No numbers, no special characters. Choosable by the customer when opening the account."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Unless, of course, a reasonable implementation were used, tying the image to a cookie and using the browser security to prevent it being sent to different domains; if you're on a subdomain of a bank already, there are far more effective ways to execute an attack."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The image is a way for the user to \"manually\" authenticate the server. It's a weak authentication because an attacker could easily get a copy of this image once he knows the user identifier and forge a apparently valid page.The most secure authentication is the one using security cards/key with a challenge code sent by the bank and the response returned by the key using bi-key cryptography. The one with usb connections would be most efficient, convenient and secure.Nfc on phones may look more attractive, but phones are insecure."
}
] | en | 0.923157 |
A replacement for email | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What a dreadful idea.How could I prove that you wrote me what you wrote me in the first place if you could edit your email after I received it?Email is not facebook, people."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is brilliant in its simplicity. It would be very feasible to implement on a single web server, but what are some ways to extend it into a protocol?If multiple servers mirror an email thread, how does one edit what he has already sent/posted? I think this can be done by using a public key encryption scheme, so that only the person who published it with their key can edit it on the multitude of servers that share this new email protocol."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We are developing external and internal communication tool that has all the features that you have described.\nIt called Discourse - http://www.discoursehq.com \nWe are releasing new version on 3rd of October that is more flexible and generic then current one - if anyone would like a beta invite please let me know!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "IM2000 has some interesting ideas applicable to some of the issues raised here."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Isn't the 'unsend' feature one of the things Microsoft was trying to achieve with the Trusted Computing malarkey?"
}
] | en | 0.991978 |
Ask HN Air or Pro? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I love my Retina MBP. I had a 13\" Air before.The Air was great for most things but too many tabs or certain websites with intense Flash movies or Javascript would send the fans spinning and really make it churn. This rarely happens on my rMBP.Also I spent close to $1800 for a top of the line 13\" MBA. My rMBP is the base model and cost me about $2200. I feel it was easily worth the $400 difference.The rMBP is heavier though, and sacrifices some portability. A retina MBA with more power to avoid the chugging would be my first choice if it were available."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have a 2012 13\" air (i7, 8gb ram) at home and I use a 15\" pro (2.3i7, 16g ram) for work. The screen on the pro is amazing, as is the speed (as you'd expect given those specs). I use a cinema display at the office but can work just as well on the laptop screen (my work is coding, so Xcode most of the day) and haven't found anything that caused the pro to struggle (I've not noticed any UI lag either).That said, I still love (and probably slightly prefer) the air because its so small and light (ergonomically i prefer a 13\" laptop), and the difference in power for most tasks is not that big (though its definitely noticeable when using Xcode on the air). If you took them both away and told me to get one, I'd get the air again."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've worked solely on a MBA (plus external monitor) for 3+ years now. I started with a 13\" and then moved down to an 11\". Doing a variety of design work, etc. and I love the simplicity of a smaller machine that I can throw in my bag without worrying about weight. Hook it up to a monitor and you're good for serious stuff too. I'd go for the MBA!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "What will you be doing? Unless you're spending your day in a heavy application (i.e. Photoshop, XCode, Eclipse), I'd say the Air, hands-down. I'm on my third one and am hoping to never get another brand of laptop - I love it. You just can't beat the size.It has to hustle to keep Photoshop or XCode open longer than an hour or so, though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Had a rMBP, it was nice and light, but still \"big\". Sold it and got a maxed out 13\" Air, haven't looked back. About the only thing I miss is the nice GPU in the rMBP, but I only miss that with games.No speed complaints with the Air. Super portable."
}
] | en | 0.971785 |
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