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AT&T to Buy DirecTV for $48.5 Billion | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The race is officially on!\nCan the Telecoms retain their terrible monopolies by becoming streaming providers Faster than the Streaming providers (Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime et al) trying to become Content creators?AT&T is running out of customers to squeeze in the cell phone plans market. This is the next frontier for terrible service, exorbitant prices and regulated monopolies..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Use this as a perfect example to explain to people why Net Neutrality matters."What incentive does AT&T have to bring you good streaming experience for Netflix, Hulu, or heck even Youtube when they'd much much MUCH rather you were buying DirecTV from them?""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Think. How would the content providers - any of them, from Disney to Facebook - get their content at the consumer without the data-distributors, from Comcast to AT&T ?\nThe saying is internet kills the middleman, but this is the real middleman that needs to be killed, and just as our roads are free and open to everyone, so should the digital roads be."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Do many young people watch TV anymore? It seems like netflix + youtube scratches that itch."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is getting dangerous. Imagine a world where a public transportation company owns the network of roads too and denies any other transportation company to come up besides their own."
}
] | en | 0.927907 |
Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott.“These numbers do not reflect the proportion of women active in the field,” said Gagliardi, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota. “Some 50 years ago the gender distribution in Quantum Molecular Sciences may have been so skewed, but nowadays things have changed.”To illustrate the point, Krylov maintains the Women in Theoretical Chemistry web-directory, listing “more than 300 female scientists holding tenured and tenure track academic positions or equivalent positions in industry and other research establishments pursuing research in theoretical and computational chemistry, biochemistry, material science, as well as theoretical molecular/atomic physics and biophysics.”That doesn't illustrate the point unless you compare that 300 against the number of male scientists. If there are 3000+ male scientists in the field, then it's not crazy that only 5-10% of the members/talks are given by women.300 women is undoubtedly just a drop in the bucket compared to everyone working in "theoretical and computational chemistry, biochemistry, material science, as well as theoretical molecular/atomic physics and biophysics", a ridiculously broad set of topics spanning multiple large departments at every major university (most of which have little business at a quantum chemistry conference, of course)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm not convinced there is a problem. It sounds like some women seized upon this conference as an opportunity to point out a perceived bias.The article is clearly written to suggest that you are either with us or against us and I take issue with that. The academic content of that kind of conference should not be limited by a speaker's gender, even if that means there are no women speakers. Just to be clear, I would feel the same if there were no male speakers"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Wow that Kress guy is really missing the point. He keeps yelling true things without realizing that they're irrelevant."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There may very well be systematic bias against women by the organizers of this conference, but this article does a terrible job making such an argument.Even anecdotally, citing specific women who have done good work in this very specialized field, submitted a quality paper, and were rejected would go a long way towards corroborating the claim this conference is excluding women. Without knowing how many women submitted papers, and some (even subjective) indication of the quality of those papers, there is no way to judge whatever bias towards women this conference may have.Also, are all identifying data stripped from the papers before consideration? If there is no way for the judges to even know whether the paper was submitted by a woman, how could they discriminate against her? If this is not the process, it may merit consideration for future conferences."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Salon articles are always to be taken with a grain of salt.Once again though, this appears to be an issue of equal representation. The classic dilemma is that if you have no speakers belonging to X group, you'll appear to be exclusive. Yet if you hire a few speakers of X group just for the sake of having them, then that becomes tokenism and is hardly beneficial in the long term.Treating the symptoms is only a band-aid. The condition will exacerbate, unless the root cause (which is a sociological one, in many cases) is examined and treated. One must also evaluate whether it is worth doing so."
}
] | en | 0.976352 |
Data visualization - 9 Years of Sleep | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I would love to have access to gmail's log data to check something similar (I study sleep). In my case, the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing before going to bed is checking my email. I bet I am not the only one."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This site does something similar based on when you tweet. It's reasonably accurate for me: http://www.sleepingtime.org/nahurst"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I used to adjust my sleep schedule on weekends like he does towards the end of the chart, but I have recently lost that ability. (I think I stopped caring what time it was, so I lose/gain just about two hours a day now. This gives me one day every two weeks where I am awake at 9am :)Someone should do this analysis with HN comment posting times. I only use IRC for being productive, which is not necessarily indicative of when I am awake ;)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Genius how he determined this."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I should be able to determine something similar to this in a few years time from RescueTime, with the added bonus of how long I wasted on certain activities."
}
] | en | 0.932114 |
Lenat (of Cyc) reviews Wolfram Alpha | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Google sort of has a preprocessor that does stuff like this. Probably not as much as Wolfram.You can see it when you search Google for things like:\"What time is it in Las Vegas\" (notice that it knows, and it also knows that you probably mean Las Vegas NV but might mean NM, and that Las Vegas NM is smaller)\"MSFT\" (e.g. a ticker)\"Who is the president of France\"\"16 USD in GBP\"From the stories, it SOUNDS like Wolfram can answer a lot more of these kinds of queries than Google, which makes me think that the best way to use a technology like this is to sell it to Google to plug in as their pre-search pre-processor to replace the simple ones they've already developed."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Thanks for this.Lenat's probably the best-positioned guy out there to back-infer some of alpha's design and limitations from a two-hour demo; this is the most informative summary I've seen."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'll be quite honest: I'm sure that Wolfram has made something truly, honestly amazing and perhaps even beautiful...to a geek. Much like one artist can appreciate the time and dedication required by another artist in creating a complex work, to the lay person it's still just random splotches of color.In fact, reading this review I'm reminded of the article about Git and merge algorithms that was on the front page recently. In all likelihood, Alpha will be amazing at what it does, without anyone worrying whether what it does is what people want. Maybe people like Google because it's fast and reasonably accurate, and the human brain is still a really amazing filter once you narrow down the data set sufficiently."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Would you trust any of the answers returned by such a system? Or would you double check them on Google?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If it's so impressive, then why does it need so much hype? Just release it already..."
}
] | en | 0.989531 |
Joel on Software: "By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java" | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "How many times does \"Joel on Software\" show up on this blog entry? I count 5 times, including the Title and email address. Pot...kettle...black."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If you can’t think of anything to say, maybe you should just up.Although Joel's writing a post about omitting needless words, I think this sentence needs an additional word.Sometimes I wonder if blogs could use a \"typo alert\" button."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Given the JVM startup times, shouldn't it say \"Please Wait.............Java Loves You\". Ha ha...ooops not really actually funny at all. I'll leave it though. Sorry.(I'm not bitter, I just had to restart tomcat over 50 times today. It has its upside: 12145ms x 50, enough time to read a couple of items on hacker news. I wonder how much this post will cost Sun? There will probably be a bug in their tracker by morning. Maybe Joel's just making an issue out of these little things so their bug tracking will be overwhelmed and they'll have to turn to FogBugz?)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Could we actually have some real conversation about the topic?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well, it has been pointed out before, but this is just too funny. I hadn't looked at joel's site for some time and I had to check some other posts to tell whether the blurbs under the real posts were there for humorous reasons or whether they were an actual part of the page template. Unfortunately the latter is true. He could just put \"Joel loves developers.\"What's there sounds like the same kind of marketing department cool-aid that the poor engineers at Sun are forced to put in their installers.Now, if you are tempted to say something like \"the inmates are running the asylum\" in Sun's case that may very well be true: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/santaclara/agn.htm :-)"
}
] | en | 0.953719 |
Ask YC: Which is easier to deploy/maintain: Python or Ruby apps? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It takes me ~10 min to deploy a Rails app (production ready) on a freshly installed Ubuntu server. To do that, I have to issue a SINGLE command that includes the IP, ssh port, and a password of the machine. The process includes setting up the server, downloading all of the necessary files, security updates, compiling and setting up the server (nginx), setting up rails, setting up database, loading database dump from the remote server, grabbing the app from svn, etc etc anything I want really. I issue the command and just forget about it and work on something else for ~10min. When I come back, the app is up and running and production ready! Wanna setup 10 servers? Just open up 10 terminals and you'll have 10 servers in 10min.How? Through the magic of capistrano: http://www.capify.org/getting-started/railsI've never seen anything else even come close to this level of simplicity.Seriously, that should be the LAST of your criteria as to which language, and more importantly, framework to pick. We went with Rails since it has better plugins/gems than Django. We don't want to waste our time re-implementing basics and Rails currently has the cutting edge libraries for web work... stuff that you will have to do yourself in other frameworks."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've found python much easier to deploy.Rails is just a pain.Python has a longer history on the web. Give cherrypy a try, which, although not as powerful as Rails, is lightning fast."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Here's a recipe for deploying django on ubuntu.http://www.jeffbaier.com/2007/07/26/installing-django-on-an-...Its really simple and takes negligible time. Django is also easily scaled as all sessions are stored on the database.I chose python because I had been using it for years and love the language. It also has a ton of libraries and support obviously.I chose Django after a horrible stint with Zope3. Especially now, django has some great documentation and a super helpful IRC channel."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Deploy: Ruby things. GEMs work better than EGGs, in part because there are fewer of them. Ruby makes OO easier.Maintain: Python things. There are so many EGGs! If you need a new package for something or other -- the JSON parser isn't fast enough or something -- someone has made an alternative already. Performance matters for maintenance -- scalable deployment is still not easy, or cheap -- and it helps that Python has a fast core and syntactic shortcuts to things like generators (memory efficient) and list comprehensions (CPU efficient)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Django has a less advanced schema evolution framework compared to ROR, making database updates harder. You need to kill the process to update the code, as opposed to ROR (i think).Python is a better language than Ruby. Python has better libraries for more advanced processing because it is so close to C."
}
] | en | 0.829067 |
Lessons from Dropbox - One Million Files Saved Every 15 minutes (2011) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "'Just buy bigger machines' - Uhh I mean that works but that isn't really a solution is it?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Anyone care to elaborate on:\n"Poll - Polling 30 Million Clients All Over the World Doesn't Scale"Rather interested on defining an HTTP notification structure."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Original HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319667"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This article is 2 years old"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> Use PythonIt may be a good fit for Dropbox, but that doesn't mean it's going to be a good fit for your company. You're probably best off using what's suitable to the task and that you have a team that's familiar with. If your programmers are all, 'let's use C' and they've got a good argument for that suiting a particular problem domain, (and you're not somehow tied down to using another language by need to work with what another company is doing...) then it may be a good idea to use C. Same with Lisp or Python or....There are going to be trade-offs there; (what library support is available, what sort of community of programmers you're buying into when you choose that language, how the semantics let you fit it into a particular production/design paradigm, are the really major ones to me.) So, it's not quite free choice. But those are discussions that ought to happen if you're going to sit down and choose a language."
}
] | en | 0.760597 |
Why Hardware Development is Hard, Part 2: The Physical World is Unforgiving | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There are plenty of hardware startups, you just don't hear about them a lot. The AVR (used in Arduino) was designed by a few guys from Norway, which sold their idea to Atmel.The development costs are higher, but with some investment it's certainly possible for a small startup to create new CPUs and GPUs. Gaining market share is more difficult which often necessitates a huge established chip company as a backer."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As another data point. A couple days back there was an article about a hardware kickstarter product, where the designers did not add reverse polarity protection to their power socket. (For the life of me I can't find it now...).So it is not just in the high performance hardware space, but even relatively simple hardware projects suffer due to lack of experience."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> You never hear about a new team successfully making a high-performance microprocessor.Not on Hackernews, but this does happen. Microprocessors do get less spotlight because the costs involved in developing and producing them are huge. You also don't hear too often about a team successfully making a high-performance compiler."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Another important factor: bringing it to market doesn't scale up or down like software does. You can make a program and test it on a single user; or, at the other end, with a bit of pre-planning you can scale upwards by buying more EC2/AWS capacity on a credit card.NRE (one-off costs) on ASIC design is very large. PCB manufacture costs have gone down, thanks to companies like OSHpark, but you still have to assemble them. Then there's CE and UL requirements to actually sell into the market (somewhat evadeable if you're doing "kits" or "prototypes".As a result, you can't "fail early, fail often" without very deep pockets. And in some product categories "failure" gets people killed (Toyota passim)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My background is in hardware, especially RF, and it's fun to talk to pure software guys that "understand" RF and radios just because they set up a wireless network at their apartment or made a cantenna. I invite them to hang out with some world class engineers that I've worked for in the past that design microwave networks, test semiconductors, cell systems or technical ilk of that caliber. You really aren't experienced in the field without 30,000 hours of dedicated effort."
}
] | en | 0.977412 |
The Sorry State of Music Startups | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's an ill wind that blows no good. The fact that the labels are killing the startups trying to stream their music could be the best thing that ever happened to indie music. TheSixtyOne is happily profitable streaming that.http://thesixtyone.com"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Music startups are mostly focused on the consumer right now. The real opportunity I think lies in empowering the artists. Give the artists the tools to do things without the labels and the consumers will benefit better. Without the artists on board (most likely without the label), the experience will never be there.Correct me if i'm wrong, but it seems thesixtyone is a play for the artists ie- upload your tracks here. In turn, by empowering the artists, the consumers have an awesome experience."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "While there are very few hard facts in the article to support his claims, I tend to agree. The current business models for music start-ups do not work.That being said, music industry executives are not as dumb as we see them. The music industry has a hold on America that is not going to fall soon. The industry is pushing artists to sign 360 degree contracts so that record labels do not rely solely on record sales. This will encourage distribution of free music in order to increase tour sales which record companies are mostly cut out of. This will make the ultimate surrender date a change of model, not a killing of the industry.The venture industry is out now because they realized that the record companies control the market and aren't too eager to give others control of their product."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The labels are so ignorant that it's unbelievable.The sooner musicians get rid of them the better..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I don't envy the position that sites like Pandora and imeem are in. Getting a fair shake with the major labels is tough.However, there is plenty of room to do interesting things without touching music tainted by the Big 4 labels. We are doing it with Mugasha in regards to electronic dance music and TheSixtyOne is doing it with indie music. The niche is your friend, the major labels are probably not.Also, I think it's time to realize that basing your business model on advertising isn't working. These services are going to need to start getting creative with their business models and start making money on things people want and not things people hate (ads)."
}
] | en | 0.960043 |
How to Fix the Uncommunicative Table | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think the tables he chose were examples of bad table design rather than anything inherently wrong with using tables per se. It would have been more insightful had a better table example been used followed by a the new representation with the exact same data. This would have made it easier to assess the relative strengths of each approach.I don't know the data very well, but I think the table could be improved by doing the following:Remove the columns with only one value and make part of the header or footer.For the columns where nearly all of the values are identical, a light highlight on the different values followed by a slight graying of the common value would have worked.A small space could have been added to the bottom of every fifth row to make it easier to track horizontally.The far right columns could have been aligned so that the numbers on either side of slash lined up with the ones above or below."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I think there is some promise in the circos technique, but the author would be well served to eliminate some of his rhetoric.In particular, he should recall Tufte's advice that every visualization should serve to answer a question. Tables are very good for looking up information, in much the same way that a telephone book is good at providing the published phone number of a specific person or business. Despite reading through two examples, I am still unsure what relationships the visualization is particularly adept at highlighting.I don't know what \"agnostic to the data domain\" means, but I assume that it suggests that the visualization has application regardless of the questions being asked of the data. That attitude implies that the author fails to understand what makes visualization interesting and useful in the first place."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This reminds of of some of the graphs they have in wired. While I'd love to have a table to backup every visualization, I think if you're trying to communicate the data you need to have both. I wish I knew who designs the graphs for wired, I'd follow his work any day."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think I honestly prefered the tables, despite their flaws - although he makes some good points. Maybe it just takes some getting used to."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This is pretty cool. The only problem is that the graphs are slightly unconventional, so people may be put off by them at first.They may seem less intuitive than other graphs, but it's probably more a matter of familiarity. We understand other graphs so well in part because we've been exposed to them so thoroughly."
}
] | en | 0.987491 |
Ask HN: is it wrong to sell a software product you made to your employer? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Congratulations! You have a seed for your own Enterprise/B2B startup. This is how I have seen quite a few such startup sprout. Now, you have to be careful not to let your employer take control of the IP you develop for addressing this problem. The key criteria is that you didn't come up with the solution while you were with your employer.Talk about problem but don't talk about your solution in the same domain as your employer while you are with your employer.Don't discuss the solution with anyone at your workplace or other employees, you are free to talk about the problem and problem space. Don't try to suggest or sell to your employer your solution. Don't use company time and equipment to develop the solution and any associated activities like documentation, presentation, emails or anything to do with your solution. Don't create paper/electronic trail that can date that you came up with solution while you were working with your employer.Keep developing prototype solution on the side, keep identifying potential buyers, investors, partners etc. (never discuss your solution, just the problem). Focus on learning problem space, key players and solutions in the space. Become expert in problem space inside and outside company. Keep incorporating in your prototype the key problems and features potential buyers indicate. Your prototype need to be a reasonably working solution for B2B buyers to buy.Once you are reasonably confident about potential of your solution and working prototype, quit your job. Give the impression of you are traveling and relaxing while continue working on your solution for however long your signed agreements, NDA, etc specify (typically 6-12 months is reasonable time after which anything you do belongs to you). Then start your company and go out sell to potential buyer. Avoid having your last employer as first buyer.Good luck!ed: IANAL."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Many companies have clauses in your offer/contract for situations like this. They often own what you do in your spare time as well as while you are on the clock, as the lines are often blurred.I think the first step would be to talk to HR (or if you don't want to do that, take a look at your contract, read it closely, or hire a lawyer) to see what would happen if worst came to worst (if your company took legal action, regardless of if you develop it while working for them, or shortly after quitting)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Does it represent a conflict of interest to build that software in my spare time and then try to sell it to my existing company as a solution?In my opinion, no. Unless you've cross some proprietary line which would allow them to try to sue you for it anyway, use whatever leverage you feel you have for your own benefit."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I seems you have identified a problem that is not unique to your employer, and have a solution to it. Unless some clause in your contract specifically prohibits you working on this in your own time I don't see a problem."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Would your company allow you to develop the software on company time as part of your regular work?"
}
] | en | 0.979988 |
So Long Apple. The Party's Over | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I never really understood why it was Apple's responsibility to write the JDK for OS X, and not Sun's..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "unprecedented arrogance of Steve Jobs and companyUnprecedented?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Anyone remember this?\"Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain...\" -- SJhttp://www.informit.com/discussion/index.aspx?postid=d1e63fd..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is really evil. Apple needs to realize that people use the Java JDK for purposes other than writing enterprise Java applications. Some run Python code above the JVM (Jython), for example. I use it to compile Java syntax to native javascript using GWT. Bad move Apple.\n"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This article would have been so much more interesting if it had said, \"Not only did Leopard not ship with Java 6, but Apple, in typical fashion, apparently thinks it has no obligation to its customers to inform them it replaced Java with Haskell\" :)"
}
] | en | 0.940894 |
Will Developers Ante Up for a Gambling API? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> According to Betable’s Griffin, social games average $1 of monthly revenue per user. Existing gambling games, which Griffin says are mostly boring, average $300 of monthly revenue per user.That seems way, way off. $300 average would require either all of your players are hardcore and put in a lot of money, or you have a decent number of players at the high end skewing it. Assuming they're getting something out of it (at least some of the time), this number seems to be quite... deceptive. I'd love to see the data behind it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is very interesting for use with a mock gambling game - one where users cannot cash out. Users can buy in-app chips to keep playing. Is this the entire purpose of it? I'd think actual gambling online, even with no house edge, has proven to be a \"den of thieves\" (Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet) how would this actually solve the problem of trust?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm curious as to how this model will work if users can't easily deposit money online. I can only imagine they will inevitably face the same problems as online poker where credit card companies and banks will block any transaction related to gambling sites or 3rd party eWallet proxies.In the early online poker years, you could easily deposit directly from your bank or credit card. Then banks started blocking these transactions. The online casinos came up with the eWallet proxies such as Neteller that served as an intermediary between the banks and the poker sites. Those too were blocked. Then gift cards became the main funding source, and eventually those were blocked. Eventually the process ended up with direct wire transfers or payment-by-phone. As each deposit method was blocked, it became harder for the casual players to get money online and they stopped playing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For a couple of years I've been cooking a gambling API and while there is a huuuge market for that, execution is what separates wheat from chaff. Here are two key things I believe will make it a winner:1. Make it easy for developers to integrate in their apps.2. Make it easy for users to deposit/withdraw/bet money.So, if I am playing online poker on my iPad, I may call, raise or go all-in on very single hand. Can your API do that? What means all-in in that case? All I have in the bank?Allow me to move $100 from my account to any game I feel in the mood to play. Let me deplete that bag and go for more or just quit in the middle and get the rest back. Can your API do that?Btw, call it iChips and put it on the app store (there is already one app with that name, but fight for the name) and use colorful casino chips everywhere.Again, execution is king..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Interesting stuff and the ARPU generated from gambling revs will ofcourse be a massive draw to devs looking to use the Betable API. We're working on a social sports prediction game with a football(soccer) focus at launch but have consciously avoided building in gambling mechanics. We will run with an affiliate model where we can achieve around 15-30% of a users lifetime value from the provider.Our aim is to focus on the gameplay and have the cash betting as an extra. With such tricky global regulations this frees us up to pick and choose partners that meet local laws and expand into regulated markets with new models.Of course Betable would prove a great expansion of our product in future.Interested to hear HN's thoughts (affiliate vs betable) and would love you all to play and inform our beta later in the year: www.betstars.co.uk"
}
] | en | 0.96622 |
HackerSkills Game – Level 1 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Cute concept. I liked the CTF game from Stripe[1], it progressed more quickly and there were no ads. It felt like a more genuine challenge.Some interesting Google results show for hackerskills.com [2].[1] Stripe CTF 2.0: https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag-20[2] Skip ahead?: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.hackerskills.com"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "If only "hacking" was as easy as finding passwords within JavaScript. Got bored after level 6 or so, meh."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Also I'm not sure if it's part of the game, but I can't get the page to load after the first level."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Level 7 is broken. First six levels consist of searching the JS for a password. Pass."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Those awful pop-up ads render this pretty much unplayable."
}
] | en | 0.884858 |
India's Pointless Search for 'Black Money' | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This article is written by someone with the same partisanship as an extreme right wing Republican in the US talking about minimum wage or gay marriage. There is too much sarcasm and too much talking down to in there. The reality lies somewhere in the middle.For example none of the Indians I know ever said their country will become rich if all the undisclosed wealth is siezed by the government. The reality is there is way too much corruption and the majority of the ill-gotten wealth is in India. In all but the biggest cities the real estate is not priced to market per the government and so the property is registered at 1/4th the value (for e.g.) and so taxes paid on only that amount. The rest is not disclosed and reinvested into the real estate market. There is a lot of that going on. What ever the Prime minister is doing about talking to Swiss officials is just posturing and he is also sure that not much is going to come out of it but some political victory."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "There are two sides to this entire Black Money story.First is the bitter reality of the parallel economy that runs in India, amounting to huge revenue losses to the governments each year. The black money, not only robs to country and its citizens of their revenues, but also can then be used into funding terror activities, because this amount may very well be transferred via Hawala Channels ( they won't wire black money to tax havens, would they ? ). This is the money that can be used by the government to increase the services, this is the money that was intended to be transferred to the citizens in the form of increased infrastructure and better services. Ultimately citizens end up paying hefty amount of money for really crappy services.the author is right in suggesting that this stash, if it even existed in no longer lying in the swiss banks, and has been rerouted to other investment opportunities, and possibly rerouted to Indian markets itself, via different channels (like the controversial participatory notes, shell companies etc). Both the current and the previous government have provided enough room for managing the black money, and I'll be surprised if India is successful in extracting any significant amount of money (order of 10 Mil. $), or to extract only account closure reports for the Indians who held account in various swiss banks and banks at other tax havens like Liechtenstein.The other side of story is that it has become an issue that attracts eye balls. The amount that is suggested to be at stake is huge enough to attract the attention of even the upper middle class. People are very much dissatisfied with the performances of subsequent governments, and that made the Black Money Issue something on which political campaigns can be built upon. This issue was advertised in such a way that would attract the attention of average person, who wouldn't go into the details of the issue, by using headlines like, "We won't have to pay any taxes for a decade", "Every citizen would be given X sum of money", "India's revenue deficit would be bridged" etc.As the events and outcomes of this election suggests, it worked. The current government even managed to show the act of constituting the Special Investigation Team to look into this matter, as a voluntary act of being righteous, when in reality they were just following the Supreme Court's directive to do so within a week.Curious days ahead."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Someone should write an article about how some Indian writers need to stop eviscerating "millions of indians" based on imagined opinions.This article is downright insulting. I am an Indian, and I don't believe that the "black money" is going to solve all of india's problems. That isn't even the point. The investigation is a good thing not because of the actual sums of money, but because some extremely powerful people who have stashed away the money need to be brought down. As the author himself says, the siphoned-off money is used to manipulate markets and elections. Shouldn't it be taken off their hands?And trust me, hardly anyone who ever read a newspaper would take Baba Ramdev seriously. The author just kinda threw that in - "hey check out how stupid these indians are... they listen to a yoga teacher lol""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The site has a broken browser sniffer. On IE11 it throws a black layer at 90% opacity over the content and tells me that I should upgrade to a different browser...What's the point of blocking out the entire content like that? If you really want to nag me based on some embarrassingly outdated user agent regex, go ahead, but at least have the common sense of offering a close button so I could still view the site despite your JavaScript competence."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "> (very legitimate) resentment felt toward businessmen, farmers and politicians by salaried IndiansResentment toward farmers? You gotta be kidding me. I agree with the argument that most of the illegitimate wealth get invested in India in one way or other and most of it might not be present in Swiss banks and several other things from the article, but above comment shows the author has no idea how Indian society is operating internally. I have lived both in village and in the city, I've seen salaried city/village people having many opinions/feelings for "farmers" but resentment was not one of them."
}
] | en | 0.984584 |
With 34M+ Visitors a Month, Twitch Raises $8.3M in New Venture Funding | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Gotta hand it to Emmett Shear for finding and doubling down on the one genuinely great use for live video streaming that exists today.There was a lot of excitement and competition in live streaming from 2005 - 2008. In the end it all turned out to be a giant waste of energy and money. No one succeeded in a big way.I'm not sure I buy the idea that "electronic sports" will be as big as Twitch thinks. I certainly don't think it will ever compete with real sports programming. I do think it's very real though and Twitch is a really great service that will continue to grow.Maybe in another 10 years we'll find that there are two good uses for live streaming."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Twitch has one effect I wonder how many others figured out, it saves gamers money. By watching streamers play games I am interested in I have managed to save a good amount of money. It used to be I had to rely on word of mouth or worse, reviews. Now I can see the games in action. I can hear the enjoyment or frustration of the players.I can see how game developers in turn can leverage it into more sales, there are many big names in Twitch and getting them to play your game is a great way to gain exposure. The risk of course is falling on your face in front of thousands.So I am glad to hear they are getting more funding, they certainly changed how I select games to play, let alone what I keep in the background while working."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Had no idea justin.tv went through Y Combinator (then again, I'm pretty new 'round these parts)As someone who likes following pro Starcraft and League of Legends, I really appreciate what Twitch gives us access to. I've heard people groaning about Twitch in favor of Own3d, but I never understood the negativity towards Twitch. I hope they keep it up."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Recently, Own3d.tv shut down. Twitch immediately picked up the slack, and many top-tier gamers started streaming there. Often, you can find top gamers getting 10k-20k viewers as they play games like League of Legends and Warcraft."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I hace conflicting feelings on twitch. As a french user, some streams are just aweful to watch because of the lag. I'm speaking about Twitch's lag where all users even at 240p (sic!) have their video shuttering. I understand they can't treat each stream the same, like,thses LoL streams having 10k viewers versus a stream with 10. But video is not like text: you can't rely on the user just waiting a little more for a page to load while you are giving full bandwidth to the most popular one. Streams lagging on a streaming website have a much more negative effect."
}
] | en | 0.933246 |
Rackspace launches Performance Cloud Servers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Wouldn't poke them with a 20' long stick.When we spoke to their rep about data security and access in the UK they made no guarantees about our stuff being secure from meddling by their own staff or external agencies. They literally told us that we'd be better off elsewhere and refused to comment further.we're in a position where we have UK data protection to consider and shipping data out of the EEA is illegal for us. Obviously this is still a problem if someone takes it.In the end we ended up with a wholly UK owned DC and company."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/ (scroll down a bit) has the pricing, they start at $0.68/hr for 15GB of ram, 40gb ssd system disk, 150gb ssd data disk and 4 vcpus. Significantly cheaper (however with lower specs) than the cheapest Amazon offering with an SSD ($3.10/hr I believe)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Having used rackspace for the past 5 years, I'm happy to see some more performance machines in the cloud.We have quite a CPU intensive infrastructure so will be benchmarking the new performance servers against themselves to see if it is still cheaper to scale out then scale up."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I used Rackspace back in 2000 for my first startup after our existing hosting solution could not take the load.This was a huge mistake!Rackspace canceled our contract without warning and without the ability to get our data. Their customer care was extremely rude and completely incompetent. I will never ever host anything again with Rackspace.Luckily we had external backups and were able to purchase our own hardware and install it in a local Boston data center."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "wouldn't touch rackspace with a stick. We tried them for 6 months - particularly because we weren't price sensitive and wanted the "fanatic service" they promised. The service however is terrible bordering on non-existant. Digital Ocean or Linode on the other hand - price + service I'm happy with!"
}
] | en | 0.96502 |
Ask HN: Which Android phone would you buy (Nexus 4 sold out) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you have a phone that you could manage to get by with for another few weeks, I'd wait for the Nexus 4.If you really can't wait, there are still some good options. The S III is one of the best phones ever made. The Note II is just as nice as the Nexus 4 and the S III, but it might be too big for some people, myself included. Also, you might be able to find the Galaxy Nexus, which is the phone I currently use. The Google version is no longer for sale, but you might be able to find a brand new one on Ebay, or if you aren't comfortable with that, some of the wireless carriers might still be selling them."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "A Samsung Galaxy S III with Cyanogenmod 10, which is usable as a daily driver- or -If I could deal with the size and pending a usable CM10 build for it, a Galaxy Note II, which is essentially a giant-screened SGS III with monstrous battery life and a pen (which won't be usable under CM10).Both support 64GB microSD cards, unlike the N4."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Wait for the Nexus 4. I've had one stock Android phone (Nexus S 4G) and 6 non-stock. Stock beats custom skins, hands down. I know CM is (mostly) always an option, but the hassle is reminiscent of trying to remove bloatware from a Windows PC."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Wait till it's back in stock -- as a developer you want to be seeing the flagship model and Nexus is it. And I say this to you as an Apple fanboy who just ordered a Nexus to make sure I know what's going on in the other side of mobile."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In its place I'd get the Galaxy Note 2, I really like the big screen."
}
] | en | 0.992737 |
Nudge users towards goals with annoying CSS3 arrows | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Wow, they're right. It's really annoying.At least they're honest."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Surely adult sites will put this to good use."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Why is jQuery needed? Shouldn't it be just a few new CSS3 stuff and <img class=\"nudge>?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Awesome concept and I think it has some potential to evolve but for now I see two problems. 1) The motion makes it too distracting from other page content (at a sub-conscious level) so you may as well just have a blank pages with the action item as nothing else can be consumed. 2) If you're trying to use the arrow to identify the real action item on a page littered with ads, this will just make it look more like an ad."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I still prefer the <blink> tag."
}
] | en | 0.972076 |
The Startup’s Guide to Budget Design | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Here's another way of looking at it.Visual branding (Which is really all we're talking about here. It's logos, etc. Not many of the other things that sit in the design/ux skill set) is directly related to the product/market fit of your company.Harrods and Wallmart have different branding because they're aimed at different markets and are selling different things.What have we learned about building startups of late? That people's original ideas of their product/market are often way out. As you start pushing our MVPs and getting real feedback the original ideas about product and market get pushed in new and interesting directions.So investing a lot of time and money in strong visual branding at an early stage in a startup is often going to be a mistake. The market the brand is targeting and the values that the brand is trying to communicate will almost certainly change as the startup progresses.Indeed, with the right perspective, you can look at the lean startup process as being a brand discovery process. My approach to branding startups is now to start cheap and neutral, and then refine later on as product/market fit becomes clearer.If folks find this idea resonates, they might like find these of interest:* https://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/What-is-a-lean-approach-...* https://www.quora.com/At-what-point-should-branding-become-a...* http://www.slideshare.net/willevans/introduction-to-leanux-b..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You might want to correct the \"use iStock\" part of your article: \nThe whole point of having a logo, business name or design mark is so that it will be unique in the marketplace. How can your logo be unique if you're using a royalty-free file that millions of other people could have downloaded? Besides violating the iStockphoto Content License Agreement, using an image in this way also infringes upon the rights of the artist who created the file. If these aren't reasons enough, good luck trying to develop or enforce rights in conjunction with a logo that uses a royalty-free image.http://www.istockphoto.com/article_view.php?ID=616"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm a designer and I have to say that this article is dead on: It's about the right approach for your budget.I think people tend to get into problems when their level of expectations don't match their budget. So if you have less than $500 don't expect a real designer to treat you better than a full service agency. Also don't hire an agency unless you have someone on your staff who's a real point person and actually knows something about the project domain."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I found an amazing designer who did the logo for NodeSocket (http://static.nodesocket.com/home/images/logo.png) for $300. Best money ever spent, he did a fabulous job."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I can't wait until people doing start-ups realise that design should come first. Not only the aesthetics, but making it usable. Most start-ups I've worked for say they wished they had hired me when they had started, because there are so many problems that good design can solve.I would place most emphasis on hiring a designer or find a design co-founder. The more common option, is a technical founder with a understanding of good design/usability, that seems to get you quite far too."
}
] | en | 0.959637 |
Computer Crime, Then and Now | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "From Article: One of his friends is a 15 year old hacker who goes by the name of Cosmo; he's the one who discovered the Amazon credit card technique described above. And what are teenage hackers up to these days?Adapted from the Evil Overlord list[1]: 12. One of my advisors will be a 15-year-old hacker. Any flaws in my computer security that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.These kids should be paid to find and report these security holes, not arrested. They're producing very valuable information in their boredom.[1]http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "When you think about it, a supermarket authenticates your identity to a higher standard when you purchase beer more than many of the companies that you do non-trivial business with. Kind of pathetic.For a random hacker to compromise your personal security, they need to find the last four digits of a credit card number that is relatively easy to derive. That's scary. Much scarier is that a not-so-random hacker with even a casual personal acquaintance can utterly destroy you."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I remember having a very good time reading Mitnick's \"Art of Deception\" ten years ago.A very good overview of what is social engineering, its methods, risks and consequences."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "How about a credit card anonymization service, such that the bank allows you to generate a virtual 'card number' useful for payments to only one merchant?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Tl;dr use social engineering - computers are not the weak point, people are.True."
}
] | en | 0.965915 |
Crayola colors 1903 to 2010 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I find the topic of color dictionaries fascinating. I compiled some information while working on an app here: http://colordictionary.info and made my color dictionary data available for download as a Ruby hash here: http://colordictionary.heroku.com/data.rb"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Here's some more information on the origin of the picture - http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/01/crayons_and_cho..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I was talking with someone the other day about web design and caught myself saying something about \"the flesh color\". Thanks, Crayola. (http://contexts.org/socimages/files/2008/08/flesh-4.jpg)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I remember a moronic high school English teacher that didn't know what \"umber\" was and marking me down on a paper ... \"burnt umber\" of course being a Crayola color..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "http://www.weathersealed.com/2010/01/15/color-me-a-dinosaur/"
}
] | en | 0.835236 |
Ask HN: would you use an API to create attractive infographics? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "No. The reason is that good info-graphics designs coordinate the design of the element to strengthen the message of the element's data, and the overall layout and story to strengthen the message of all the data. I do not think it is possible to programmatically accomplish this, so I would not use the API."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Yes, I would. Seems it would be particularly useful for content marketers. I'd also like to know how you plan to do this with an API."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "No, but I am probably not your target market. Who do you imagine your target market to be?I urge you to consider that an infographic's job is to provide a compelling narrative that helps the viewer take away a new data-driven truth. Without the story, any machine-driven infographic would just be pointless, no matter how nice it looks."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I would if it was free, which probably isn't too helpful. I probably wouldn't if it cost money, unless it was integrated into something else I was using and was super easy to get going."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Maybe a wysiwyg infographic tool. How would you do this with just an API?"
}
] | en | 0.933343 |
Ask HN: Where I can post my startup to get beta users? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a lesson I have learned the hard way... You should know the answer this question before you start work on anything. If you're having trouble figuring out who your product is for, or how you're going to get in touch with prospects in an affordable way, you may have picked the wrong thing to work on.That said, it's definitely possible to recover from being in this position. It can just take a long time."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Sites that are relevant to your audience. Don't prioritize "startup" sites over industry-specific sites."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492109"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is super hard and there is no great answer. I've never met anyone who's had good luck with places like Betalist. (Though "Show HN" can work.)Realistically you are going to be tracking down your first 100 users yourself manually. Figure out who among your friends is a good fit and bug them. Then ask all your other friends who they know who'd be a good fit. If they don't click, follow up and ask why. If they click but then don't come back, follow up and ask why. If they become an active user, you are about to become best friends, always talking about what they like and why.You're going to feel like a mooch for a while -- like you're always asking your contacts for things and not giving back. This is normal.Also, this thread is on the front page, so post a link. Quick -- an opportunity!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "My best tools for getting beta users when I was kicking around Draft as an idea:1) Build your own audience through teaching. Stop looking for the one time hit. The odds your startup/project is going to last the long term are probably low, and if you move onto the next thing, you'll be in the same spot. Start trying to build an audience around you of people and students who share your world views, and build stuff for them. Blog, write articles, do webcasts, talk at one of the many co-working spaces that look for speakers now.Many people reading this are saying "But I don't know anything to teach." That's ridiculous. You just learned something last week that someone still doesn't know. I was teaching an entire Freshman Chemistry class as a Senior. There were juniors doing it. Sure, I took the class myself, but I didn't think I knew it well enough to even teach them. But I did the work to prepare, and teaching made me learn it backwards and forwards. Teaching isn't just good for the student; it's good for you."What is obvious to you is obvious to you" -John Medina (author of BabyBrainRules).There is so much you know that someone else would love to acquire.2) User testing. Get some beta testers simply by paying some people to use your app. (Read: Don't Make Me Think) I got some early folks on Usertesting.com. They were invaluable in finding problems and providing feedback in way you just don't get from some comments on a forum or thread about your product.3) Go do some volunteer/non-profit work for 2 hours a week. Join something that has a big group of people you can help out and commit to for awhile. You'll quickly find when you start working for groups have a cause much bigger than you, you make a lot of new friends. And when you help them out, they love helping you out. You'll have these new groups to reach out to kick around new ideas. And they are the first ones spreading your stuff. Even better if you can find some groups to help with stuff you are building, but definitely not required to get some great benefits."
}
] | en | 0.956024 |
Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is a well known practise in Spain. I com from Spain and I have always seen my family (parents and grandparents) drinking coffee after lunch and, then, doing a nap on the couch. Usually, we sit on the couch, take the coffee together and then every person takes a newspaper or magazine and after a few minutes of pseudo-reading everybody is sleeping or in a state of deep relaxation. We sleep for 20 minutes. That's all. I guess this is very common in Spain.This works well because we often take lunch at home. But, now that I have lunch at the office, I do the same. I have a 1 hour pause. The first half hour I have lunch, then I take the coffee and I go to the office to sleep on the floor, on a very thin mattress. If my brain is too active, I listen to a foreign radio station with my iPhone. I like to listen to ICI Radio Canada (in French). When I have lunch here, they broadcast the morning news and commentary. The news are about stuff happening in Quebec. It is interesting enough for me to forget the work stuff, and dull enough to induce me into a deeper relaxation state, which allows me to fall sleep fast. Being the broadcast in a foreing language, also helps to fall sleep. I often dream during this 20-30 minutes naps.An interesting detail is that I had to learn this habit. I remember being a child and being pissed off because I wasn't allowed to make noise after lunch. Now, that I'm a father, the roles are changing and I'm the one sleeping after lunch.By the way, at night, in order to fall sleep, I never take phones, tablets or computers to my bedroom. Instead, I take a shortwave radio and I tune the BBC world service news (fortunately, in Spain we can hear the broadcast directed to Africa). I put a 30 minutes timer on the radio and I almost never hear it stopping, because I fall sleep before. The day that the BBC will shut the SW broadcast, I guess I will take a bluetooth headset or speaker to my bedroom, but not the iPhone. It is very important to avoid computers in the bedroom."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I wish I was able to take naps. Do people can really fall asleep on command just like that when they have some spare minutes in their day? Shit, even when I am sleep deprived, I can barely fall asleep in my own bed, sometimes it literally take me hours.When I manage to take a nap it's usually involuntary by falling asleep in front of the TV."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I found this by experience few years ago. It works. \nAt first, I started with naps, and drinking coffee after. \nAccidentally I had few times coffee before nap, and noticed the difference.But I don't recommend this kind of nap all the time - because after a while it's not that effective.So, after years of napping (I'm an expert - I became so good at napping, that I can fall a sleep in 1-2 minutes, and wake up without alarm after 15-20 minutes), my advice would be: take a nap after lunch, between 1 and 3pm, without coffee before nap. Only in special situations, when you are under high pressure and lots of work, take "coffee nap" as they call it in the article."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I have read this before. I do not understand how you can sleep for 20 minutes. It takes more than 15 minutes just to fall asleep."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What is the tolerance level for naps in silicon valley companies (both big and small)? Does it depend on the role/position? Wouldn't they rather have all their employees down mugs of coffee instead of taking even a quick nap?"
}
] | en | 0.95953 |
Is the Better Business Bureau a protection racket? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's a cheap way for businesses to avoid litigation and bad publicity. Pay the fee, get a sticker to put on your door or website, and hope that most people think it's a mark of trust or quality. When consumers do complain, get them to vent on an online complaint form, provide some minimal mediation service, and hopefully the consumer won't take it any further.I followed the complaint process for the southern New England BBB about five years ago for a local car dealership and BBB member (the complaint concerned misleading advertising). I discovered that the complaint was erased from the BBB database for the dealership a few months after the process ended (it was supposed to stay up for three years). I told the BBB about it, they added it back again, but a year later it was again removed.Makes me wonder that the problem the LATimes identified (accredited businesses having more complaints but higher \"grades\") might actually be worse than described in the article."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've gotten a telemarketer call from the BBB here in Southern California recently and it reeked of the worst things Yelp is accused of.They led off with a yarn about how they had heard from consumers looking for information about my business. Uh huh. Pull the other one..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "My sister works for a small company and dealt with the BBB. This article is on par with their experience. Because they were a small company, they decided not to get involved with the BBB. Only then did they realize that if you do not you start out with a bad mark if someone looks up your company. I believe she said a \"C-\" was given to them by not being a member of the BBB. The only way to resolve this was to become a member. Talk about racketeering."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "i've talked to small business owners about the BBB in the past, just in incidental conversation, and they all used the exact same words to describe it: \"protection racket\"."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'd say they were similar to the credit ratings agencies* in the obvious conflict of interest in taking payments from the entities whose creditworthiness they \"objectively\" rate, except a little more willing to give A+ ratings to entities that don't even exist and rebill scammers. They're a non-profit, so there's probably nobody raking in particularly large sums of cash from their shady or sloppy ratings, but it would be daft to rely on them.*who, if there was any justice in the world, would have become the first casualties of the credit crunch, along with their business model"
}
] | en | 0.957102 |
In a CDN'd world, OpenDNS is the enemy | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This issue will be (is?) solved with the \"Client IP information in DNS requests \" DNS extension[1]. A year ago, David Ulevitch (OpenDNS's owner) mentions in HN post that he already got it working for all Google properties and few other CDNs (except Akamai).[2][1]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-...[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2941948"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This article is from 2010, back when the edns-client-subnet [1] draft wasn't even published.\nI believe most CDN's are now whitelisted with Google's and OpenDNS's edns list, so you'll much better results. also see edns-client-subnet demo [2][1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-sub...\n[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4174512"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This article misses one of the main reasons for people to use OpenDNS/Google DNS, which is to prevent ISP hijacking of domain names or redirection of unresolved domains.I personally use it because I am extremely uncomfortable with my ISP catching mistyped URLs and redirecting me to a page filled with ads, searches, and other bogus things."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"Fairly simple to set up BIND\" - well yes, for someone with access to the local gateway and the ability to install a caching DNS resolver, this is a good option.Unfortunately, most crappy DNS servers are with residential ISPs - and most residential users don't run anything near an usable distro on their gateways. For a user who's just competent enough to change the DNS settings, the \"slow CDN access\" versus \"spotty DNS\" tradeoff will be heavily weighted towards the first option."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's worth noting that ISP-run DNS services aren't entirely free of these issues either.In Australia, both Vodaphone and (to a lesser extent) Optus resolve all DNS queries from a server farm in a single location. It is unfortunate, because mobile clients are the perfect use-case for highly localized CDNs."
}
] | en | 0.860794 |
Getting traffic for your newly launched startup | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of building the \"seller\" or in this case, the \"lens renter\" side of the market, I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around \"Make Money Renting Your Gear\" or even more specific messaging \"Make up to $20/day/lens renting your unused gear\".You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as \"camera lens rental + city name\" has decent volume, as does \"lens name + rental\" and \"lens name + rental + city\", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:http://www.borrowlenses.com/http://www.cameralensrentals.com/http://www.lensrentals.com/http://lensrentalscanada.com/http://www.lenslenders.ca/P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As a photographer who has rented lenses online I'd say your biggest issue is lens options. Especially under featured lenses.The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.You need stuff like:\n70-200 f2.8 constant appGo after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear policy on what is who's fault.Add in fraud protection of some type etc.Then you will be offering a real service.Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?Those are among the key initial questions to answer."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Nice break down of what you did, I have a couple of similar stories of launching something (after fully building it) and then getting very low traffic but a fairly high conversion rate(as in, user arrives, uses the site to do thing I designed it for and maybe comes back in the future). I seem to struggle with growing traffic though.I have heard StumbleUpon is great for traffic, especially paid discovery, but each time I apply to paid discovery they turn me down on a \"Lack of content\" issue so I guess they safeguard what they present on Paid Discovery.I have found, for other projects that I no longer run, that \"offline\" buzz works well - so press releases getting picked up in local media and that kind of thing works well, you just need to know which reported to sweet talk I guess.My current side projects are http://oneqstn.com, http://efficientthings.com"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Are sign-ups intended exclusively for people listing their gear? Perhaps you can have sign-ups for people trying to rent, too, and request additional information that would help you hone the site, such as equipment sought. For example:Email: [email protected] Sought: <text field or drop down listing camera lenses>This could be done under the guise that you will send them an e-mail notification when the requested equipment is posted to the site. This would help identify whether:1. Users are camera-savvy at all or are indeed random people \"stumbling\" upon the site2. Get more detailed user needs"
}
] | en | 0.961429 |
Ask HN: Diet/Fitness program resources? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The key facts are:1.- Eat 5-6 times a day in reduced quantity2.- Drink plenty of water3.- Anaerobic training is important (i.e. strenght training) because it helps to build muscle tissue, and the more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolism will be, and the more calories you will burn, even while sitting in front of the computer.4.- Aerobic training (i.e. running, cycling, swimming) is important too, it helps burning fat faster, but don't do only aerobic training because you will burn both fat and muscle, and then, with less muscle you will burn calories slower. At leats 30 minuts of aerobic training per session.5.- Protein is important to fuel the muscles (meat, egg whites, tuna...)6.- Avoid fat, specially animal fat7.- Avoid processed hydrocarbs (pastries, cakes), candies, chocolates8.- Eat lots of fruits and vegetables."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I got a lot of useful information, tips and techniques from the Hacker's Diet: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/It's been discussed many times here on HN:http://searchyc.com/submissions/hacker%2527s+diet?sort=by_da...Personally I used it to lose about 30 pounds over the course of about 6 months, and I've mostly kept it off. I'm going back onto it to lose about 10 pounds that have crept back on."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Diet seems to be one of those places where there is a lot of variation between people. I believe it is because there is a large physiological component to food and eating. Having said that:Good Calories,Bad Calories is a book that gets recommended around here quite a bit. I haven't read it myself. Sugar Busters is an interesting read, as it actually covers a bit of the science used in coming up with their program. Flaws in their method have been discussed ad nauseum, but the biology behind it seems sound."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I've been tracking my diet and exercise routines on Daily Burn, and I like it a lot. It's an easy way to track calories and macronutrients. You'll learn a lot about what you eat after you track it for a few days.http://dailyburn.com/"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I might be too late for this, but hit me up through email and I can help you out if you want to. I was the interval training article poster and I'm working on something that might help you."
}
] | en | 0.89816 |
Changing my operating system | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Thinking the article was too long, I was searching for mentions of \"OSX\", \"Linux\", \"Windows\" and not finding what I was looking for.Then I noticed he wasn't talking about computer operating systems."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "'But that feeling kind of scares me, because it’s like that thing when people get to a certain age and say “This is who I am. This is how I like my eggs. This is where I live.”'This how I've been trying to live my life for the past seven or eight years, by tackling the fear head on.Sometimes I've been successful and other times, not so much.Never settle and never get comfortable. Thanks for the inspiring interview."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Slightly off topic, but one of my favorite episodes from that podcast actually aired right after Derek Siver's interview: http://foolishadventure.com/audio/write-compelling-copy-with...It was definitely worth a listen and included a ton of practical tips on copywriting. The one that stuck with me the most was to \"steal copy from your potential customers\", for example, look up customers' Amazon reviews on your competitors to see how they're describing products."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I like the analogy (and, of course, the content which has been read and bookmarked!). I'm co-launching a business into this sphere next month, though with a niche focus on young women - not sure how the OS analogy will work but so many other tips are universally applicable."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I don't really get the whole self-help, personal-development thing, but maybe that's because when life starts to bore me or get stale I change it.The conversation in the article reads like this guy is somewhat manic though."
}
] | en | 0.974803 |
Should you use CoreData? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you plan on using Core Data please read objc.io issue #4[1].The reason I use Core Data is because the alternatives for data persistence are not that great. We basically have NSCoding Protocol[2] and FMDB[3]. I find both cumbersome to use.Also, not that it matters for this conversation but it is Core Data, not CoreData.[1] http://www.objc.io/issue-4/editorial.html[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...[3] https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Most iOS devs fail to realize that CoreDate was originally created for managing data in desktop apps, but many of the advantages it offers for Mac development don't exist on mobile. For example, iOS has no bindings. On the Mac you can bind your UI elements to data objects backed by Core Data so that as the data changes everything stays in sync. (Yes, like modern JS libraries.) For simple use cases you can do a surprising amount of development with very little code, although for complex use cases it can sometimes get ugly.Also, I believe an SQL-based approach is more appropriate for the smaller screen sizes with iOS. The master-detail approach on iOS typically works out to showing a master list with a few labels describing each object, then drilling into to the object's details. In many cases all the labels on a master list (plus an associated object id) can fit into a single in-memory array, and an SQLite query works great to pull these labels strings off disk when the view loads. There's little reason to have CoreData manage faulting/loading entire data objects as users scroll up and down the master list just to view the titles. Of course the SQL data access should still be abstracted, but CoreData is overkill in cases like this."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> It's an older article (2012), but recently came to my attention via Drew McCormack (@drewmccormack): "Great post", he wrote, and after reading the article I not just disagreed, but found that Twitter wasn't really adequate for writing up all the things wrong with that article.This is how I discovered the article and also felt exactly the same way as OP. It was a massive amount of hand-waving, appeal to authority, and supposition."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The short and easy answer is no, never.Core Data is just not a good technology. People on the other side of this debate will say that there's an appropriate time for everything, but nothing makes sense for everything, so you have to choose based on your needs. This is half true. It misses the fact that some things are just plain bad and are never better than the alternatives in any situation, and IMO Core Data is in this category.There are several fundamental problems with it.First, the API is awful. If you want decent model objects in memory you either have to do a bunch of manual work, or use a third-party tool like mogenerator. Even then, the result is a massive soup of mutable objects with no intelligence. The structure of the API encourages passing the entire context around everywhere, which basically turns all of these objects into global variables. Look no further than popular Core Data wrapper APIs to see how bad this can get. For example, ObjectiveRecord[1] adds class methods for looking up objects using a predicate. Modularity? Separation of concerns? Perish the thought.Second, it ties your on-disk representation to your in-memory representation way too strongly, and this makes it more difficult to choose appropriate structures for either one, and more difficult to make changes to either one.Third, it locks you into the technology something fierce. Core Data is so different from everything else that once you build your model layer on it, you're just about stuck there forever. You can move away, but it's a ton of work that reaches into every corner of your app. Other solutions, like serializing to a property list or SQLite, simply require a translation layer that you can switch out more or less at will.Fourth, it's unbelievably slow. Literally unbelievable, as in I tell people about it and they don't believe me. It's too slow for a large number of records. It's fast enough for a very small number of records, but at that level it provides no advantage over using property lists and just loading everything into memory. At the large scale, you don't want to load everything into memory so you need a better scheme, but then you need something like SQLite so you can avoid the slowness and gain more control. Core Data is really only workable when your quantity of data is in a happy medium, which exists roughly within the range of 1097 to 1143 records. (Warning: previous numbers made up.) Since you can almost never guarantee that your data will live in that happy medium and not exceed it, Core Data is a bad choice.I understand why its proponents advocate for it. It's shiny. Apple pushes it hard, and people tend to like what Apple tells them to like. It gives the illusion of making things easy. It does make certain simple things easy. The problem is that making easy things easier is not a virtue. Making difficult things easier is what counts, and Core Data fails at that.[1] https://github.com/mneorr/ObjectiveRecord"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Very true article. CoreData has a lot of path and legacy behind and thinking it would solve some problem magically because it is vended as "the high level problem solver" is a mistake. More than once I have seen performance problem appearing 2 weeks before release by (mis)using it."
}
] | en | 0.833411 |
Amazon was down | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The title now says \"Amazon was down\" but I'm still getting \"Http/1.1 Service Unavailable\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Some folks at Amazon are having a really bad day right now."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's spontaneously up for me, sometimes I get a homepage, most of the time I get Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I wonder how many millions are lost per minute of downtime."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "All other Amazon sites (.co.uk, .fr, .de, etc.) are up."
}
] | en | 0.97019 |
Limiting Antibiotics in Animals | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> I am astonished by the letter from Bernadette Dunham, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, especially since she told a House committee on April 9 that she was unsure how antibiotic resistance develops.I've posted this before, but some people may have missed it.\"Defeating the superbugs\" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ms5c6) has a segment showing bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics.(http://v6.tinypic.com/player.swf?file=24goih4&s=6) (Sorry about the lousy host; YouTube's content sniffing detects this as BBC property and blocks it.)They have a slab of jelly. The jelly has sections of differing strength of antibiotic. There's a section with no antibiotic, then 10x, then 100x then 1000x. (They cannot dissolve any more antibiotic into the jelly at that point.)A time lapse camera shows the bacteria growing, and developing resistance to each section.It's an excellent bit of video."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Where I live, fruits and vegetables are ridiculously cheap, and meat is rather expensive. For example, apricots (which are just now in season) are $2.50 per pound. When the height of apricot season kicks in, the price will come down to around 50¢ per pound. But if I want a steak I can expect to pay at least $12 per pound.I take a certain comfort in the notion that this price difference reflects the true cost of producing meat. Likewise, everything is locally sourced because there isn't really any other option, so everything taste fresh. Produce is only available when its in season, but this adds a fun sense of anticipation as the seasons change.That's one point of view. The other point of view is that feeding antibiotics to cattle improves yield. Transporting produce long distances ensures that it can be grown where conditions are best, and flying fruits in from Chile means that supermarket customers can find what they crave even in the middle of winter.The US has a long tradition of asking \"can we?\" not \"should we?\" Sometimes, as with the Apolo mission, this is a very good thing. Other times, as with the issue addressed here, it can be rather bad.Edit: Also, as I always do when this topic comes up, I'll point to this extremely useful list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antibiotics . This battle is occurring on two fronts: the bugs are becoming more resistant, and we're having an increasingly hard time finding new weapons to fight them off."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I don't understand, how people, who supposedly must be well educated in biology, allow antibiotics to loose efficiency by feeding them to animals."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "While it would be great if the FDA did something about this, there are probably global dimensions to this problem also. Presumably antibiotics are used globally against strains of disease that spread quite merrily from country to country.I'd assume epidemiology is not domestically constrained: the antibiotic/agricultural practices of one nation impact all others.I have no idea what is standard practice for domestic agriculture in my own country. Things I think I \"know\" about agriculture are distorted through the prism of American cultural influence - documentaries like Food Inc., are writ large in the imagination even where these are only concerned with domestic affairs.What resources exist that document antibiotic use on a global basis?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What an unfortunate name to have in this field!________________________And for Pete's sake, I do note that I agree with her wholeheartedly on the substance. It's just the name that struck me out of left field ;-)"
}
] | en | 0.960181 |
RJ45-sized Linux networking server goes IPv6 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Out of curiousity does anyone use any of these style devices? And if so what for?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Isn't IPv6 a feature of the Linux networking stack? Shouldn't everything that runs Linux be IPv6 capable? Or is there some IPv6 stuff implemented in hardware here?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I read "RJ45-sized" and thought they meant the size of the connector."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I wish this thing was double sided so I can make a router out of it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Am I missing something or does the article not state how much RAM the server comes with?"
}
] | en | 0.925944 |
Ask HN: How important is it to stuff your CV into one page? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If it's a CV, it's not important at all. Write a book.If it's an American style resume, then it's pretty important but not superlatively important. Your resume can be 2 pages (maybe 3 if you're awesome), but assume that the second page will never get looked at (and make sure your good stuff is on the first).Edit: Also, it helps to have multiple resumes. My project management experience is ~2 lines on my programmer resume, but on my project management resume it's most of the page (obviously)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We could give better feedback if you posted the draft of your CV. I'd be surprised if you can't fit everything important into one page. But maybe my assumptions are false, and certainly our advice would sound a lot more compelling if we could point out specific things that to emphasize or remove.Think about how long Steve Jobs' resume would be. You could fit it on half a page. Is your background really more significant than his?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I had a 2 page resume and I was fresh out of school, you will be fine. The market is so choked at the moment that if you are from a decent school, with decent grades and nice internships, a recruiter will take the time to give it the look over.But yeah, optimize it as much as possible: remove as much as you can remove but like I said don't worry too much about the 1 page requirement..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "My uncle was a Col. in the Air Force, taught at Air Force Academy, Naval War College, wrote 3 books, got a PhD, and was the dean of a department of a University. When he was 45 and I was 15ish, he said \"Always have a one page resume.\" If he could do it, so can you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If a C-level executive of a public company can fit their CV into one page... you can fit your CV into one page."
}
] | en | 0.971519 |
Fibonacci Flim-Flam | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "That was a nice thrashing of some of the silly numerology that seems to collect around the Fibonacci sequence/golden ratio.I do wonder why phi gets so much attention (pi as well), but e doesn't? My suspicion is that it's because logarithms are \"harder\" to understand..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Nice as a continued fraction:phi = 1 + 1/(1+1/(1+1/(1+...)))"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Great great article.As far as my memory serves my I do though think that the article is making one claim that is wrong.It was Bach and not Mozart who was obsessed with numbers and not phi or fibonacci.Harmony in western music is based on phi subdivisions of the octave.Fibonacci is used in design and art quite a lot. the A paper format (A0, A1, A2, A3, A4 etc.) is based on it.When you see a website that is \"pleasing to the eye\" that is often (but far from always) based on some interpretation of Fibonacci sequence.Most probably it's the consistency in proportional difference that is pleasing and not phi in it self.Phi and f are retrospectively pleasing because they are culturally imposed on us. If you divide an octave in ten (instead of 12) then you get a different division of the octave but it wont feel pleasing to the ear.Just as the Arabic division of the octave is quite different and doesn't really allow for harmony.So I think it's premature to just throw it all out and say nonsense. Neither Fiboncci nor Phi are some natural constant but they might be a cultural constant for the west.Or as Wittgenstein said:\"The faculty of taste cannot create a new structure, it can only make adjustments to one that already exists\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Speaking of Fibionacci, I was browsing through my old Data Structures and Algorithms lecture notes the other day for nostalgia and discovered that Fibionacci(n) can be computed in O(log N) time, at least in theory. I have completely forgotten about that fact."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I remember being surprised by this back in '07: http://akkartik.name/blog/10476036"
}
] | en | 0.99023 |
Design patterns aren't | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "In his postscript the author explains that he wasn't trying to criticize design patterns, but was rather trying to promote this other concept; which, supposedly, is little known in CS circles because of the similar names...His summary: \"We need to take a fresh look at Christopher Alexander.\"That's all well and good, and as far as I know the concept of pattern languages could be very useful; I wouldn't know, I've never heard of it till today, and in fact still have no idea what it's about. Which brings me to my point, which is to wonder why the author chose to waste an entire 5 minute and 13 slide presentation (5 of which were dedicated just to bashing design patterns) to making the point that \"we need to take a fresh look at Christopher Alexander,\" instead of, say, spending more time introducing Alexander's ideas and presenting ways they could be useful in our domain.I will conclude by pointing out another pet peeve of mine, which is sensationalist titles only tangentially related to the content. Design pattern, most certainly, ARE. What they are NOT is pattern languages, which is a similar sounding but entirely different concept.</ grumpy geezer mode>"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd recommend going over the postscript http://perl.plover.com/yak/design/samples/note.html and note that all the discussion here has already happened years ago. IMHO if the majority of listeners misunderstand your talk and don't get the point you're trying to make, then you made a bad talk. Seems like his real point was to distinguish between the GOF book and the Alexander book were about. That's great. Present that point in a thoughtful and careful way, not by going off on GOF in a way that will turn off listeners/readers and occlude the more subtle point you're trying to make."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "When I read the GoF book in '95 it was a revelation, I had learned C++ a few years earlier and here were all the things I had seen in my and other people's code with names and explanations. At the time Rogue Wave hosted an informal lunch meeting in our town where they and some OSU guys discussed patterns, I attended as a visitor and to me it just seemed magical. Over the years some of the high hopes have been dashed but I think some of the core pattern ideas have become useful standard idioms.A year or so after reading the GoF book I saw the Alexander book in a used book store and picked it up to see what it was all about and I was very surprised. I like the book a lot but I really don't think the parallels with the GoF book and the software design patterns are all that strong. The Alexander book does not seem very systematic or analytic, it's more rambling and philosophical. I'm not an architect so I probably don't see the big picture but to me the book seems to lack a coherent vision.If you're interested how Alexander himself saw himself fit into the emerging pattern movement, here's a link to James Coplien's description of Alexander's OOPSLA appearance in '96:\nhttps://sites.google.com/a/gertrudandcope.com/info/Publicati...Hard to believe it's been 15 years!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "paraphrased: \"In C++/Java, you write an iterator again and again for every collection\"No, you don't. If you write them yourselves (which is in most but all cases the wrong approach, what with the Java libraries and the C++ STL), you use templates or generics, as appropriate, to define reusable ones.In many cases, proper patterns are reusable--and in many cases for good programmers, design patterns occur automatically just because they're a logical way to do something. I don't set out to create flyweight objects, they're the simplest way to achieve my goal. I don't write a thread pool just to create a thread pool, I write a thread pool because it makes sense.Even in 2002, this was the case. I don't get the feeling that the author of these slides knew either well enough to make the claims he made..The Gang-of-Four idea is to discover existing patterns of software development / Then program people to implement them habituallyEr...no. The book Design Patterns is descriptive, not prescriptive. Is that so hard to get?.I am by no means a C++ fan, or even really a GoF fan, but this post is slagging it just to slag it. If you want to slag it after you understand it, by all means (and I have perturbed a great many electrons in doing so, myself), but it doesn't sound like the author does, at all."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I think the criticism here on GoF is misdirected.As far as I'm concerned, GoF is (or at least should be treated as) a taxonomy, not a cookbook.The fact that people use it as a cookbook is not necessarily the fault of the authors."
}
] | en | 0.99225 |
How Facebookipodayclosingprice.com Scaled with MemCachier | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Not to be cynical but this post has virtually no content -- it's simply \"We used memcache as a caching layer and not hit the DB. The End\"Didn't we know this a decade ago?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While some people look at this as \"so what?\" I did find the post valuable. I've never used memcache before, and this was a good illustration of its use."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How many hits were they really getting? It appears that only 2261 people made predictions."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Website uses basic caching to survive traffic spike, news at 11."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Had not seen the site before. Amusing how far off nearly everybody was on the pricing."
}
] | en | 0.988056 |
AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Reading articles like this I'm often reminded of Amara's Law:"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."In terms of overestimation in the short term, it seems to me that although we are trending towards automative technologies, 11 years seems like far too short a span for those technologies to have "displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers."Meanwhile, in the long term, the time frame these technologies actually need to have fully permeated, we don't know what types of jobs or how many will be brought about by their existence."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "> Throughout history, technology has been a job creator—not a job destroyerThis is one argument that I have always really disagreed with. Technology doesn't inherently create jobs. Rather it makes people able to be more productive and efficient. I think that will longer stand the test of time.Hopefully someday soon we will go beyond this need for everybody to have jobs so that they can pay for food and rent. Instead we will be able to do human things. Do projects, cool hacks, make art and music, explore the universe. Why spend all our time compensating for scarcity when robotics can do it for us?That however is going to be a long transition. Especially one for the people in the US, who have such a heavy burdened work culture (i.e. if you aren't working you aren't valuable to society). Also shameless plug here for basic/guaranteed annual income."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You could pretty much eliminate all mcdonalds staff already with a vending machine that has a conveyor belt that runs under a heating element(like they do at quiznos), and sprays some condiments on a bun. All you'd need then is someone to replenish the vending machine.So artificial intelligence isn't even necessary."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Considering cars are made by robots I always wondered why a big company like McDonalds couldn't do similar when making its cheeseburgers. Never researched it until now but looks like there is a machine capable: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-12/meet-smart-restaura..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "We're always hearing "there will be new kinds of jobs", but never what those jobs will be , how many they could be in number or any relevant detail to that claim.Why is that ?have we no sense of imagination ? Or is it that the claim is just an easy comforting truism(that preservers the current order) and nothing but ?"
}
] | en | 0.948509 |
Walking out of an interview | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My answer on this depends on whether we want to be an emotionally supportive group for people who make a badge of honor out of being socially and professionally inept, or whether we want to give advice which will actually move careers forward.A company which is not a cultural good fit for you, and the employees thereof, can still be very valuable allies. I would not act to antagonize them absent substantial provocation. Not being like you is not a substantial provocation. Most people in the world will, after all, not be like you, and you'll end up not working for approximately all companies in the industry. That's OK.You've already got the day blocked off in your calendar. Smile. Firm handshakes. Thank them for taking the time to interview you. Heck, they're giving you free live-fire practice for your next interview, make the most out of it. You should never say a word of criticism about the company to anyone but your primary point of contact and you should be darn circumspect with how you word it to him. (I like something along the general lines of \"Thanks for your time and allowing me to get to know $FOO_CORP better. We're really in the same boat: I only want to work at employers where I'd do my best work, and you only want to hire people who'd do great things at $FOO_CORP. Having had the opportunity to hear you guys out a bit more, I don't think we're a great mutual fit. I will keep my ears open for you in case any of my friends would be a good fit for your position.\")"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I once declined an offer over email and promptly got a conference call back from them where the CEO was incredibly hostile, the purpose of the call seemed like the CEO just wanted to publicly berate me and tell me that I was making a bad move.Afterwards I realized that its entirely a subconscious alpha dominance thing. There's this unsaid very primal, tribal power trip that goes along with the interviewee vs employer relationship.As the interviewer you want to be holding the power card - you sit in a position of power and have other people dance around and do what you say in order for you to be able to judge them and make them prove their worth to you in order to join your tribe.Its really one of the few times we get to break down our democratic social structure and revert back to this primitive social order in adulthood, so its a pretty important ritual for alpha-types.When someone comes in and disrupts that natural boundary it becomes offensive as they've unconsciously told you \"I don't respect you as a leader\" in front of your staff and team. The interviewer then needs to re-affirm their ego and dominance over the tribal unit in a public display.If you look at all these articles floating around about judging candidates and \"top grading\" and you look at it from this tribal alpha-dominance perspective it really breaks down some of what we assume is necessary in hiring. I think the whole system is based around some silly ancient ritual that we haven't been able to shake from our culture."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm sympathetic to the guy who walked out of the inteview, though I'm not sure it was a good idea.A lot of this probably has to do with your experience. I once had an interview for a position that was right up my alley. I have an MS in Industrial Engineering and I've worked at large manufacturing companies as a developer, as well as smaller startups that create optimization software for manufacturing, shipping, and production systems.I went to an interview for a company almost precisely in this business area. They asked me to code a singleton, traverse a binary tree, then do it without recursion, add a leaf to a binary tree, prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, prove various long term outcomes from markov chains, swap two integers without creating a third integer, write various outer joins, convert a sql table to a binary set of indicators (is this a common thing?), and print all possible permutation of string using recursion.At no point did anyone ask about, or even show the vaguest interest, in my background or experience. It wasn't super well coordinated, they pretty much just kept moving me from one developer to the other - so of course I was much more exhausted and drained than perhaps my interviewer of the hour realized.My interviewers were younger, and generally looked fresh out of their CS degrees, so I'd guess that they were quite a bit sharper where it came to markov chains, hessian matrices, and b-trees. I didn't look like I was clueless, but I came off as rusty, and I did stumble with things that I would have done much more easily with an hour hitting my old text books.It was eye-opening, and frustrating. I was polite and stuck with it, and I kept trying, because I actually wanted the job, and I thought that they could use someone like me, because while they were very talented, my few questions to them suggested that there were areas where I could bring some experience that they didn't have in house.I didn't get an offer, but I am glad I stuck through it. The one thing I wish I'd done is politely explain to the hiring manager what I just wrote here - that I think their hiring process might be filtering out an area of talent that could be valuable to the company.Actually, that's probably the advice I'd give the dude who terminated the interview. Rather than ending it abruptly, ask the hiring manager if he'd be willing to confer for 15 minutes or so. Explain why you think it's going badly, and what your concerns are. If you disagree, that's fine - then you can end it on better terms without appearing to leave in a huff.And while this is off topic, I would like to point out one more thing - this is the sort of experience that often comes to my mind when I hear about companies complaining about a lack of available talent, and it's one of the reasons I'm skeptical (though this interview was years ago, when hiring wasn't on fire the way it is now)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I debated doing this once. I was still in college interviewing for an entry level position where the company found my resume on some job site and invited me for an interview.I arrived at the place and was told to go into a large conference room. In the room were about 30 other people all staring at each other wondering what just happened. We were all given a coding test in Java (Java was no where on my resume and I had zero experience with it). After answering what I could with C we were broken up into teams and started a Jeopardy style game on Java and XML. I can't imagine they gained any insight into any candidate with this game since so many different people were answering questions.Once the game was finished we were then kept in our teams and given engineering problems to work out as a group and then had to present the solutions to the \"judges\". Every team was pretty much told their answers sucked, I can only compare the feedback to something out of the TV show \"Apprentice.\"I left the interview completely dumbfounded as to what just happened. People had flown in from out of state to be there for the interview and were blind sided by this horrendous group interview that felt like it took place solely to stroke the ego of the guy leading the whole charade. I also remember the head guy preaching to us that Java was the future and if we didn't learn it we'd be left behind."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I remember being sent to an interview for a PHP developer, only for it to transpire that the company was actually after a Perl developer. The recruitment agent had sent me along anyway, having helpfully added a couple of lines to my CV.The strange thing was that after I explained what had happened (after 15 or so minutes of initial interview fun) and said something like \"Thanks for taking the time to see me, and sorry it couldn't be more productive,\" the interviewers were suddenly really keen on me; I was standing halfway through the door, answering questions for a good few minutes until I worked out how to leave, much to the interviewers' reluctance.Had I more sense at the time (I was 18 or 19 then), I would've sat down the extra ten minutes and tried to work out if we could've done business together one way or another. So whilst there are definitely times to leave early, nowadays I wouldn't be too hasty in doing so."
}
] | en | 0.971453 |
Interview with Rob Rhinehart about Soylent | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "On one hand, I really really want Soylent to be successful; it would solve so many problems if we had a ubiquitous, cheap, and above all else effective meal replacement option.On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that it's not going to. Even reading this article, my suspicions flared up a few times (I thought invoking McDonalds was strange, and most of his points about nutrition and consumption seemed off-base.) Maybe it's years and years of pseudoscience taking its toll on me, I dunno.At the very least, I'm interested to see where things are headed."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Sounds pretty wild. What's next for the smoothie that Gawker said "looks just like semen"?The color is a bit problematic in that respect. He should just put in a little coloring. I suggest green."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "An overlooked consequence of long-term replacement of solids with liquids for nutrition is the fact that dentition is going to most likely change, I'm referring especially to teeth position.Daily chewing is applying pressure to teeth and keeping them 'set' in the position you're familiar with.While researching some wisdom tooth extraction possible long-term side effects, I was surprised to find out how much can teeth migrate, start receding etc. if one is not able to chew on both sides for example.I don't remember the source(s), but I saw real pictures of people with this problem. There were multiple causes too, not just as a consequence of extractions gone wrong.A lot of people are focusing on the issue of meeting nutritional requirements, but I'm curious on seeing a real dentist's opinion on the possible long-term effects of such a diet as well."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "There is a big gap between "all the ingredients are safe to eat" and "the ingredients comprise everything your body requires"."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Doesn't someone already own the trademark for Soylent? Here is Rob's trademark application dated February 21, 2013: http://www.markhound.com/trademark/search/sBxK5WeM7 It seems (to me) incredibly unlikely that someone hasn't already at least tried to trademark it for use in protein shakes or other foodstuffs. And whoever owns the rights to the movie Soylent Green might want to have a word with him if his food supplement ever becomes popular."
}
] | en | 0.96004 |
Show HN: Mojofiend giving away free coffee to San Francisco residents | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I like free coffee.I don't use Facebook for log-in to services. You don't say why Step #1 is \"give you lots of my financial info.\"Site design needs some polish. There are a few unfinished edges. Color palette is too muted and visually homogeneous."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "clickable: http://www.mojofiend.com"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Interesting concept... I'd go with a different name though.I'm assuming it is just \"selling\" loyal customers of a product/service to businesses in exchange for them giving a sample of their product for free. Could work well in other industries, as long as you can ensure it isn't abused (i.e. I buy $1.30 coffee 4 times at Tim Hortons/Dunkin Donuts, then get a free organic latte ($5) at the place down the street... )"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Facebook login button doesn't work on Ubuntu 64bit chrome."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Looks really neat! Any plans to expand to the UK? :)"
}
] | en | 0.942168 |
Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student - Manuel Blum (CMU) | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "There's a lot of filler in there, but one advice that I found interesting was to write right back what you're reading (I take it to refer to technical material and not exposition - e.g. proofs and definitions). Anyone has any experience with trying that?(I've tried this with math books before, but it always felt too tedious to keep up. But I suspect I may have tried to hard, going for a nicely formatted shortened exposition of the entire material; I didn't try to simply jot proofs and formulas down as I was reading them)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I found this article extremely insightful and decided to prepare it for the print so that I could read it more carefully and add some notes on the margins.While I was doing it, I realized how awfully true was the fact that science people _can't_ write.No disrespect to Mr. Blum, but really, what is going on with the writing in this article? New line every several words, unconsistent emphasis, various writing styles, quick abbreviations in some places, but not in others, inconsistent division in paragraphs, several misspellings."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "When I was a kid, my father (an EE guy) used to tell me the importance of writing while reading. I mostly ignored that in my career and now a very smart person(Manuel Blum) has validated it. I hope there aren't many things (as told by my father) that I would want other smart people to validate ;("
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Did not realize this:\n\"the median of n integers can be found with just O(n) comparisons.\"Must figure this out!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other.\" - Associating Islam with being outdated can be good for your demographic I guess."
}
] | en | 0.980745 |
Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know.If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.From Match.com:\n> We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "A recent blog post from OkCupid dissects Match.com (and eHarmony, to a lesser extent) to bits: \nhttp://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/04/07/why-you-should-..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This reminds me of the Intuit/Mint exchanges, pre-acquisition.\"What you say!??! You can't be more popular then we!! We demand that you prove this to us.\""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to knowWould anyone in their right minds consider this?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Mahatma Gandhi"
}
] | en | 0.991823 |
Lessons Learned After Two Years as a Startup Founder | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Fire people who aren't 10x unicorns as fast as you can? You need a Rictus Director, not a Smiles Director."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "IMO you don't need a team of only unicorns. In fact, ego management will be very difficult if you miraculously manage to build such a seemingly perfect team. You need a good balance between leaders and \"followers\", who can be great people, but not superstars."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "i constantly wonder whether it's worth entering the startup world after finishing my phd, hearing of 'hire fast/fire fast', looking for 'unicorns'....is this rat race even worth it? What's wrong with just wanting to solve problems, why do you need to build fast as opposed to building something that's awesome and works well - find a niche and grow from there. I can almost feel the 'pressure of the job' for those engineering the system when reading posts from founders/ceos with regards to recruiting - here's a hint \"it's always about finding the right employees\" (well no shit sherlock)."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Great openness and willingness to be transparent about the fact you don't always feel in control (as much as you would want your investors, team, and users to think so 24/7)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great post, from the heart. And a beautifully designed website. Great to see someone using their exit money to spread good in the world."
}
] | en | 0.986103 |
NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Wanted to take yet another opportunity to mention the nationwide Restore the Fourth demonstration happening this week. http://restorethe4th.net I hope everyone reading this attends their local rally.It also needs to be said that another leak is coming soon that details a program that collects/stores the contents of 1 Billion cell phone calls every single day [1]. I submitted the link earlier but it got buried after only a few upvotes.[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/greenwald-nsa-store-calls-eve..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection.US citizens make up less than 50% of the world population. So given any target I can be more than 51% confident that they are not a US citizen, knowing nothing about the particular target whatsoever."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "From the article:"The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants."So does this mean that the number of government requests released by Facebook, Microsoft, etc. within the last few weeks are essentially meaningless in regards to PRISM and most likely other top secret government spying programs?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": ""The FBI uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA." (emphasis mine)Is it just me or is this a fairly bold claim? I don't see anything about government equipment on private company property in the slides... wondering if this is additional testimony from Snowden, or info from supplementary docs that they haven't released.Also: "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not review any individual collection request." Could I get some perspective on this statement? Is this as bad as it sounds? Or are they saying the court approves monitoring on an individual and doesn't need to give approval for every single collection request on that individual?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": ""On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database. The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected "incidentally" during surveillance of those targets."I think something is inferred there that isn't necessarily true: there being 117,675 PRISM records does not necessarily refer to 117,675 different people being targeted. The slides imply that there would be two different records for the same person's Gmail account and their Facebook account. So the number of individual people being targeted would actually be a good amount less. Yes, still tens of thousands of people... but less that 117,675."
}
] | en | 0.944549 |
Complete Google App Engine + Backbone.js + Require.js Todo list Web App Example | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't get it - why are people so interested in Backbone.js? It seems to impose the same kind of baggage in interfaces/front-ends that operating systems impose.Lots of configuration, tons of conventions to learn, lots of little files... personally, in Javascript I create classes of things I want to draw, and they know how to draw themselves. Is that so bad? Now... granted, I don't build CRUD apps. I do visualization and data apps. But... it just seems like Backbone.js puts me in Java world in a browser.Am I wrong? Why? How does backbone.js help you?"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I did the same thing but without Require.js:Code: https://github.com/ccarpenterg/todolistWiki: https://github.com/ccarpenterg/todolist/wikiDemo: http://todolist-app.appspot.com/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I have one that is mostly working with some bugs running on Heroku -> MondoDB -> Node.js -> Backbone.js w/ BrowserIDhttps://github.com/overshard/node-todobin/"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I made a spine.js Todo list for any php back-end + couch/mongo/pgsql -- it jquery-polls a _changes feed to show todos that other people addcode https://github.com/voitto/structal.todosdemo http://todosdemo.structal.org"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "All i need is a piece of paper and a pen. No need for unnecessary complexity."
}
] | en | 0.948533 |
The evolution of a website design | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Personally, I like clean, minimal designs. I'd have been happy with anything between 2-4. Stage 12 (or finished) is completely over-the-top for my taste. Tags are hard to read (red is too dark) and don't tell me anything about the depth or breadth of discussions that will be on these topics. Devdays font is coming off too strong in the final one. In Stage 4, StackOverflow was clearly visible and Devdays seemed pretty significant too. I was instantly able to make out that it was a 5-city dev conference by the folks from StackOverflow. In Stage 4, he could have highlighted some of the key words from the description to give more value to specific 'tags' and put simple links for buy-ticket, speakers etc. As it stands, it's very high on graphics, definitely very impactful, but not too clean or simple. However, that being said, it is still a very good design."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"I’m not feeling that good about the design at the moment as it’s shit,\" made me laugh.Also it's always heartening to see even great designers like Mike have to scrabble and grab for inspiration."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "So does this guy design the covers for Wired magazine? Because that's what it looks like."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I was just looking at this and one of my Japanese-speaking colleagues walked up and said \"Whoa, nice site design. Lots of impact. What the hell is it for?\"I don't think I can improve on that comment."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "The way he worked through the design really resonated with me, especially when he would break away from his original only to come back to it later on."
}
] | en | 0.98525 |
Ask HN: What happens to older developers? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It seems that they go a few directions:The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get tired of running in exactly the same place. You also start to get a long view on things, where all these new things coming out don't really seem to offer any advantage to you that keeps development fun. It's just more and more layers of abstraction and you start to see the nth demo of WebGL maxing out a 4 core modern GPU system doing exactly what you did 20 years ago with a single 32-bit core, 1/5th the transistor count and all in software. So how do you generalize? One word: management. You start to take over running things at a meta-level. You don't program, you manage people who program. You don't program, you design architectures that need to be programmed. You don't program, you manage standards bodies that people will be programming against. It's not a higher level, more abstract, language you go for, it's a higher level, more abstract job function. The pay is usually better and it's a natural career progression most organizations are built around. There's lots of different "meta" paths you can take. And because most of the skills in them will be new to you in your late 30s, 40s or 50s, they're at least interesting to learn.The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days. Some folks like this, and look at it as a new challenge. Some hate it and wish for their programming days again. YMMVSo the next most common path is to just become more and more senior as a developer, keeping down in the weeds and using decades of experience to cut through trendy BS to build solid performant stuff. These folks sometimes take on "thought leader" positions, act as architects or whatnot. Quite often though industry biases will engage and they'll be put on duty keeping some legacy system alive because their deep knowledge of the system lets the company put 1 guy maintaining half a million lines of code in perpetuity vs. 10 young guys maintaining the same, who all wanting to leave after a few years to build more skills. The phenomenon is best seen as the ancient grey beard COBOL mainframe guys. Some people love this work, they can stay useful and "in the game", but some hate it because it comes with the cachet of being stale and not keeping up with the times. YMMVProbably the third most common path is to simply branch out and start your own gig. A consultancy or something where you get to work on different things in different places on short engagements. The money is good while it's coming in and you get to make your own hours. At some point you decide to keep doing this till retirement (if you can keep finding work) or to grow your business, in which case you generally end up doing the meta-management thing. There are thousands of these little one-man development shops like this and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is more common than third on my list.Probably the next most common path is to just get out of development entirely. The kinds of logic, planning and reasoning skills, plus the attention to detail required to be even a half-assed developer, can be extremely valuable in other fields. Lots of developers go into Systems security, Business Analysis, Hardware, etc. With a little schooling you can get into various Finance, Scientific or Engineering disciplines without too much fuss. The money isn't always better in these other fields, but sometimes the job satisfaction is. Again YMMV."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'm 60+. I've been coding my whole career and I'm still coding. Never hit a plateau in pay, but nonetheless, I've found the best way to ratchet up is to change jobs which has been sad, but true - I've left some pretty decent jobs because somebody else was willing to pay more. This has been true in every decade of my career.There's been a constant push towards management that I've always resisted. People I've known who have gone into management generally didn't really want to be programming - it was just the means to kick start their careers. The same is true for any STEM field that isn't academic. If you want to go into management, do it, but if you don't and you're being pushed into it, talk to your boss. Any decent boss wants to keep good developers and will be happy to accomodate your desire to keep coding - they probably think they're doing you a favor by pushing you toward management.I don't recommend becoming a specialist in any programming paradigm because you don't know what is coming next. Be a generalist, but keep learning everything you can. So far I've coded professionally in COBOL, Basic, Fortran, C, Ada, C++, APL, Java, Python, PERL, C#, Clojure and various assembly languages each one of which would have been tempting to become a specialist in. Somebody else pointed out that relearning the same thing over and over in new contexts gets old and that can be true, but I don't see how it can be avoided as long as there doesn't exist the "one true language". That said, I've got a neighbor about my age who still makes a great living as a COBOL programmer on legacy systems.Now for the important part if you want to keep programming and you aren't an academic. If you want to make a living being a programmer, you can count on a decent living, but if you want to do well and have reasonable job security you've got to learn about and become an expert in something else - ideally something you're actually coding. Maybe it's banking, or process control, or contact management - it doesn't matter as long as it's something. As a developer, you are coding stuff that's important to somebody or they wouldn't be paying you to do it. Learn what you're coding beyond the level that you need just to get your work done. You almost for certain have access to resources since you need them to do your job, and if you don't figure out how to get them. Never stop learning."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm 41. I also worry about ageism but so far I don't feel that it has affected me yet.> Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence? I know this isn't the case at some companies (e.g. Google), but is it rare or common to progress as an individual contributor?That has not been the case for me. I'm currently doing software development for a startup - the same thing I've done my whole career. I do get asked to provide guidance and help for younger devs sometimes, but I don't mind that one bit, it's actually very personally fulfilling.> Is there a plateau in pay? Is there a drop in pay switching jobs after a certain number of years experience because places are looking for 5+ instead of 20+?For me, so far no. I'm currently making the highest salary I've made yet in my career. I've been here for a year and a half.My age has not been an obstacle to finding a job yet; I've had plenty of interviews and offers over the last 5 years and have chosen the places I wanted to work, rather than the places where I had to. It's worth noting that I'm white, male and American, so I realize I'm less likely to suffer from workplace/interview discrimination with US companies than people in other demographics.> Is becoming a specialist rather than a generalist the answer?I'm pretty much a generalist web developer, I do backend and front end work, On a nearly daily basis I work with Ruby, Javascript, Postgres, Haml, Chef, CSS, Sass, Shell scripting, etc. I didn't have to become a specialist to get my job, although the fact that I've been doing Ruby for about 10 years did help me get it. I think the answer is, just to be good at what you do, whether that's as a specialist or a generalist.> Are older devs not looking for new jobs because they have families and want more stability/are focussed elsewhere?> What are the older people in your workplace doing?I have two kids, 5 and 2. My coworkers are evenly split between man and women, are mostly in their 30's to 50's and most of them have kids too. A coworker of mine recently returned from a ~5 month maternity leave after having triplets, and we've been flexible about her work hours/conditions because we didn't want to lose her. So we're definitely not averse to having employees with families. I look for companies that have this kind of attitude to work at. It's not as hard to find as you might think; as long as you're good at what you do people will probably want to hire you.I'm not sure to what extent my company is "typical" but you can at least count me as one "older" developer who is happily still working as a developer, was able to have a family without harming my career, and didn't get pushed into management.All in all I would say, your early 30's is still young. Statistically you've got more than half of your life ahead of you, likely the best part, too. As we get older I suspect the demographics of our profession will change along with us, and there will be more older people in roles we stereotype as being for younger people.\nAt least that's what I keep telling myself!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm about to turn 53. I spend most of my day coaching younger programmers at Facebook (because they're almost all younger). We pair program and talk. I work on speculative projects, some consumer-oriented, some programming tools and some infrastructure. I also research software design and the diffusion of innovation.I took a 10 year excursion into being a guru, but I'm technical now and intend to stay that way. I love programming. I've never been a manager. I suppose that capped my pay, but I'd rather be satisfied with my work. I haven't noticed a pay drop with age, but my experience may not be typical.The most important factor for me has been to keep coding. It gets harder. I have noticed a definite drop in my long-term memory, concentration, and general cognition, but I compensate by being better at picking important problems, being able to pattern match a large library of experiences, and not panicking. As Miracle Max said, I've seen worse.I started learning Haskell a couple of years ago, and that has really helped expand my programming style. I still don't like it, but it's good for me. I'm also learning React and the reactive style of coding UIs. That's also a brain stretcher."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm almost 57 and still write real code that people use and employers make money from. The trick is to continuously learn new stuff. My whole career has always been spent at the leading edge of whatever was most important at the time. Sure, people sometimes don't want to interview you because they assume you are old and pointless, but that's usually when they don't even read your resume, blog, linked in or whatever you have. There are people who think that way, and there are people who recognize ability and experience matter. The trick is finding the latter while trying to avoid the former.Some people don't learn anything new and become obsolete, or become management, or even have to start over away from programming. It's not easy to stay out front but you are the only one who can do it."
}
] | en | 0.976104 |
Ask HN: Fastest Web Framework? Rails, Django, Node.js, ASP.NET, PHP on HHVM | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The new kid on the block is Go. It has a lot of the features that frameworks claim baked into the language. The only caveat I can think of is how new the environment is.Google [1] and Dropbox [2] have started using it successfully. And we all know the scale at which they operate.Another thing to consider is this will provide a back end and allow you to use any type of front end that you wish.[1]: https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article[2]: https://tech.dropbox.com/2014/07/open-sourcing-our-go-librar..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "They all have plus/minus. It is hard to say without knowledge of your app. You say in terms of CPU, but all have different characteristics.We use node extensively, great overall for quick to market and i/o type operations but requires some decent design choices to make it perform and easily maintainable.PHP is good and you see tons of very scalable sites using it. It has issues, and done poorly (like anything) it can be a real bitch to deal with.ASP.NET is the last one I would ever use at this point (although I spent years writing large systems in it). Mostly because of cost to deploy and scaling it can be a royal pain in the ass on top of expensive. Not that it can't be done, and done big and good. Just expensive to me compared to the other options.Rails, I don't do anything with today. Not a bad platform from my understanding, quick to market, but generally not thought of for high performance applications. But again, design probably is the biggest factor here.Frankly if I needed all out CPU performance for say an image filter or something along those lines, I'd write that functionality in C/C++ and connect it to any one of those frameworks. At which point I'd pick the web framework that got me to market the fastest.If you have someone else building it, make sure they pick the one they are best in, or seek them out for being the best at what they do. Don't go to an ASP.NET shop and ask them to do it in Rails because you think that is the right framework. They might be able to do it, but unless the framework is a core competency it will never be as good as it should be."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "this might help, it provides benchmarks for most of the popular frameworks: http://www.techempower.com/blog/2014/05/01/framework-benchma...If you're going to hire someone to do it, asking them what their preference is might be better than saying, "We're going to use x.""
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is like asking "I need to commute to work, what car should I drive?."There are many factors at play with creating and running a SaaS-based business, and often technology plays a minor role. Even less important is how fast your chosen backend runs.By the time you run into a technical scaling problem where you are stuck with a less-than-optimal solution, you've already solved much, much harder problems like finding customers, scaling a team, raising money, etc.So decide how big your org will get, look at the skill sets of developers available in your local area, and partner with someone that has experience with both. Then let them make the decision on the tech and trust them.Then you can focus your energy and attention on what's really important for your new business."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First of all:Rails is a frameworkDjango is a frameworkNode.JS is a platform/frameworkASP.NET is not a framework, but a languagePHP is not a framework but a language, HHVM is a platformThat being said: you did not specify what exactly you are planing to do. For most scenarios, the choice of the environment doesn't really matter. What DOES matter is that you find someone that is proficient, has experience and knows the pros/cons in whatever framework he is using.If you really need minimal memory and CPU footprint, i'd suggest you choose Go."
}
] | en | 0.965573 |
WebOS legacy lives on as next-generation Enyo framework exits beta | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I logged into the sampler site and toyed around with it in the different browsers (IE 9, Firefox 15, Chrome ??) on Windows 7 with only input boxes behaving in different ways. Escape key could be used in IE to cancel input but not in others. On my iPod Touch, Safari could not render anything and Opera Mini could only show the front page but did not allow interaction. On my Nook Color, the Browser app also could not render the site either.Overall a nice little library with most of the expected widgets. Too many issues with the older mobile browsers that I'm not sure I would use it just yet but I would give it serious consideration as it does look like it might improve the experience for business apps we currently deploy in-house. I would probably need to actually download and toy with it for a more complete experience."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "We've picked this for our mobile presence, the real selling point for me was the pretty much native speed animations out of the box, which is a killer on things like jquery mobile. There might be more work up front for us as there is less reuse possible from our web front-end but that is our issue to solve once, having a clunky, unresponsive UI is a problem every user would suffer every time."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Kudos to the Enyo team for making this happen (despite it being widely and inaccurately reported that Google hired \"the whole team\" a few months back).Clearly there are still some very talented engineers working there, can't wait to see what they do with Open webOS 1.0 later this year."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "It's great to see Enyo survive the HP touchpad train wreck of last year."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Looks very simple yet powerful."
}
] | en | 0.969043 |
Net neutrality | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access.It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea is that in a free market, providers would only focus on the profitable parts of the city, leaving the lower-income areas without service.Universal access is why it's impossible to "disrupt" the market for local internet. A new entrant can't just come into the market and pick off the most desirable customers or the ones that are cheapest to service. They have to be prepared to service everyone, even many customers who can only be served at a loss, in order to be allowed to operate at all. Additional regulation in this space isn't going to eliminate the underlying problem, it will just make infrastructure construction a more unattractive business and decrease investment.There is no free lunch. You can have: neutrality, universal access, or a mostly privately-funded telecom infrastructure, but you only get to pick two. If you think universal access is important, and net neutrality is important, you have to be willing to publicly subsidize the construction of telecom infrastructure.PS. Some folks have mentioned BT OpenReach, but it's important to understand what did and did not happen there. First, BT was originally a government-owned corporation before it was privatized, so the government was in a position to set the terms of the privatization. Second, the government used a fairly generous "RPI - X" price cap to certain of BT's services. Between monopoly pricing power and a relatively generous price cap, BT made very healthy returns on investment. See: http://www.academia.edu/3399930/LESSONS_OF_PRIVATISATION_IN_... (p. 28-9).In the U.S., unbundled DSL was a failure. First, it got caught up in litigation because the infrastructure was never public at any point. Second, it was an almost pure losing proposition for the telecom companies. The FCC mandated a not-very-generous cost-based price control (TELRIC), which made further investments in DSL infrastructure unattractive."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I wonder. I wonder. I live in Russia and I have 2-3 very good providers on the block constantly competing with each other and offering better connection and prices. They would show up on time and connect you very fast. They fix things quickly (in my government maintained house, the basement once became filled with water after the rain, and the wires were damaged. Even though it wasn't their fault, the ISP came and fixed it the same day). I pay about $120 a year for my internet. It's faster than anything I saw when in the US. And that's in Russia, that authoritarian backward country. Do you know why I pay so little? That's because we have the free-est goddamn ISP market, government hasn't been interfering with it (it's starting to, though). Everything I see government touches is of low quality, whereas everything that's good in my country is private enterprise.And yet, you claim free market fails. Dear american internet users. The only reason you have what you have - shitty speeds and near monopolies - is BECAUSE you have government sticking its nose where it shouldn't (I'd say, it shouldn't stick its nose anywhere, but that's another story). Comcast is the second largest lobbyist in Washington. And still you want to fix the problem by introducing more of the same, that is more regulation and more government, whereas the only way to fix things is to not allow governmental interference in the first place. You can't blame evil Comcast. Why? Because if not them, someone else would lobby and win. If you can lobby, you have to or you're gone."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. [2]This is pretty much how it works in the UK; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenreachIt does seem to work pretty well.. there are a wide variety of operators and prices are very low. If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I agree, there's no real competition for the "last mile." (If there were real competition, ISPs would be trampling over each other to deliver the best Netflix experience and bragging about it in their advertising campaigns!)Requiring the incumbent mono/duopolistic last-mile ISPs to lease their lines may improve the situation, but I'm not as sure as Sam Altman that it would bring about real competition, because of the difficulties inherent in enforcing "fair, transparent leasing." Incumbents surely would find lots of clever ways to game any leasing scheme imposed by the FCC while technically "complying" with it.I expect it would be better for US consumers than the status quo, though."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "In this debate, a lot of people - especially those discussing "paying per GB" - that seem to be missing a key issue. Sometimes this is intentional, but I suspect that is a fairly small minority.The central problem: trying to apply the concept of money and economics to packets doesn't work, because money and economics are tools for handling scarce resources, while the major benefit of the modern "digital age" is that you can copy those bits without a per-copy cost[1]. As bits are not scarce, "pay per GB" becomes a case of applying to wrong tool or trying to solve the wrong problem.Observing that the infinite scalability of bits isn't leading to free high-speed internet for everybody, a better question is: which resources really are scarce? These are the costs that billing should be based upon.With networking, those costs are things like creating the network hardware, installing it, and maintaining that hardware. The first two are a one-time cost. We usually distribute that kind of high-variance, unpredictable cost into "monthly payments" in a variety of industries, and tthe maintenance costs are inherently a "per-unit-time" cost as well. This includes the expensive routers that you need to have anyway to be able to tolerate variations in usage[2]. At no point does the contents ("number of packets") enter into this as a cost.A common rebuttal to the idea of usage not being a cost is to point out the problem of saturation and how an oversubscribed line would the ISP to make expensive upgrades. This problem does exist, and should be part of the billing... because it is a problem about bandwidth, not bits. You don't get to keep billing someone indefinitely for a one-time cost. Attempting to do make up costs like that would be rent-seeking[3].Various ISPs have shown that billing for a given amount of bandwidth (at some defined defined guarantee of service) can easily be profitable.[1] Electricity costs are not relevant, and are often not relevant anyway in physical layers where you have to send an empty carrier if there is no data. Most of the rest of the "costs" are associated with using those bits (see: CMOS), which is addressed above.[2] The specific amount of tolerance required being defined by the guarantees (sometimes with SLA) offered by the ISP.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking"
}
] | en | 0.974123 |
Google’s Crystal Ball | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "One confounding variable here might be the fact that conservatives are actually less likely to use Google. There has been a strong backlash that I've seen personally, where conservative members of my family actively encourage me to stop using Google because it's in some way \"liberally biased\" and that it has a \"hidden political agenda\" and is trying to \"impose its radical views on the world.\" I'm not making this up, there are even books on this very subject. One example is \"Search and Destroy.\"Google has an advantage in mindshare in that it's effectively the \"default\" search engine on the web, but its population is still, to a degree, self-selecting. Whether this effect is pronounced enough to skew the data, I can't say."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Counter point:http://xkcd.com/1122/It's an interesting hypothesis, but it would have to be tested over a large number of elections before you could claim any statistical link."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "All this energy to figure out what people will think on a particular day. And so much energy spent trying to manipulate their opinion as that day approaches. We should be figuring out how to make the system better respond to what people think all the time, just as entrepreneurs do in any industry.Yes, people try to influence us when we are at decision points. But many things are about long term relationships and trust. Shouldn't we be striving for that?Its a bit absurd that we cannot change our minds later. Wouldn't having that ability make politicians more honest?I'd prefer to see proportional representation in both the legislative and executive branches (Switzerland does it) PLUS the ability to change who represents me whenever I want. We have much better technology now, so shouldn't we use it to make our electoral decisions more effectively?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I think he hints at the concept that, because of the emergence of the internet, certain statistical analyses may now be redundant, or worse yet, not actually accurate. If the average voters' feelings can be adequately captured using aggregate search data, what other types of polling can be augmented or replaced with data from Google, or Facebook, or Twitter?Pure statistical analysis and true polling will probably never be replaced, due to their sheer importance and applicability, so I'm not trying to suggest that people start using Google data rather than creating their own surveys. But I'm certain that there exist some academic researchers who would leap at the idea of using [Aggregate Facebook Statuses, 2010-2011] as a source for their next piece of research."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "That's really cool.Polls are pretty useless. I'm a fan of using prediction markets like betfair to figure out what's going on. When people stake money on an opinion, it gives it a lot more weight.For awesome analysis on prediction markets and the elections, check out the signal: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/"
}
] | en | 0.98117 |
Papers – Desktop app for finding, organizing, citing academic research | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Interesting that this has appeared here now, since it's been around for quite a while (I first saw colleagues using this nearly 7 years ago). I've only heard good thing about it, though I've never used it myself (not being much of a mac person).Other similar services include Mendeley [0] (now owned by Elsevier, I believe), gPapers [1] (less functionality, looks defunct), and good ol' bibtex files.[0] - http://www.mendeley.com/[1] - http://gpapers.org/"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I use BibDesk [1], which is open source and comes bundled with MacTeX. It is useful and very fast by itself, and it has a full AppleScript API which makes it extendible without having to dig into the code.I wrote a couple of 'plugins' for it, one for looking up papers through Alfred, and another for quickly importing papers from the arXiv and from INSPIRE (the high-energy physics database).[1] http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "In grad school, I wrote my own academic research "organizer" using Django (the framework makes it really easy). It takes a few weekends of work, but then you have something really cool and suited to your needs.And it allows you to do stuff that commercial software couldn't do, like use a headless browser to fetch metadata from the ACM website using your credentials (hey, I pay for my membership, and I have very reasonable rate limits built in my system). Sadly that's why it's the one piece of software I'll likely never open source :'(Colleagues were always surprised to hear about my system, but honestly I believe that any tool you'll use consistently throughout your life is worth building yourself.I ended up dropping out of my PhD for startups :) but I'll probably go back to research in the long term, and am looking forward to adding more features to it."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I remember that OSX colleagues used to be quite enthusiastic about Papers. As a Linux and sometimes Windows user, I used to use Mendeley quite intensively, until I rediscovered Zotero, which is open source, and for my use case much better than the competition.Zotero is cross-platform; it enables me to sync my papers in whichever way I choose and its bibliographic data extraction and PDF downloading work much better that that of Mendeley, because it does this from your computer, not via their servers, meaning you have access to all the fulltexts that your institution has access to.I've used Zotero to write a bunch of papers, book chapters and part of a book. It's very solid."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Papers had two downfalls for me, which were that it had no functionality similar to Mendeley's sync to .bib option, and it made weird citekeys when you manually exported lists.Using Pandoc and its referencing tools requires .bib files, and Mendeley's automatic .bib export means I can just type citekeys and expect them to work. And if you want your text to make sense as a markdown file, you want your citekey clean and informative. It's been a while, but I think Papers used citekeys that didn't conform to any sort of spec (something like :_blah instead of Author:DATE), and pandoc simply couldn't read them.I use Mendeley now. Doesn't have the cool research tools figured out as well as Papers, but it does what it's supposed to do, which is to store my citations in a way that makes it easy to put them in a paper."
}
] | en | 0.950367 |
How should I learn programming? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I actually still think that one of the best ways is to watch some of the Abelson-Sussman lectures. Unfortunately, they teach Scheme, but fortunately... they teach Scheme. (They also unfortunately have prehistoric audio quality.) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/\n\nThe bad thing about Scheme is that while it prepares you for function-oriented languages like Clojure and JavaScript (and hence Node.js) and to some extent Python, Scheme is not used by itself much on the web.The great thing about Scheme is that, unlike Python -- where I suddenly find myself explaining that this is generator syntax, that is function syntax, and so on -- lisps (like Scheme) have some extremely simple syntax principles. This makes them very easy to teach to someone who hasn't seen programming before, and helps people through understanding what exactly machines do.You may also want to start with JavaScript. (Do not confuse JS with Java.) JS has some of the best returns for its investment, because if you're building web apps, you will eventually have to face it anyway. (JS is the programming language of the Web.) You should run Firefox with Firebug (and eventually GreaseMonkey) if you want to make the most day-to-day use of learning JS.JS allows you to more readily have a concrete goal. Concrete goals are great for the dive-right-in school of programming. Let me offer this as something attainable: Sudoku. Go and find a web site which lets you play sudoku, and if you've never played, familiarize yourself with the rules. There are a bunch of them, like \"if all the other numbers appear in this row, column, and box except one, then this number should be that one number.\" I will give you a little bit of a head start on this: on the site puzzle-sudoku.net, here is how to get the board elements in a JavaScript object which you can then enumerate and query: // useful to know the JS operators:\n // https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Operator_Precedence\n // and the floor() function:\n // https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Math/floor\n function sudoku_groups(inputs) {\n var out, i, row, col, box, square;\n out = {rows: [], cols: [], boxes: [], all: []};\n for (i = 0; i < 9; i += 1) {\n out.rows[i] = [];\n out.cols[i] = [];\n out.boxes[i] = [];\n }\n for (i = 0; i < inputs.length; i += 1) {\n row = Math.floor(i / 9);\n col = i % 9; \n box = 3 * Math.floor(row / 3) + Math.floor(col / 3);\n square = {row: row, col: col, box: box, input: inputs[i]};\n out.rows[row].push(square);\n out.cols[col].push(square);\n out.boxes[box].push(square);\n out.all.push(square);\n }\n return out;\n }\n var board = sudoku_groups(\n // this selection line would be different for other web sites:\n document.getElementsByClassName(\"brd\")[0].getElementsByTagName(\"input\")\n );\n\n board.boxes[3]; // write this to inspect the 4th box in Firebug.\n\nI'm not saying you have to know what all of that does right now! Especially if you've never seen JavaScript before. But I am making your first programming task a little easier by solving the problem of finding the elements and turning them into a useful data structure for you to play with. Once you know the language a bit better, you might like to peek inside this to see how it works -- but you might also just use Firebug's \"inspector\" tools to see what the data structures look like without my help.When you want to start solving the Sudoku, you might start looking through board.all to see which elements do not yet have a value. Then you might want to start writing and using rules like this: function fill_in_if_only_one_option_remains(square) {\n var options;\n options = [\n false, // 0 is not an option\n true, true, true, true, true, true, true, true, true\n ];\n // here is how you cross off a square from the options\n function cross_off(other_square) {\n options[other_square.input.value] = false;\n }\n if (square.input.value === \"\") {\n // to be perhaps written by you: cross off all of the options which\n // appear in board.boxes[square.box], board.rows[square.row], and\n // board.cols[square.col]. Then, if there is exactly one option \n // left, fill it in, like \"square.input.value = 9;\"\n }\n }\n // then you can apply it to the whole Sudoku board like this:\n board.all.forEach(fill_in_if_only_one_option_remains);\n // it might be useful to look up Array.forEach() :\n // https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/forEach\n\nAnd then you might realize that this rule is not quite strong enough to solve Sudoku puzzles, and start thinking about how to describe even stronger Sudoku-solving strategies to a your computer. You might start a GreaseMonkey script to try to apply the automatic procedures every 1000 ms (every second) that you're on this page, so that as you solve the Sudoku the computer \"helps you out\" in realtime. You might start implementing 'speculative' algorithms, where you type 'a' instead of 1, 'b' instead of 2, and so on, to see if this leads to a contradiction somewhere down the line -- and your computer can notice that you're thinking speculatively and start to type 'a', 'b', and 'c' alongside you. (You might want to use an uppercase letter to denote the letter which started the speculative train of thought off, though, because it will quickly get lost!)So that's the sort of thing which programming is, and that's how I'd look to learn it. Dive right in like a six-year-old: play for ten minutes, fall, hurt yourself, cry for five; then get up and breathe deep and play with it some more, repeat as necessary."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Learn Python the Hard Way- discussed here:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2701504While doing that, start pre-reading for your specific interests."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I am very interested to hear about difficulties one might face doing this, as I'm in a similar situation. Currently I am a scientist in R&D for a blue chip company, but have been programming for fun and as a small part of the job for a couple of years. I'm interested in moving to a full-time programming job, but am worried about the typical minimum requirements; after all, I have no CS degree and haven't been coding since a young age."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "> do we have any professionals out there who quit their former professions (finance, marketing, etc) and pursued programming as their careers?Yep> What difficulties did you face and is it worth it or not?Probably no: http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First Off, you need to tell us what language you are interested in. Like PHP, ASP.Net, python or whatever. In that case readers of your post can recommend a better suggestion and resources to where you can learn to program."
}
] | en | 0.923258 |
Ask HN: What books have helped make who you are today? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "_A Brief History of Time_ by Stephen Hawking_The Way to Wealth_ by Benjamin Franklin_The Book of Job_ by Job, from The Bible_Meditations_ by Marcus Aurelius_The Prince_ by Niccolo Machiavelli_The Bill of Rights_ by James Madison_The Gospel According to John_ by John, from The Bible_The Gospel According to Luke_ by Luke, from The Bible_The Acts of the Apostles_ by Luke, from The Bible_The Song of Solomon_ by Solomon, from The Bible_Heimskringla_ transcribed by Snorri SturlusonThese books have combined to make me the free-thinking, reactionary stoic that I am today. Most of them are old, but they contain much wisdom about life, work, politics, gender relations, spirtuality, and history. Please let me know if you have questions. :)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse is a big one. Ecclesiastes is also excellent, and you shouldn't shy away just because it's in the Bible."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "_The Myth of Certainty_ by Daniel Taylor_Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing_ by Soren Kierkegaard_The Invisible Computer_ by Donald Norman_Death March_ by Edward Yourdon_War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning_ by Chris Hedges_What Do You Care What Other People Think?_ by Richard P. Feynman"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The C Programming LanguageThe Moon is a Harsh MistressLord of the Rings1984"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "_The Ecclesiastes_ by Solomon, from The Bible_Start From Scratch_ by Wes Moss_The Facebook Effect_ by David Kirkpatrick_The Millionaire Mind_by Thomas J. Stanley_Secrets of the Millionaire Mind_T. Harv Eker"
}
] | en | 0.96267 |
The Square Root of Not | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy my series of short videos on \"Quantum Computing for the Determined\", which go deeper into the subject than this article, while remaining accessible to anyone with some basic background in linear algebra. The videos provide an intro to quantum mechanics, and cover the basic quantum computing model, as well as quantum teleportation and superdense coding:http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-det...(Apologies for the self-plug, but this particular article seems like a good prelude to my course.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Here's a much simpler and more intuitive (IMHO) way of understanding this: imagine you're encoding bits as polarization. Vertically polarized is 1 and horizontally polarized is 0. Rotating the polarization by 90 degrees is then a logical NOT operator. Rotating by 45 degree is then the \"square root of not\" because if you do it twice you get a NOT operator. (This exactly analogous to how you can define the square root of -1 by thinking of multiplying by -1 as a rotation through 180 degrees on a number line. The square root of -1 then becomes a rotation by 90 degrees.)BTW, you can actually do this experiment yourself at home using very inexpensive materials: a laser pointer, polarized sunglasses, and a few dollars worth of \"quarter wave plate\" material that is easily found on the internet."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This is a fascinating article but the formatting is atrocious, mostly with the closing >-like character in the |0> notation, which seems to be rendered as an image and then repositioned in an inappropriate way so that it leaves its context.People with Chrome developer tools or Firebug will find it marginally improved by disabling the stylesheet rules for the .imageRight class (and maybe setting the p.font-size to 16 or so to boot, so the > isn't grossly oversized relative to the text)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Non-print friendly version, possibly with better formatting, but in five pages:http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-square-root-..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"In all known classical factoring algorithms, the amount of time needed to find the prime factors of a number grows as an exponential function of the size of the number, making the algorithms impractical for very large numbers.\"General number field sieve is sub-exponential. Factoring is interesting because it is not NP-complete, but not known to be in P either. It is my understanding that NP-complete problems remain so in the quantum world."
}
] | en | 0.890151 |
Ask HN: What would you fix in Gmail UX/UI? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Search could learn to handle a hierarchy of mailboxes. For example, if you have labels "project1" and "project2", each with sub-labels under them, it doesn't seem possible to make a search in "project1" to go into the sub-labels.Grep-based search would be good.When replying to a message, it would be nice if the controls for breaking the window loose of the rest of the application didn't require four or five actions, in different parts of the screen. Here's what I mean. Hit "reply" to a message. If you want to pop that window loose, so that it's actually useable while you run through other messages, you first go to the upper left corner of the editing area, click the drop-down, and hit "Pop out reply". Then go to the upper right of the subwindow that just opened, hold down shift, and click the arrow that points up and to the left. None of it is intuitive, and it's just too much clicking for such a simple action.It would be nice if the editor wasn't so forgetful about the insertion point. For example, if you're editing some text in a reply, and click on the "..." icon to see the message you're responding to, the insertion point hops to the top of the editing window.Ability to remove an attachment.When you delete a message, and you're looking in Trash, have the quick-preview line (i.e., the first few words, shown in the main screen listing all the messages) show the contents of the message you're actually looking at, rather than the first sentence in the most recent e-mail with the same subject. I don't know how many times I've panicked, thinking that I deleted an important e-mail, rather than some formulaic "Catch you tomorrow" or "No problem" message that I had trashed.I've long ago given up hoping that some organizational capability would come to Gmail that went beyond the pathetic "conversations" mode. Gmail's idea of organization pretty much amounts to this: (1) you either want to list all e-mails by subject all the time, or you want to list them by time all the time; (2) you only rarely want to switch back and forth between those two views; and (3) if you want to list them in any other way, then it's a "search" which delivers limited results, and disappears the instant you navigate away from it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "2 things that kill me all the time- Fix Threads as if I forward an email to someone and they respond, it's not part of the original thread\n- Have the edit subject line NOT require another click"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "One UX strategy to improve moving attachments without downloading is to add a button in the bottom of the compose/reply window that responds with a list of recently viewed/downloaded attachments. The user could then click on any of them and they would be attached to the email without downloading and uploading."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'd stop Gmail from somehow grabbing tab focus in Safari once it completes its in-page loading bar. I had to disable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail because I don't want to be typing elsewhere in Safari only to suddenly be firing off a bunch of unintended Gmail actions."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I would make it not take over my emacs key bindings: I want ctrl-k to kill to the end of the line.Actually, what would be really neat is if they found a way to make an API that still included their ads, so that people could experiment with different stuff."
}
] | en | 0.916979 |
Apple drops Consumer Reports/iPhone 4 discussion threads | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Umm... it's a support board for people who have bought a product, not a soapbox to whine on. It's one thing to have negative threads about how their product they bought doesn't work, it's another when people who haven't bought one complain. (And/or a continuation of the same subject that needs to be merged into the parent thread.)EDIT: I should edit quickly to say that what I mean is that support boards specifically for support are for one purpose: support. Complaints need to go in the complaint box or the FCC or something."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I have some rules when buying gadgets:- Never buy it in the first six months of release, even if it is a holodeck.- Read/watch review. Not only from fanboys but also from rivals and people who despise this gizmo.- If its expensive (and a bit out of your range), wait to see if there is any competing products. (I am still waiting to see what Google has to offer before getting iPad)Frankly I am surprised that most tech savvy consumers don't follow some of these rule."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Remember, it's Apple, no dissent is allowed.Frankly, most companies would probably do the same thing. You wouldn't want a highly negative thread in your forums. That might make potential customers question their zeal and wait for the next model before they make their purchase. Definitely not something you want if you're in the business of releasing new phones every year or so."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I guess they undeleted them, because I see both threads on their forums:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2503667...http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2503228..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'm looking forward to a proper response to these design issues.I have quite a bit of my savings invested in Apple and, while a recall would be bad, an Apple that doesn't recognise it's own fuck ups would be far more serious.They've made it much harder for themselves with Jobs' obnoxious e-mails and that dishonest press release."
}
] | en | 0.97875 |
Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I can not believe you linked to yourself!It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- \"you don't know everything\" and \"programmers can't communicate\". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "He actually spent time to write that bullshit? I really hate articles that offense their readers.All these people he mentions were lead to create something out of need or by a strike of genious, and I don't see this guy getting either of both.Unicode is not a luxury, is a need.Supported or not by Arc at this version or in the future, is another issue and if the community needs it, a totally another one.But leaving a language without builtin support for Unicode, its destiny not far should it be from ending up like what is to day to writting C++ in Windows, which is a tottally NIGHTMARE to handle strings as there more than 10 different types.I don't think anybody attacked Arc or its creatos by stating their \"dumb\" needs!"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/theyInterestingly enough, in the three months the above link has been around, I've found it germane to something like four threads on Hacker News.This is open source, people. If you need something, add it yourself. This is a Lisp for God's sake, you can actually add syntax to the language!In general, grumble, but don't be obnoxious about gaps unless you're paying the developer for the privilege.The Tao of Steve applied to free and open-source software:1) Be desireless; 2) Be excellent; 3) Be gone."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII character was used."
}
] | en | 0.962968 |
YC is a cult | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Actually there's a fundamental incompatibility between cults and startups. Cult followers tend to be people who want someone to tell them what to do. There are a lot of people like that, but they're the opposite of the kind of people who make good startup founders. What you want\nin a startup founder is the sort of tenacious independent mindedness\nthat makes you start a new search engine in 1998, when everyone else\nthinks it's too late.If the startups we funded were run by the kind of people who'd feel\nat home in a cult, they'd get creamed as soon as they hit the real world, and our returns would be terrible. A regular company could \ntend toward the cultish and succeed (some technology companies show signs of it), but a venture firm couldn't be, because its startups would lose in the market."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This guy is presumptuous, ill informed and appears to have a thing for blanket statements.Hi, I'm currently in YC for the summer. Although I certainly don't speak for everyone in YC, I think I'm somewhat more qualified than the author who has never been in the program and who apparently receives his information from blog posts and hearsay.Most of his assertions apply to startups or any intense forms of collaboration (as PC noted) in general. Although we work a significant amount of hours, it's not as if we never get out. I've gotten to know many of the other cofounders very well outside of YC. Additionally, is it really work if you enjoy what you're doing? I rather work 60-80 hours per week on something I like that challenges me, than 40 hours per week on something I'm disinterested in. As for the pure speculative, link-baiting stuff:\"Young, impressionable and inexperienced entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice their health, happiness and creativity while pursuing wealth.\"\nThis is the second company I've started. It's my business partner's second as well. Many of the founders in YC have worked at startups or run their own businesses before.Happiness/Creativity? I went from working a 9-7 office job I wasn't interested in to working on my dream project.Health? Due to increased schedule flexibility, I've actually been able to exercise more and eat better. I've lost a good 5 lbs.\"They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic...\"\nYou should have been at my team's first meeting; it was like this, but the opposite. Informal founder feedback sessions have been similar. The carebear environment the author described wouldn't work anyway - the VCs would destroy us.\"They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.\"\nIsolation? My parents just visited this past weekend. I still keep in touch with all of my friends even if many of them wear the hat of beta tester. If anything, I've been able to keep in _better_ touch with my friends because they're all curious about what I'm working on. Talking about a startup is a lot more fun than talking about a 9-5 or 9-7 for that matter.Without YC I'd still be at my same old job trying to work on our startup on the side. This is not only difficult to do, but very slow as well. YC essentially moved everything up a year or two and allowed us to work on what we love while being surrounded with a bunch of brilliant people to bounce ideas off of and anxious investors to present to. What more could two cofounders originally from Ohio ask for?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": " - People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;\n - Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;\n - They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic; [sic]\n - They get a new identity based on the group;\n - They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream\n culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.\n\nTo the extent that YC fits this definition, so does any intense and ambitious collaboration. Take the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions, and some parts of the Human Genome Project -- they all fit criteria 1, 2, 4, and the first part of 5 to a much greater extent than YC ever does.So it looks like we have a broken test function. (Though perhaps it's just missing a type-check -- maybe it's only supposed to be applied to religions.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Hilarious. Blatant linkbait, but hilarious.Clearly he does not know many actual participants. Working 18 hour days for two months is not the norm."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's sad to see this trollish content rising to the top of news.yc."
}
] | en | 0.987252 |
Tools for startups along their lifetime | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is great, as is rchaudhary's link.I can usually deal very well with tools/software/etc, but I have more problems getting really straight answers on non-technical things sometimes.Does anybody have similar links for business processes? \"Here's the least amount of accounting/legal/business/etc you need for starting up a business...\"Quick steps like:\n- Use this template as your Articles of Organization and file for an LLC.\n- Get a company credit card and buy everything on it.\n- Your accounts should look like \"this\"\n- Here's the steps you go through to add money from your personal savings to your company's in a clean way (no corporate veil piercing or anything of that nature) _after_ the beginning of the company\n- A guide to internet advertising -- what works/what doesn't/who the players areProgrammers have so many bulidings blocks these days for handling sys admin, money handling, etc, but there are still a lot of things I'm very curious about and can't seem to find a single simple source of information for."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I second the wiki suggestion.My experience, thus far, with Google Docs:- Click on link and browse around a bit- As usual, use backspace key to go back to HN- Nothing happens, tap backspace key a few more times out of habit- Accidentally delete most of the presentation"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "You guys should check out http://startuptools.pbworks.com/w/page/17974963/FrontPage"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Has a lot of great information for anyone interested in startups. I have to agree with the rest also, would be nice in a wiki format. However, it seems that it was just thrown together as a mash-up of resources - kind of a first stage document. Hopefully with some more effort it can be a wiki page."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Really good idea, whatever format you publish it in. Will save many searches of hacker news archives."
}
] | en | 0.986438 |
Why does GitHub let me commit as other people? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The author of a commit in git is just metadata. You can set it to whatever you want. This is a necessary feature for distributed workflows, or any kind of workflow where one person may be committing on another person's behalf.The only way to avoid 'spoofing' commits would be to require them to be signed. Anything else would require a single source of authority on the identity of a given committer, which would defeat the purpose of a distributed VCS.The OP mentions "security": what's the security issue here? Being able to label a commit as being from defunkt doesn't give you access to anything defunkt has access to."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This isn't a github problem, git lets you set your user.name and user.email as anything you like. In addition, you can rebase and rewrite the history to change former commits to be from whomever you like.It's a feature, not a bug - this is how git is able to seamlessly interoperate with other VCS, like SVN. The SVN user id and email is displayed as the git commit author. Having to verify this information would be very complicated and essentially break interoperability between VCS's. In addition, mutable history means you could go back and fix up the history, remove misspellings from names, update your git repo to show a new email address, etc. Git follows the standard user philosophy of letting unix users do what they want, and simply warning them if they push rewritten history to a repository."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "This isn't a "security problem", nor is it something on GitHub's end. The email used to author a commit is set by the person making the commit, and shouldn't be taken as a secure value or proof that the person who owns that email made that commit. Think of it like the return address on an envelope, not the barcode on a driver's license.If you're looking to securely prove who made a commit, look into signing commits.GitHub does require that you have a valid SSH key for a GitHub user, and that the given GitHub user has access to write to the repo you're pushing to, but that's totally separate from commit messages and authorship."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Discussed earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6918343Original post: http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/pushing-code-to-github-as-linus..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "It's because Git is decentralized, and when you push a repo to GitHub it could contain genuine commits from other people that you've pulled into your repo from some other, non-GitHub source. There's no way for GitHub to authenticate such commits.There is definitely a potential for abuse, but can you solve it without breaking useful functionality?"
}
] | en | 0.94913 |
The World's Lightest Electric Vehicle | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is one of those things that's like Google in the sense that it seems to be just an improvement on existing technology, but in fact is enough of an improvement that it's qualitatively different.In all the startups we've funded I don't think I've seen one whose product was so enthusiastically embraced by YC partners. Three bought one of these boards. One says it \"changed his life.\""
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This sounds cool, but (IMO) it's actually a bad idea. When I was in my late teens / early twenties, I essentially had a 180HP version of this.It was a lot more expensive back then: $4,000 for the 1984 Chevy Blazer and $0 dollars for an extension cord we found in the garage, but going going fast on a skateboard, no matter what the method, is dangerous.The worst part of this idea is \"braking\". I can assure you the only good way to brake a skate board at speed is a power slide, which you need to be an expert to do.I've hit sand at speed and, even knowing it was coming, the slight braking power of the sand was enough to throw me. It's difficult to explain, but between knowing how far to lean against the braking force AND managing your balance side to side on the trucks, it ends up being harder to pull off than a good ole power slide.That said, a roller blade version of this would be cool."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I've been building that project over and over since I was 14. My first try was a \"Vision Gator\" skateboard with a 35watt brushed dc motor and vacuum cleaner belts for drive.It is astonishing (and more than a little awesome) that you can pack 2kw of motor power and so much range into so small a space now. Oh how I wish parts like this had been available in 1989."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Seems like it's illegal to use in California: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc21968.htm"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Great idea. I'm surprised nobody has done this before (but they probably have, I'm no longer a skateboarder).But I'm wondering about the prices. $10 stickers and $40 t-shirts are still advertising, so people are paying to advertise for your company? That doesn't seem right.In reality, they are really trying to push people to spend $1200 for a board. Even the $1099 pledge is a complete rip-off since you spend $100 less than the pledge that gets you a board, and they only give you a $100 coupon when you buy your first board for full price. That doesn't make sense.A suggestion: create a small batch (5) of $500 or $700 pledges that provide a board. That kicks everyone into gear to get that pledge as soon as possible and fight over the $500 pledge spot."
}
] | en | 0.991755 |
Ask HN: Science for the very young? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I think anything that \"looks cool\" will be good for getting a kid interested in science. Once you've got him/her hooked, then you can start on the actual scientific method. To that end, science things that look cool:Cymatics:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iXY2BE1S8QFerrofluid:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpBxCnHU8Ao\nhttp://www.gaussboys.com/ndfeb-magnets/FerroFluid25Non Newtonian Liquids:\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5SGiwS5L6I\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XQ97XHjVwMicrocontrollers:\nhttp://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=211799... (maybe not the best for a 5 year old, but in a couple years)Make a Speaker for cheap (haven't done this one myself):\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m8fbnShPcwElectromagnets:\nhttp://education.jlab.org/qa/electromagnet.htmlFinally, one project I did with my little brother that I thought was cool. I got a frequency analyzer for my computer ( http://www.relisoft.com/Freeware/freq.html) and then filled glass cups with varying amounts of liquid. Then we ran our fingers around the lip of the glass to get it to \"sing\" and measured the frequency. We were able to come up with a function for X amount of liquid gives you X frequency. I thought this was great because: it was really appealing to my brother (he was 10 or so at the time) because all kids like making cups make noise, we got to do scientific method (hypothesis being more water in the glass) will make a lower frequency, I got to teach him about graphing, how to get a forumla for a line on a graph, and finally we could use that line to predict things to see if we were right."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "You could have a lot of fun with an inexpensive microscope (look at a number of different materials, bugs, etc..) or even a set of magnifying glasses. Get your hands on some polarizers, play with the affect of one and your ability to look into bodies of water (pool, lake, etc) show him that if you cross the polarizers you can't see through. Couple the polarizers to the microscope and do some polarization microscopy. You could also play with prisms and look at the dispersion of light. Lots of good optics stuff out there. I would highly recommend staying away from lasers until he's older.You might also consider doing some crystallization experiments (google \"crystal projects for kids\")."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Throw some pepper on a bowl of water, and touch it with a soaped finger."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Also Baking Soda + Vinegar, add some red food coloring for lava effect"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Show him videos on youtube of various science experiments or lectures. When he seems interested in an idea, work with him to create an experiment, find the items, and perform it."
}
] | en | 0.678369 |
Hexo+: Autonomous Aerial Camera | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I've spent the past year working on a similar concept using the same flight controller, but didn't think that its safe enough for everyday consumer use, not at least for another couple of years until radar or optical obstacle avoidance is available in the consumer space. Everyone who operates MAVs knows that things are guaranteed to occasionally go wrong even in ideal conditions. If GPS or INS glitches, the drone becomes a high velocity flying circular saw - and make no mistake, those flimsy plastic propellers will casually cut you to the bone at decent speeds.I've had a number of aborted flights and close calls during development, the scariest one being a GPS glitch while testing full autonomy on a crowded beach. The most common issue is poor GPS accuracy which can cause autonomous flight to be erratic or completely uncontrolled. In these cases, the operator will notice that the drone isn't responding correctly and switch to manual control to recover. The worst possible issue is a GPS failure or occlusion: if the system loses GPS during autonomous flight, it has about 10 seconds of guessing its velocity based on other sensors before it becomes completely out of control. In these circumstances, again the operator will quickly take over to recover. GPS dropouts or poor accuracy are a regular occurrence in suburbs and guaranteed in built up cities at altitudes below the skyscrapers. The only time it's more or less reliable is over water and rural land.I think giving drones without a means for manual control to untrained consumers is almost negligent and a disservice to the industry. Speaking about the 3DR flight controller and software in particular, there are a number of known issues such as the dreaded uncontrolled flyaway which are guaranteed to happen to one of the users at some point. God forbid one of these flies into a kid and leaves them disabled; the FAA is just waiting for an excuse to crack down on hobby MAV use."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "The team section lists 3 "development" staff: there's a CTO and two developers. There are 6 people on the team doing design, videography, and marketing, including the CEO who does list himself as a "telecom and electronics engineer", and so might be involved in design.A startup building hardware - not to mention advanced image-tracking, autonomous navigation, (hopefully) hazard avoidance, which are hard problems - would in my estimation have more staff doing engineering and manufacturing, rather than design and sales.Is this a reasonable team arrangement? Am I underestimating the skills of their technical staff, are they outsourcing engineering, or are they using a preexisting plaform? Or am I underestimating the importance of design and sales (which have certainly produced and brought to my attention a gorgeous Kickstarter page)?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How does it compare to AirDog: World's First Auto-follow Action Sports Drone (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7897776)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A while ago my wife and I were having a debate about hollywood. Mostly about how much it sucks, and why. I made the statement, it doesn't really matter because technology is bringing down the cost of making a movie for everyone in literally every way. At the time I was thinking about cheap CG, and DSLR's. Great quality filming like aerial shots were one of the few holdouts that individuals didn't have access to.Now one of the last few holdouts are good quality talent, but I think people can learn to improve skills, and technology can help there too.To me there isn't a single "hollywood killer" but rather its a singularity of sorts. When technology converges to the point where the quality of million dollar marketing oriented mass audience films are irrelevant. Because cheaper "niche" movies are more compelling anyways."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Cool, but I thought "follow-me" technology was already pretty advanced. Does this do anything different?I'm a rower and a few people are looking at using follow-me drones for rowing training and coaching. Here's one example (not follow-me, but shows observation from a drone):\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XfL_2EzEHIThe theory is that a drone follows the rower, maybe moving around the subject for different viewpoints, and the (possibly remote) coach can examine the footage afterwards. A coach can advise many rowers without needing to be on hand (or even in the same continent) for all of them."
}
] | en | 0.95128 |
We’re Being Sued For Linking To Shopzilla | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I suspect datadial know exactly what they're doing here - as revenge for this alleged petty act by the lawyers they're now google-bombing the term shopzilla (by deliberately including so many refs to shopzilla in this new blog post), and hoping to teach them a lesson about who is in control of links. They're already on the second page for a simple search for shopzilla, and I'd expect them to move up closer to the top if this gets more publicity and links in from other sites. Does it deserve it?A very strange attempt by Shopzilla in the first place to control links to them, so it would be interesting to hear their side of this story. I looked up datadial - they're a London SEO shop, and their original blog post is typical of SEO blogs - lots of links to random sites strung together into a blog post to boost their blog's ranking for that topic - ecommerce in this case. I have to wonder if this little storm in a teacup isn't more beneficial to them the more absurd it sounds and the stormier it gets - even if it dies down later the benefit will still be there for them.It's strange to see the court of public opinion function on sites like reddit and HN - the more controversial and snappier the original post, the more traction it gets, and nuances and truth are lost in the rush to condemn based on a very limited set of facts."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "That's a clever ploy to get some eyeballs out of a legal case that isn't worth the paper it is printed on.But if some company is hell bent on suing you for linking to them and you want to get mileage out of it by going to the media with the story you're going to have to weigh your options carefully. Just remove the link, problem goes away no need for legal representation and you get on with your life.Or you milk it for all it is worth, eventually go to court and you're vindicated in your laymans interpretation of the law. Or you find that the court - for whatever reason - sides with your opponent. Now you have a problem, and don't say it can not happen, there is no such thing as a slam-dunk lawsuit.Pick your battles, carefully and make sure that you make the right choice.In this particular case I think the plaintiff is dead wrong, they don't have a leg to stand on but it could still cost you a lot of time, money and effort to prove that and in the end it is their loss not yours if they lose their link.For more information:http://searchengineland.com/in-wake-of-penguin-could-you-be-..."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The hyperbole and tone of the article is difficult to read through.Have you thought about writing a simple letter to the solicitors saying something like \"Hello, you sent us a letter. Would you like to review our webpage here to see if we actually are infringing on your client's trademark? We seem to have been caught in some automatic system.\"Be careful about 'no legal reason to take down an url' - there are a few. DMCA requests, anti-deeplinking causes in ToS / AUP, etc etc. See the Shetland Times vs Shetland News."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Shopzilla probably has bad links that are driving down its SEO and page rank on Google and they are trying to get low quality sites to remove those bad links. It is totally OK for them to want to have links removed to their site, since some of them may be damaging their SEO and hence their earnings. Maybe the method used is a little over the top, but there is probably nothing wrong with their intentions.If someone asks you to remove a link to their site in a post where you criticized them, I would feel uncomfortable with it, but in this case you and them are acting in good faith, just remove the link. That they used a lawyer just means they really want you to remove the link.Edit: Uh oh, looks like this innocuous reply is not compatible with uncritical outraged HN readers looking to punish someone, anything for all the bad things Shopzilla has done to them and the world. Let the downvotes commence I guess."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "First time I've seen a business not want to be given free advertising.But instead of just giving them a call (it's not difficult, they're both UK based) they're going to Streisand themselves some negative PR.I'll wait for the statement from Shopzilla's top brass, just to see if it's ran by 1000 monkeys on computers."
}
] | en | 0.968405 |
Ask HN: Learning C | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "1. In Which I Join The ChoirYou should definitely learn C:* You'll learn the memory hierarchy, which is probably the most important thing to know about performant software.* You'll get 100x better at debugging --- both because you'll have practice, and because most of the tools you use to debug C code work for higher-level languages (gdb is still a better Ruby debugger than Ruby's own debugger).* You'll be able to bridge Python (or Perl) to almost any library or framework you ever need.2. In Which I Express ReservationsDon't learn assembly. In my (C and assembly-heavy) career, I've found it works in exactly the opposite direction: you won't really understand assembly until you understand C code. There are mainstream architectures (SPARC and MIPS) that are literally designed as drivers for C compilers.You'll eventually want to be conversant in assembly so that you can debug faster (when it comes to the runtime, the C language is a flimsy abstraction indeed). But you should let your needs and interests drag you into the machine, just like you should probably learn \"Stairway\" and \"Smoke On The Water\" before mastering barre chords and sight reading --- you can have a pretty excellent punk band without ever knowing how to read music.3. There Are BooksEveryone is going to have an opinion about K&R. What I think you need to know is, it's short and it's dry. I re-read it 6 years into my career and I was surprised at how rich it was; there's a lot of design and data structures material, beyond the core language.There's a C book that changed my life. It's David Hanson's \"C Interfaces And Implementations\" (CII). I will now make a case for why it's the first and only book you'll need. You're coming to C from a high-level language. That language is giving you a couple key things you don't realize you depend on:* Garbage collection* Lists and hash tables* Resizeable stringsAlmost every major C project contains a site-specific reimplementation of these concepts. CII gives you one --- an internally consistent one, relatively well implemented, and extremely well documented. In doing so, it also teaches you the single most important thing about writing good C programs, which is how to build abstractions around your gnarly code.The difference between people who know C as a language and people who can actually deliver software in it is resizeable containers (linked lists, dynamic memory allocation, high-level strings, doesn't really matter what the specific is).The other book you want is \"Advanced Programming In The Unix Environment\" (or its moral equivalent, \"Win32 Programming\").CII is \"how\". APUE is \"what\".Finally, I like (for new programmers) \"The Practice Of Programming\".4. What I Did To Get StartedI \"knew\" C for a while (maybe since I was 13) before I actually started coding in it. Two things got me unstuck.First, I picked a couple basic Unix APIs and wrote little toy programs around them. If I remember correctly, the first thing I wrote was \"who\", from \"getpwnam(3)\", which forced me to do some basic strings and structure pointers.Second, I wrote network code from a socket tutorial. Sockets are a great thing to get started on; just write a scraper for a service you like, and there's a zillion little problems you'll have to solve that are the same problems you solve in every other program you write."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Best beginner text after K&R is Kelly and Pohl's \"A Book on C\"; very newbie friendly and at the same time uses traditional C examples (i.e. memory management, serializing and reading-back record-oriented data stored in structs, file and directory manipulation, string manipulation, etc.)Most other C books will just treat it as a stepping stone for C++ which is a different beast, and a few awful offenders will stretch it to Java!To see a few Algorithm implementations in C, there is no better friend than Robert Sedgwich's polyglot tome; it's the applied Knuth volumes that everyone keeps on their desk (quickly swapped for the actual Knuth volumes when expecting hacker guests.)Along with C materials you will also need Unix materials. The two are inseparable and fuel each other. You already have a decent Unix in your Mac, and your FreeBSD is the best of the Unix breed bearing the original blood. For that there are no better companions than the books by Richard Stevens, both for system and network programming.For larger scale software engineering you will need a few small to mid projects of your own. You will deal with header file and Make dependency problems, a few unix and processor portability problems and a few other stuff. The solution to those problems along with a fat library of useful routines are found in \"C Interfaces and Implementations\" by Hanson. It's a literate programming text where source code is interwoven with prose documentation and it's very self evident.Along with productive C programming you might need to look into the darker side of C and Unix and follow the papers of the hacking underground (yes, HACKING, dispute the terminology all you want, but I think some blackhats deserve the noble noun more than javascript and CSS jockeys.) Unix and C have plenty of Not-TODOs to motivate plenty of caution. Hoglun and McGraw's Exploiting Software is the canonical C-Do-Not text books.If you want to read library source code, your FreeBSD source code should give you plenty to keep you busy. Start with the sources for the games; I spent an enjoyable summer porting Minix games to DOS and taught me allot. There is also \"The Standard Function Library\", or SFL, google it, it has the cleanest C sources you ever seen. Highly recommended.And should you ever want to write a C compiler, like I attempted, here is some advice: implement Oberon instead. Everything you could possibly learn at 1/100th of the headache.Just the 2 cents of a guy who will only write C code again if there was a gun to his head ;-)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Just about everybody who answers this will say that K&R is good, and I agree, but in addition to this I found that learning the basics of assembly was helpful. You can really see what's going on with the stack, what a pointer really is (pointers are really the only tough part about learning C, everything else will be the same old same old if you already know how to program), and the difference between a system call and a regular function call, and it doesn't take much time to learn.Books by W. Richard Stevens were old when I was learning, and older now, but they were the best guides to taking it to the next levels. You can pick up a lot of tricks and stylistic pointers from him while learning about UNIX features and networking. Maybe somebody will chime in with a more up-to-date resource that does the same thing."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "C isn't hard, don't worry! It's actually a fairly simple language. But it's medium/low-level and there is a lot of power within its simplicity. Fast to learn, but a long time to master, as one might say.I don't know what people are using to learn C these days, but the standard has always been the white book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Prentice-Hall-Sof...You will find yourself spending more time thinking about programming concepts rather than dealing with C syntax, since it's pretty concise. I don't know how difficult it is to learn about pointers if you have already been programming for a while but haven't had to use references directly, but it's very important to learn. C does not do too much for you on its own, so handling references yourself is an important skill. It will also help you understand how higher level languages and concepts work.If you are working through it and find that you're enjoying yourself, congratulations, you're a programmer :] Then it's time to pick up the 1st volume of Knuth and start working through that."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "You should absolutely learn C. A good knowledge of C is a very valuable asset for all sorts of work, especially on Unix.Thankfully, C is straightforward to learn. The major concept you need to understand is pointers; once you've done that, there are some syntactic oddities to absorb (typedefs, function pointer syntax, arrays vs. pointers), and you should skim through the standard library (which is tiny compared to Java, or even C++), and you're most of the way there.In addition to K&R, I've hears that Steele and Harbison's \"C: A Reference Manual\" is very good, although I haven't read it personally."
}
] | en | 0.953585 |
GoAngular - build realtime, collaborative apps with AngularJS and GoInstant | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "GoInstant is like firebase, realtime db in the cloud.Not golang related as I can tell."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This looks awesome.I just signed up for GoInstant, won't have time to play with it for a bit but now the signup email should remind me :)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I would love to use this for the app I am building, only thing thats preventing me from using this is, I already have some data , and I need a way to use my exiisting data ( may be offering an import solution would serve the purpose )"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Why do these kind of tools have tendency to appear on HN about a month too late? :)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I don't understand what GoInstant does, the "How it Works" page tells me nothing. How does the real time functionality work? Is it MVCC, Operational Transformation, just a locking protocol?"
}
] | en | 0.947532 |
'Don’t ignore your stupid ideas.' | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Not shown: 1000s of goofy iphone apps that generated close to $0If the moral of the story is \"Do funky apps for fun and be happily surprised if they make any money\" then I agree. If the moral is \"Do funky apps and expect to make $16k over a weekend\" then I have to disagree.Note: I say this as the co-author of a very nice funky app: http://fakewhale.com I am currently waiting by the phone for investors or acquirers to call."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "For all the new designers out there, please don't add a CSS text shadow to the main body of your text content. By highlighting everything, you make everything less readable."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Don't ignore your stupid ideas... that only waste a few hours of your time if they don't go anywhere; otherwise, your first instinct is probably the one to go with."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "IMO his big win was getting an iPhone app dev (who can actually execute) agree to make an app for him on the premise of splitting revenue. \nEither this was real early time of the \"App goldrush\" before anyone knew money could be made or the dev was a friend (post seems to imply it was a random twitter follower).Anybody with a reputation as a good iPhone app dev get the age old \"idea guy\" proposition at least 3 times a week: \"I got a great app idea.. I'll give you some of the $ if you code it just for me.\""
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What does this say? I mean, it's nice that he made a popular app and a ton of money, but there is nothing to learn here. It was either raw luck or a stupid populace or both that made this happen. There's no insight in to the design of a well made and genuinely entertaining or interesting application here, just a gimmick app that somehow made it big.It's discouraging to read things like this, because the implied moral is \"any stupid idea you come up with has a chance of making it big\". But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?"
}
] | en | 0.908109 |
Texas Battlefield 3 launch LAN bans women from attending | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> women are disallowed from attending in order to protect them from misogynistic insultsFundamentalist religious societies often use the same line of reasoning: women are not allowed to walk around unveiled or allowed to do pretty much anything because they are powerless and ostensibly have to be protected from society as much as society needs to be protected from the unrest their public presence causes. The deeper \"logic\" here is that women are held responsible for the abuse they are provoking just by being around, and also that they're somehow not mature enough to handle themselves.This is exactly the same reasoning as banning, say, black people on the grounds that they might cause unrest among KKK attendees who might be present.In one line: this is the most insultingly stupid thing ever and it's happening not only in Texas but all over the world. I just wish it didn't happen in so-called free societies at all."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As far as I can tell, this is not in anyway affiliated with or sponsored by EA or DICE. Is that correct?Just want to make sure people don't automatically leap on the BF3 link and blame the publisher or developer, when this appears to be a privately run event."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "How exactly does one get into a launch party? Because if they're letting in 15 year-olds, sure there's going to be spiteful words. I always pictured these sorts of things having more mature crowds, but maybe I'm wrong.My strategy, instead of excluding women, would be to make it a 21+ event (or maybe 18+), as well as kicking out anybody who doesn't abide by decency standards."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "We already have a nontrivial number of women only events in technology. What's wrong with a men only event?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is this immature and inconsiderate of women and does it reflect poorly on the LAN? Absolutely. Are they within their right to do so? Absolutely.People get up in arms about stuff like this because they're offended that people would so boldly exclude someone, but the key here is that it's a private event. Don't like it? Don't support them. Or, create your own private event with any rules you see fit.As a nonreligious white male, I'm also excluded from minority scholarships, many religious private colleges, jobs with many religious organizations, being a waiter at Hooters, and plenty of other social groups, simply because of my personal beliefs or race or gender.Women also can't join the Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters) for similar reasons as this, but I don't see that on the frontpage of HN."
}
] | en | 0.981812 |
Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "One thing the article didn't address is performance over time. Even with TRIM support, SSDs get slower as they're used. Occasionally, cells die prematurely causing spare capacity to decrease. This won't affect read speeds much but it will hurt writes. These older SSDs will still be faster than hard drives but they won't be as fast as you'd expect them to be.Now for some of my own data. Here's an Intel X25-M G2 after a lot of usage: http://abughrai.be/pics/ssd_erase/Screenshot-160%20GB%20Soli...\nand here it is after an ATA secure erase: http://abughrai.be/pics/ssd_erase/Screenshot-160%20GB%20Soli...The G2 has TRIM support and this drive was used on an ext4 filesystem with TRIM enabled. After the erase, performance was almost back to that of a pristine drive. There was a 6GB swap partition on the drive as well as the ext4 partition. I'm pretty sure swap partitions aren't trimmed, so that could have been the reason for the performance degradation."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't know how the data works out for this, but I imagine that SSDs in laptops fail a lot less often than spinners do. \"Enterprise use\" is the perfect place for rotating storage: the machines aren't dropped off desks, they aren't power-cycled very often, and they aren't stuffed into backpacks while turned on (nearly causing a fire). SSDs don't care much about these things, while spinning disks do. So I imagine that if you have an SSD in your laptop, you are less likely to experience drive failure.(Another nice thing: those new micro-SATA SSDs are small enough that you can conceivably RAID-1 them in a tiny laptop!)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "At the moment, the reliability problem with SSDs stems entirely from firmware bugs, rather than the underlying flash technology. All the issues you hear about with regards to drives causing blue screens or simply failing to be recognized by the system at all after a while are issues with the firmware on the controller chip - the actual flash chips themselves are pretty dumb and rarely fail catastrophically.This will get better with time, as SSD firmware accumulates the kind of run time (in terms of number of hours x number of units in use) over years that HDD firmware has had."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The short summary is that nobody had used SSDs in any large scale for more than 2 years and the rates of failure for SSDs in that period of time is similar to regular hard drives.Also apparently OCZ SSDs aren't as good as Intel SSDs (based on customer return rates)."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Consider this: the hard drive is the least reliable component of almost any modern PC/laptop. Add to this that it likely contains the most valuable non-commodity asset: your data.Anyone not backing up their system is really asking for trouble... which will happen. Given the ease of use of modern backup systems, and their cost (free only costing a modest amount of your time), everyone should be doing it. OSX and Win7 make you feel guilty for not doing it (though OSX's version is better, both deliver on basic backups).All this said, the difference between an SSD and an HD is about zero when it comes to real reliability. Both will fail at odd times, and you should have a backup, preferably bootable, to get you back to good. An external drive with a system-imaged startup disk (free for all major desktop OSs) is quite cheap to maintain."
}
] | en | 0.967546 |
The Hidden Cost of Letting Workers Telecommute | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "It's really not that big a deal. At Stack Exchange I think we have employees in eight different states now, all individuals working from home. It's a lot of paperwork but not disproportional to the amount of paperwork you have to do per-employee anyway. It does cost something to deal with but it's a rounding error compared to the cost of those people's salaries. It is by no means a reason not to hire people who work from home in other states.It DOES require us to collect sales tax for a bunch of different states, though. This would be a big deal if we were an ecommerce company... you'll notice that Amazon is fanatic about avoiding telecommuters; they don't want to accidentally get themselves in a position of effectively raising their prices by 8% on the entire state of Texas just to have one remote employee there."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Sounds like good way for rural states to further depress their economies. You'd think they could use all the tax revenue possible. Having a telecommuting worker pays property tax, income tax, and spends their money at the local food establishments. All this without having to give \"tax intensives\" for a company to move into the state. What could be better than that?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "As somebody whose last startup had people working remotely from four different states ... yikes!With state budgets as tight as they are, it's no surprise to see them looking for reasons to tax out-of-state companies. And it sounds like it's still not clear just how much tax liability this will lead to. But wow, it sure sounds like a minefield for startups."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Discovery (DISCA) faced this issue in 2008 and decided to lay off all employees who lived in a state with this tax nexus law (I was one of them). There were a total of three employees in my state, but there were probably scores of employees around the country. They probably saved several million dollars annually in sales tax by doing this (back of the envelope calculations). A handful of the employees affected in my group were re-hired as contractors."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "On the flip side, if you work in Massachusetts but live in New Hampshire and work from home some days, you don't have to pay income tax on the days you worked from home (NH has no state income tax)"
}
] | en | 0.97795 |
The Book That Every Programmer Should Read | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "My parents bought me this book when I was in elementary school. I was fascinated with it; I read it and reread it until I understood everything in it. It took me something like eight months, but when I was done I had an instinctive grasp of computers and mathematics that many of my college classmates still don't have. Highly recommended."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "BTW, if you want to buy the kindle version, buy it from O'Reilly instead of Amazon: 5 formats and no-DRM: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780735611313.do ($1.83 more though)."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Another good book by Charles Petzold is The Annotated Turing.http://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Turing-Through-Historic-Comp..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "After reading Code my hacking skills increased considerably. I am never comfortable relying on abstractions so understanding more of the programming stacks I use increased my willingness to experiment with then. It also helped me to better understand pointers and memory management as memory became a real thing to me.Also, I had fun building my own simple computers in logic gate software."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"The Elements of Computing Systems\" is very good in that respect too: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/plan.html"
}
] | en | 0.989728 |
Show HN: dcpubin - a pastebin for DCPU-16 programs | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The javascript version of the CPU seems to be turning into something really cool.Here a person made a real-time IDE:\nhttp://dwilliamson.github.com/"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This is a really cool idea! I could see people using this as a testing ground to learn the instruction set as well. Especially if you can make the \"paste your code, share your link\" part of it as easy as pasting into a single obvious text box (like with pastebin).If you can make it easy to browse the snippets that would be great. It's probably important to get that working right away so that people can play with different programs and get a feel for the instruction set. (Plus people like to have their stuff seen by others.)Can't wait to see where this is heading, as well as your JS implementation of DCPU."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "a few of examples:fibonacci recursive: http://dcpubin.com/ppJrob0g2fibonacci tail-call: http://dcpubin.com/epaCb-NI2itoa: http://dcpubin.com/puu5gf0C6"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I'm starting to think we need a dcpu.ycombinator.com."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Just wrote my first assembler program ever! Thanks, OP.Prints factorial table (2 columns - index and result) in console display.http://dcpubin.com/eshsuZqgq"
}
] | en | 0.97452 |
Why do you have to click Start to shut down? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users existing mental model rather than trying to change it."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Is it really that unintuitive to click the start button to start the shutdown procedure?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I think that as tech people, we often forget that the vast majority of people that utilise tech are often less logically inclined than we are.Or to put it another way, simplicity + attractiveness sells.David Pogue did an interesting TED talk on this in 06 in which he made a quick stab at the start menu thing at about 10 minutes in. Linked below for reference.http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplici..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I actually knew someone who could not figure out how to shut down their computer because it did not make sense to them to click \"Start\" to shut down."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Will the sequel explain why, on Macs, you drag disk icons to the trash can to eject them? That always made me think twice about what I was doing."
}
] | en | 0.966366 |
Farmers Didn't Invent Tractors. They Were Busy Farming. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Sorry, they do.A farmer friend of my dad had a large dryland farm, and decided to hook two tractors together. He removed the front wheels from each, connected the back tractor to the hitch of the front tractor, linked the throttles together and had a double-size tractor, with four high-traction wheels. Hydraulics from the front tractor were used to steer the tractors.This same fellow built a developing tank for b&w movie film, and did a lot of time lapse photography. This is on a farm in Montana in the 1960s.He built a jig to help build these for other farmers who wanted them.Later, Case and other manufacturers populated the dryland farms with something that looked very similar.What many people do not realize is that rural farm america has had a more thorough impact on daily life by technology than any other segment of life. From the beginning of my grandfather's generation through the end of my father's generation saw a nearly two orders of magnitude improvement in productivity. Every aspect of daily life was affected.\"Busy farming\" in our life meant plowing the fields, seeding, harvesting, which involves machinery, or in my grandfather's generation horses. Everybody had a shop, which included torches, electric and acetylene, a wide range of tools. Something breaks, which it often does at the worst possible time, you generally fix it. Changed plugs in all your vehicles, gapped the plug, points, changed the oil, put in a new head gasket. During family get-togethers, my Dad and Uncles would sit around while waiting for dinner figuring out how to make something work better. Innovation is part of farming.So the headline is wrong, the article is wrong, and the quote it points to is wrong. Some of the comments do offer some correction. And apparently there is a bit of \"Blub\" phenomenon going on with what does \"Busy Farming\" mean."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Truly_Large_Numbers"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Eric von Hippel's book \"Democratizing Innovation\" talks about this.The book is primarily about how end users more than ever are driving innovation, but he provides plenty of historical evidence of this being possible for a long time.There is a chapter that analyses the type of innovation that a user is likely to make versus the innovations a tool producer is likely to make. A user has the domain knowledge to realize that e.g. a tool with a particular shape might be necessary. A tool producer has the knowledge of metallurgy or tool production to realize that some new alloy might be a better fit for the type of stresses that this tool requires.He also notes that not all users will innovate, it will primarily be what he calls \"lead users\".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_userThe book is CC licenced and available for free download. It's got far more insight than this glib blog entry:http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Farmers, especially in the era when the tractor would've come about, were inventing things to use them, not to patent, attract VC investment, conduct publicity campaigns, and settle into the 4-hour work week."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Accepting the premise, I think the most interesting question is: how do non-farmers learn enough about farmers' problems to solve one?Generally, how do non-specialists find enough out about a specialized world to solve a problem from that world? And then, learn enough about the specialist culture to successfully sell into that culture?(Not accepting the premise, a few clicks through gives its origin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs#The_Economy_of_Citi...)"
}
] | en | 0.982794 |
In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video] | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Their disagreement can be viewed through the lens of how they view Twitter. Thiel sees it as \"we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters\" (a Founders Fund motto). He thinks it's an unimpressive, incremental advancement. Andreessen, however, views it as \"instant global public messaging for free\". In other words, fundamentally transformative.The entire video is well worth a watch, but that's it in a nutshell.[edit: fixed typo]"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Definitely worth a watch. Interestingly, they agreed on quite a bit. The one thing I was struck by, was the extent to which they agreed that government regulation was an inhibitor of innovation. Actually, I expected that from Thiel, since he's well known as a libertarian, but I wasn't sure that pmarca would share that viewpoint. But they both came down pretty hard on government in that regard.I think both agreed that energy is of critical importance as well, and that the nature of the energy markets have had a big impact on shaping progress in other areas.Also, I think Peter Thiel made a fairly interesting point about the connection between our imagination (as a culture) and Hollywood's portrayal of technology. It is a little odd that some of the most well-known and popular movies with a large technological element are the ones where the machines are coming to kill us. I'm sitting here right now trying to think up some good counter-examples, and am coming up fairly blank so far...Something else that Peter Thiel mentioned at least twice was the phrase \"risk averse\". I think that's a pretty important point... as a society, have we become so risk averse that we aren't willing to gamble on the big breakthroughs anymore? Are we content to just sit back and wait and hope for a steady stream of incremental, sustaining innovations? I think he might be onto something with that.Edit: Something that neither Thiel nor Andressen mentioned, that I think is relevant to this discussion, is the recent re-emergence of the hobbyist / DIY / amateur scientist / solo hacker/builder movement. Hackerspaces, cheap embedded / embeddable computers, Arduino, Beagleboard, rPi, 3D printing, cheap DIY CNC milling machines, etc, are enabling thousands or millions of people to take a stab at building things they never could have tried to build before. And go visit the recent HN thread on \"Hardware startups\" and the CDixon post... looking at what an entrepreneur can do now, in terms of having a physical product built at scale with a much smaller capital investment than in the past... that's got to encourage some new companies to form, and some people to start working on ideas and dreams they've been stewing no, no? And hardware devices aside, cheap computers, cheap Internet access, Open Source software, etc., are making it so much easier for people to explore their software and virtual ideas as well.But, then we'd be back to Peter's point that \"we got 140 chars\". So, is it lack of imagination, or something else, that's keeping us from getting radical, disruptive breakthroughs? Or are they out there, on the cusp, just... about... to... happen."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Quote from Peter Thiel starting around 39:10 in the video:\"Mean wages have been stagnant (not median). It’s not an income an inequality issue. Mean wages went up 350% in the US after inflation from 1933 and 1973. [They] went up 22% from 1973 to 2013. Median wages were flat, so it’s become more unequal. Even if you had redistributed everything, it’s gone up only 22%.\"I feel this is an overly US-centric view of humanities progress. Globalisation produces winners and losers in the short term, and even though manufacturing jobs are being destroyed in the US, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and other low cost developing nations.If you are using the argument that stagnant wages in one part of the world means human civilisation is not progressing technologically, does that argument stand up if you look at global living standards?There was an interesting argument (unfortunately I can't recall where I heard it) that put forward the idea that World War II was like a massive subsidy from the US Air Force to the US manufacturing sector. The US Air Force destroyed many of the industrial cities of America's global manufacturing competitors (mainly Germany and Japan) and other major European nations were destroyed also and were bailed out with the Marshall Plan.All this meant that for decades, the US manufacturing sector had it artificially good because of greatly reduced global competition, as factories and other manufacturing infrastructure had to be totally rebuilt in the other big industrial nations, which took decades. This was great news for US car companies (and other manufacturers) in the decades after the war, who could churn out (relatively) unreliable and fuel inefficient vehicles, which were bought in huge numbers as they were the best available. In the 1970s, the combination of the oil shocks and encroaching competition from Japanese car makers, who innovated with reliable, fuel efficient and affordable vehicles, meant that the good times were over.Tl;dr using US wages from 1933-1973, and 1973-today is the wrong metric to measure human civilisations technological progress, for a variety of reasons."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The truth is they are both right. Technology is accelerating but it is also changing directionally. It is no longer accelerating along a physical axis but instead along a virtual one. What Peter Thiel doesn't see is that the virtual curve will be even more transformative than the physical one. Physical technology has had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve but virtual technology will obsolete it in just a few decades. How? The answer starts out looking a little like Angry Birds but probably ends up more like the Holodeck.The issue of measurement IS important. The problem with all of Peter Thiel's metrics is that they are inherently indicators of external activity. The triumph of the virtual curve reveals itself in the only metric that really matters: time.All forms of technology have the same purpose: to optimize the utility obtained during a finite lifespan. Some forms of technology increase the utility per unit time, others simply increase the units of time we have left. Therefore, more and more time spent in virtual space is an indication that virtual technology is out competing the substitutes provided by physical technology. As we go higher up the virtual curve and technology becomes more advanced at fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs by moving bits instead of atoms, eventually physical progress will slow to baseline: literally life support (maybe with gamified life extension projects taking place in virtual land).Alas, the last technology invented by man will not be the singularity, it will be near perfect virtual reality; closer to Angry Birds than Skynet."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I was there, probably one of the best sessions at the event. I especially liked the part about building a very strong roof if flying cars come to fruition."
}
] | en | 0.956904 |
A Plea For Companies To Provide Support Via Text | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Text of any form is not good for support because it amplifies the back-and-forth duration required to actually determine the issue and walk them through the resolution. The key here is bi-directional conversation - that is, you can talk to them and they can talk to you at the same time.Think of someone helping Grandpa with using his email. On the phone, most of the time is spent in back-and-forth, explaining a concept multiple ways until he understands the request. The information he gives back may be vague and incomplete, so you can discuss it with him to get instant further clarification and context. You can then walk him through the solution in a bi-directional conversation, whereby you say a step and then he asks for clarification about certain aspects, before you proceed to the next step.Now consider email/text/etc. Focus even on the solution stage. You send 5 steps to perform to complete the task. He gets stuck on step 2, and so responds. He doesn't know if he'll get stuck on steps 3, 4 and 5 either because he can't get past step 2. That's potentially 8 emails back and forth to get the problem resolved.By not having instantaneous bi-directional communication, it is a hell of a lot harder to debug and walk someone through the solution particularly if they're not technically adept. For us on HN it may be fine - we can stumble our way through blanks relatively easily - but for Grandpa, he has no hope of doing that and so phone support is by far the most time-efficient method."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This article only thinks about what the caller's experience is, and doesn't consider at all what it would take to implement this on the call center side.How would you guarantee responsiveness? With a voice call, the representative is on the line with you until your problem is resolved. With a text message, the rep would have to start helping somebody else if you took too long to reply, and may not be able to get back to you for a long time. Since they have no way of knowing how soon you'll reply, or if you'll reply at all, they can't just sit there idly waiting for your reply for a couple of minutes. And if a rep gets a large number of slow repliers queued up at once, he'd have to mentally juggle several different conversations and couldn't give any of them his full attention. Which caller gets priority? The one who you're currently texting with or the one who just came back after five minutes? What if a caller hasn't replied for a while and it's the end of the rep's shift?Also, is there any way to route text messages through a call center so that a caller could text a single customer support number instead of having to know the number of the next available service representative?One more thing: SMS messages get lost at a rate of 1 to 5%[1], so you're going to have a lot of irate customers wondering why they never received a reply. If a voice call drops, both sides know about it immediately.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Unreliability"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Needy customers. That's the problem. Some of your customers literally just want to chat. They want to feel close to your brand and give feedback directly to the CEO. It's problematic. Easier to keep them at arm's length with email."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "SMS is terrible for this. It is completely insecure. You can fake transmissions easily, and nothing is encrypted, so you can't discuss any private info. There are very good, and obvious, reasons why organization do not use SMS for support.While it's great to have a simple text-based medium to do this, SMS is awful.I agree with the sentiment, but it's hard to take this guy serious when he suggests something so obviously bad."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "From a customer point of view, I'll go for the phone call if phone is available on the website. Why ? Because it's much faster.\nA simple example is to change a flight, I could do it by email but then if I call I have the immediate confirmation that my flight has been changed, that I have a correct seat and a confirmation by email (yeah I know those kind of stuff should be doable directly from the airlines website but Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines do not offer that for some of my flights). Of course those call center are in Asia, so staffing is not an issue.. Western company take so much time to deal with. Air France took 2-3 days to change a detail on a flight. Valve took 5 days to tell me that cross country checkout is disabled. It would have taken only 5 minutes on the phone.And let's not talk about banks..."
}
] | en | 0.970857 |
An Old-School Board Game Goes Viral Among Silicon Valley's Techie Crowd | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Settlers isn't very good. The game is largely all due to luck after the initial placement of pieces; get that part wrong and you'll be spending 45 to 90 minutes repeatedly asking anyone if they can trade you that one resource nobody can get, and repeatedly hearing \"no.\" (The 45-to-90 is conservative; if your game contains one of those knobs who drags trading out into elaborate haggling over resources-to-be-named-later, God help you.)Of course, the luck in Settlers is actually why it appeals to people. Nobody likes feeling like they lost because they played poorly or because somebody else is better than they are. That said, there are games like Carcassonne and Ticket To Ride that actually balance luck and skill, and so help to provide that social insurance against feeling pathetic while still making the time spent making decisions actually feel like it was worth something."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I've seen Settlers of Catan at my local puzzle store, where they promote its popularity. Any personal experiences here about whether this is worth buying it and introducing it to friends to play (especially over options like Risk, Cashflow, or even Monopoly which has less of a 'I don't know this game' resistance)?"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "So there seems to be a lot of more interesting board games than I ever realized, but they all seem to require 4-6 players and take over 90 minutes to play. Juggling two full-time work schedules and a toddler old makes these restrictions a non-starter.Does anybody know of a good tactical game, preferably playable by two people who used to have time for Risk and Monopoly, that can be finished generally in about an hour?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "For kicks, play a game of Settlers with a New Zealander and ask them if they have wood for sheep. ;)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I'll play Diplomacy with people once I make it out to the west coast."
}
] | en | 0.950752 |
Ask HN: What would you like built on top of the G+ API when it is released? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "A way to post on other networks that brings the people reading those posts and their feedback back into G+.The last thing I want is to auto-post a G+ post on Facebook, and trigger an interesting conversation there that I don't participate in. And I don't want to turn G+ into a megaphone where I'm simply talking at people without enabling them to talk back. That's not a conversation."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "An easier contacts organizer.Not for tech savvy but for regular people. A relative of mine has recently switched to an android phone and finds a real hassle to complete all contacts and categorize them (as in circles).A well done contact manager could be of great value.Also, twitter and posterous publishing to g+ would be great"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I use Gmail to take down random thoughts or notes about different business ideas that I have...mainly because of the search functionality. I started using G+ for the same purpose. It would be awesome to be able to search through the different streams."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A newer better interface... the feed is too hard to read.\nA native application for your choice of OS would be nice too."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I am planning to build an iPad app for it, if it hasn't existed yet after the API release"
}
] | en | 0.978123 |
Fun Jekyll Tricks | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "> Another thing you could do is dump your database into a _data file and use Jekyll to serve static content as a JSON api. That would be absurdly fast and would potentially be a much better solution for serving a read-only web API than building a full on rails app for exposing a dataset.Couldn't you, with much the same effort, just convert your database to a static set of JSON files? What, exactly, does Jekyll bring to the table here? (Also, is it really an API if it's static?)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I used Jekyll for years.My favorite Jekyll trick was ditching it for middleman."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I have been working on building better deployment systems for my Jekyll sites. I opted for using a Bash script for deployment and ended up integrating with CircleCI:https://github.com/philipithomas/www.philipithomas.com/blob/...https://github.com/philipithomas/www.philipithomas.com/blob/..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "The nesting _posts in subfolders trick is awesome, I wish I had known about that before I wasted countless hours learning how to customize Jekyll and eventually giving up:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9829302/return-list-of-fi..."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Nice tricks! The most relevant for me however would be the idea of categorizing _posts and _data folder, never knew about that! Neat. Thanks!"
}
] | en | 0.96697 |
Ask HN: Technical founders: What percentage of your day is coding? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I find that my patterns of productivity when varies a lot when coding. Occasionally I get in 'the zone' where I have laser like focus and can knock out hundreds of lines of code in a night. Other days, I have no inspiration and write next to nothing.Can you clarify how you would measure a percentage of a day (are you referring to a 24 hour period or the awake hours)? I think a more sensible metric would be to ask how many hours per day on average does a technical founder spend coding.Averaged out in the first few months, it must be around 40-50% of my day. (~5-6 hours max).I find it hard to believe that anybody could clock more than 70-80% sustained for more than a week. With 8 hours of sleep a day, you would get 16 hours of potentially productive time. 80% would equate to ~13 hours of coding leaving you with 3 hours for meals and general 'life admin'. That's not much."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Think I'm a hybrid vs. pure technical founder, though I am doing all the frontend and in theory will be doing some of the backend too. I spend 90% of my day coding."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Depends what stage you might be in. I started at pretty much 90"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "70% - early stage"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "70-80%"
}
] | en | 0.955256 |
Google to Microsoft: Remove your YouTube App from the Windows Phone Store | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The Microsoft PR machine in full motion again I see.1) Build app that clearly violates spirit and word of TOS, steals content, blocks ads.2) Complain and act surprised like Google is being a bad guy when told to take it down.3) ???4) Profit!Now they just need to some how spin in some automatic #droidfail hash tags to all the videos they show in the app and it'll be perfect!Idiots.(No, not the developers. I feel an immense sympathy for the people who had to work on this; their managers are the ones who are idiots)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "\"This isn’t the first time Windows Phone users have been shafted by the Mountain View company not willing to develop for the platform.\"Bullshit - this isn't Google screwing over Microsoft, it's Microsoft being idiots. If MSFT built a YouTube app that didn't blatantly violate Google's policies, I don't think it'd be a problem.YouTube wants viewers, regardless of which platform they're coming from."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "The comments on that article are atrocious. It's like one big fanboy rage orgy. I like Microsoft and all, but Google seems to have a legitimate claim here. All Microsoft needs to do is update the app to comply with the YouTube TOS, which doesn't seem like that big of a deal."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I wonder how this app got approval from Microsoft's own legal department."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Microsoft's statement: \"We'd be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs.\"What's interesting is what they don't say. They don't say that Google have refused to provide them this, or even that they asked Google for this.Assuming that Google's complaint of \"Prevents the display of advertisements in YouTube video playbacks\" is a TOS violation, it looks to me that Microsoft violated their TOS first, and are only now trying to imply that Google are the bad guys."
}
] | en | 0.939971 |
Politically Incorrect: Spec Work | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Nothing against spec work, but theres one thing I dont do, which is discounts. I'll either charge full price, or work for free, nothing in between.If you charge full price you're sufficiently motivated to do the work, if you work for free, you'll do the work if you feel like it and the client its likely to have no expectations. However if you work for a discount, the client has the same expectations as if they paid full price and you have less motivation to get the work done, which can lead to trouble."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "As Thomas brings up regularly, high end consulting engagements frequently involve spec work. When I get brought in to work with a company, that rarely just happens. Generally, I do a sales pitch which is indistinguishable from the actual work, follow it with a written proposal which would otherwise be a deliverable, and only then get a contract and start the meter. Sometimes clients decide the free portion was all they needed.This is, to steal another tptacek quote, \"life in the big leagues.\" (P.S. Charge more.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "It's interesting how much more positive the reaction overall is to spec-work not in design, like Kaggle's machine-learning competitions. There's some negative sentiment towards Kaggle, but much less, and much of it boils down to, \"meh, I don't consider it worth my time, but if others do, that's their decision\". I'm guessing it's mostly a question of economics; ML consultants don't feel like spec work threatens to seriously affect their pay, while designers are more worried. Photographers seem to be at the far end, with photography forums full of all sorts of crazed ranting, some even claiming that people who CC-license photos and upload them to Wikimedia Commons are unethical."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"I think an often overlooked idea is that spec work is similar to internship. For little to no pay, you gain experience and a portfolio piece. I definitely don’t see anyone calling that exploitation. Yet being an intern lasts much longer.\"Is it actually a common thing for design internships to be unpaid or minimum wage? Programmer internships, following internships in engineering disciplines, are usually pretty well paid, so this idea is foreign to me."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "\"I personally have done a few projects of spec work. Both my projects for Mozilla were spec work for example. I did them for free, in return for the projects being a portfolio piece.\"Having the opportunity of doing some work for Mozilla is MILES AWAY from the majority of the sort of thing that is requested in your standard spec work. 99% of it will end up lost in a shared drive on some corporate network somewhere."
}
] | en | 0.980296 |
Show HN: CommitQ – Programming language-aware Git repository hosting | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This seems really cool, I'd love to see it integrated with GitHub so that when I push my code to my repos it notifies CommitQ of the diffs and it can process them. I don't need a new host for my code, but more insight into what's going on there? Yes, please, I'll certainly pay for that!"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Interesting project. Semantically organizing code is a longstanding problem in the world of software development. The primary concern with this project, or any other attempts at solving this problem is practicality and actual utility.I suppose utility rests on whether you treat it as a collaborative development platform or merely as a host for your code (and keep track of discussions, proposed changes, and what-not through other means).Essentially, whether or not it turns out to be useful assumes that it is used as the central collaboration platform to an extent. Though on the other hand, merely tracking changes on a higher-level could be sufficient."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Giving more \"engineering\" tools to devs is finally getting more attention which is awesome. I'd love to use this kind of tech but don't want to move source repository host and also want something that would work with my stack and intricately so, ie providing more than just code modification but introduction of potential security holes and/or perf issues (like doing database queries in for loops, etc), regardless of whether it was RoR or ASP.NET MVC or X, Y, Z.I would be really interested in some kind of open source project that offered this kind of tooling with said vision that I could use and commit back to..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is pretty amazing. I regularly have conversations with other programmers where we talk about needing this sort of tool.Question: For every language, are you writing a full-blown language parser to get the semantic information you need? Can I hook in new parsers to add language support?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "This has some real promise. Congrats! Are you planning to parse PHP?"
}
] | en | 0.9767 |
Ask HN: What are you working on? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "http://www.one-tab.com - save up to 95% memory in Google Chrome and reduce tab clutter. It launched on HN a couple months ago, and am currently adding multi-PC sync."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "An open source game for the Apple II, written in 6502 assembly language. Original music transcribed from public domain scores (played with the 2-tone Electric Duet software). It's been very mind-opening to have to think about every byte of memory, learn bit twiddling tricks, design efficient data structures to fit game data on a 140KB floppy disk, etc."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I'm currently working on three "different" applications/use-cases using a single platform:- "Terms and Agreements" as a service. Applications and websites can delegate the Terms and Agreements process to my system. All contracts and agreement are signed and stored on my side.- One-stop semantic contract management social network. A single location where you can track and manage all of your contracts, agreements, transactions. There is no limit to what kind of contract you can store and manage using this. The social aspect let people send offers to each other (and accept them). Contracts can have semantic data added to them, to make search, navigation and organization easier.- One-click classified advertisement listing. List any item for sale with a single click (or in that case, picture).Again, these are all interfaces to the same platform. They will eventually converge to be the same things."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "In my "free" time lately writing a book on Software Performance and Scalability. After that will write a sequel to a sci-fi comedy I published earlier this year titled The Dread Space Pirate Richard.Also want to put more time into 2 experimental/speculative software projects, one that does election processing, the other involving taxes and electronic transactions. Not expecting to make money with either. Mainly for the experience, more career feathers in the hat, and to concretely apply some ideas around architecting for maximum performance and scalability.My "day job" work is confidential, and therefore a secret between me, myself, I, and my employer. (And whichever employees/contractors of the NSA that the NSA/FISA sees fit to share it with, haha.)"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "http://usehuman.com and http://mvpforum.com"
}
] | en | 0.856314 |
Ask HN: Who's hiring.. Sysadmins? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "White Oak Technologies in Silver Spring, MD (DC area) is looking for a Linux sysadmin. I've been working here for 4 years and love my job.http://www.woti.com/We need an additional Systems Administrator to support our growing high-performance computing facility, consisting of Linux clusters, servers and desktops, Microsoft Windows desktops and servers, as well as other architectures. We run many flavors of Linux, develop custom scripts and chew through truly massive data sets using parallel processing and associated technologies. We use Open Source tools when appropriate (love that Python!), and integrate COTS when necessary. To be eligible for this position, you must have current hands-on skills in most of the following areas: large-scale system and network planning and architecture; installation, troubleshooting, and integration of commercial packages; shell/Perl/Awk scripting; web server administration; firewall configuration and network management; large scale enterprise class storage systems including NAS/SAN devices, SCSI and ATA Raid systems; data backup and recovery on both Linux and Windows platforms; and experience with enterprise class tape autoloaders preferred. Programming experience in any cross-platform OO language (Python, C++, JAVA, PHP, etc.) is a big plus. A Bachelors degree in Computer Science or related field or a minimum of four years of directly related experience or training may be acceptable. Applicants must be U.S. citizens and selected applicants will be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "IMVU in Palo Alto, CA is looking for a sysadmin or two. (http://www.imvu.com/jobs/)... that description is full of shit. I'll have to talk to my manager about that.Basically, we need three things from a sysadmin candidate:We're a Debian/Ubuntu shop, with huge deployments of MySQL. Some of the job is day-to-day management of servers. You should know how to manage databases and handle replication.We also require solid networking knowledge. You should know about the difference between TCP and UDP, and be able to explain Spanning Tree or ARP. (It actually shocks me how many sysadmins don't have this knowledge.)The third part is programming ability. Most of what ops does is in Perl, but we also have to interact with other systems, so any knowledge of Python, PHP, etc. will enhance your appeal.We're doing pretty awesome things, and only getting bigger and better. Come work with me! :-)(E-Mail to [email protected] if you have any questions or whatever.)"
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "We use Bitpusher as our vendor for sysadmin/ops at Posterous. They're a great group of people to work with, and they get to see a lot of different environments since they specifically specialize in working with startup ops.http://bitpusher.com/careers.phpOn the engineering/development side we're hiring for dev-ops / infrastructure engineers who love to scale.http://posterous.com/jobs"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto, CA.http://hire.jobvite.com/CompanyJobs/Careers.aspx?c=q7X9VfwS&...Feel free to email me - timc at surveymonkey - if you have any questions about the role."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Well, whilst now a startup only in attitude rather than size, OpenMarket (formerly MX Telecom) is looking specifically for ops folk in the UK at the moment.If you're based around London and want to get involved in a small but deadly ops team building out the global infrastructure for the UK & US's biggest mobile service provider (everything and anything to do with SMS/MMS/Voice/Video telephony, mobile payments and hosted applications), then please get in touch.We're an entirely Linux shop, with a major preference for building tools (e.g. multi-datacenter apps hosting environment, monitoring systems, IRC bots...) to avoid the boring problems. Come and help us eliminate all the world's evils with a well-placed python/perl script or two. :) http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/sysdev has the details."
}
] | en | 0.920774 |
The Internet, a collection of computer networks that already has hundreds of thousands of users. | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Weird to think that was only 15 years ago."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'll have to try that Interweb thing."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "I was a teenager back then attracted to the apparent freedom & lack of oversight present in the fabric of internet 'culture' back then. Somehow, looking back now I cannot help but feel a slight sentiment of loss. I want my old internet back, without the ads please, without the copyright police, without the spam & without big brother watching over my shoulder. Anyone up for a rebuild of the thing? ;-)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is the first mention of the internet in the NYT"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "From the article: \"In many cases, retrieving information is much like dialing a bulletin board. A user mails a query to a particular computer address, and the system responds by sending a directory and then providing any specific documents requested.\"I like how they use the phrase \"mail a request to a computer address.\" Kind of made me chuckle."
}
] | en | 0.973303 |
Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The profile of Raymond Chandler is a bit misleading and over-simplified. It suggest that he lost his lucrative oil company job due to the depression. That was not the case.Chandler is a very good example for the suggestion that one has to try to do what one loves for a living. He was initially a very successful and well liked oil company executive. But his own success seemed to cause him unhappiness. He eventually started drinking showing up late for work, flirting with all women in the office, etc. Eventually, even though the company owners liked him and had a lot of respect for his abilities, they had to fire him.He then returned to a life of poverty trying to hack it as a writer. But eventually he became the brilliant writer who with Dashiel Hammett basically defined the noir style. He never quite kicked his alcoholism but he was much more fulfilled and productive than as an oil company executive."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "While some of these examples are rather remarkable, like the ultramarathoner, it's kind of a reflection on the media's obsession with youth that this seems like an oddity now, and I say this as a young person. Probably most serious achievement in any field will be by older people, just because it takes time to gain experience, knowledge, and wisdom. What's unusual is people achieving very much in their 20's, unless they're professional athletes."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Cliff Young would be a good one to add to this list: http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-youngMore on him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)Summary: 61 year old sheep farmer, shows up at an 875 km (540 mile) ultra marathon and enters. No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls and work boots. He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2 days off the old record."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "I hate slideshows masquerading as articles. I hate them so much.- Raymond Chandler, author- Harry Kroto, chemist- Anton Bruckner, composer- Mary Midgley, author, scientist- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's- Jean Dubuffet, painter- Marco Olmo, runner"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "King Gillette is another patron saint of late bloomers.While walking around the Boston harbor recently I read the bio of him on a plaque at the site of the first Gillette plant.He was a middling salesman when he came up with the idea for disposable razors. When he was 48 years old he sold 51 razors and 168 blades, 12 years later he was selling 70 million per year:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Camp_Gillette"
}
] | en | 0.98921 |
Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I have a rant coming about these things too.* I started out with Backbone. It seems ok as far as it goes, but a bit annoying in that there's enough \"magic\" and stuff going on that I don't quite understand it completely, but without enough magic to really make things simple and easy.* Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh: http://www.grobmeier.de/angular-js-binding-to-jquery-ui-date... - how many lines of code just to make it a date picker? I couldn't have written that code myself without several more days of banging my head. Wonder what'd happen if I really try and do something it doesn't agree with... So out the window with that for the time being.Also: a lot of these tools have tutorials that don't really walk me through all of what I want to do, which initially involves a fairly straightforward \"CRUD\" type of application. I want to see how the framework deals with both 'make me a new one' and 'edit an existing one' forms, for instance. I found that very irritating about the Angular tutorial, which is otherwise very nicely put together.Now I'm testing out jquery-pjax, and... so far I'm happier. It behaves more like a web application that I'm used to, sending around HTML, and staying out of my way. And, seeing as how all of these things require that the server do its job in any case, it has more of a \"don't repeat yourself\" feel to it: click on the button, and the server gives us some new data, without repeating the whole MVC cycle on both the client and server. I got the idea from this post: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Recently decided to use Backbone as a JSMVC Framework on my team. Although I looked at Ember and Angular, which obviously both have many more features than backbone out of the box, We chose to use Backbone because it seems to have such a large and vibrant community behind it - seems like angular and ember are both lacking in this respect.However, as our Backbone application grew in complexity, we noticed that Backbone is so bare in terms of functionalities that we had to build our own half-baked framework on top of \nit to make up for the gaps.I think the Backbone project needs to make Backbone's intentional feature sparseness clear. I've come to realize that backbone is more of a library which provides a basis to make a client-side framework rather than a something that can be used standalone by app developers.If I could go back and change our original choice, I definitely would have gone with one of the Backbone-derived frameworks (chaplin, marionette) or just gone with something more fully-featured like angular. While backbone is beautiful and elegant for small projects, it just doesn't provide much convenience as a stand-alone library for larger applications."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "[meteor dev] Please come help us with this! We have six engineers at Meteor and dozens more contributors in the community working on the platform every day. The plan to 1.0, including REST, is at http://roadmap.meteor.com/.Here's the guiding principle behind Meteor. There should be a dramatically faster, more accessible way to write applications. Improving that developer experience means rethinking some things: autopublish and minimongo, so you can jump right into a new app's UX in the first five minutes; one-line authentication (http://meteor.com/authcast); synchronous APIs that are more comfortable for a lot of developers; dirt-simple reactive templates; hot code push.Focusing on that kernel of development experience means some other things -- REST, routing, form building -- need more time to fully bake, with hacks like __meteor_bootstrap__ and phantom for apps that need them now. We think that's a good tradeoff pre 1.0."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "\"It seems that most people today, when thinking about their next JS project, will use Backbone because it's the most popularl framework when it shouldn't be.\" (sic)Here's a long list of examples why maybe it should be:http://backbonejs.org/#examplesIn comparison, here's the public list of interesting apps built with Angular and Derby:http://builtwith.angularjs.orghttps://github.com/codeparty/derby/wiki/Community-ProjectsWhat you want to look for in a library goes beyond feature checklists and magic datepickers. Lots of client side developers have been burned in the past by JavaScript frameworks that promise the world and end up getting in the way more than they help.Backbone tries to provide the barest useful essentials -- the main business of building your app is up to you."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Try knockout. I wrote a quick intro to it a few days ago:http://returnbooleantrue.blogspot.com/2012/12/architecting-k...I personally don't like backbone that much. I don't know why so many people love the damn thing. It is hard to understand and not even that great."
}
] | en | 0.976736 |
How Not to Advertise on the Internet | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Not knowing more about Evony's business model, I think this is likely an example of optimizing for the wrong metric - in this case clicks versus conversions. The creator of the last ad is probably thrilled that it's \"performing\" better than the earlier ads, although I'll bet the actual return on investment is the same or worse.On the other hand, if the site is ad-supported in addition to the freemium model mentioned in the article, this is a way to drive up the number of unique visitors in their traffic stats."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Their target audience is probablya)\tMaleb)\tBoredc)\tNot so jaded that they won't click on ads or try something newd)\tInterested in rts gamingSo yeah, that’s how you reel in that audience. You control for their interest in gaming by placing the ads on gaming sites.Additionally, your ad stands out because the gaming sites are clogged with ads for games that involve swords.Once you’ve got them on your homepage you have the opportunity to show them fullscreen art, shots, animations, etc to actually sell the game."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "No matter how much Jeff and many other people might take the moral high ground, they have to admit that this is nothing more than an appeal to the true nature of an average human (male). The \"problem\" is not with the advertisers; they are simply doing their job in the most effective manner possible."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "As a game developer, I find myself clicking on a lot of game ads...both for fun and \"research\". Out of all of the game ads I've seen, Evony fr. Civony are the only ads out of all of the game ads i have ever seen that I haven't clicked on. And I see them a lot.Because I see them a lot, it makes me wonder if this means they are actually profitable? They've been running these ads net-wide for at least a year."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I spent a lot of time looking for something akin to \"we made the last ad up\". And I was shocked to find out that it is real."
}
] | en | 0.973403 |
Traits of Successful People | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "This is ridiculous. 27 points cries out for analysis. For example, points 1 and 23 are the same; and points 2 and 24 are contradictory. And none of this relates to hacking or gratifies intellectual curiosity. This is worse than religion. Please keep this kind of thing off HN."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I don't buy it. This is nothing but a list of random feel-good catchphrases, with convenient \"benefits\" for each one. The reason they never criticize others is that \"otherwise people among them will recognize them as persons who tend to talk behind others.\"? Yeah, really sincere.If I met a person that actually followed this advice, the stench of fakeness would probably knock me out."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "With every decision comes a CHOICE that will either take us in the direction of our ideal life, or potentially down a path that is completely undesirable. And what dictates our next step is something that I like to refer to as your P.O.P, or in other words, your POWER of PERSPECTIVE! Successful people are able to \"POP out of it,\" faster then those who achieve moderate success..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "28. They smell good.29. They enjoy food.30. They walk with poise and posture...."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "What my mentor taught me (I'm sure it's in there somewhere):\"They see the possibilities.\""
}
] | en | 0.950068 |
Retina Mac External display problem | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Just a guess:The patterns in the examples seem to be horizontal, meaning the raw (pre 'cable encoding', usually 8b/10b) bit pattern of the display output would be repetitive . It wouldn't be out of the question that a slightly improperly electrically balanced or terminated output could cause signal integrity issues, including ringing (voltage exceeds spec on rising / falling edges) which could trigger safeguard circuitry in a display (shut it off)."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This works for me with my first gen 15" Retina. This also happened to me at https://optin.stopwatching.us/, and I assumed it was exploiting some kind of bug with fullscreen for an intentional effect. I am using an external 20" older generation Apple display."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Not experiencing this with a mid-2012 Mac Book Pro Retina hooked up to an external display via an HDMI/DVI adapter.I wonder if this is some strange prank designed to get people to look at a screenshot of https://optin.stopwatching.us/, esp. given the '1px reproduction' of this is entitled 'We are watching you!' If so, I really, really don't get it :-S"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "How long before it takes effect? I don't see anything on my Retina MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt Display. Model Name:\tMacBook Pro\n Model Identifier:\tMacBookPro10,1\n Processor Name:\tIntel Core i7\n Processor Speed:\t2.6 GHz\n Number of Processors:\t1\n Total Number of Cores:\t4\n L2 Cache (per Core):\t256 KB\n L3 Cache:\t6 MB\n Memory:\t16 GB\n Boot ROM Version:\tMBP101.00EE.B02\n SMC Version (system):\t2.3f35\n\n\nThunderbolt Display: Vendor Name:\tApple Inc.\n Device Name:\tThunderbolt Display\n Vendor ID:\t0x1\n Device ID:\t0x8002\n Device Revision:\t0x1\n UID:\t0x0001000100508120\n Route String:\t3\n Firmware Version:\t22.2\n Port:\n Status:\tDevice connected\n Link Status:\t0x2\n Port Micro Firmware Version:\t0.0.21\n Cable Firmware Version:\t0.1.18\n Cable Serial Number:\tC4M2263005QDNWFAX\n Port:\n Status:\tNo device connected\n Link Status:\t0x7\n Port Micro Firmware Version:\t0.0.21"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "off-topic: how does he/she get those vertical tabs in Firefox in that screenshot?https://raw.github.com/oyiptong/retinadisplayproblem/master/...(warning: that is the picture that apparently breaks certain displays)"
}
] | en | 0.880731 |
Ask HN: Confidence, how does one go about getting it? | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "Become successful and rich. Or at least more successful and richer than you were before.This is unfortunately recursive, but that's the way it works. You try something at the edge of your ability and accomplish it. Because you were successful at that, your confidence goes up. Then you try something harder, accomplish it, and your confidence goes up again. If you happen to fail at something, lick your wounds and try again.Eventually, you don't need to play mindgames with yourself, you just realize that you're completely capable of doing what you set out to do."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Always challenge yourself and make little, concrete steps towards achieving bigger goals.I think it also depends on whether your confidence comes from within or without. For example, does one need external praise for something one has done in order to gain confidence? Or is it enough to just personally feel that a goal set has been well-accomplished?Becoming successful and rich inspires confidence in a spiral, like what other posters have said. Faking it but always have something real--be it facts, good estimates, faith etc. behind to back it up also helps, I think.Can't say I'm successful and rich, but I am confident and that probably came from doing things and getting positve feedback about them, and from inspiring quotes along the lines of, \"Confidence, or the lack of it, is entirely up to you yourself.\""
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "A long time ago something clicked for me and I realized other people have only as much power over you as you grant them, and the main thing standing in the way of your own success is yourself.IMO/IME confidence comes mostly from realizing that almost all failure modes are, in the grand scheme of things, impermanent and insignificant.Worry less about what others think, worry less about most consequences, and just attempt whatever interests you. Pay attention to your mistakes and incorporate some learning from them in to your next attempt."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "One hack I've heard of is to fake it.Fake it, at least at first. It's a way of bootstrapping yourself into truly being confident. Act like someone that is confident, and do it enough, and pretty soon you my find that gosh you've actually become pretty confident!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Achieve things, even small things.Achievements incrementally build confidence."
}
] | en | 0.982491 |
Nginx Requests/Second – RaspberryPi vs Amazon EC2 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "EC2 micro instances throttle down very heavily if you use CPU for more than a few seconds at a time. Other instances allow you to burn 100% CPU all day, but not the micros.http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan..."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Google Cache link - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... currently main content not working for me."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Very unfair to be using a t1.micro instance, they're only meant to give very short bursts of power and don't give any dedicated hardware (so giving the hardware specs is pointless).Do a new benchmark comparison vs a m1.small and it'd be interesting. I bet the small wins by an absolute mile."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "This is interesting. One obvious question, although a little tricky to test. Did the raspberry pi get an advantage by being in the same room as you?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "A blog is nearly a read-only webapp, it's the easiest type of website to scale.If you can't avoid 502s with trafic HN can make, you should'nt do benchmarks about hosting matter."
}
] | en | 0.902232 |
Emergency NYTech Meetup to Stop SOPA Jan 18 | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I know it sounds crazy but ycombinator is based on the valley. Barbara Boxer is a co-sponsor of PIPA and Dianne Feinstein supports it too.Does the New York tech scene have to do all the heavy lifting or could we have similar protest in California on the 18th?Office of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer\n70 Washington Street, Suite 203\nOakland, CA 94607\n(510) 286-8537orOffice of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein \nOne Post Street, Suite 2450\nSan Francisco, CA 94104\nPhone: (415) 393-0707Hopefully, people in the valley can join New Yorkers in their opposition of this bill."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "Everyone from my office will be attending this. I'm curious to see if a mob of tech nerds will be taken more seriously by the powers that be than occupy wall street people."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "While also anti-SOPA, this rally is primarily aimed at PIPA (the Senate version of the bill), which has been getting a free pass. Can you change the title to reflect this?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Is there anything like this for the DC area?"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Why that date and what will we be doing?"
}
] | en | 0.958328 |
LibreOffice 4.2 released | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "I know that the LibreOffice team is short on manpower, but I still find it puzzling that they do not treat reproducible crashes as release-blocking bugs. Instead, there are a lot of such bug reports untouched, potentially waiting to be exploited by bad people. (I reported 2 such bugs myself, neither has been fixed yet I think)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This being a more major update, I won't touch my LibreOffice install until 4.2.1 is released at the earliest."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Also of interest: the developer-focused improvements in the LO codebase up to 4.2, by Michael Meeks.https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-01-30-under-the-..."
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Great release from the Libreoffice team, as usual!LibreOffice might not be the "Snazziest" or whatever, but it's perfect for folks like me who need to use MS office but don't use Windows and can't stand Google's web UI."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I applaud LibreOffice's intent, but the interface reminds me too much of Office 2003 and older.What happened that Microsoft has the most modern-looking office software?"
}
] | en | 0.964007 |
The Funded’s Adeo Ressi Arrested After Virgin America Flight Incident | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "The problem, as I see it, is that flying has become an utter evil to be avoided at all costs unless absolutely necessary. It used to be that flying somewhere was a trip in and of itself. Now it is a nightmare. Now, everything from pre-boarding security (which is an absolute joke) to in flight (non)service to hoping that your luggage makes it to your destination at the same time you do to being cavity searched by customs upon arrival is and everything in between is an absolute horror show.Truth is that there are no good airlines. Just functional airlines. At this point I am just thankful to arrive at my destination in one piece.Frankly, I don't know why foreigners still come to America. If I showed up at JFk and got the third degree from some rude lackey on a power trip then got fingerprinted along with my wife and child I would turn around and never come back. (I know, separate issues but I'm venting.)"
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "This headline seems rather prejudicial to Ressi in light of what he says was the story, and in light of the fact that he was interrogated for an hour, not arrested - there's a huge difference. \"Arrested\" means Ressi did something terrible enough to get booked, and there will be corresponding inferences about what happened on the flight. Ressi was \"detained\", not arrested."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "Is it unreasonable to conclude if he had just closed his laptop the incident would have never happened? Landing is a very stressful time for the flight staff. It's really not the best time to do the \"just a second\" routine which inevitably turns into 1-2 minutes or more. Maybe the flight attendant overreacted but I feel like we're missing some basic human courtesy here. We shouldn't be making someone's job harder and more stressful at the worst time and then act surprised when they get mad. I tend to side with the figure of authority in those situations. You know in the flight attendant's mind they're playing out the scenario of coming back 1-2 minutes later and asking again just to be told \"one more second\" again knowing if they fail to do their job they might get into trouble. Maybe they're not too tech savvy and truly believe these devices pose some real safety risk. They're on edge anticipating the passenger making an ugly scene. In this case there was a follow-up incident which probably came across to the flight attendant as baiting. In the end it was resolved without any real harm?"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "A minor linguistic point, but, the use of \"reached out to\" in this and similar articles really bugs me somehow. Why say that TechCrunch \"reached out to Virgin America for their position\" when what actually happened would be better described as: \"TechCrunch asked Virgin America for their position\"? There was no touchy-feeling \"reaching out\" going on; it was closer to a corporate request for a position statement from one company to another, whatever spin you want to try to put on it."
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "Is there any actual reason to turn off electronic equipment during takeoff/landing, or is it just because of government policy based on FUD?"
}
] | en | 0.973021 |
Free Printed Copies of "Version Control by Example" | [
{
"score": 0,
"text": "What a great idea. Will future updates be available as well? Perhaps in a DVCS for easy access?I'd be a happy man if ALL tech books lived in a DVCS. Users could fork it, push updates, fixes, etc. and the author could integrate changes as they see fit. No more searching for errata URLs, simply update your repository.I'd even pay for this.A great example of where this idea could be really useful is with Linux books like 'Linux Device Drivers', or 'Understanding the Linux Kernel'. These books are often out of date at the time they're published. I'd happily pay for access to them in a repository somewhere.This is not unlike how the Pragmatic Bookshelf (http://pragprog.com/)works today with the exception that you have to wait for new book versions to become available, then regenerate them in your e-version format of choice. It'd be much more useful if the community of users could contribute back to the book source repository at their leisure."
},
{
"score": 1,
"text": "I'd love to request a copy, but the District of Columbia is not an option in the state field. I know we're not technically a state, but we're still people!I actually have this problem more often than I should. It is especially painful when I'm trying to pay for a product. Tip to all web developers: Make sure DC is an option in your signup/order forms."
},
{
"score": 2,
"text": "> Heck, people often pay more per click on AdWords than it costs to print and ship a book.Wow. Such a great way to spend money, and I think it would get them some great ROI.(They are launching their new SCM veracity.)"
},
{
"score": 3,
"text": "Would be great if you guys would report back with a ROI type report on this pr stunt. Wish you all the best!"
},
{
"score": 4,
"text": "I reside in India. \nMy request went through without a hitch (Opera11.50/Linux).I think this is great idea for a version control book.\nI work in a dual-vcs environment (Hg, git - Work, personal)"
}
] | en | 0.947665 |
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