HackerHouse London looking for hackers - <AUTHOR>

Calling for hackers, designers, entrepreneurs to establish a shared living space in London. A hacker house is a living space shared by a group of individuals with similar interests living together to inspire each other and have a kick-ass time! We will be looking for a house or a refurbished warehouse with 3-6 bedrooms and a large living room where we can socialize, work if needed and host small hacker events from time to time. Indicative price: £140-180 p/w Location: North-East London, so that Google Campus is reachable by bike (Shoreditch, Old Street, Dalston, Stokey etc.) Moving in: within 2-4 weeks (flexible). If this sounds like a place you want to live in please email valdemaras(at)gmail telling a little bit about yourself. Comments & ideas welcome! <comment><USER2> this hacker help me last mouth when i wanted to changed my school grades and he block my website to for me so that no one can hack it he has work in pentagon before email him maybe he will work with you email@example.com</comment>


The Women of Bletchley Park (audio) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b062ktlf <comment><AUTHOR> > For decades it was Britain's best kept secret, the huge codebreaking > operation centred around a Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire, Bletchley > Park. Despite the fact that at least 8000 people worked at Bletchley, and > many others in listening and codebreaking centres across the country, no-one > gave the secret away. And when the story did eventually begin to emerge, the > star-studded heroes of Bletchley's narrative were men, led by the most > famous cryptanalyst of them all, Alan Turing. In recent years, Hollywood > blockbusters have cemented the reputation of those clever boffins, who have > been credited with shortening the Second World War by many months.

> However, if you walked through the gates of Bletchley seventy years ago, you > would have been struck not by the number of men working there but the number > of young women. That's because by 1944 three quarters of Bletchley's > workforce was made up of very young women, or girls, often just out of > school.

> Tessa Dunlop speaks to some of those Bletchley girls, now in their late 80s > and 90s, about their stories. Who were they and what did they do? Why were > they selected to work in Britain's most secret organisation and what impact > did Bletchley have on the rest of their lives?</comment>


A job at Yale in the 1960s set Susan Eggers on a path in computer science - <AUTHOR> https://egc.yale.edu/how-job-yale-1960s-set-susan-eggers-groundbreaking-path-computer-science <comment><USER2> I love this...

> _Almost immediately after she started to talk, they began to speak up, so > she sprayed them with water and they never cut her off again._

No point in responding with pleas to straight up rudeness.

</comment><comment><USER3> She helped invent hyperthreading. How have I not heard of her before? [https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~eggers/](https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~eggers/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, never knew this backstory about Professor Eggers!

It's kinda crazy how often seemingly random events and chance encounters are often the catalyst for major life outcomes. Even more so when they trigger an outcome that hadn't even been considered or "the plan" up to that point.

Playing video games as a kid, and online MUDs as a teen, directly led to my eventual career in software and opportunity to rise out of poverty.

25 years later and my current social circle / work colleagues have no idea I was a poor kid of a single parent living off free school lunches and food stamps.

Still amazes me how little interest there is in CS/tech/software for the average American -- more so for women/minorities. Most kids go through their doctor, vet, firefighter, detective, astronaut, lawyer, ... phases but computers are rarely on the radar.

\---

On completely different note, as a UW undergrad I fondly remember taking a computer architecture seminar with Prof. Eggers back in 2005.

I was super interested in architecture back then, and had already decided to head to grad school to do research in the area. Even though I had already read most of the papers we covered, it was still great round tabling things and have Eggers chime in with her perspective.

Too bad computer architecture was kinda past it's prime at that point. Took me a few years into grad school + several Intel internships to finally realize that though.

We had a flurry of advancements from CISC, RISC, superscalar, out-of-order execution, SMT/HyperThreading, CMT (eg. Sun's Niagara, later AMD Bulldozer), RAW/Tilera, VLIW/EPIC/Itanium, etc. Then things just sorta stalled. It's 2020 and we're mostly just putting a zillion cores in a die/package each with uarchs that haven't changed much in 10-15 years.

Memory, interconnect, wider SIMD, and (recently) AI focused features are the main topics thesedays. Oh, and low power/mobile...but that's less fun.

Personally pivoted to distributed systems for a few years, and now static analysis/abstract interpretation. All interesting, and a crazy fun career so far. But, kinda miss the alternative timeline where computer architecture was still a rapidly innovating field to build a career in.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was lucky enough to attend classes by Susan Eggers and Hank Levy in UW's professional master's program back in 2002. Not only amazing researchers but also great teachers.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the Einstein picture is from the campus of Georgia Tech.

<comment><USER7> The Einstein statue pictured is on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington DC.

[http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/visiting-nas/nas- building...](http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/visiting-nas/nas-building/the- grounds.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Surprised I didn't hear about her sooner.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr Invented hyperthreading, got the Eckert-Mauchly award in 2018.</comment>


This Student Invented a Stepper Motor Organ - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--sH0071ZDc# <comment><USER2> I made this!

I tried posting this myself in Show HN, but I think I was getting caught in the spam filter because I'm a new account.

Here is how it works, copied from the video description:

This is an experimental instrument I built that uses back-driven stepper motors to synthesize sound. The operational principle is that when stepper motors are back-driven, they induce a pseudo-sinusoidal alternating current. If this signal is amplified and connected to a speaker, you can listen to it as sound. The pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency of the wave, which depends on how fast the motor is back-driven. Higher speed will be a higher note. I thought this sound was interesting, so I wanted to make an instrument that used this mechanism to make music.

There are 49 stepper motors, one for each note in my four octave instrument. At rest, each motor floats above one of 49 disks, which increase in size exponentially as the notes ascend in pitch. The disks spin together, driven by a single speed-controlled DC motor. When a key is pressed, the corresponding stepper motor is engaged with the corresponding disk in the disk stack, and the disk back-drives the stepper motor. The larger disks are moving faster on their outside edge than the smaller disks, so the stepper motors are driven faster by the larger disks than the smaller disks. The disks are sized such that all the notes will be in tune relative to each other. The key that the instrument plays in is determined by how fast the disk stack is spinning. A faster disk stack will play a higher key, a slower disk stack will play a lower key. The speed of the disk stack is a global pitch shift.

Each note has a volume knob because the higher notes come in much louder than the lower notes, so they need to be trimmed down.

The disk stack isn't built perfectly; it actually wobbles a little bit off axis. Because the pitch of any note isn't actually determined by the radius of the disks, but rather the instantaneous radius at the current point of contact, this causes most notes to slightly fluctuate in pitch as the disk stack rotates. This adds an interesting character to the sound.

Another interesting effect is that especially when spinning at higher speeds, it may be difficult to get the higher notes to fully engage with their disks. You have to push the higher keys pretty hard to get full engagement, otherwise the note may go up to a half or full step flat.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This University of Maryland student made this experimental organ using 49 back-driven stepper motors this summer - absolutely incredible

</comment><comment><USER3> I made this!

I tried posting this myself in Show HN, but I think I was getting caught in the spam filter because I'm a new account.

Here is how it works, copied from the video description:

This is an experimental instrument I built that uses back-driven stepper motors to synthesize sound.

The operational principle is that when stepper motors are back-driven, they induce a pseudo-sinusoidal alternating current. If this signal is amplified and connected to a speaker, you can listen to it as sound. The pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency of the wave, which depends on how fast the motor is back-driven. Higher speed will be a higher note. I thought this sound was interesting, so I wanted to make an instrument that used this mechanism to make music.

There are 49 stepper motors, one for each note in my four octave instrument. At rest, each motor floats above one of 49 disks, which increase in size exponentially as the notes ascend in pitch. The disks spin together, driven by a single speed-controlled DC motor. When a key is pressed, the corresponding stepper motor is engaged with the corresponding disk in the disk stack, and the disk back-drives the stepper motor. The larger disks are moving faster on their outside edge than the smaller disks, so the stepper motors are driven faster by the larger disks than the smaller disks. The disks are sized such that all the notes will be in tune relative to each other. The key that the instrument plays in is determined by how fast the disk stack is spinning. A faster disk stack will play a higher key, a slower disk stack will play a lower key. The speed of the disk stack is a global pitch shift.

Each note has a volume knob because the higher notes come in much louder than the lower notes, so they need to be trimmed down.

The disk stack isn't built perfectly; it actually wobbles a little bit off axis. Because the pitch of any note isn't actually determined by the radius of the disks, but rather the instantaneous radius at the current point of contact, this causes most notes to slightly fluctuate in pitch as the disk stack rotates. This adds an interesting character to the sound.

Another interesting effect is that especially when spinning at higher speeds, it may be difficult to get the higher notes to fully engage with their disks. You have to push the higher keys pretty hard to get full engagement, otherwise the note may go up to a half or full step flat.</comment>


Mask Customer Credit Card Info API? - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I run a company that buys goods on behalf of customers, up till now we have been charging them 3% extra to cover processing fees.
In a focus group, some customers who make frequent larger orders have chosen to stop using our service as they really don't like paying that 3%.
They want us to be able to use their raw credit cards to place orders! Which, is a little unsafe from a developer POV, as humans on our side would need access to those credit cards, plus mistakes in handling that data could be cause for serious concern. Though, assuming we can store that data correctly... (humor me)
We were thinking of a solution, and noticed that services like Google Pay take your CC number, and generate a new virtual Visa card for each payment. We've found a lot of services that can generate these Visa cards quite cheap, but they all draw funds from a central deposit of funds.
Does anyone know of an API that might be able to generate Visa cards that draw funds directly from the customer's Visa card?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I knew a personal shopper who used her own American Express for all purchases (get those points/miles/etc), and then just billed the customer via ACH afterward. She would invoice via QuickBooks (Free ACH payments), but there are programmable options out there.

Plaid+Stripe can hook into a bank account, and you can initiate an ACH that way. The ACH fee is only 0.8% with a cap at $5. That might be low enough to eat it. I'm not sure what your business model is though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the comment!!

I actually just checked in with Stripe because that sounded awesome! They say that the funds that customers put in via ACH are not able to be drawn upon for up to 5 days, until the transaction "succeeds".

We are slightly worried about using a credit card / line of credit as a buffer to that 5 day ACH, as it would be super risky as we could easily blow past a $100K credit line in the few days ACH would take to settle, leaving us high and dry.

If customers were to "pre-fill" accounts, that would allow for some really cheap funds, though :O Thank you so much for that tip!

<comment><USER2> I guess that scale is a little higher than my personal shopper friend. She'd only charge to credit around $25k/mo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work at Bento for Business.

Sounds like a perfect use case for our virtual cards!

Our API lets you create virtual cards with custom controls (max dollar amount, days active, category, card on/off) from a bank account that can be funded via ACH. Although the money is kept in a central deposit for your business, each card can have part of the money allocated for purchases and be controlled with our API ([https://apidocs.bentoforbusiness.com/](https://apidocs.bentoforbusiness.com/)). This allows you to easily track expenses at an individual card level.

Let me know if you have any questions. You can reach me @ api- email@example.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thank you for the reply :-)

I stumbled across Bento - the fact that it was based off a central deposit system means we need a high degree of liquidity 7 days in advance?

We are interested in a way to acquire and spend customer funds in near real- time. If Bento had a service that masked customer card information with a virtual card and charged something like 1% with a cap, that would be ideal!

<comment><USER3> Normally, ACH transfers will be available in 2-3 business days after the process has been initiated by your bank or our application.

Although we don't have a service to proxy card information, we're able to receive wire transfers from your bank account and funds will be made available same or next business day. This can help with same-day liquidity.

Bento does not charge fees for inbound transfers but your financial institution may and we recommend checking their transfer fee schedule.

\---

Transfer Funds options:

[https://support.bentoforbusiness.com/hc/en- us/articles/21280...](https://support.bentoforbusiness.com/hc/en- us/articles/212804126-Ways-to-Transfer-Funds)

Auto-reload based on low-balance and periodic reloads:

[https://support.bentoforbusiness.com/hc/en- us/articles/21281...](https://support.bentoforbusiness.com/hc/en- us/articles/212811546-Automatic-Transfers)</comment></comment></comment>


Cows explain 21 Economic models - <AUTHOR> https://disqus.com/home/discussion/returnofkings/university_of_missouri_sjws_force_resignation_of_president_for_no_particular_reason/#comment-2351823782 <comment><USER2> Previously mentioned:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297048) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052646)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 21 Economic Models ... explained with cows

SOCIALISM You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM You have 2 cows. The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away...

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

VENTURE CAPITALISM You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States , leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION You have two cows. You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one- tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called 'Cowkimon' and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You count them and learn you have five cows. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. You count them again and learn you have 2 cows. You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity. You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION You have two cows. Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION Everyone thinks you have lots of cows. You tell them that you have none. No-one believes you, so they bomb you and invade your country. You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of Democracy....

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. Business seems pretty good. You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.</comment>