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The Highway Less Traveled (1998) - dredmorbius https://www.greensboro.com/the-highway-less-traveled/article_5e9d9ffd-5abf-59d4-8630-048594cbcb88.html ====== dredmorbius Robert Wood Kruch's dictum, sometimes abbreviated to bad roads make good filters, strikes me as a melding of Gresham's Law and the Jevons paradox.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bandersnatch Shows You What Depersonalization Disorder Feels Like - swamy_g https://acoachcalledlife.com/bandersnatch-film-dpdr/ ====== brootstrap Interesting and good to learn about this real problem. The show had me really on edge (like all black mirror content) until they kind of broke the 4th (5th wall?) with the netflix thing at the end. Watching this guy talk to his therapist because he was being controlled by netflix was friggen hilarious to me... I think i have felt this way at time, usually when really high. The whole LSD trip with colin in particular.. I liked that rant, the multiple realities, the time is a flat circle thing. The movie hit pretty hard, good on black mirror guys for pushing boundaries of film as we know. Even some folks who dont usually get into black mirror were like, well i want to retry it and pick the different cereal to see what happens! ~~~ ardit33 Yo, no spoilers please...... or at least warn about it. Not everybody has seen it. ~~~ twothumbsup The show has been out over month now and you willingly came into a thread about the show. Any plot that's spoiled is entirely on you. ~~~ setr Tbf I had no idea this thread was about black mirror from the title, as I wasn’t aware of the director, and I normally read comments before the article ~~~ twothumbsup I thought "Black Mirror" was in the title, my mistake. ------ ada1981 I thought bandsnatch did a great job of articulating what psychosis was like. I spent the better part of a decade in that state of mind. Grateful to have rebuilt my psyche from scratch and be free of that. Occasionally I catch a flicker of it and need to bring myself back into a state of relaxation. ~~~ swamy_g Would you be willing to share more? What triggered it? And what were your symptoms like? ~~~ ada1981 In college freshman year I tried to teleport to see my gf by driving into the back of a semi on I-79. As far as I can tell it didn’t work. I spent a lot of time lost in what felt like a deep metaphor / parable. One time I thought my gf as an alien from another star system; when I looked out at the city of Madison, WI I saw present day Madison but also an overlay of an ancient city — it felt like this was some sort of eternal city that always was. I walked into a church and saw the priest was a vampire. I had a conversation with a time traveling Albert Einstein at an airport in Boston. At times it felt like childhood make beleive, there was still a tether back to reality but I was deep in the other realm. At times terrifying. Flights into the depths of hell and judeo-Christian mythology. I was also in and out of suicidal depression. Somehow I also managed to start a number of projects and get lots of press and even some investment, but I couldn’t keep anything going sustainably. A few years ago I was at wits end and had a vision that guided me to start feeling my emotions. That led to Psychedlic therapy, Somatic Therapy and Breathwork. It also led to a new context for relationship and learning how to navigate love induced psychosis and coming out the otherside more healed. Eventually I was able to get underneath the symptoms. I found abuse in my childhood, dishonest and narcissistic care givers, a school that couldn’t hold my high IQ, bullying, etc. I was also always fascinated with technology, psychology, shamanism, the occult, Psychedlics, personal development from a very very early age... sometimes this feels like my purpose. Anyhow, I’m symptom free, healthier than ever, in love and engaged, running a fairly full transformational coaching practice (supporting unicorn founders and other creative minds), building an eco village island at Majagual.org and have no need for medications. Western Psych said I’d be on meds for the rest of my life. Turns out I followed the path of others like Jung - going mad and then creating your own tools and frameworks to find your way back out. ~~~ dkersten Thanks for sharing and congratulations on breaking free from it! ~~~ ada1981 You are welcome. ------ DaiHafVaho Fresh account for obvious reasons. I wonder whether I "suffer" from this. It's not really suffering. I am very comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts; I know that none of it is really real in the way that physical artifacts are real. Now I have a new and better explanation for why I have visual hallucinations sometimes, particularly halos and fuzz. For anybody else: Don't worry. You aren't controlled by any one thing. You're a colony of trillions of cells, all working together to produce a mutually- beneficial outcome. Edit: Do I have free will? I don't think that the question makes sense. I have free will in the same way that my subatomic particles have free will [0]. I have the ability to choose and to choose not to choose, but none of that entails free will [1]. I can even say that I have free will, but that does not mean that I have free will [2]. I think that, even if free will is a thing, maybe I am not a thing which can have free will because maybe I am not a thing at all. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem) [1] [https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html](https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) ~~~ mfoy_ Interesting, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective. I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but would you say that perhaps everyone who _doesn 't_ have DP/DR is actually _more_ "delusional"? ~~~ DaiHafVaho I'm not sure. It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or whether memories are trustworthy in general. At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie, because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the argument. ~~~ AnimalMuppet "I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does "I have no evidence against it". ~~~ DaiHafVaho Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I can't share with anybody: my experiences. ------ clearing I haven't seen this, but as someone who's had DPDR for the better half of a decade, I don't think this article frames it 100% properly (which, to be fair, is harder with this than, say, general anxiety). Yes, fear does come up during derealization experiences, but the difference is there's no grounded "you" experiencing this fear, more that the fear comes as "the experiencer" reconciling the reality one experiences with a new and disconcerting distance. This reads more like a profile of Pure-O OCD (they're comorbid so I got the two-for-one), where there is somewhat logical rumination about a specific fear. I've never really had a DPDR experience where I was questioning my own free will. To me the external world at the time is best described as seeming aggressively real to the point it seems false, objects indistinct from others, bereft of any intent or memory. You feel like you've lost some foundational understanding of the world that has been instilled in you forever. ~~~ bonesmoses I had a very protracted DPDR experience start around when I was 12, and slowly dissipated over the course of a decade. I woke up one morning, and it was like I was slapped out of my body. It's like I was piloting a Me(ch) suit. I wasn't seeing through my eyes. They were transmitting, with perceivable lag and some kind of acknowledged overlay, their sensory data. It's like being embedded in _extremely advanced_ and nearly seamless VR, but also hyper aware of the "nearly" part. It's like the Uncanny Valley effect, but directing it toward your own sensory system. It doesn't feel quite real anymore, and you don't know why. So that's probably how I'd convey it. "You know the Uncanny Valley? Imagine everything you experienced felt that way." It's uniquely awful. ~~~ kall1sto Very well described. ------ mentos Random aside: Anyone else watch the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix? I feel like that could be an interesting choose your own adventure similar to how Bandersnatch was done. Let people make decisions as if they were in charge of the festival and see if they could come out the end of it having made it a success or not. ~~~ sucrose Yes, I was so intrigued by their story. I feel like the right person could pull it off. I've thought about this documentary non-stop for the past couple of days. ~~~ colemickens > I feel like the right person could pull it off. I uh, I guess I'll bite. How? If anything, I think it's funny to imagine it as an interviewing exercise to suss out people with delusions of grandeur who have lived a life free of real-world consequences. They basically had a failed FEMA campsite without water or electricity, or effectively, shelter. It absolutely blows my mind and shakes my understanding of humanity to think that people got sucked into that or that there would be folks lining up to get suckered again, or that people somehow think it was ever achievable based on the timeline and current human time-travel technology. While I understand Billy's "charm" and even how to use it at times, it's amazing how enough of it will convince people to believe absolutely any delusional fantasy. Partying with a bunch of Insta influencers glued to their phone sounds like hell, anyway. Who doesn't want to hang out with the grown adult proudly bragging about urinating on all of the bedding? ~~~ mentos I think maybe a timeline where they listened to the guy suggesting they use a cruise ship to transport people might be 1 correct choice. After that they said they chose between 10 venues, maybe there is a timeline where they could have done something on the main land (Nassau) and crowd sourced more appropriate villas with AirBnB. Delaying the event by 1 week to avoid the yachting event might have brought airbnb prices down to a reasonable threshold. Maybe secretly there is no actual successful decision tree and its just a dark reminder that some things are never meant to be. Maybe at the start there is an option 'refund everyones money' haha and thats the only positive outcome. ------ afpx Bandersnatch made me feel like I participated in an invasive data science project that I didn’t agree to. ~~~ pcmaffey I don't know if this point gets brought up much, but I wholeheartedly agree. The data generated from situational A/B testing is scary. Just imagine what you could learn by looking at one viewer's choices across a range of situations that you control... While I doubt the mass-analytics is there yet, it made me shudder at the privacy implications for the future. ~~~ kian Couldn't one technically do this right now with online games? ------ empath75 This is actually a pretty common side effect of chronic mdma use — I went through this a bit in my mid 20s. And I had a friend go on a few month bender after burning man who was telling me he could read minds and was living inside a simulation. Not in a theoretical, isn’t it fun to think about way, but in a “I can control reality with my thoughts” kind of way. Definitely not a pleasant feeling. Seems like somehow the serotonin system is responsible for maintaining your belief in reality and free will. ~~~ davebryand The bodies of knowledge and practical tools (meditation/breathing/etc) from the great spiritual traditions over many thousands of years come to exactly this conclusion: your consciousness DOES create your reality. "Control" of reality is a different beast, you have to ascend to very high levels to achieve that, but it's 100% possible and happens all around us. ~~~ mfoy_ I think you have it a bit backwards. You perceive reality through your consciousness. So if your consciousness were to interject a filter of its own choosing, your subjective reality would be affected. However, this has no bearing on objective reality. You can't will bad things to not happen, but you can choose to perceive them as less bad. It's like writing a SQL query "SELECT name, MIN(51, objectiveScore) as subjectiveScore FROM TestResults" and then say "hey look, no one failed!". The data in the table is still going to have any sub-50 scores it originally did, you've just turned a blind eye to them. ~~~ davebryand Maybe, or maybe we exist within a realm that is more like a video game, where each frame is generated based on the prior state of the game plus the inputs (Thought) from every character in the game? This is what people mean when they say "thoughts are things" or talk about "conscious creation". Ultimately the topic of Awareness or Consciousness transcends rationality, so the only way to know what the hell I'm talking about is to try and walk the Path yourself. :) ------ randyrand Have DPDR, I appreciate that DPDR is becoming more talked about. Makes me feel less alone and less abnormal. Thankfully, I've slowly (~years) been returning to normal. ------ davebryand This is the state that most of us committing our lives to spiritual practice seek to achieve. All of these overlap with symptoms of Enlightenment, although the enlightened being has conscious control over all internal processes, so they are not only able to feel joy and love, they've reached the source of those emotions. * _Detachment from self, feeling as though one is watching a movie about oneself._ * _A sense that one is not in control of one’s thoughts and actions._ * _Reality may seem dream-like or unreal._ * _Distorted sense of time._ * _Perceptual alterations like visual snow, halo around lights._ * _Emotional numbness, unable to feel joy or love._ ~~~ mindgam3 What you are describing is getting high, not spiritual practice. Nothing wrong with getting high per se, but it can be extremely dangerous if you confuse those states with "Enlightenment". The experience of transcending one's ego identity may feel similar to dissociation or depersonalization at times. But the end result of awakening is not a dissociative state. It's being fully present to all of your emotions, not numbness at all, but simply not attached to them in the sense that they don't automatically dictate your response. You still feel all the things that apply to your normal sense of self, but you're able to observe them and act from a different place. There is a real risk to people getting lost on the spiritual path and ending up in places like nihilism or dissociation. Be careful. ------ sergefaguet i feel a bit confused about this "disorder." i spend hundreds of hours a year meditating to get rid of my sense of self. it is the best thing about the LSD experience too. the idea that one is not in control of one's own actions is called "seeing the illusion of free will which is obvious to anyone who has ever seriously thought about the issue." the idea that you are watching a movie about something that does not actually have a self is called "ego death" or "enlightenment." ~~~ swamy_g The problem with DP/DR is that the loss of control/feeling of unrealness is not pleasant. It's the opposite. Your ego is not completely lost, it's still very much present. But it feels really threatened. You feel like you are on the edge most of the time. You feel like you might go insane or die any minute (when the intensity gets high). After years of getting my grounding, I feel like I can manage these feelings. I don't have them that often. But it takes practice, and you have to surrender when the feelings are overwhelming. For functioning in this world, you do need a sense of self. But it also helps when that self realizes that it is part of a whole. Without a self, I don't think you can operate in this reality, so there's no point trying to get rid of it. ~~~ renholder >You feel like you are on the edge most of the time. You feel like you might go insane or die any minute (when the intensity gets high). Mine's been far milder (thankfully) and the best way I could explain that feeling is like being a boat with it's anchor dropped. You're very much the anchor but, when you hit the DP/PR, you're also - very much - the boat, as well - being tossed about by the waves. It's like events happen but you're kind of pedestrian to them, seing them after-the-fact, almost[0]. That's the best way that I can describe it but I'm not even doing it justice, overall; just from my own anecdotal experience(s) and it's a piss-poor analogy at that. Sorry. [0] - [https://media.giphy.com/media/UrO3di2UKs4qA/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/UrO3di2UKs4qA/giphy.gif) ------ mfoy_ I recently read "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" and in it, the author raises many interesting ideas about consciousness, the mind, self, free will, etc. Would someone with DP/DR say they possess free will? Would _you_ say you possess free will? Is the test for "having free will" simply feeling like you have it? Or _saying_ that you have it? Does an AI that says "I am sentient. I possess free will." actually have those qualities? Do we? ~~~ unimpressive Obvious resolution: There's no such thing, the universe is deterministic but not predictable. This doesn't matter very much in practice, punishment is about game theory so your 'free will' to perform or not perform an action is kind of irrelevant. ~~~ mfoy_ That's my takeaway too. In practice, it doesn't really matter since we only have the one universe to observe, so there's no material difference between one model and the other. ~~~ trevyn But be aware: The free-will model can be uninstalled from your brain, and this may have interesting side-effects. (Including possibly temporary DPDR, though I wouldn’t necessarily call DPDR a bad thing, just... atypical. And it helps to have solid coping strategies.) ------ danburbridge Interesting, the symptoms remind me a lot of many of the themes of Phillip K Dick's works, particularly the questioning of reality and consciousness. ~~~ roywiggins PKD had his own unusual experiences: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_experiences) ------ md224 If one is having a panic attack regarding free will, it might be helpful to remember that if you're able to speak the words "I have no control", then you've proven yourself wrong: you just exerted control over your vocal chords. Helpful reminder that you're not a prisoner in your own body! ~~~ jjnoakes Unless whomever is controlling you made you say that so you'd think you were free... ~~~ md224 True, but then they'd need to be reading your mind to know that you were thinking about it. The plot thickens... Also, if this controller needs to do external things to influence what you think about, rather than just controlling your thoughts directly, then there's already a hint of free will in the choice of your thoughts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Study confirms that ending your texts with a period is terrible - KerryJones https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/12/08/study-confirms-that-ending-your-texts-with-a-period-is-terrible/?tid=ss_fb ====== DrScump [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10703303)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
German police raid homes of Tor-linked group's board members - jfreax https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-police-raid-homes-of-tor-linked-groups-board-members/ ====== merricksb Heavily discussed 1-2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17456289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17456289) (333 points/130 comments) ------ n1231231231234 another example of tried overreach: a branch of the federal police, "staatsschutz", raided the posteo office in 2013 and claimed to have a warrant to seize _everything_. posteo immediatedly pushed back and it turned out that the police only had a warrant for a single document [0](in german, tho). like the investigating officers wouldn't be aware of this. it's their modus operandi. what they also like to do is to adjust events in hindsight such that it suits their story. the case I have in mind concerns the NRW state police, but that, too, seems to be common strategy. in this case, which is very recent, a protester was arrested and police claimed, in their official report, that the protester physically assaulted the officer and resisted arrest. the protester disputed this, but without evidence would not have stood a chance in court. moreover, the protester was badly injured during the whole ordeal. now a video turns up and what do you see?: no physical assault, no resistance [1](also in german). in such cases, i am glad that we live in the age of mobile phones, where anyone can take recordings. [0] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posteo](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posteo) [1] [http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/wuppertal-fall-von- polize...](http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/wuppertal-fall-von- polizeigewalt-erregt-nordrhein-westfalen-1.4040203) ------ anoncoward111 Wow, imagine being raided by police and having all your stuff stolen, just because the police allege that you helped someone do something "anti- government". Tor board, I would offer you my help, but I'm an American, so we would probably all be sent to Guantanamo ~~~ superkuh I don't have to. It happened to me in 2010 in the middle of the USA. 6am no- knock raid by regional FBI agents with guns drawn. They stole all of my computer equipment and my flatmate's computer equipment too. There were never any charges brought. We never got our stuff back. The local police were brought in to try to charge me with something, anything, and the best they could come up with was a city ordinance called "Maintaining a disorderly house." \-- yeah, it tends to be a bit messy after the feds have trashed it. Of course back then the feds were really up in arms trying to squash any and all grassroots political organizations (ie, wikileaks + occupy). Even more than now. ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife Police raided my home in South Australia. It was drug related, and I was dealing, so fair enough. They later dropped the charges, _nolle prosequi_. But did they have to make such a mess? I mean, they had had my keys and still busted open locks, pulled everything out of everything and threw it across the room, upturned everything that wasn't bolted down. And they still didn't find some of the drugs in plain sight, and a substantial amount of cash that was barely hidden. More recently they forced their way in to my home Sunday night at 12am and dragged me off before I had a chance to get out of my pajamas to charge me with assault on allegations I pushed someone over in to 2 feet of fresh snow. Held me till midday Monday forcing me to miss a day at work and appear in court in my bed clothes. Yeah, they dropped those charges too. The police are _the enemy_. And an incompetent, gun wielding, violent enemy immune to the law. ~~~ anoncoward111 The government quite literally hires goons to be... well... armed goons. I am so, so sorry to hear about what you went through. These guys are overpaid thugs with a lot of public support shockingly ------ CBLT I guess a big lesson here is: keeping the data on paper made it less secure. The police made overreach on top of overreach and grabbed as much as they could, far exceeding their warrant. They now have historical donor records for an unrelated organization, when the warrant should have limited them in scope and history. But the police can't compel them to unlock their encrypted hard drives. If they kept that info on encrypted disk it would have been safe. ------ forapurpose I'm not speaking about the events in the OP, but generally I think people do their cause harm when they say things such as the following (there are several more examples in the article): _After the raids, Bartl was forced to take a break from work. He said that he assumes, given his work on digital rights issues, that he may be under surveillance. Bartl also expressed concern that future donors may also face scrutiny, financially hurting the group 's projects._ Sometimes (I know nothing about these incidents), some of the reasons for these actions are to intimidate you and disrupt your work. Letting them know you are intimidated and disrupted not only encourages the bully, it spreads those consequences much more widely than just you: It demoralizing people who follow you, who depend on you, and who are in similar positions; and via the news article it spreads the intimidation and disruption to a much wider audience. How many on HN will now have second thoughts? The better response, I think, is _f- that; we won 't be stopped or intimidated_. ------ mindfulhack This law enforcement overreach and breach of civil freedoms is fucked up. How is it fair to just sit back and not wage war after persecution like this? If I were in the CCC I'd be fuming and scheming right now. Not sure what sort what the war would look like exactly, but I'd be thinking of something. ------ hh3k0 > But, under pressure from tax authorities, the organization had compiled > paper receipts with names and passport numbers of those the project had > reimbursed. > Bartl said those records have been compromised, putting the identities of > those involved at risk. Pretty sure those records have been compromised the moment you handed them over to the tax authorities.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gauge blocks, a system for producing precision lengths - camtarn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block ====== Obi_Juan_Kenobi If you're interested in precision machining, Robrenz is a good channel to check out: [https://www.youtube.com/user/ROBRENZ/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/ROBRENZ/videos) He demos a Brown & Sharpe electronic indicator here, showing how sensitive they are, even to errant breaths: [https://youtu.be/UG6LV8v8W-0?t=25m15s](https://youtu.be/UG6LV8v8W-0?t=25m15s) ------ imglorp AvE did a few vids on the "wringing" phenomena. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbsd2OpPOMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbsd2OpPOMw) ------ curtis Having now read the whole Wikipedia article I can say it was way more interesting than I expected at first.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Ok done with our website. But Look and feel is developerified. - retrofit_brain We got done building our site but it has developer looks. How to find a cheap way of improving the look and feel? What sites/designers have you guys looked at to improve the look. I know many people on hacker news suggest hire a professional, but where to hire a cheap and reliable professional? ====== Dramatize Maybe have a look at <http://siteinspire.com/showcase> I found this site to have a good collection of well designed sites. The main area to work on is typography and navigation layout. If you have nice typography and an easy to use navigation, you'll be 90% of the way there. Another tip is to never use #000 for your text. Try using a dark grey. Two sites I like the design of are: <http://www.thrivesolo.com/> and <http://www.bestmadeco.com/> ~~~ retrofit_brain Thanks, yes looks like Typography is the most critical thing. Any pointers for typography? ------ mattvot Can you define developer looks? Might help to see the site. I'm not a designer by heart, but I just look at other sites in the same market for inspiration. Most of the sites I design come out looking pretty good. It's all about prioritizing. Take a look at this amazing post Allison House: [http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-arrange-interface- elem...](http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-arrange-interface-elements-4/) ~~~ retrofit_brain Thanks will look and will definitely post the URL once we iron out the last few nicks. ------ gspyrou You could purchase a template from Themeforest <http://themeforest.net/> ~~~ retrofit_brain i should have mentioned. Our UI is GWT and not sure if custom template would work.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer (online book, Haskell) - SkyMarshal http://nlpwp.org/ ====== RiderOfGiraffes Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1907825>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Groovy and Grails Plans Announced at SpringOne2GX - mindcrime http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/09/groovy24-25-grails31 ====== vorg > Perhaps the most significant is improved compiler performance with a new > Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) class reader in place of using class loading > tricks. The Groovy compiler starts by compiling scripts to a Concrete Syntax > Tree (CST) Rather than talking so much about AST improvements, perhaps these Groovy developers should explain why the process for compiling to the CST still uses the Antlr 2.x lexer/parser which hasn't been worked on since 2005, and both Antlr 3 and Antlr 4 have long since arrived in the meantime. When they got a Google SoC student to attempt an upgrade to Antlr 4 in 2011 and another one last year, they both failed, and Groovy didn't get any SoC students this year despite Scala, Clojure, and JRuby getting plenty each.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Safety Implications of Serialization Timing in Autonomous Vehicles (2017) [pdf] - zzulus https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a60ec649f8dce866f011db6/t/5ab286da2b6a283afce7d752/1521649372997/Safety-Serialization.pdf ====== zzulus Author compares different message serialization libraries (protobuf, capnproto, flatbuffers, etc) using real world data.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis' - gibsonf1 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,435681,00.html ====== ryanmahoski It appears a contractor at the World Bank methodically compromised a _ton_ of sensitive information. Article Summary: Between 18 and 40 servers at the World Bank Group were secretly compromised during the past year. Among them: 6 SAP servers, a security/password machine, a server that contained "scanned images of staff documents" and one that held contract-procurement data. Senior IT guy at the bank's headquarters: "They took our existing data stores and organized them in a way that they could be easily accessed at will...They had access to everything...They had the keys to every room at the bank. And we can't say whether they still do or don't..." The first major breach was on the subsidiary International Finance Corp in 2007. The invader had at least 6 months of total access to the company's data. A second major breach occurred in April '08 on the World Bank Treasury system. Then in June they found a sysadmin password on an external box which let them to log into the World Bank's insurance arm. From there they compromised yet another sysadmin account and you get the picture. Evidently a contractor installed a keystroke logger.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge - bryanrasmussen https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/china-is-on-track-to-beat-its-peak-emissions-pledge/ ====== ei8htyfi5e I've lived there and can say from experience China just makes stuff up. The local governments are responsible for reporting to higher ups and they don't want to miss targets, so they straight up lie. In reality it's a house of cards. You can lie about a 2% change once, and twice, and three times, but soon your lies compound and it's clear you didn't reduce emissions by the rate you reported. Only time will prove me correct about this. They do this with air quality regularly. Chinese official numbers of PM2.5 are regularly 30-50% lower than what the US embassy reports. ~~~ smacktoward I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted on this, it’s a common problem in authoritarian governments of all stripes. Nobody gets promoted from Apparatchik to Senior Apparatchik by pushing back on the quotas set for them. ------ YippRino I'd like to be proven wrong here but I tend to suspect them of fudging their numbers, so to speak. There is a lot of corruption at the municipal level and there is incentive for local officials to overstate their progress. That said, pollution is pretty serious in their bigger cities so I hope for everyone's sake the numbers are true. ~~~ simion314 Is it easy to fake the numbers this days where you can automate a lot of the measurements? ~~~ saagarjha Well, it depends on who's making the measurements. How easy is it to actually measure China's emissions by a neutral third party? ~~~ TeMPOraL With the proposed new set of EU's Sentinel satellites hopefully to be launched in the coming years, it should be trivial. That is, if the proposed mission actually happens. ------ rayiner What a bizarrely upbeat article. China’s CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article’s numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China’s population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S8048). The only reason US CO2 output didn’t peak decades ago is that the US population continues to grow steadily. ~~~ yorwba > The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 > emissions. The paper is based on the environmental Kuznets curve model [1], according to which growth in GDP per capita eventually allows more environmentally friendly policies to be implemented, causing pollution per unit of GDP to shrink again. That's exactly the effect that allows the US to generate a higher GDP with comparatively smaller increases in CO2 emissions. The paper uses the fact that some countries are farther along the curve than others to empirically fit the parameters and uses that to estimate when CO2 emissions per capita will peak given current economic development. Note that that's just about the per-capita measures; the expected peak in population compounds the effect. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Kuznets_curve)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity - johnny313 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/us/military-enlistment.html ====== killjoywashere As usual, the HN crowd is comfortably outside the impact zone of military recruiting and despite being submitted multiple times, the basic responsibilities of citizenship command no discussion.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Remotion – Quick video chat for remote teams (macOS only) - aejae https://remotion.com/ ====== aejae Hey folks, I’m Alexander, cofounder of Remotion. We help teams get into quick video chats instead of scheduling meetings or texting. This makes remote collaboration faster and less isolating. We’re in beta (macOS only for now) and looking for as much feedback as possible. If you’re up for a 15 min video demo/call to share your thoughts and maybe onboard, please email me at alexander [at] remotion [dot] com. Alternatively, if you’d rather just try the product, feel free to sign up directly and shoot me a note with feedback. Interesting data point from beta thus far: 47% of conversations are <10 minutes—people are getting unblocked and saving time instead of spending hours in Zoom or Slack. Thanks! ~~~ andreshb This looks great! How would you compare with Tandem? ------ zpj5005 I've been using Remotion for the past 2 weeks with my startup twingate.com. Here are my thoughts thus far: \- It only works if enough people remember to open it every day. We started with just our frontend team of 4 people and since we're at the end of a sprint and doing a lot of code reviews it's been getting a lot of activity. \- It's more viral than I thought. We went from 4/25 to 12/25 teammates using it in the past week. I typically join a call maybe once a day, but I'm seeing other teammates jump on a call every hour (just saw two people start talking while I was typing this comment). \- The UI is small so it's fairly easy to ignore (especially on a big monitor) \- Since videos are limited to a small circle, ending calls after 5 minutes feels more natural than ending a Zoom call \- Screen sharing is pretty good, but you can't limit sharing to just one app My theory on why Remotion has picked up so quickly with our team: Working remotely can be lonely. By no means does this _solve_ loneliness, but it definitely gives you back a slice of that working-in-an-office vibe. ------ randylubin My wife's company has been using Remotion and she says it's sped up decision making and helped the team feel closer together	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Under Pressure from Uber, Taxi Medallion Prices Are Plummeting - uladzislau http://nytimes.com/2014/11/28/upshot/under-pressure-from-uber-taxi-medallion-prices-are-plummeting.html ====== ps4fanboy "The crucial question for medallion owners like Mr. Ionescu is, if Uber is that much cheaper than a taxi, why would anyone take a taxi, and therefore why would any driver pay to lease a medallion? Mr. Ionescu says his revenues are down around 25 percent, and he’s having trouble leasing out his whole fleet." Apart for selling the right to operate in a government sanctioned monopoly what service does this man provide? This looks like the worse example of rent seeking I have seen. ~~~ ghshephard Here are the "non-services" that he provides: o A poorly tracked rider/driver interaction in which it's somewhat obscured which riders I road with in case I have a bad interaction and need to follow up. o A poorly designed hailing system in which I need to physically see the taxi in order to request its service. o A poorly designed (non existent?) tracking system, in which the taxi that I've requested may, in fact, be service another passenger, and have no intention of coming directly to me for the next 30 minutes. Or, never at all. o Almost no feedback, and certainly no "default opt-in" feedback mechanism on the driver, providing no incentives for the drivers to behave professionally or courteously for every ride, resulting in frequent rude or abrasive customer/rider interaction. Without the medallion, of course, he couldn't afford to provide those "non- services", and would therefore have to compete for business. The medallion is what allows him to provide such a horrible level of service - and, such poor service is frequently seen in most monopolistic markets. See Comcast. ~~~ furyg3 It's also important to list the proposed services the monopoly provides. Personally I avoid them at all costs... Nevertheless they are historically: * Price reliability: Prices in most taxi systems follow strict rules. Customers can use this knowledge to estimate what they will spend, and drivers what they can earn. * Service dependability: Because medallions are limited and prices are regulated, taxi drivers can make a living, and the service does not boom/bust. This means customers are not gouged in good times and unable to find taxis in bad times. * Non-discrimination: Taxis are usually required to respond to all hails, and to not refuse service because your ride is too short/long. * Driver tracking: because a taxi driver must have a medallion and follow rules about posting information in/on their cabs, passengers can distinguish between 'taxis' and random people offering ride services. While there may be no built-in reputation system, there is incentive and recourse. How do passengers know if a non-taxi is a guy who makes his living from offering rides, or a guy who just stole a car and is going to rob them? A taxi driver is risking a lot by robbing his passenger. Many of these points are matters of preference, or can be solved by technology (reputation). Do we, as a society, want to incentivize a stable transit system by limiting the number of drivers or by paying more than 'market' prices in slow periods, and more in busy periods? Do we want drivers to be able to refuse service? If not, how do we compensate drivers who make short/long trips that have low profitability and high opportunity costs? ~~~ ghshephard I like the general balanced approach you are taking, but I have to critique a few elements. Service dependability - I take cabs exclusively, and, while I can't comment on other markets, I have deep knowledge of the bay area taxis. First, it's important to note, that even when they are operating in "normal mode" \- you can never, ever quickly get a taxi on the peninsula. Minimum time is always about 15-20 minutes, and frequently 30 minutes. Also, when it's busy, or late - forget it, you will not get a taxi. Compare this to Uber, that works hard to ensure you will always have a ride, regardless of time, level of busy. And yes, basic economics therefore suggests that in order to make that happen, you will have to vary the price. But, I would definitely like to have the _choice_ of taking a more expensive ride, then no ride at all. Non-Discrimination: You've got it backwards. Taxis discriminate all the time based on every conceivable factor. Uber doesn't even let the driver know where you are going, and the driver is committed to picking you up before he sees if you are young or old, black or white, male or female. About all they can discriminate on is _how well you treat them_ (Drivers rate passengers). Your Driver tracking thing is a long stretch. A better example would be, "Taxi Drivers in general have been doing their job for a while, there is little churn, so it's unlikely you will get one that will rob or rape you, (though it's not unheard of, particularly with drunk passengers.) as those drivers who do that are probably going to get fired, and it's less common to get new drivers with taxi services than with uber. Of the 200 or so RideShares, the worst one I got was a Driver who had only been working for Lyft for a week, and used her cellphone to get GPS directions to the airport, and came to a hard stop at a stop sign. Every other one has been excellent, courteous, and clean safe cars. I have no end of horror stories of psychotic taxi drivers driving cars that sometimes wouldn't open from the inside. ~~~ jsun Yeah I love Uber but the one thing that's really annoyed me the past couple of years is whenever it goes above 2x surge every UberX driver immediately "forgets" how to navigate the city. Even a couple of blocks out of the way means a couple of bucks extra on your fare at surge pricing levels. Uber definitely has this data, I would love to see them release it given their commitment to data transparency. Even some really simple metric like average distance traveled vs. average GPS route distance during surge vs. normal should give a fairly unbiased view of how often this is happening. ~~~ jquery Surge pricing gets more, less experienced, drivers on the road. ------ seliopou > Yellow taxis in New York also face competition from new green “boro taxis,” > which may pick up fares only in the boroughs outside Manhattan and in > northern Manhattan. That program has been in the works for three years, > including during a period when medallion prices were still rising. The vast > majority of yellow cab pickups occur in Manhattan below 110th Street or at > airports, where yellow cabs face competition from Uber but not from green > cabs. Still, the green cab program has faced strong opposition from yellow > cab medallion owners, and the start of falling medallion prices coincides > with a June 2013 court ruling upholding the green cab program. Did anybody read this? My understanding is that green taxi medallions started selling at around $5,000 when they were introduced, and green taxis are now fairly common in the outer boroughs. You also see them quite a bit in lower Manhattan as well (dropping off fares). Also, did anybody look at that chart? Prices haven't been stable for the entire time span that the chart covers, and the current price isn't even the min for the data set. Uber's been operating in New York since well before 2013. It just so happens that the (three month as indicated by the chart, mind you) decline coincided with a court decision that upheld a city policy that would put more cabs on the streets in areas of the city that are booming right now. On top of that, I wonder if there are any other macroeconomic trends that might be affecting medallion prices and ridership overall. Mind you, if total taxi-like revenue for the last given period is R = T + U, where U is Uber's share of the revenue and T is the rest, and the next period's revenue is R' < R, then it's completely consistent to have T' < T and U' > U. In other words, total taxi-like revenue can be on the decline even as Uber's revenues are increasing. This could be because the Uber service is cheaper, or because people are overall using taxis less. Who knows if this is actually happening? I don't. But it'd be interesting to see the question raised and pursued, even to be quickly dismissed by some obvious fact. Don't mistake this article for economic analysis. It's a puff piece. ~~~ netcan I'm ashamed to say that I didn't. You're right. Medallion prices look pretty close to average for the dataset, which only covers 18 months. The article also mentions problems with the data. Low data, small dataset, questionable outlier removal. " _There was only one medallion sale in September, followed by nine in October_ " This data doesn't really say anything. The remarkable thing here is that medallion values aren't dropping. This really is terrible reporting. ------ smcl Stories like this confuse me, they seem to suggest that I should be sympathetic towards previously inflated prices starting to fall. In this case we're talking about taxi medallions but closer to home it's been UK house prices where a decline is reported as "bad" and a rise is "good". In both situations it's seemed pretty obvious to me that there's a crazy overpriced asset that will correct eventually and those who paid over the odds will take a hit. ~~~ k-mcgrady House prices are always reported as bad. Either too high for new buyers or they're falling and owners don't like it. ~~~ _delirium Falling prices are bad in the current arrangement, unfortunately, for more reasons than the current owners being upset: a bunch of other financial products are also tied to them, so falling house prices cause a mess cascading beyond just the real-estate market. E.g. the 2008 crash produced defaults on housing derivatives worth more than the entirety of the actual real-estate in question, which in turn produced bank failures, etc. (Not a good situation in the first place, but it's why financial news treats falling housing prices as negative news.) ~~~ humanrebar > a bunch of other financial products are also tied to them, so falling house > prices cause a mess cascading beyond just the real-estate market That's an argument for gradually deflating housing prices, assuming they are overpriced. If people are running businesses and preparing for retirement with faulty price projections in mind, I don't see why others (people who don't own homes, mind you) should be forever penalized because the system is already stacked against them. ~~~ _delirium I agree they should be deflated, if overpriced. My point was that the people who don't own homes _also_ suffer from real-estate declines in many cases, with the current way the financial system is intertwined with real estate (which is itself a problem). By dollar terms the vast majority of money lost in the '08 real-estate crash was lost by people who didn't actually own a house or condo, because the second-order losses were much larger than the primary losses. ------ raverbashing "“I’m already at peace with the idea that I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Larry Ionescu, who owns 98 Chicago taxi medallions." That's how much again? 30Million? If you manage to go bankrupt with this kind of equity you're bad at business. Like, really bad. The best investors know when it's a good time to go into a business, but also when it's time to disinvest. Looks like the time is now (or maybe, 6 months ago) ~~~ onion2k The problem is that pretty much everyone realised the problem at the same time. In order to disinvest there would need to be people willing to buy, but in this case it seems his assets became unsellable pretty much overnight. It's not like Uber was always certain to win; for a long time there were plenty of people who thought Uber would be legislated out of business. Now it's looking like that won't happen. Consequently his position is sensibly pragmatic - his business is failing and he has no way to get back much of his money. The best investors realise that there is _always_ a possibility of that happening. ~~~ raverbashing "The best investors realise that there is always a possibility of that happening." Exactly. Especially with things that are very dependent on legislation. This is not a material asset, it's a license. Cities might one day legislate a medallion is not needed anymore, or increase their number, or change the rules in some way. ------ bluedevil2k The article doesn't touch upon the illiquidity of the taxi medallions in these cities. In most of them, once you buy the taxi medallion, it's difficult or impossible to sell again. Even in cities where you can sell it (San Francisco), you get a fraction of what you paid for it (30% typically). This distorts the market even further, when the buyers need to price in the fact that these are assets that in some cases might depreciate to $0, and not give them the ability to sell them before that happens. Additionally, there's no price feedback, or it happens rarely. As the article points out, NYC publishes the price once a year, and did it incorrectly last year. What type of investment gives you no feedback on its current value? To reduce the price swings, cities need to create an auction system where they allow current owners of medallions to list their current medallions for sale. The auction system would provide price transparency, and allow all the stakeholders involved (medallion holders, buyers, and sellers) to get a clear picture of the market price at any given point. ------ BillFranklin I'm bored of stories about Uber, they're all paid for, marketing crap. ~~~ colinbartlett You are suggesting that Uber paid the New York Times to write this piece on medallion prices? ~~~ BillFranklin Yes, and I don't know why I've been downvoted for it. Read this: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html) Then this: [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#tbm=nws&q=Uber) Uber's PR agencies are Westbourne and FleishmanHillard: [http://www.prweek.com/article/1295173/uber-bring-european- pr...](http://www.prweek.com/article/1295173/uber-bring-european-pr-taxi-wars- demand-comms-firepower) ------ steven2012 I'm shocked at how the taxi industry is behaving in the face of this new competition. Uber and lyft have been around for several years and all they are doing is sitting there and then eat their lunch with no attempt to protect themselves. But believe me I have no sympathy for them, especially in the Bay Area. I welcome the idea that they go bankrupt after the years of disservice they have provided this area. The interesting thing is that I'm not sure what options they have at this point. Uber is spending hundreds of millions of VC money, which is a huge advantage over existing taxi companies that don't have this free money that allows them to operate at a massive loss. About the only thing I can think of is taxi companies from several cities across the U.S. have to merge together, and then partner with a smaller company that can raise the same 100M+ in financing and then create an uber competitor that can drive prices even lower. Basically it's a scorched earth policy on taxi fares driven by VC money, similar to the dot com days. Other than that, I have no idea how the taxi industry will survive, unless they can somehow get uber regulated the same way they are. ------ dmishe I'm not familiar with medallion system, do you have to buy them per-car or per-cab-company? In any case, 1 million is just, wow. ~~~ ars Per car, and also they are tied to the car, not the driver. So divers rent them for the day, or by the hour. It's basically a government sanctioned monopoly. It doesn't even have the pretense of being about safety or anything like that. ~~~ jgh Does it transfer to a new vehicle? Cabs put on so many hard miles that it seems like a really steep price for something that isn't going to last that long. ~~~ ars The medallion itself is physically attached to the cab, but since the medallion does not expire I'm sure there is a transfer process. ------ netcan I realize that most people here thin medallions were always a and idea, bad for consumers and _should_ die. But, the fact is that they do exist and were promoted by the municipal government (this is a municipal government system, isn't it?). Even if it was a bad idea, aren't they responsible for it? They sold or issued medallions on the grounds that they are a resellable perpetual license to run a taxi. If i'm not mistaken, the city made money selling them. Unless you consider the whole "contract" void, I can think of only two logical perspective. Either the city is violating that contract by allowing uber to operate or uber is a new kind of service with no bearing on that contract. IE if segways had replaced cabs, tough luck #1 sounds prohibitively expensive to accept & #2 sounds dishonest. ~~~ icebraining I think that question is perfectly valid; even if the contracts are considered unfair/rent-seeking or whatever, why shouldn't the city be at least partly responsible for issuing such contracts? There's an article on Cato about the issue, which focuses on the economic efficiency of the issue: [http://www.cato.org/blog/should-taxi-medallion- owners-be-com...](http://www.cato.org/blog/should-taxi-medallion-owners-be- compensated) ~~~ netcan I agree that this is anti-consumer. But I can imagine similar schemes that aren't. Say a city decides to have a market in the park every Sunday. They issue resellable medallions for stalls, food carts, etc. A few years later, they cancel the market or the medallion system or otherwise make the medallions worthless. With uber there is some ambiguity. Maybe uber aren't cabs. If some awesome new public transport system lowered demand for cabs the city wouldn't be responsible. Claiming that they aren't cabs is how/why uber get around the medallion system in the first place. Taxis and medallion issuers are challenging this in someplace. In any case, I think there is a genuine question here. Even if medallions were wrong in the first place, issuing them was the wrong, not buying one. Buying a medallion is the only way to operate a cab. I don't understand the downvote- anger. ~~~ icebraining _I don 't understand the downvote-anger._ I think it's because they're being sloppy in the reading of your post and assuming "therefore Uber should be banned" somehow. ------ jsun I'm not sure the math works out. It mentions a weekly lease price of $780 per medallion in Chicago. Assuming 15% tax and 15% cost of insurance that comes out to $600 to the leasing company. Assuming the car costs $25,000 and has a depreciated value of $10,000 after 3 years as a fleet car, that means the weekly "cost" of the car is $113.21 (assuming a 5% financing rate), which prices the medallion at $486.79. A perpetuity of $486.79 per week at an expected 20% gross return only costs $126,566.15, less than a third of the selling price of a medallion in Chicago today. Even at a expected 10% gross return still only comes out to $253,132.20. Am I off on my math somewhere?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Site that lets you record and automatically phone-blast SOPA supporters for you - cjfont http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/reverse-robocall-campaign-lets-citizens-phone-blast-sopa-supporters.ars ====== nick-dap Activism needs to be reinvented. Legislators are already not paying attention to email, because so much of it is automated. At best, some legislators tally email, many of them don't pay attention to it at all. Automating phone calls is an inevitable continuation. Right now, phone calls have _some_ impact. Unfortunately, technology will make calling less effective. On one end we have software, on the other we have the poor Congressional staffers who have to pick up the phone every time it rings. Eventually the staff will become numb to phone calls, stop paying attention, and turn to people sitting in their offices for guidance (lobbyists, who get paid to be there, or, less likely, people like you and me who find the time to actually go and talk to them.) We have a disconnect between taking the smallest step (sending an email, calling) and the next one, physically going somewhere. This is why we -- we the tech industry, in partnership with visionaries from the non-profit space -- have to reinvent activism. To make the transition from the online to the offline world smoother. And to make the time spent online more meaningful. Increasingly, people look online first. The dozens of petition sites -- Change.org is a full social network type of deal -- are making it easy to confuse "doing something" with "doing something effective." ~~~ stinkytaco >Activism needs to be reinvented. No, activism is effective (see: GoDaddy, Arab Spring, Montgomery Bus Boycott), but it's hard and takes real work. It's the political system that needs to be fixed. Those lobbyists _should not be out in the lobby_. The fact that they have more clout because they are right there is the major problem. Saying we need to get boots on the ground so we can compete with lobbyists is to miss the core problem that we shouldn't need to compete with lobbyists. We should be able to email, call or walk into an office and have our voice heard. Our vote should matter more than money. In the meantime, yes, we need to be active enough to change the political system, but changing activism should only lead to the larger goal of changing the fact that activism shouldn't need to be changed. ~~~ nick-dap Activism can be effective, but certainly not by default. Non-profit campaigns fail about as well as startups. When I say reinvented, I mean that we need innovative ways to use technology in the advocacy space. Like you said, activism takes real work. Clicking "Like" on FB is giving people the false impression that they have actually done something. Where we agree is that the political system is broken and that it is a much more important issue. I've been fighting for a particular bill for nearly a decade (see my profile, if you care to know) and the thing that I've heard consistently, regardless of what season or year it is, regardless of who controls Congress, regardless of who is the President, is this: "now is not a good time to make the push, because the election is coming up." If there is ANY election in the next two years, Congress simply STOPS. In other words they are in a perpetual election cycle. We make the push anyway, we inch closer, but fail (always due to filibuster and votes splitting evenly along party lines, regardless of actual stance of specific legislators), then we spend YEARS in the election cycle. I've seen this happen too many times... I'm starting to think that all progressive organizations should drop their pet issues and focus on campaign financing reform first. ~~~ stinkytaco >I'm starting to think that all progressive organizations should drop their pet issues and focus on campaign financing reform first. We certainly agree on that point. I believe publicly financed campaigns and term limits will bring the United States greater change than any other two policy changes can. That said, I don't think slactivism is really a _change_ per se. It's hard to believe that people who click the "Like" button on Facebook would be out picketing or writing their congressman on any issue. What you could argue is that it at least forces them to consider a position that they might again consider when they are standing in the ballot box. ------ igul222 I can't imagine this having much positive effect– if I were a politician, I'd just hang up as soon as I realized it was a robocall. If anything, it'll probably make it more difficult for actual people trying to talk to their representatives to be heard. ~~~ noonespecial "Sir we're getting all these calls about this sopa thing. They're automatic but there's a lot of them and they're all different. Its starting to tie up our phones." ...is a hell of a lot better than "no mention at all about that entertainment lobbyist's bill I rubber-stamped and then never heard anything about. Must not have been important." ~~~ nextparadigms I could see how if this starts happening for a lot of issues and becomes a popular thing, they would make this sort of thing illegal. ~~~ sukuriant That sounds great for the telemarketing and political system, to me! I tire of calls about my political stances on random issues... as well as telemarketing calls. ------ cjfont Direct link to set up a SOPA/PIPA robocall: [http://www.reverserobocall.com/products/sopa-and-pipa- propon...](http://www.reverserobocall.com/products/sopa-and-pipa- proponents-301-offices) ------ Havoc Robocalling strikes me as somewhat pathetic, regardless of who uses it. Sort like spamming people. ~~~ thesis There are plenty of legitimate uses for it where you just want to get a point across. ~~~ Havoc >There are plenty of legitimate uses for it Name one. ~~~ rdouble In my town, tornado and blizzard alerts, including road closings and school closings are delivered by phonebots. ------ thesis I especially liked this part: "SOPA isn't the only target of Reverse Robocall, and it's not an issue that the site specifically takes a stand on. In an interview with Ars, Dakin said that the site is a non-partisan, for-profit effort aimed at providing a service for advocacy groups, in the same vein as the petition site Change.org. But the service, launched in beta just before Thanksgiving, is also an outgrowth of Dakin and Titus' work as privacy advocates to work against robocalls by politicians, he said." Why not take a stand on it, rather then just worrying about your bottom line. ------ timjahn I really hope an idea like this will make an impact. But I have a hard time thinking the politicians won't simply ignore the robocalls like we do and then think it still makes sense to robocall us. ~~~ rhizome I'm not saying it's an effective method, but to be fair, if the politicians are going to ignore it they (or one of their minions) will at least have to confront that decision. ------ username3 What do they hear?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
One line of node.js turns RSS to JSON - duvander http://h3manth.com/content/rss-json-using-nodejs ====== tantalor And that one line calls out to a library which does all the work. Why should this be a module? It's absurd. ------ eonil What's NEWs on one line of calling a library? Titling crap.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The story of Henry Ford's $5 a day wages: not what you think (2012) - hhs https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#674d6332766d ====== mjw1007 The story makes a good deal of sense if, in general, wages are set only partly by supply and demand, and partly by the employers-as-a-class's feelings of how much money people doing that sort of job ought to earn. In this case production line workers were a relatively new thing, and Ford was helping to create a consensus about where they would fit in. Part of the reason why simple supply and demand doesn't dictate a single level of wages is that there's a good deal of flexibility in what doing a job entails. In this case it seems Ford was helping to decide that the workers would be skilled labourers: there'd be a training cost (what the article calls "a costly break-in period") and high enough wages to reduce turnover so as to amortise that cost. The business about "character requirements" and visiting the employees' homes also looks like a conscious attempt to control where the workers fit in the class system. The alternative would presumably have been to try to organise the production line to require less training, and accept the efficiency loss in exchange for the lower wage bill. ~~~ brandmeyer > The story makes a good deal of sense if, in general, wages are set only > partly by supply and demand, and partly by the employers-as-a-class's > feelings of how much money people doing that sort of job ought to earn. In my experience, this is exactly how business owners feel. The skyrocketing salaries of tech workers in recent years is a prime example. It isn't just supply and demand. Its also norm-breaking behavior by a handful of exceptionally profitable employers. ~~~ rumanator > In my experience, this is exactly how business owners feel. Anyone who consumes a good or service is aware of its market price, and is very well capable of comparing it to any value offered. There is no need to pull a classist conspiracy card because, in the very least, those responsible for doing the hiring have interviewed multiple candidates and heard what wages they were asking, and were more than able to compare offers. ~~~ mjw1007 It isn't so simple, because there are many ways of dividing up the work that's going to be done into job roles (and the division tends to be industry-wide, rather than done separately within each company). The people doing the hiring may have enough information to produce an efficient market for a given job role, but I don't think the mechanism for the selection of job roles looks much like a supply-and-demand market. Consider system administration. As a simplified example, you could have one equilibrium in which you have one low-skill employee for each 50 computers, or a different equilibrium where you have one high-skill employee for each 500 computers. If the industry as a whole settled on the first, a particular company would find it hard to switch to the second: it would be hard to even gather information about how well it would work, because the operating systems available would be designed for the lower levels of automation that the first model implies. In cases where two equilibria are viable, I think where we end up can depend on whether the employers feel that a given sort of job "ought" to be a high- paid professional one or not. ------ 34679 I don't disagree with the article, but the false equivalency at the beginning is pretty annoying. >It should be obvious that this story doesn't work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner. You could go the other extreme and ask the same question about paperclips, but paperclips are a poor substitute for automobiles. The equivalent of a jetliner in Ford's day would probably be closer to the Titanic than a Model T. ~~~ gshdg But it is in Boeing's interest to pay workers enough to increase demand for jetliners -- that is, enough that they can afford airline tickets with some frequency. ~~~ philwelch Not necessarily! If Boeing decides to pay an employee an extra $50/month, and that employee saves all of that money and spends it on airline tickets, after the money that goes to the airline, the airline workers, the oil companies, and the airports, a small fraction of it returns to Boeing. Whereas if they didn’t pay them that extra $50/month, they would retain 100% of it. ~~~ iso1631 If you pay an extra $50 a month, it forces all the other companies to pay an extra $50 a month, and you get a fraction of everyone's extra $50. If you get 5% of the average $50 a month extra, but only employ 1% of the workers, you make money ~~~ philwelch If you only employ 1% of the workers and you pay an extra $50/mo, the rest of the market isn’t necessarily going to keep up with you. You’re probably just gonna end up hiring the top 1%. (Which also had a lot to do with Ford’s success, to be fair!) ------ csours Why does my company give a raise every year: If they don't, I'll leave. Why does my company employ me in the first place: If they didn't, they would make less money. ~~~ lotsofpulp > Why does my company give a raise every year: If they don't, I'll leave. AND someone decided it probably costs less than hiring a replacement for you. ~~~ unlinked_dll I don't think people responsible for making those decisions are always adept at calculating what those costs are, and they aren't always empowered to make the fiscally sound choice. ------ sixhobbits part of an account I heard of this somewhere else was that the turnover of employees was specifically _between_ car manufacturers. Because they all paid more or less the same, if a worker got annoyed he would leave with no notice and go to a competitor. Ford also refused to re-hire anyone who had previously quit, so the $5 was a great example of "Golden handcuffs". People would think twice before leaving, knowing they would be making 50% for the foreseeable future if they did. ~~~ ClumsyPilot Is a blanket ban on re-hires legal? It does not sound legitimate/legal. Surely a hiring decision should be based on employee skills/performance, and not punish general life choices? ~~~ sixhobbits I'm not an expert! But my impression is labour law was pretty different then and very employer focused. ------ irjustin Today, I don't think the general public buys that story cover. Probably back in Ford's time. Ford had to raise wages because it was actually cheaper than to not to. If we want to look at a good analog today, I would point to software engineers. ------ ruytlm The most fascinating part of this article to me is the choice to represent dollar amounts like $9,250,000 as "$9 1/4 million". I don't think I've seen a non-decimal format used for currency outside of history books talking about pre-decimal currencies. ------ thethethethe >It should be obvious that this story doesn't work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner. This is a terrible strawman. One could easily argue that Boeing should pay their employees enough so they could afford plane tickets to fly in Boeing jets. Comparing a commodity product to a commercial product like this article does is narrow and silly. ~~~ mcguire Well, it is Forbes. ~~~ ChrisSD To be clear, this is not Forbes. This is forbes.com/sites/ which is an unedited blogging network. So long as a blog brings in clicks and doesn't cause problems for Forbes then they don't much care what is posted. ~~~ xyzzyz If it's at forbes.com, and has Forbes logo at the top, it's Forbes. If they don't like the brand damage this is creating, tough luck: they can't have their cake and eat it too. ------ iguy Another facet not mentioned is unemployment. The world of pretty casual factory work (52k hires/year with 14k employees) was one in which (say) a 20% decline in work meant the average guy waited an extra 2.8 weeks before starting the next job, which he did a few times each year. It's pretty easy to save/borrow enough for a few weeks. But in Ford's new world of more-or-less employment for life, a 20% decline meant 20% got fired, and those guys now waited on the bench until the economy recovered. This is, I think, part of why the great depression was so unpleasant, compared to 19th century recessions. (For clarity, I don't think this was anybody's intention, just a consequence of higher-skill jobs being less flexible. Nor that it was the entire story.) ------ thaumaturgy Beware of getting history lessons from fellows at the Adam Smith Institute. As is almost always the case with history, the truth is a bit more nuanced and needs more than one conservative's blog for a full treatment. The policy did come directly from Henry Ford [1], and in 1926, Ford himself wrote: > _" The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, > and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices > low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. > One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers."_ [ibid] Although employee turnover may have been a factor, the source material for Tim Worstall's quoted excerpt in 2012 continued, > _" The $5-a-day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with > character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. > This was a committee that would visit the employees' homes to ensure that > they were doing things the "American way." They were supposed to avoid > social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and > many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become > "Americanized." Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were > single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives > worked outside the home. Other groups also offered classes to help > immigrants and southern blacks adapt to the Detroit area, but none were so > prominent as the Ford plan."_ [2] And this is where so much more of the nuance really comes in to play, because Ford was a complex character. Among his complexities was a really paternalistic view of his workers and of society; he believed in an idealized, perfect society, and sought to create it and to force others to live in it. [3] The $5-a-day plan solved a handful of problems then. It gave Ford a lot of free advertising in the press, it added a significant amount of pressure to his competitors, it ultimately made his automobile a little bit cheaper, and it supported his paternalism for his workers. You could do worse for a modern analogue for Henry Ford than Elon Musk. He's a really divisive figure in a lot of discussions, alternately driven by impassioned visions of a hypothetical society and by larger-than-normal faults. He makes decisions that are part business and part ideology, and so did Ford. [1]: [https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles- min...](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-minimum- wage/) [2]: [http://web.archive.org/web/20121224153214/https://www.michig...](http://web.archive.org/web/20121224153214/https://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_18670_18793-53441--,00.html) [3]: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City ~~~ hither2 I enjoyed your comment, but it is an unfair criticism of the article. The subject of the article is not Henry Ford, the subject is his $5 a day wages. It's a business article (vaguely economic) not a historical account. Will probably buy that book though. Thanks. ------ austincheney The article centers on this: > The point is not so as to be paying a "decent wage" or anything of that > sort: it is to be paying a higher wage than other employers. There are a couple of key take things to take away from that. * The employer is less pressured to find candidates. Candidates will find the employer if it means double wages. * The employer has more choices. They aren't locked into settling for somebody vaguely competent from a limited pool of applicants. * Employees are locked in knowing they cannot go somewhere else for equivalent money. Despite those points there are limitations to this approach. For example, I have known many low income people who would not join the military even though it could mean double or more in wages. Likewise I have also known many people who refuse to get into software knowing they could double their wages. I would also be willing to accept lower wages elsewhere if the work were engaging and meaningful (however a person defines meaningful). The only way that super high wages make sense numerically is if it results in retaining employees for a longer enough period to reduce expenses of employee replacement over a satisfactory time period and results in a premium on choice of employee from the population at large. Wages alone won't provide a combination of those though. There has to be something in addition that makes the employer stand out in world class fashion. That could be unique opportunities, superior training, an accreditation program, research recognition, or something else. If this is missing the organization is going to swell with a certain percentage of bad candidates that will decay the organization over time from the inside out. Government agencies emphasize the later more than the former because they have budget limitations on what they are allowed to pay employees and because the later has proven more historically reliable at retainment. ~~~ smt88 > * The only way that super high wages make sense numerically is if it results > in retaining employees for a longer enough period to reduce expenses of > employee replacement over a satisfactory time period and results in a > premium on choice of employee from the population at large.* This ignores the large increase in productivity from each individual employee. Better-paid employees are less stressed, healthier, less busy at home (because they can afford domestic help), and spend less time commuting. All of those things provide ROI for higher wages irrespective of turnover. ~~~ austincheney > Better-paid employees are less stressed, healthier, less busy at home > (because they can afford domestic help) Again, that isn’t always true. It is true when comparing $40k to $100k but less true when comparing $200k to $400k. When looking at that argument in terms of scale it is an argument of diminishing value that does not guarantee the increased individual productivity the argument would promise. The reason why that argument can suggest but not promise increased individual productivity is that increased wages alone does not directly correlate to better leadership or a more valuable team. ------ baybal2 You boss being generous does not have to mean him being lax. Laxity and lack of seriousness are bad for the company. All bad bosses I had were like that. ~~~ fuzzfactor The moral of the story is you're supposed to be generous to your employees by reflex without having to wait for excess labor difficulties or costs to become quantifiable. Pinpointed savings will always be limited and never correlate very well with the unlimited advantage of a more motivated staff after all. ------ 6510 I'm not a communist in that I feel we should reward effort, experience and commitment but that said I also think grunt work and bean counting are equally important to get a product out there. There is nothing logical about squeezing the grunt work as much as possible for the benefit of the bean counter. Its just theft. I one time oversimplified the situation like this: We could examine each sector for innovation. If there is not enough or a sufficient lack of it government can run the operation. The idea needs a bit of fine tuning to house the remnants of innovation in competitive commercial hands. ------ tehjoker Essentially employee non-compliance with a capitalist induced higher wages. What a wonder. ------ hindsightbias Stopped reading when he compared a commodity auto market to Boeing. ~~~ dredmorbius You can stop when you see Worstall's name. Absolute lying imbecile. ------ forkexec _The International Jew: The World 's Problem_ Ford's articles published in The Dearborn Independent - Ford's personal newspaper, and later published as a book. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew) And let's not forget the bromance between Ford and Hitler. “only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews’] fury, still maintains full independence…[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions” - Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand- cross-1938...](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand-cross-1938/) Also one of the many antisemitic conspiracy theories Ford espoused: _Jews have always controlled the business... The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada...is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind._ \- Henry Ford ~~~ rmrfstar Why was this down-voted? If we don't pause to examine the dramatic moral failings of earlier tech titans, how will we identify our era's blind spots? ------ rmrfstar Seriously, please read about how creepy Ford was, this article does not do it justice. [1] There are other tech titans with strong ideological views about how you should live. [2] Fun fact: Ford hired "private detectives" who used machine guns to murder striking workers. [3] Know your history. There is nothing new under the sun. [1] [https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2124&context=dissertations) [2] [https://youtu.be/xM9GMGDsKUU?t=859](https://youtu.be/xM9GMGDsKUU?t=859) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March) ~~~ rumanator > Seriously, please read about how creepy Ford was, this article does not do > it justice. What surprised me the most is that Ford's decision to increase wages was actually to use Ford's dominance to pull an anti-competitive play on his rivals to try to dry them of talent and manpower, which back in the days actually was deeply tied to the throughput and quality of the product that comes out of their production lines. Thus by paying a little extra to their workers, you in practice are killing off your competition by strangling their ability to produce competing products. It surprised me that the author showed ignorance in a way that forced him to use some imagination to come up with absurd argumrnts when he did not needed to. ~~~ stale2002 How in the world is that "anti-competitive"? It sounds like you are saying that these workers were worth a lot of money, as they determined the quality of the cars. So... that means that they were actually worth those higher wages. Anti-competitive would instead be if a company did something that was unprofitable in the short term. This wasn't unprofitable in the short term! It makes perfect business sense to pay lots of money to highly skilled workers that are legitimately worth that money! ~~~ Nasrudith My guess is that it requires deeper pockets but it is an utterly fucked thing to call actually competing for employeers anticompetitive. Granted the accusation "anticompetive" is often a tall poppy complaint that really means "I don't want to have to compete with that!" ------ _red 1913 US dollar backed by gold @ $25/oz. Therefore was 1/5 oz of gold. Thats a 2020 equivalent to $300 per day and there was no income tax. This is whats been stolen from you. ~~~ RubenvanE A better way to find the 2020 equivalent of $5.00 would be to look at the change in Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the past century. The CPI changed from 9.9 in 1913 to 255.7 in 2019. So $5.00 dollars in 1913 is equal to about $130.00 in 2020. ~~~ _red >CPI * hedonic adjustments * variable basket of goods * structurally created to understate inflation to save gov money on entitlement payments ~~~ derriz The difficulties with CPI are well known to economists and anyone interested in historical finance. But its flaws are insignificant compared to using the price of gold as a measuring stick - given how volatile its price is. By your method of calculating equivalent amounts, the $5 a day was worth $300 in 2020 but only $200 in 2016 - or $380 in 2012 or $50 in 2002. ~~~ fuzzfactor IRC these wide variations are all due to relatively greater fluctuations in the value of the dollar compared to relatively lesser fluctuations in the functional value of gold. With uneven but too-frequent devaluation events, the US dollar, or indices based on it, certainly does not have enough continuity to make accurate trending across the previous century feasible. These events are usually reserved for situations when other assets are in extreme flux, exacerbating the difficulty accommodating the discontinuity. This has been by design. ------ worik Repeated use of a straw man argument. I knew that retention was a reason for higher pay. But social inclusion was too, that is the surplus of money and ability to join in consumer culture. (I doubt Henry used terms like that!) "It was nothing at all to do with creating a workforce that could afford to buy the products" is simply a lie. That was part of the reason. ~~~ ncmncm It was promoted as the reason, but all the evidence directly contradicts that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hacking: Always Design the UX First - systemizer http://blog.systemizer.me/2012/06/hacking-always-design-ux-first.html ====== robomartin I disagree with this. Think of the basics of the UI if you'd like, but this idea of creating it first might only apply to a narrow project definition. In my view you must think in terms of data models / data representation first. Then you move on to CRUD. At that point you might move into some of the functionality above CRUD and other app mechanics (for example: login, authorization, verification, support interaction, etc.). At this stage, if we are talking about a web project, the UI doesn't need to look any prettier than a Craig's List page. Once that reaches flight altitude (meaning, that the basics are working) the UI can become the focus. This becomes particularly true when you consider multi-platform applications. Say you have an app that needs to run on the web, mobile-web, as well as various phones and tablets. If the UI is first, which one? They are bound to be different. If you focus on the UI first you might do things that skew the model to suit a particular platform. I you believe in MVC then you ought to be able to separate the three through specifications and marry them once each has reached a certain level of compliance with said specifications. Of course, there are difference that contrast a solo developer/designer vs. a multi-person team. I want to see the engine sputter, backfire and pop before I try to optimize anything and make it pretty (UI). ~~~ anigbrowl I strongly disagree. Of course I understand what you mean about proof-of- concept - your analogy of testing the engine is a good one. But think about wher the engine is to be fitted: if the UI is not well-specified, then the best engine in the world will only help you crash or blow things up faster. you can't build good data structures until you have a clear idea of the information you want to gather and manipulate for the task you propose to solve, and often that involves going to other people in a specific market and asking them how they do things. I have lost count of the number of software packages I've looked at and asked 'why is X so awkward' only to receive the reply that it 'had to be that way' because of something on the backend. This is what happens when you build data structures that are half-adequate to the task at hand and then have to have other things shoehorned into them. ~~~ robomartin Well, funny enough, I am one of those guys who is equally comfortable doing mechanical, electrical and software engineering. In all cases, the "beautification" of the product happens after the underlying principles, data structures, circuit fundamentals, loads, thermal requirements, etc. are well understood and have gone through many prototyping and testing phases. I am not talking about minimum-viable-product stuff here. Yes, if the goal is a minimum-viable-product type web solution, by all means, make it pretty and fake the rest until you see enough traction to figure out if there's a real business. For nearly anything else, the internals need to be well understood before it makes sense to do anything else. I can't think of one mechanical design I've done where I spent a ton of time figuring out color, size, shape and location of buttons and knobs before fully understanding what needed to go inside the box, what the electronics was going to look like, communications protocols, power supply requirements, environmental requirements, etc. So, yes, if I was going to design a car I'd start by selecting an engine, drive train and suspension components and then designing the of the vehicle rest around it. You'd fit artists concepts and renderings to the realities of the underlying mechanics. It then becomes an iterative process where you push and pull and make adjustments to both the artistic expression and the technical realities of the design in order to converge on a product that can be released. Let me state the obvious: These analogies are all imperfect. ~~~ lovskogen A good user experience isn't 'making it pretty' or 'beautification' – this is 2012, I thought this was repeated enough. ------ brlewis Always be cautious of advice that starts with the word "always". The UX you design first might preclude an innovative approach that you would have discovered if you had just started coding first without a plan. ~~~ skbohra123 Fittingly, your advice is also starting with always. ~~~ dllthomas I assume that was the joke. ------ kappaknight I concur. It's much easier to plug in functionality and DB objects into a finished UI/UX than the other way around. Also, it allows the hacker to just work on the core functionalities instead of worrying about how their code is supposed to output to fit into an unpainted canvas. Obviously if you're working on an API, this doesn't apply - but you'd be surprised at how fast the hacking sprint can get when you know exactly where to plug your code into. ~~~ scottschulthess I'd probably recommend having an example app that uses the API anyways :) ~~~ dllthomas And the API itself is UX for developers... ------ Goladus If the main problem you are solving is a usability problem, a domain-specific language syntax, for example, or maybe a new photo-sharing app that's better than all the other photo-sharing apps, then the top-down UX-first approach is better. If you are mainly trying to solve anything else, it's probably better to focus on that first and make sure the data models, APIs, algorithms, or other key features are solid. An exception to this could be when you just need to get something up and running for morale reasons, so you can begin iteration. (Although in that case I would still argue that focusing on the UX isn't critical) ------ jdludlow Speaking of UX, this is what that page looks like when JavaScript is disabled. [https://img.skitch.com/20120604-e4x8dgp8u82akj7ngmyhywbtdb.p...](https://img.skitch.com/20120604-e4x8dgp8u82akj7ngmyhywbtdb.png) ~~~ systemizer Sorry about that guys. I just started using Blogger's new blog theme. I assumed they would account for javascript-disabled clients, but I was wrong. I'll fix that asap. thanks! ------ AznHisoka Designing the UI first also boosts morale b/c it gives you a tangible sense of progress, and you get to see what the end product looks like. ~~~ kylebrown Yes, but be wary of showing a prototype UI which works as if the functionality/back-end is also working. Even if you stress that its not, the client will understand that the functionality is already working if they can see it, and won't understand what you're doing afterwards or why the back-end is taking so long. Be especially careful with making assumptions about complicated functionality and back-ends, as they are difficult to estimate and clients grow very frustrated after they've already seen everything "working". ~~~ ilkandi I'm not afraid of a temper tantrum, it shows the client cares. Showing a basic UI that was generated by the use cases will confirm that you understand the client needs, reduces miscommunication and clearly highlights the feature creep you should be charging for. It helps the client sell the project to whoever she reports to. It's easier to change a UI and it's a stronger emotional lock-in for the client (so she doesn't cancel). Win all around! ------ ighost The authors makes it sound like after designing the UX, the implementation will become trivial. I think this is a bit naive because most serious applications go through many iterations of UX. Some of these changes will be small and not require significant re-plumbing, but others will necessitate a lot of behind-the-scenes churn. My point is that it's better to design the plumbing of an application with some longer-term considerations than just "what do we need to implement that UI wireframe." Minimal viable products are cool and all, but let's not use that as an excuse to write something that will need to be thrown out wholesale to add that big traction-building feature. ------ loudin Wanted to jump in on this. Like any problem, the answer is "it depends". If you are building an application that relies on having an extremely slick UX, you should probably start there. If you're creating an app that you want to be a workhorse or relies on a highly experimental feature, start at the implementation level. With that said, I do feel like teams of pure programmers have a tendency to overlook the UX in favor of diving right into the code. The article is a great reminder that it takes more than wonderful code to solve a problem. In fact, the less code the better. ------ anon-for-now I immediately dismiss any posts claiming to know the superlative of anything -- best/worst, always/never, dead/alive. Yet, somehow, I've manage to consistently hack successful things. My advice: Avoid linkbait articles like this, and instead spend the time actually building something. Really, it truly is that simple: Build something. In any order. With any technology. ------ jorgeleo For me the UI should be just one example of how the API of the model can be used, the model is the engine, the UI is the tool that the user manipulates to move the engine. I guess there are different schools. ~~~ iMark Importantly, it's also likely to be the first example, and failing at the outset will make it difficult to gain any sort of traction. ------ amishforkfight I need to learn from this. I'm usually too excited to start turning out some code, and I almost always end up at a dead end a few weeks later (talking about personal side projects). ------ sktrdie The site doesn't seem to load. ------ jsavimbi Within the constraints of a hackathon-type scenario, in general I would hypothesize about the expected user interactive results (the experience) model my data, establish the basic CRUD and wrap the UI around that, tailoring the experience to what the actual user outcome will be. If you do it in the order listed in the post you'll end up spending too much time with a UI and later having to model the data around it. That's backwards. tl;dr: hypothetical use case, data model, CRUD, UI, test for results. ------ eswangren If you're designing the UI first, you're not "hacking" anything.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lies, Damned Lies, and Stock-Based Compensation - pvsukale3 https://tanay.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-stock-based ====== cletus So people have a tendency to read a headline/submission title like this and without reading the article they launch onto their soapbox about their pet issue like, for example, equity compensation at startups should be treated as being worth $0 if the company is not listed. The article isn't about that. It's about companies misrepresenting their expenses by not accounting for stock-based compensation ("SBC") costs, which is completely fair. Google and Facebook (quoted in the article) do. Others (eg Workday, Splunk, Okta and Atlassian are quoted) seem to muddy the waters by stating they're unprofitable on a GAAP basis (which includes SBC since 2004) but profitable on a non-GAAP basis (where SBC isn't treated as an expense, I assume?). So, caveat emptor for investors, basically. ~~~ sergiotapia are you cletus from stackoverflow lmao you used to help me so god damn much back in 2008 during my college years when i was writing c#. small web! ~~~ paloaltokid Yep, that's him. ------ whack Here's a thought experiment that helped me reason through SBC and GAAP. Scenario A: Company hires an engineer with a base salary of 100k/year, and 100k/year worth of SBC. Scenario B: Company convinces an investor to invest 100k/year... and also hires him as an engineer with a base salary of 200k/year. From a business fundamentals and margins perspective, the two scenarios are identical. And yet, in scenario A, the company is spinning their non-GAAP annual expense as being 100k. Whereas in scenario B, the company wouldn't even try to spin their annual expense as being anything other than 200k. The above thought experiment becomes particularly powerful if the hypothetical company has no other expenses and an annual revenue of $150k. Using the non- GAAP estimates from scenario A can mislead investors into thinking that the company has a very healthy gross margin, and is a lucrative investment. Whereas the actual GAAP numbers from both scenarios A and B, make it clear that the business is not profitable at all. ~~~ wolco If you can convience employees to trade 100,000 cash for stock then is it really an expense or a risk shifted to the employee? ~~~ hansvm It read to me like they were intentionally ignoring details like the risk adjusted value of the SBC, not because they don't matter, but because they obscure the point being made that employee payment schemes can be used to sweep unprofitability under the rug. ------ otoburb We should be glad that public companies are forced to comply with FASB and issue GAAP financials that (since 2004) mandate that stock-based compensation be classified as a non-cash expense. By definition, non-GAAP figures are up to the company to specify and state, which indeed means that investors should be _actively_ updating their own models when making investment decisions if looking at non-GAAP. ------ throwaway_81726 > “ On February 28, 2017, the Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors > of the Company (the “Board”) granted Mr. Hu a time-based stock option for > 900,000 shares of the Company’s Class A common stock vesting over four > years, three performance-based stock options for an aggregate of 555,000 > shares of the Company’s Class A common stock, each with a per share exercise > price equal to the closing price of the Company’s Class A common stock on > the date of grant, and a time-based restricted stock unit grant for 100,000 > shares vesting over four years. Each equity grant is subject to the terms > and conditions of the Company’s 2016 Stock Option and Incentive Plan (the > “2016 Plan”) and the applicable form of award agreement thereunder.” [1] I’m surprised Twilio isn’t listed. Just there COO alone was issued ~1.5M shares. At today’s market price ($208) his shares alone are worth $312M. Their annualized revenue is ~1.4B. So just their COO alone was issued SBC of 22% of the companies revenue. And that doesn’t factor in the SBC of all of the other employees either. [1] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000110465917...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000110465917014048/a17-7474_18k.htm) ~~~ otoburb Good catch about Twilio missing from the SBC as %revenue chart. Without digging into Twilio's 8-K's I feel compelled to note that options would be expensed as each tranche vests. So as a very rough estimate the COO being issued ~1.5M shares over 4 years wouldn't be 22% of annualized company revenue but perhaps something on the order of 6%, notwithstanding the vague language about the performance-based options conditions and vesting schedules. >> _And that doesn’t factor in the SBC of all of the other employees either._ You're right -- that probably pushes Twilio's SBC %revenue higher to the Salesforce line. ------ ineedasername It's not cash, so where does the money come from? Isn't the answer "investors"? Wouldn't their decreased share value from the dilution be the source of "value" used to pay these options to employees? ~~~ Denzel Exactly this. I find the article unconvincing as far as its conclusion is concerned. At the end of the day, shareholders pay for the stock-based compensation with dilution. There’s no expense to the “company”. As a thought experiment: say someone works for $0 in salary and 100 shares of Worthless Corp. After a year of work, our employee attempts to sell their shares, only to find no buyers. Unsurprisingly, their shares of Worthless Corp are worth $0. Did Worthless Corp incur an expense somewhere? As far as I can tell, Worthless Corp received a years worth of work at no expense. ~~~ YokoZar It's a bit weird to try and conceive of the corporation without thinking of its actual owners. They're the ones who the accounting is ultimately for. If Worthless Corp had 100 shares outstanding before this employee, the expense was half the company - whatever the valuation ends up being. This is not the same as "nothing", and accounting should at least attempt to reflect that - such as by placing an estimated market value on the shares. ~~~ kelnos That's only true if it happens to be true for a specific scenario. If giving some new employee 100 shares (doubling shares outstanding) actually increases the value of the company by at least 2x by some measure, then the investors holding the original 100 shares should be happy. Regardless, this is a silly, contrived example. No public company is minting anywhere close to 100% of their total share count every quarter in SBC. It'll be a fraction of a percent, probably? And investors shouldn't care, as long as the company is performing well at metrics that actually matter: acquiring paying customers, where the cost of that acquisition is less than the new customers spend. That, and things like efficiency improvements that cut costs, are the only things that actually matter, because those things are what drive stock prices up. ~~~ YokoZar Half a percent per quarter means you've given away a quarter of the company in 14 years. That's not something an accounting rule should allow you to just hand-wave away. ------ GASCap The wild thing is, if ones accepts modern financial theory, from the eyes of a risk-neutral investor, stock-based compensation is actually much more costly because of imbedded option value and time value of money. Say one needed to hedge the other side of a 4y employee stock grant. Let's assume the new cliff-less, monthly vest structure that is now market at some of FAANG. The counter-party would need to borrow a large amount of money to buy some fraction of the shares that the employee is likely to vest based on historical data. This also assumes they are just "delta hedging." There is definitely a "negatively convex" situation where if the stock price increases employees are less likely to leave and if it goes down, employees will find a new job that pays market. Given the immense volatility in earlier stage companies, the counter-party may elect to hedge the gamma exposure as well, meaning they may need to buy calls in the open market against the RSU position. In my opinion, Netflix has realized this, and given the implications decided to just pay cash. Dollar for dollar, to a well enough capitalized employee, the stock package is much better. This advantage increases with the volatility of the underlying asset. This completely ignores the career risk of working for a failed startup, but the culture in SV seems to minimize that. ~~~ kelnos Not sure I get this; who is this "counter party" you are referring to? My understanding was that the company doesn't actually buy shares on the open market when an employee vests RSUs or exercises options, but instead they either have a pool of shares waiting around (which they've never sold before), or they just mint new shares (and dilute existing investors). For the pool structure, sure, there's an opportunity cost (the company could instead sell those shares on the public market). But in neither case does the company have to go out and spend money to buy up shares. ~~~ GASCap In modern financial theory valuation = cost of replicating the position. One can approach that cost from how the company or the employee would replicate it. My point here is that it is much more expensive than just paying the employee cash due to the optionality and the financing costs associated with such. ------ s17n For mature companies it's pretty simple, stock-based compensation can be valued using the current share price and standard accounting principles. For young companies, employees typically believe that their equity is worth _more_ than the fair market value. So if anything, the non-gaap income should use a higher number for stock-based compensation expenses. ~~~ kelnos > _For young companies, employees typically believe that their equity is worth > more than the fair market value. So if anything, the non-gaap income should > use a higher number for stock-based compensation expenses._ That's backwards, no? If employees are delusional and over-value the stock, they'll be willing to accept less of it and be just as happy, which reduces the amount of the "expense". ~~~ s17n Right, and this reduced expense is the one that is in fact reflected in the GAAP numbers. But it might be useful for investors to know how much salaries would cost if they had to be payed in cash, which would be a higher number. ------ alkibiades what’s the issue with this as long as the investors are also provided with the GAAP numbers? it’s not like the compensation is hidden ~~~ kelnos I never got this criticism either. If investors are too inept to look at both numbers and do their due diligence to figure out why there are differences (and whether or not those differences are in some way legitimate), then that's on them. And I also just don't agree that SBC is an "expense" that materially impacts a business to the degree the article implies it does. I think there are a lot of other numbers that change between GAAP and non-GAAP that are much more relevant and interesting to look at. It seems like missing the forest for the trees to pick on SBC like this. ------ remote_phone This is a shitty article. He doesn’t spend a single sentence defending why he thinks SBC should be included in non-GAAP reports. He just states it should be but never once says why. It’s a terrible article and a waste of time.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: CryptFolio – a decentralized app to manage cryptocurrency portfolio - kherwa https://github.com/kherwa/cryptfolio ====== kherwa CryptFolio is a small client side application, where you can save your cryptocurrency portfolio. It uses IPFS to store your encrypted portfolio and Ethereum blockchain to store IPFS hash. As far as UI is concerned, it is not good at the moment. Requesting feedback from all, about the concept and UI. If found useful, will work on incorporating additional features and improving user interface design.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Platypus genetic code unravelled - epi0Bauqu http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7385949.stm ====== epi0Bauqu Summary: _One big surprise was the patchwork nature of the genome with avian, reptilian and mammalian features..._	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
13″ Retina MacBook Pro review: more pixels, less value - shawndumas http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/13-retina-macbook-pro-review-more-pixels-less-value/ ====== gros-calin please, won't you stop to publish Ars Technica papers? Probably everyone here is subscribed on Ars. ~~~ carlosn Not everyone. And I know I won´t subscribe to anything.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Weekend Project, Social Network Without Users - martinariel http://doadoing.com A proof of concept i've developed several months ago . The idea was to build a social network without users and learn Django.<p>Warm Regards from Argentina. Martin. ====== materialhero Pretty cool. A little scary how accurate the heat map is though. It's recording me about a half a block from my house! ~~~ martinariel Thanks! We're using the geolocation API directly in javascript, the accuracy it's quite good. ------ akadek Accurate but completely anonymous, nice idea! Keep going!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Silicon Valley Prefers Obama 2 to 1 - nikunjk http://paulgraham.com/ovr.html ====== ssclafani I flagged this. No politics on HN, not even from PG. ~~~ tzs I wouldn't consider this to be politics. It is not advocating a political position, or discussing the merits of a political position, or advocating or discussing the merits of particular politicians. Rather, it is about how a particular demographic that is of particular interest on HN but that is not covered much in the mainstream press is leaning. The distinction is subtle, but I think important. For instance, an article on Romney's attempt to take all sides on all issues so as to appeal to whatever audience he is speaking to at the moment would be inappropriate politics if the theme of the article is that Romney's campaign is setting the record as the most dishonest campaign in Presidential history. On the other hand, if the theme of the article was that in the age of the internet, when we have near instant access to news, and anything a politician says is widely reported, you might expect that the "all things to all people" approach would be a terrible failure, and yet it is working well for Romney, and so the article tries to explore WHY this is so, I'd say that would be quite appropriate for HN. It raises an interesting question of whether widespread access to information actually helps people make better decisions, or just makes it easier for them to find information to reinforce their preexisting beliefs and contrary information gets ignored. It could be the launching point of some very interesting non-political discussion. ~~~ tptacek The demographic here is "people will who answer questions like this from Paul Graham". It's not exactly a representative sample. We don't even know its operator vs. investor makeup. Some of the people in the sample don't even live in the Valley. But the headline... I flagged it after 'ssclafani did, hoping it might just vanish (I've since unflagged it), but for what it's worth: I don't so much think it's radically inappropriate for HN (though it sets a disquieting precedent, because the world is full of cohorts that someone can claim are interesting to HN), just that it's not particularly valuable, and a little transparent. (For whatever it's worth, I'm an Obama supporter). ~~~ Jd Additionally, when there is a potentially negative association with a particular political choice (i.e. the choice of something other than pg's preferred option), one will obviously refuse to report, and will usually not make one's refusal explicit. That is to say, that even were we to assume that the 32 people pg asked were utterly representative of the startup community as a whole (which I don't think we have grounds to do, esp. given pg's own sensationalist headline), we have every reason to suspect that the 9 people who have refused to answer (including explicitly and implicitly) may have an answer other than the expected norm. Take that into account, and you have 15 Obama 6 Romney 9 Refuse to answer Where does that leave us? Well, with more questions than answers, to start with. ------ hiddenstage Obama is very well in touch with the tech generation. He was the first presidential candidate to really put social media to use and his recent AMA on Reddit shows he is still able to relate. The JOBS Act didn't hurt, either. ------ johnrob Is the implication here that choice is based on who is better for growth? ------ tptacek Oh for God's sake. ~~~ w1ntermute I don't understand your problem with this. It's always interesting to know where SV's movers and shakers stand on various issues, and if you ever have to socialize with them, you'll know what views to express. ~~~ sfreiberg > if you ever have to socialize with them, you'll know what views to express. I really hope you didn't mean that in the completely pathetic way that it sounded. Group think is a great way to fit in but certainly isn't a good way to stand out. ~~~ tptacek I think he's sort of joking. ~~~ w1ntermute Yes, I was trying to make a joke about how people on here have attempted to justify off-topic articles in a rather roundabout manner when it suits them, as well as how people are often so eager to suck the dicks of the "rockstars" in the industry. Unfortunately, it seems to have gone over most people's heads. ------ gms Assuming that these people are voting for Obama with economic growth potential as their metric (perhaps not a true assumption), can anyone explain why? Am wondering what Obama policies are pro-growth vs Romney's. ------ jff Remember, HN, that the only way to success in startups is by slavishly following everything successful people do. Sit/stand desks, nerf guns, free food, and voting Obama. You heard it here first. ~~~ sfreiberg Thinking is hard. Group think for the win!! ------ ryandvm Shouldn't the title be "32 of Paul Graham's associates prefer Obama 2 to 1"? Frankly I'm surprised he even took the time to ruminate on such a fundamentally biased poll. ------ mahyarm How much power does the 'king of america' really have? How much do they effect a country through their actions compared to the rest of the political apparatus? ~~~ fusiongyro They have an effect, but not enough of one to justify the level of collective hysteria we experience every four years. ~~~ staunch They appoint Supreme Court Justices. Those appointments decide our constitutional rights for decades or centuries. For that reason alone, it's worth all the fuss. ~~~ fusiongyro I'm going to respectfully disagree. I disagree about the gravity, but I don't feel I can make that argument satisfactorily with the time I have now. But even aside from that, the relationship between my vote for a presidential candidate and the eventual appointee is very indirect--in my case, the presidents I have voted for have always chosen vastly worse Justices than the candidates I voted against. I think you'd have to somehow agree fervently with one of the major party's ideals, but also take the broadest reading, in order to really be satisfied with their appointments. I personally think there's a lot of value in combining a progressive legislature with a conservative judicial branch. ~~~ _pius I want to respectfully disagree, but I'm afraid there's no truly respectful way to call your statement what it is: naïve and dangerous. Based on the current composition of the Supreme Court, replacing a single judge could have dramatic, fairly immediate, and nearly irreversible real- world consequences to the citizens of this country. Whether you agree with those consequences or not, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that the stakes aren't high. ~~~ fusiongyro This is probably why talking politics is frowned upon here. I appreciate your perspective, and I especially appreciate your civility, but I don't think we can go further in this venue.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Scientists have developed a method to control moths using electrodes - section43 http://www.factor-tech.com/robots/7303-scientists-to-transform-moths-into-search-and-rescue-cyborg-biobots/ ====== Stwerp Maybe I'm reading the article wrong, but it seems they are only describing a way to record EMG signals --- and not a way to `control' anything. I've previously worked in neural/EMG recording of flying insects and a major issue to overcome is the effect of the recording apparatus on normal behavior. For instance, a tiny coin-cell battery can have a significant impact on the flying ability of a small insect (we targeted dragonflies). This work described in the article seems to use a very large structure attached to the insect which the insect cannot lift (they describe being held aloft with electromagnetics). I'm definitely curious to see where they go with this though. I'd love to get back into 'insect cyborg' work. EDIT: And after looking a bit more, it seems that the actual paper describes the surgical process for implanting the electrodes such that the rebuilding of the moths tissue actually makes them be a part of the moth. Cool!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Cycle of Reincarnation - dsr_ http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/cycle%20of%20reincarnation ====== dsr_ It's not just hardware: this also applies to software, occupations, business models, and probably governments. In particular, I'm thinking of "full stack programmers" and DevOps right now.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Barking drones used on farms instead of sheep dogs - howard941 https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018685575/barking-drones-used-on-farms-instead-of-sheep-dogs ====== samcday > The latest drone model, the $3500 DJI Mavic Enterprise, can record sounds > and play them over a speaker - allowing a dog's bark, or other noises, to be > loudly projected across a paddock. Ok so basically it's just an off-the-shelf drone with a big speaker on top making barking noises. The most clever solutions are the simplest ones :) In my mind the next logical step would be AI that pilots the drones autonomously, managing location of herds of animals to balance various objectives. I'm not much of a rancher, so I don't know what those would be. But if I had to hazard a guess, rotating where the herd grazes, keeping them safe, bringing them into pens during certain periods. I remember reading years ago that there was some project to autonomously milk cows. The cows were taught to go into a special milking stall when they were ready to be milked. Each cow was RFID'd and even had their own Twitter handle that was posted to each time the cow was milked. Modern John Deere machinery all but runs itself. Modern combine harvesters are outfitted with GPS and the person "operating it" is basically sitting in there watching the sportsball or whatever. It's kinda surreal when you step back and look at the trajectory. It's easy to picture, in the not too distant future, farms that are run entirely autonomously, with only light direct intervention performed remotely from C&C centers in a nice comfy air-conditioned office in downtown Manhattan. I wonder how much longer it would take before some kind of mass human extinction event doesn't even impact the agriculture ecosystem? I'm imaging this bizarre dystopia where the machines rose up, killed all the humans, and then settled down to produce countless tonnes of animal and vegetable produce in peace. Sure, there's none of those pesky humans around to consume it, but the AI wasn't optimized for that purpose - it just wants to produce as much and as efficiently as possible. ~~~ jimmaswell Why would anyone choose to live in Manhattan when their job is entirely remote? ~~~ baddox I’m not sure what you mean. New York City is famously regarded as a great city for music, art, museums, theatre, cinema, comedy, architecture, food, nightlife, cultural diversity, and more. I have never heard the sentiment “my NYC job is so great, I just wish it were in another town.” ~~~ jimmaswell High rent like pizza said as well as crowdedness, having to choose between transit and driving in really bad traffic, general city complaints. I've used the subways in NYC a few times and I really wouldn't like having to do that all the time. There is some great stuff there like the Museum of Natural History but I think I'd rather live in a surrounding suburb or something, or Hawaii like the other commenter suggested. On the transit subject, the lack of car reliance is nice in theory, but I honestly found my short experience of taking MTA subways around less enjoyable than driving. Very crowded, jerked so hard when it started moving that I almost fell over, and the walks between connections can be tiring if there's a rush to get there on time or it's a long distance (or both - running from one side of the PABT to the other isn't fun when you're not in great shape) ------ pixelpoet I was already on the fence about replacing humans with robots for e.g. driving, but dogs? Why would anyone want to replace dogs with robots? Worst trade ever. ~~~ executivetech Dogs cost a lot to maintain, think about Vet expense and Food. Lithium batteries simply need electricity. ~~~ lelf Dogs don’t require charging every 20–30 minutes. Dogs can fly^Wrun without remote control. ~~~ allannienhuis The dog's remote control is the whistle. :) I expect that at some point the utility of the robot/drone will outpace the utility of the dog in this role (and others). Wanting to hang on to our dogs isn't a bad thing, but I don't think we will be able to make as many arguments based on their utility. Instead we'll just have to accept the idea that the reasons for having them (and even working with them) will be cultural/emotional instead, which are perfectly good reasons. We have an Australian Shepherd as a family pet - they're amazing companions! ------ ohazi Just so that everybody is on the same page: [https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8](https://youtu.be/IGo32RICjk8) The bar for sheep herding robots is _ridiculously_ high. Border Collies are super smart. ~~~ TimTheTinker Obligatory: [https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM](https://youtu.be/vGOGOxtN2lM) (Welsh herdsmen put lights on sheep and play “pong” on a sloped hillside after dusk with the help of border collies.) ~~~ dTal That's incredibly impressive. I knew that sheepdogs were good but that level of control is unreal. ~~~ TimTheTinker You should check out videos of sheepdog trial finalists. Here's one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdrwm-8c354) Pretty impressive and fun to watch. ------ failrate As someone who grew upon a (hobby)sheep farm, this seems to miss the point. A good sheep dog is already an autonomous "drone". How autonomous? Mild example: our collie would frequently herd the sheep into the barn even before we realized the weather was turning. Extreme example: a Great Pyrenees moved into our farm from a neighboring farm that didn't have any herd animals. The neighbors just gave us the dog after the third time it moved in to our farm. ------ walrus01 The drone in the picture has a maximum 27 minute flight time, and requires manually changing batteries, manually launching it. Not exactly something you'd want to sit around doing all day. Livestock guardians do not necessarily have to be dogs. Three llamas living with a herd of sheep will provide a great deal of defense against coyotes and mountain lions. ~~~ joshvm There's also a quote in the article about the farmer sitting indoors on a miserable day flying the drone. Firstly, it's unlikely it would be safe to fly in rain and or high wind. Secondly, in most countries it's illegal to fly beyond line of sight without a lot of paperwork (which basically nobody except the military, possibly law enforcement, and some large companies have). You would need to be in the field, watching the drone. ------ hotcrossbunny NZ cracked the robot sheepdog back in the 70s [https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko](https://youtu.be/T1cmPNYb5Ko) ~~~ robocat I think that was actually using stolen Australian technology. ------ erikig I really enjoyed watching the aerial video of the sheep and cattle, it was just sooo satisfying. I've been tinkering with ProcessingJS's Flocking visualizations and the similarity is striking: [https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html](https://processing.org/examples/flocking.html) ------ nmstoker Good to be pushing the limits etc etc, but is this really at all close to being practical yet? Just think of the scale of NZ farms vs the DJI range. Unless they can land on remote charging stations dotted about the terrain it's going to run out of power far too quickly to explore much of the farm aside from a brief flyover. Back of the envelope calc: if an avg NZ farm is 252 hectares [2], and we charitably assume it's square and it's about 6.3km for a trip round the perimeter, yet the DJI flies for 31 minutes at 25kph [1], so roughly 13km, it could only do ~two laps (without stopping and presumably not accounting for cross winds) It gets worse if the farm isn't square (as seems likely in NZ terrain) and it gets much worse when you considering that livestock farms are bigger still than the overall average. [1] [https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info](https://www.dji.com/uk/mobile/mavic-2-enterprise/info) [2] [http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/](http://www.environmentguide.org.nz/activities/agriculture/) ~~~ dan-robertson I think the technology is still useful as it is. I think normally farmers wouldn’t take a sheepdog all the way around the perimeter of a farm like that. Instead they would drive to the part where the sheepdog is needed and do the work there. One would imagine a drone would be useful in this scenario too. I think the main advantage with the current limited range would be for driving animals (something that wouldn’t routinely require high speed or long distances but might take a long time) and more localised surveys. I can certainly imagine eg taking the quad bike to different parts of the farm and just sending the drone up to look at/round up the sheep. ------ mseidl Given how loud rotors are of flying quad copters this seems... it seems like this might be not that good. ~~~ allannienhuis dogs barking at animals at close range is pretty darn loud. Much of the time the drone is pretty high up, which is relatively quiet at ground level. Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big concern. That said, I think like many things, if reducing sound levels is important then over time it will be addressed - seems like it would be a good application of active noise dampening. ~~~ marcosdumay > Especially in a rural setting, I don't think noise levels would be a big > concern. Animals are quite sensitive to noise. ~~~ allannienhuis that's true. ------ misard I heard about this method, but tried only on the advice of a friend…And what can I say...It's really COOL and WORKS! This is a real breakthrough in training and rehabilitating dogs! It helped us solve a lot of the standard problems with our dog and I highly recommend it to everyone! But trust me, the method is worth to buy Check this site, you'll like it: [https://tinyurl.com/dogbestbehavior](https://tinyurl.com/dogbestbehavior) ------ alex_duf Looks like a solution in search of a problem. ------ robotresearcher For history buffs, here’s a robot autonomously collecting ducks in a limited arena in 1998. Was the first autonomous robot sheepdog, I believe. Ducks are slower and cheaper than sheep, and flock very nicely as the video shows. [https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM](https://youtu.be/tefXVXscNDM) ------ robocat Here's the 4m news video embedded in the article: [https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU](https://youtu.be/CTjVjKClpyU) I love the way the sheep look like schools of fish (especially when they are on fast-mo). ------ jobigoud Surely sheeps haven't evolved to respond specifically to dogs barking? ~~~ dan-robertson Most living sheep probably do know what a dogs bark sounds like, however ~~~ anoncoward111 Would they respond similarly to a DJI blasting Slayer music? That would make me move, at least! ~~~ dan-robertson I’m not sure. Here’s some evidence that it doesn’t always work for cows: [https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk](https://youtu.be/l_APUXZQDkk) ~~~ anoncoward111 HAAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH thank you so much for this, it was exactly what I was looking for... truly the empirical evidence we need. Needs more shrill screaming and the amplifier needs to be roboticized to run circles around them, of course. ------ vamos_davai Oh no how could anyone foresee this happening? We don’t UBI for dogs! ~~~ dmix Indeed but if it’s anything like other social activist issues there will be far more people worried about the (cuter) animals than the stuff that affects humans. ------ FailMore Sad. I like dogs. ------ hbarka Poor sheep. They will have nightmares from the high-decibel drone of a drone. Will probably start getting genetic changes in their wool from the stress. Why disturb nature with that buzzing annoyance?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (November 2011) - whoishiring Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility. ====== mikeryan SEEKING FREELANCER - SF, CA / Remote Possible but likely it will have to be in the US at this point. We pay competitive market consulting rates. A Different Engine is looking to expand our contractor portfolio. WHO WE ARE A Different Engine is an interactive agency which builds advanced media applications for our clients. We've been focused on TV applications on Connected TV's (Yahoo Widgets, Samsung SmartHub) and Over the Top Boxes (Roku/Boxee/GoogleTV) but have been moving to doing more mobile work (particularly on tablets) and some traditional web (most of our web work is for web services which power out TV and tablet apps instead of consumer facing web apps). This is a bespoke design and development business. We've worked with CBS/NBC/Comcast/The UFC and others. WHAT WE NEED We currently have a few inbound projects which may exceed our current capacity so we're looking for a few contract folks to help bridge the gap. We tend to prefer local folks (SF, NY and we have some folks in Cleveland) though we will go remote for the right fit. PRIMARY TECHNOLOGIES Our two most pressing needs are for frontend Javascript folks and Android Folks. On the JS side we do full Rich Internet Apps on TVs our main libraries are Jquery and Backbone. On the Android side we actually have a few inbound tablet projects and may have some work on the new GoogleTV platform (V2). When we do backend work we like Rails, we've played with Node/Redis/MongoDB - we think this may be a good stack for some projects, and we sometimes have to deliver apps in PHP. We're really technology agnostic. Because we do bespoke, project based development we can't afford to be tied too much to specific technologies. We use the best tool for the job when we can, and sometimes we use the technology we're told to use. Thats the nature of our business. You can reach me at mike AT a different engine DOT com with questions or even just to chat ;-) ------ Zuviko SEEKING FREELANCER OR INTERN: Mexico City We have a position open in our small software/web services company. Combo work from home/come in to office (Roma Norte/Condesa area). We're expanding our web services and want someone keen to learn: we're flexible with what tools you choose to use but you should have a decent grounding in Javascript/CSS/PHP(or similar)/MySQL. Good english is important. We really love our industry and are the current leading service provider in our field, working with top clients internationally. Email us at hire.me.mex@gmail.com for info. ------ tedkimble SEEKING WORK - Remote I'm a bit of unicorn: a designer and a developer[0]. I practice responsive front-end design and implementation and enjoy using Sass, Coffeescript, and Mustache. I have a graduate design degree in architecture. I have over four years Ruby on Rails experience; I enjoy Sinatra and have developed my own miniature Ruby web application library[1]. I have an undergraduate degree in physics. [0]: <http://kimble.co/web> [1]: <https://github.com/tedkimble/bruter> Email in profile ------ ssharp SEEKING FREELANCE - Remote / Cleveland, Ohio Budget is not established but is flexible. Expected initial duration is 3-4 weeks. Engagement will be limited after that, but potential for limited long- term help is there. \--- tr;dr: We have already done a lot of experimenting/testing with Drupal, but need someone with D7 experience to make sure we're doing things the right way. \--- A Drupal consultant to help us customize a Drupal installation profile to be used to power upwards of 50 individual Drupal sites. We need to work together to define our needs and translate them into a Drupal system. In addition to creating a customized base Drupal installation, you will help us create a clear process for systems administration. Experience with Drush is critical. In addition to programming, configuration, and other technical tasks, we really need you to to help us better understand Drupal best-practices and educate us on a few areaas. We will be creating a system that will empower close to 100 web content contributors, but will be maintained/adminted by a relatively small (and already very busy!) staff. We need to get things right from the onset to offset wasted time fixing things at scale. Contact: scott.sharp@case.edu Please do not reply if you do not have experience with Drupal 7 (multisite installs), Drush, or do not wish to have very active communications during the project. ------ neilxdsouza SEEKING WORK: Mumbai, Relocate? Yes, Remote? Yes I quit my job in Apr-2010, in the Middle East to work full time on my compiler(s) for Market Research Survey and Data Processing. The compiler is open source and hosted here: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/xtcc> Skills: The compiler is written in C++, Yacc. I developed the ERP system for the company I worked in Dubai (TNS MEA) - Asp.Net/C#/SQL Server. Comfortable with Postgres. I should be able to program in any language that you ask me to, although I will need a little time to get warmed up (have been reading up on Lisp, Python and Ruby). Showcase: Live demo of a survey: <http://173.230.133.34:8081/> (click "en" for English instructions) Project website: <http://qscript.in> Why? : I pitched to a few companies in India, but they are not interested in getting into the products space. Unfortunately, I have run out of time (I am 33), and have decided to freeze the project for now and get a job as I have to pay my investors back. The negative Karma on my username, is because of a "smart" comment I made, when Wufoo was bought out by SurveyMonkey (I was just happy and overjoyed, that a company in the MR related field made it). Contact: nxd_in@yahoo.com ------ Hrundi SEEKING WORK - Argentina My name is Victor, a 28 year old developer living in Argentina. Expertise: * PHP * MySQL * JavaScript * HTML 4 and 5 * C# * Unix administration Secondary skills: * Java * DirectX and OpenGL Background: I've been programming LAMP based sites for about 9 years and I'm currently working for a very large mobile games developer for 4 years now. My work in there consists mostly of the following: * Integrating customer billing for mobile sites, both North American and South American (closed carrier APIs and gateways such as Paypal and Amazon Payments) * On-call support outside office hours (in which I solve issues with firewalls, programming mistakes made by developers, etc) * Shop development and design. Basically, these are websites that display content and allow purchases with the aforementioned billing methods.I also focus on improving our custom, in-house developed framework that drives most of the websites. Previous endeavors include: * PHP programming and Unix administration at a large South American portal (from 2002 to 2005). It proved to be immensely informative, since we had to deal with a site that gathered several hundred thousands pageviews per day. * PHP programming and database administration at a credit-report company (from 2005 to 2007). This also proved to be quite helpful, as I had to deal with an ill-maintained IBM Informix database, with poor normalization along with hundreds of millions of rows. You can contact me at ar_freelancer AT yahoo.com Thanks for the opportunity! ~~~ Jose_GD Buena suerte en tu búsqueda, Víctor! ------ bsenftner Seeking work - remote or in person: Los Angeles, CA Senior technologist, MBA, with specializations in automated business systems, Drupal sites with eCommerce & RESTful APIs, 3D animation production systems (8 high profile video games, 6 VFX heavy major release feature films, plus 24 other entertainment software products.) I mostly code in PHP, C/C++, & JavaScript; but I know and have professionally worked in Perl, MS Office VBA, assembly, BASH, and LISP. I create automated businesses, and automated existing business operations, with an emphasis on media production. I am also somewhat good at AI, having written AIs for several video games, and automated systems. I create and lead highly efficient teams, I mentor well, teach classes, as well as create entire operations solo. I was an Operating System developer for the original PlayStation. Whatever you're doing, I can make it better, and your work environment better too. I can be reached at www.BlakeSenftner.com. ------ JoeCortopassi SEEKING WORK -- Remote (located in southern California) 2 years experience with the Php/MySQL/HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack, using a range of frameworks (Kohana, jQuery, Dojo, Blueprint) to build complex object oriented software on the web (lead management and delivery, cms, etc) 1 year experience with iPhone/iOS stack. Check out "Follow my Money" for an example of a simple app I've made. Looking for steady work (wife and 2 kids) Resume: <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-cortopassi/24/76b/5b9> iPhone App: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/follow-my- money/id471808412?l...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/follow-my- money/id471808412?ls=1&mt=8) Twitter: <http://twitter.com/#!/JoeCortopassi> Youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/user/Cortopasta> Example Website I've done: www.temeculaprep.com Rate:$75 an hour. Willing to go as low as $50 for W2 and benefits CONTACT: joe(at)joecortopassi[dot]com ------ taxidermyrobot SEEKING WORK Freelance Artist/Illustrator residing in San Francisco Bay Area. I can work remotely. I'm a graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. I can do: * Mascots for your products * Game Art (backgrounds, environment, items) * Character Design/Development * Flyers Here's my portfolio site: <http://www.taxidermyrobot.com> I am open to: Part Time, Freelance Email me if you're interested in my work. ------ theoj SEEKING WORK (NYC or remote) I am passionate about Android and Java development. I have worked on several large applications and smaller ones as well. Please take a look at my work here: <http://www.bricolsoftconsulting.com/category/portfolio/> ------ lynaghk SEEKING FREELANCER Remote or Portland, Oregon. <http://keminglabs.com> does interactive data visualization on the web via SVG + JavaScript. We use a lot of D3.js; formerly via CoffeeScript, now moving to ClojureScript. Backend tends to be Ruby or Clojure. We have a variety of upcoming projects that we could work with a freelancer on; web/iPad reporting tools in the healthcare domain, scientific publishing widgets, and a Google Calendar meets Command and Conquer application for the US military. We do fixed-bid work with our clients, and we'll expect the same from you. Talking talk tech arcana over beer is fun, but ultimately you're a professional that can delivers more results than code; you pick your tools, work enviornment, &c. Contact me: email: kevin@keminglabs.com Github: lynaghk ------ brianmwang SEEKING FREELANCER - Mountain View, CA / Remote Fitocracy is seeking an iOS freelancer to help build our iPhone app. WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON: Fitocracy is a fitness social network that turns working out into a more addictive, social experience. We take all the addictive qualities of games like Everquest and World of Warcraft and use them to motivate users to exercise more. Fitocracy users earn XP, level up, unlock achievements, and beat quests, all by tracking their workouts. Our vision is to turn fitness into the most addictive, social experience possible. We've bootstrapped our way to over 110,000 users in 8 months. We're projected to surpass 200k users by the end of 2011/early 2012. Our users spent over 5.3 million minutes on site last month. We are part of Dave McClure's 500 Startups and just raised an angel round so we're ready to add some fuel to the fire. WHY WE'RE AWESOME: We've been skyrocketing in popularity because we've hit on a pretty powerful idea: getting out of shape geeks fit by offering them something they already know - video game thinking. We've been featured on XKCD (<http://xkcd.com/940/>), Penny Arcade (<http://penny- arcade.com/comic/2011/10/28>), and CNN ([http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/health/video-gamers- bodybuilde...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/health/video-gamers-bodybuilders- fitocracy/index.html)). Our team is small and nimble - decisions are made quickly and we stay incredibly well connected to our community. You'll have a huge impact on a lot of users from the first day our mobile app is released. WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR: We're looking for an iOS developer who can take full ownership of building our iPhone app. You'll be working closely with the team to ensure the app jives with the rest of the Fitocracy product, collect user feedback, and iterate as necessary. You should have experience shipping awesome iOS apps that actually get used. You should have an obsession with providing an awesome user experience. You ideally work well with teams and communicate quickly and constantly. COMPENSATION: We're offering highly competitive rates for this project. There's also the good chance we'll hire you full time if you kick ass and work well with the team. CONTACT: jobs@fitocracy.com ------ Srirangan SEEKING WORK === Technologies \--- Node.js, Python, Scala Links \--- GitHub - <https://github.com/Srirangan> Blog - <http://srirangan.net> About - <http://srirangan.net/about> Twitter - <http://twitter.com/srirangan> LinkedIn - <http://www.linkedin.com/in/srirangan> Showcase \--- Review19 - Next generation, real time story board for your projects - <http://www.review19.com> Location \--- New Delhi, India Will work remotely? \--- Yes ------ brettvallis SEEKING WORK - Cape Town, South Africa, remote and travel as required. Enterprise Product Manager with experience in managing teams, and full product lifecycle development. Primary stack is Windows, ASP.NET, and major commercial software platform for the last 8 years has been SharePoint (2003 - 2010). Experience includes working as SharePoint Product Manager for Microsoft Consulting Services (Reading, UK), and working with 100+ local, and regional government, parastatal, and private enterprise-sized organisations. Looking to develop as a private freelancer with the view to establishing small ISV. contact: brettvallis [at] hotmail [dot] com ------ deno SEEKING WORK — Remote Mostly Python, Javascript. I’m looking for small to medium-sized projects. Just starting out, but I’ve already put up some code online: <https://launchpad.net/pylandro-collections-range> <https://launchpad.net/awkwardduet> I’ve used Python and JS professionally to solve various real-world problems and I can manage substantial complexity. I’m working on improving my online portfolio, but in the meantime I’m interested in really any kind of paid work. For any offers or inquiries contact me at: hn@deno.pl . ------ charlesdm SEEKING WORK. Belgium. Remote, but have no problem travelling for certain things. Mobile development; native iOS (Objective-C) and Android (Java) development. Past experience also includes C/C++ and desktop development (Windows & Mac). Specialities: Low level programming in C/C++, multi platform software (desktop, mobile), porting of libraries, 2D/3D renderers, back end systems. Portfolio work is up at <http://pandaris.com>. I'm also working on two other personal iOS projects (one is finished and ready for release), so get in touch if you want to hear more. :) Market rate contract work only; email and skype are on my profile. ------ egor83 SEEKING WORK - Remote (St. Petersburg, Russia) Python, GAE. Relatively new to these, though I did a few small things already, including one for HN [1]. Have prior experience with C# and embedded (C, asm for MCUs); also have some knowledge of maths and physics. You can reach me at egor.ryabkov(at)gmail.com GitHub page: <https://github.com/egor83> Some more details, CV, more links: <http://egor83.wikidot.com/py-dev-looking-for-a-job> \------------------------------- [1] My HN tool - poll visualizer: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977909> ------ rpwilcox SEEKING WORK - Remote (Harrisburg PA) Ruby on Rails, iOS/Mac app development, Python (Turbogears, Django), C++ I've been using Ruby on Rails for the last 3 years, on a variety of projects (some 7 engineer, 18 month projects, some minimum viable products for startups). Been programming Cocoa for the last 8 years, likewise with Python. 5 years C++ experience. I'm a big fan of quality work, communication with clients, and developing things in an agile manner (behavior driven development, tests, collaboration over contracts). Check out my github: <http://www.github.com/rwilcox> ------ ccarpenterg SEEKING WORK Python, Tornado, Django, Google App Engine, Javascript (jQuery, learning Backbone.js), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Linux and VPS (Linode), MongoDB, RabbitMQ (Celery and pika), Twitter API. My Github repos: <https://github.com/ccarpenterg> Some work in Python: <http://todolist-app.appspot.com/> <http://www.presidenciables2013.cl/> Blog: <http://ccarpenterg.posterous.com/> Contact: ccarpenterg@gmail.com (My name is Cristian) ------ e_g SEEKING WORK -- Freelance/Remote/Travel/Local PhD in Information Retrieval graduate (9/2011, UK), 3yrs industry experience (IBM lab, and HP Consulting division) _Programming Languages_ : Java, C#, Python, Ruby, R, Perl, C _Research IR_ : Search Engines(MG4J, Lemur, Terrier), Evaluation procedures (TREC-style) _Research NLP_ : Semantic Vector Space models (LSA, HAL, COALS, PMI) _General Proficiency_ : Large scale text and document processing techniques (stop-wording, stemming, indexing, nosql (tokyo, kyoto cabinet)) Happy to answer any questions for more specific details and provide my CV and references on request. get.erik{at}gmail.com ------ templaedhel SEEKING WORK. - Remote Front end designer and developer - photoshop, html(5) and css(3), love javascript and responsive fast ajax applications. Backend developer, fluent with node.js, mongodb, plus still familiar with LAMP from days long past. Also have done some work with AWS. <http://templaedhel.com> for some work. If you're curious about seeing more, or hearing references, they exist. templaedhel at gmail dot com. I also hang out on #startups on freenode if you want to chat. Or gchat. ------ zemanel SEEKING WORK (Remote). Location: Porto, Portugal, EU Backend Python/Frontend Javascript Developer \- Python: Django, Tipfy, Google App Engine [, virtualenv, pip] \- Javascript: Dojo Toolkit (including Dijits), JQuery, Node.js \- Java: Struts, Hibernate, Jboss Seam, Groovy/Grails, Solr; (many beers ago) \- NIX shell and sysadmin skills \- Source control svn, git, mercurial \- Databases: MySQL, Postgres \- General: Good learner, passionate about the work, experience remote with multi-cultural/timezone/skilled teams \- Hang around on IRC ;-) References on <http://pt.linkedin.com/in/josemoreira> ------ mike-cardwell SEEKING WORK - Nottingham/UK Perl programmer, web developer, Linux sysadmin, email administrator. List of stuff that I have done and can do: <https://grepular.com/me> Business site : <http://cardwellit.com/> Technical blog : <https://grepular.com/> Github : <https://github.com/mikecardwell> ------ rglover SEEKING WORK - REMOTE I'm a UI/UX designer looking to work with startups and smaller companies. My expertise lies in: Photoshop (visual design), HTML(5), CSS(3), and jQuery. I also have a fair bit of experience with Wordpress. I've recently gone full- time so I'm looking to book up my schedule for the next couple of months (reasonable rates always and flexible with smaller teams/projects). Check out my work and get in touch: <http://www.ryanglover.net> ------ goshakkk SEEKING WORK — remote Languages & Technologies: Ruby & Rails, Node.js, some Python/Django Other stuff: git, Rspec, Cucumber, SASS, HAML, CoffeeScript, MongoDB, jQuery, some linux administration. <http://goshakkk.name/> or directly via email me@goshakkk.name I would like to work on great & interesting projects, if I can amaze me with your idea, I can do your project for free. (Inner desire to work on something cool, combined with need to fill up my portfolio) ------ jenn SEEKING FREELANCER - Brooklyn, NYC / Remote WHO ARE WE: Accompl.sh is the online community to achieve your yearly goals. WHAT WE NEED: Developers with experience with API integrations, data analytics, mobile web apps (bonus points for iOS). Designers - particularly graphic designers / illustrators. Also looking for interface designers. TECH: PHP, mysql, github, the usual suspects. DETAILS (and other positions): <http://bit.ly/accomplshjobs> CONTACT: jobs+hn@accompl.sh ------ martynrdavies SEEKING FREELANCER Location: London, UK Skillsets: Software Engineer, Client Side Developer, iOS Developer Who we are: Six Two are a London based API, web and mobile web development company specializing in building applications in the music/culture/entertainment space. We have a multitude of clients and 3 main products of our own that require more staffing. More info: <http://www.sixtwoproductions.co.uk/jobs> ------ eftpotrm SEEKING WORK: UK, Derby. Remote, travel or local OK. Microsoft stack developer - .Net, (C#, VB.Net, ASP.Net, Winforms), MSSQL (v7-2008R2), VB6, ASP3. HTML, CSS and JavaScript too, SAS as well if that's your thing. Back end, front end, large or small, 11 years in industry now. (Less Hacker related but I'm as at home with a camera if you're after a photographer.) One day I'll set up a portfolio site - until then, contactable at gp dot webb at ntlworld dot com. ------ mattmillr SEEKING WORK - NYC or Remote I'm a full-stack coder, my strengths are Python/Django, jQuery, iOS. I would love opportunities in Android, MongoDB. I have experience with RabbitMQ, Celery, nginx, memcached. I've done plenty of PHP and Actionscript as well. I always look forward to this thread, it has been the source for some of my best clients. Contact me at: <http://brooklynsoftworks.com> \- matt@brooklynsoftworks.com ------ sidmitra SEEKING WORK - Remote/Freelance Python/Django/jQuery, with extensive experience building e-commerce marketplaces. I have a research background, data analysis, playing around with NLP right now. I run a django dev shop, currently taking gigs. Here's my portfolio: <http://www.sidmitra.com/portfolio.html> * <http://www.cloudshuffle.com/> ------ MattBearman SEEKING WORK PHP/JavaScript/HTML/CSS developer. I'm based in the UK, and happy with local or remote work. I've over 5 years experience in PHP, and have used many frameworks, including CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Zend. I've also got a lot of experience with CMSs including Wordpress and Expression Engine. My email address is on my profile. <http://mattbearman.co.uk> <http://bugmuncher.com> ------ johnnyg SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote Long term contract work. $29/hr. 90 hour 2 week cap. Paypal/Venmo. Support a family of CPAP websites including CPAP.com, CPAPtalk.com and CPAPDropShip.com. PHP/MySQL/jQuery/RabbitMQ/Asterisk. GM is a coder and manages the team. Two HNers currently contract remotely with us and we are looking to add a third. I'm happy to put you in touch with them to get a feel for our company and the work ahead of starting. Contact: johnny@cpap.com ------ kaffeinecoma SEEKING WORK - Remote (Cleveland, USA based) Experienced Webapp dev: Java, Wicket, Lucene/SOLR, Hibernate, Google App Engine, etc. I built <http://appgravity.com>, a search engine for Android Apps that currently gets ~65K pageviews/day. Other work samples & contact info available at <http://armhold.com/portfolio>. ------ pdelgallego SEEKING WORK. I'm based in the Denmark, remote/travel is OK, will relocate for the right project. Web Developer: Ruby on Rails, Rspec, Cucumber, CSS/SASS, HTML/HAML, MongoDB, Javascript, Coffeescript, Backbone, Jasmine, jQuery, Git, and a little bit of Unix. Portfolio: <http://pdelgallego.com> (work in progress) Email: $irb> "%s.%s@gmail.com" % %w(pedro delgallego) rate: ~$45/hour ------ rishi SEEKING WORK - San Francisco/Bay Area - Graphic Designer This post is for Puja Bakshi (amazing designer), 9yrs experience. Needs H1-B Visa. Portfolio/Website here: <http://pujabakshi.com/> Full Resume located here: <http://pujabakshi.com/contact/PujaBakshiResume.pdf> Contact Info located on her website ------ Xixi SEEKING WORK - Japan, Kobe. Remote, travel or local ok. I'm a doing some freelancing while bootstrapping ShiningPanda (<https://www.shiningpanda.com>). My expertise lies in: Python (Django, RabbitMQ/Celery, etc.) and Continuous Integration with Jenkins. I've also done my fair share of HTML / CSS / JQuery and GWT. Email in profile ------ kingofspain SEEKING WORK - Remote (UK based) Front end/PHP developer. HTML5, CSS/SASS, JS etc etc. I've worked on some pretty large sites. making many $$$ - even some in Perl. Also, iOS/Android development using Titanium (i.e. NOT ObjC - though I do dabble). Happy with git (though I'm a hg user myself) and fluent with Photoshop. URL's etc can be supplied on request. Will relocate for the right project, but do prefer remote. ------ guruz SEEKING WORK We're a offering consulting/contract work around Nokia's Qt framework. We're also interested in doing more general work in the world of open source, desktop, mobile. If you're interested contact us via <http://woboq.com/> We're based in Berlin but look for remote work everywhere. ------ haxoo SEEKING WORK javascript expert github profile: <http://www.ozkeebo.com/github> samples: <http://www.purfiction.com> <http://blog.bindows.net/?p=52> <http://www.ozkeebo.com> rate: 50/h remote only ------ deniz SEEKING WORK - Melbourne AUS or Remote (will travel for short periods) Android app developer - dedicated to great end user experience, app performance and code quality. Previous 6+ years experiences in .NET stack (C# ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Winforms) web: <http://www.themodernink.com> twitter : @themodernink ------ billpaetzke SEEKING FREELANCER - Los Angeles - <http://www.leads360.com> OpenVBX Developer \| Short-term, remote-friendly, US citizen only [http://engineering.leads360.com/post/12202543481/openvbx- dev...](http://engineering.leads360.com/post/12202543481/openvbx-developer) ------ blckswn49 Seeking Work - Remote or in Taiwan Technical writer, copy-writer, editor, content developer, academic writing, etc... available for jobs big and small. Have written content for the following websites: editing.tw, www.novaismed.com. Portfolio, samples, and references available upon request. blckswn49@gmail.com ------ _pius SEEKING FREELANCER Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote Skillset: iOS Developer I'm looking for an expert iOS developer to help our startup, BeCouply, go a little faster on the iPhone app. We've got a fun concept, we're funded by Mitch Kapor et al, and we're about to get some great exposure on a major news channel. Reach out to me at pius@alum.mit.edu. ------ martey SEEKING WORK - Washington DC; remote work is fine I am a web developer with significant experience with Python/Django, Linux system administration, and HTML5/CSS3/JQuery. I understand both Git and Mercurial, and validate my code with both pep8 and the W3's HTML validator. Contact me at hn-2011-11@marteydodoo.com ------ rileywatkins SEEKING WORK - Portland/Remote I do web development with Python (Django and Flask), PHP, ColdFusion (and CFWheels), SQL, JavaScript (and jQuery), HTML, CSS, some Flex and AS3, etc. I'm open to part-time, full-time, and freelance. <http://github.com/rwatkins> email: riley at rileywatkins dot com ------ ed209 SEEKING WORK. REMOTE/UK. UI+UX Designer for Mob (Android and iOS), Web. Also like building what I design in CSS, HTML, JS. Some work at <http://bit.ly/edlea-info> and <http://www.edlea.com> wltm SF based startups. ------ brianjolney SEEKING FREELANCER Vita Coco - NYC Looking for a generalist developer to run some projects internally, would need to be based in the NYC area. Half on site work, half remote. Think PHP/MYSQL backend work, HTML/CSS/JS frontend work, social APIs (Facebook, Twilio, Mailchimp), Phonegap iPad apps, etc. Email me: bolney@vitacoco.com ~~~ RDDavies I'd recommend sending me a message before someone considers taking this on. ~~~ inthecompanyof That good, huh? ~~~ RDDavies No. I'm surprised my post got downvoted when I'm trying to prevent HN Freelancers from investing a significant portion of their time to be left out to dry, as I've done with this client. ~~~ csomar Yes. But what if the problem was actually with you. Why email you in the first place? Just tell us your story in few short lines, and everyone will judge from his perspective. The other party can have the ability to reply, too. ------ robinwarren $$ hope no one has a problem with me mentioning my site www.jobstractor.com There's some contracting/freelancing jobs on there. I got an email today from soneone who has already found work through the site. It's still a work in progress, but improving all the time. Happy job hunting :) ~~~ Vivtek What the ... what kind of site is that, actually? One of the "job postings" is a Biblical quote. (<http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/SHoffman9213/~fRy55>) Seriously, that's just irritating. ~~~ robinwarren Sorry for the irritation, as I say it's a work in progress including filtering some things which shouldn't be in there. ~~~ Vivtek Sure, but my question stands - I honestly don't know what it is I'm looking at. Are you just filtering Twitter feeds for people who might want work done and putting some geographical search information onto the posts? Aside from the fact that I honestly don't know what that Biblical quote is doing there (I looked for likely keywords), it's by no means obvious that this is what you're doing. If you're serious enough about it to post it here to gain some eyeballs, then you should probably also indicate what it is you've done. If I were to tweet something vaguely job-related, and if somebody then got in touch with me because they thought I'd posted a job on your site, I think I'd be somewhat ... taken aback, I guess. ------ decadentcactus SEEKING WORK - Perth, Australia, remote ok $50/hr, list of work and buzzwords at paimoe.com. I'll discuss what you want, then get access to a git repo and get started. Mainly PHP, MYSQL, jQuery, HTML/CSS, Django/Python (less so). Built both large sites and side projects. Contact hi @ above domain. ------ bobds SEEKING WORK Location: Europe (can travel to your location for limited periods) Skills: PHP, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, SQL, Java, Wordpress, Web services, Web scraping (more details: <http://disattention.com/about/> ) ------ peng SEEKING WORK - Remote (Tokyo) Interface designer from California. I work with companies around the world on application design, usability, and branding. HTML5 / CSS3 (Sass, Stylus) / JS / Photoshop / iOS <http://nylira.com> ------ Mandar SEEKING WORK - Remote or in Paris Core skills: LAMP stack, with MySQL or MongoDB. 5 year experience designing high traffic web applications, doing security audits or system administration. I'm good at understanding business needs and can lead teams. Also, I'm certified on PHP5 by Zend. ------ raizer Seeking Work! Technologies - TIBCO Product Stack (BusinessWorks,BusinessEvents, RV, EMS, AMX, Activespaces), C, Java Work level: Senior Dev/Architect Location : Toronto, Canada Will work remotely?: Yes (Preferred) Fulltime/Part-time?: Part-time preferred Rate: $100 - $120/hr. Depending on role and contract length. ------ adamjleonard SEEKING WORK - Sarasota, Florida - REMOTE WORK ONLY Web developer that is passionate, social, and always learning. Skilled in the following: * PHP 5 & PHP 5.3 * Rails 3.0 & 3.1 * jQuery * NodeJS * CoffeeScript * HAML, SLIM, XHTML, CSS * Linux admin You can view my resume at <http://www.adamjleonard.com/resume> ------ stevederico SEEKING WORK iOS Developer (San Francisco) Contract work only. No full-time or equity gigs. Portfolio: <http://www.bixbyapps.com> ------ rizz0 SEEKING FREELANCER - AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3184887> ------ bo_Olean SEEKING WORK - Remote/Full Time Preferred work : LAMP Stack / AJAX Apps. Can lead a team, work on both frontend & backend development. I don't do designs. You can find contact info in my profile. ------ llambda SEEKING WORK: Based in NYC, remote or local Python hacker: Flask/Django GitHub: <https://github.com/maxcountryman> contact: maxc@me.com ------ TamDenholm SEEKiNG WORK UK Remote preferred but not required. PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery. A lot of experience with Facebook apps, CMS's and API's. contact@ [myusername] .com ------ csomar SEEKING WORK - Remote Looking for a $250-$400 gig. HTML/CSS/JavaScript (jQuery/Backbone) and PHP (WordPress/Fat Free). Email in my profile. ------ skbohra123 SEEKING WORK. India. Remote Django.Jquery. PHP Contact in my profile. ------ JohnOBrien10 Also seems relevant to mention my site to help people track job applications, Job-Buddy.com. All feedback is welcome. ------ rscale Seeking Work: Mostly Remote (based in the US, will travel to project kickoff / milestone meetings if preferred) Ruby on Rails Engineer, using Ruby since 2002 and Rails since 2005. Expert in SQL (primarily PostgreSQL and MySQL/RDS.) Strong NoSQL: mostly Cassandra (wrote the cassandra-cql driver), some Mongo and Riak. Strong "HTML5" expertise having made extensive use HTML5 & XHTML, jQuery, WebSocket, and pure JS. Expert Unix operational skills using Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD on real and virtualized platforms. Can use nginx or apache as easily as I can use heroku. Github: <https://github.com/kreynolds> Blog: <http://rubyscale.com/blog/tech_notes/> Experienced working with existing teams. Can offer strategic and tactical guidance, and can also do head-down coding. Comfortable executing large, complex tasks. One recent client coined the term "man-people" to describe his opinion that despite being one person, I was doing the work of five men. Prefer fixed-price/fixed-scope contract work, but daily rates are available. contact: hello@rubyscale.com ------ infocaptor SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote/ Pittsburgh, PA Need a freelancer for <http://www.mockuptiger.com> Port to Ipad. Someone with good experience converting html+javascript app to Ipad. Please email nilesh@mockuptiger.com ------ frogly SEEKING FREELANCER I'm a designer, but I can't code. I'm looking for someone who can code a template for a popular CMS. I'll do the design, and you can code. I'll provide more guidance if you contact me, with your skillset and experience. If you don't have much experience, don't worry! Just tell me what you're good at. Estimated time required: a few weeks Estimated cost: a few hundred dollars Contact: jimduggan -- yahoo.com ~~~ csomar Correlating the estimated time required and estimated cost, you are basically paying $100/week. I assume 5 days / week and 5 hours / day. That's $4/hour. Serious? ~~~ lucisferre I wonder how much he charges for design work? Cause if it's $4/hour I've got some stuff he can do. ~~~ frogly I don't live in the West, and I don't make as much money as you do. Is that wrong? There are plenty of people using HN that are not reflections of yourself. I'm also not assuming that this will be worked on full-time. If it was, I wouldn't expect it to take more than about a week. ~~~ csomar I don't think where you live matters. I live in country with a Per Capita 15 times lower than the USA but charge something per hour which is related only to my experience and knowledge.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is $5k really worth 5%? - quellhorst A good software developer contractor can gross 10k in a month. Is something like ycombinator worthwhile to give up 5% for $5,000 per founder? ====== froo Well, apart from the fact that you got your math wrong (its $5k + $5k per founder) I'll give you a few other reasons why YC is worthwhile. 1) Introductions to prominent VC's/Angels if you want to obtain further funding 2) As a result of the process of getting into YC, it can somewhat validate your idea 3) Having to pull it off in 3 months can really light fires under people's asses 4) PG seems like a genuine bloke who really wants to help people. The mentoring aspect would be worthwhile. 5) Constant feedback. You'd be surrounded by a lot of other YC alums who are very switched on people... Good things to be learned all round I'm sure there are other reasons I failed to mention, but I think I covered the basics. EDIT - also, read PG's essay on the subject. <http://paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html> ~~~ vaksel Don't forget extra coverage. Many of YC sites getting covered by Techcrunch would have never been able to get covered without being part of YC ~~~ froo I guess there's always PG's Rice & Beans to look forward too! :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525529> ------ wmf This has been answered before. YC isn't about the money; it's about the advice and connections. If those things increase the probability of your company's success by more than 5%, YC is a good deal. If you can do better on your own, do it. ~~~ ABrandt The support that YC provides is definitely more valuable than the money they provide. With that being said, however, you can't discount the benefit of having that extra cash. $5,000 for 5% equity essentially valuates your company at $100,000. Ask yourself, would anybody outright pay that much for what you have built? On top of that, YC also provides an additional $5000 to cover living expenses. Thats a deal if I've ever seen one. ------ apinstein Your question is nonsense. I'll assume for a moment that you are _presently_ a "good software developer contractor" and you currently gross "$10k" a month. Given that, $10k a month is your opportunity cost for doing something else, for instance, doing a startup. That fact has little to do with your question "is ycombinator worth 5% of my biz for ~$15k"? If you want to do a startup, then you'll be giving up your $10k a month to build something that scales beyond your time. I recommend doing this, if you have the risk-tolerance for doing a startup. IFF you decide to do a startup, THEN you have to decide how to fund it. YCombinator offers your team ~$20k for 5% of the company to kick off your startup efforts. Plus, they offer you the "prestige and access" you'll get due to YCombinator. The alternative is bootstrapping, or "normal" funding channels. From what I know about YCombinator, it's definitely an outstanding opportunity if you can get your idea accepted. If you're young and inexperienced and mobile, do it. Alan ------ jfno67 Many will point out the fact the introductions and the opportunity to work with other startups are worth more than the money. I want to say the money is worth it too. We are self-financed and so we do contract to pay our living expenses. It is working great for us, but often we will get sucked in client projects. Those distractions have been costing a lot in term of growth. 5% for the intros and money to just focus on your idea for 12 weeks is certainly worth it. ------ Dilpil Making influential people into stake holders is always a good thing. It would be worth it for $0, in fact, it might be worth paying Y Combinator to take your stock. ------ wheels Sorting out $15k is the easiest part of an early phase startup. YC seems to mostly focus on the harder parts. ------ matthewking I believe its more about the experience and opportunities that are opened up to you than the money. You can earn $5k pretty easily but where does that get you? ------ smoody It can push you from 'thinking about starting the company' to 'starting a company.' If you're a 'thinking about starting a company' person, then it is worth it just to force you to switch modes. Also, the adage "it's better to have half of something than all of nothing" has never let me down. I've always been very generous with stock and it has always paid off -- for me anyway. ------ MaysonL If you and your company are good enough to be accepted by YC, then it probably is, both for you and for YC. It's the classic win-win proposition. YC will probably get a return on their money, and your company will be worth enough more that your share, now 95% instead of 100%, will be worth quite a bit more than it was before their investment. ------ ivankirigin If you sign on an adviser, you might give them a comparable percentage for $0K. It's worth it in the right cases. ------ grinich Absolutely not. But Demo Day is worth a lot more than 5%. ~~~ tptacek ... if you believe you're going to get funding, and if taking funding is what you want to do. ------ rms <http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html> ------ donw This depends on many factors, pretty much all of which can only be answered by you. If you think that the YC route may be worthwhile, then you'd do well to apply, and if not, bootstrap or go off on your own. ------ developingchris The money is not the draw. The chance to be mentored, and get money earlier are to me. I would pay more than 5% of the current venture to benefit from being mentored by these people for long to come. ------ sjs382 The real question is whether $5k + $5k/founder AND startup school is worth 5%. ~~~ froo AND 2x demo day AND YC alum network (tapping people on shoulders to try and get introductions to others you need) AND instant coverage by many blogs AND idea pre-validation if you try to pitch later. ... just saying. I'm applying next round and for me, the money is low on the list of what I like about the YC prospect. It's a nice thing to have don't get me wrong, but it's really one of the smaller pieces of the pie in my opinion. ------ anamax mu. The right question is something like "Is ycombinator worth the equity it will cost my company?" While other people have talked about what ycombinator is worth, the right answer to that question also depends on the meaning of "my company". ------ time_management Is an elite college worth $150k? ~~~ siong1987 Yes. It is. The connections you get out of an elite college worth more than that. ~~~ time_management I disagree strongly that the connections are the source of the value, at least for undergrad. You're assuming that everyone who goes to an elite college is rubbing elbows with the wealthy. In reality, the people who are able to utilize college in this way are those who are already from wealthy backgrounds. Upper-crust kids don't go to Ivies looking to be "connections" for middle-class strivers. I think that an elite college degree is worth $150k for most people, but I don't think it's the connections that add the value, so much as the prestige of the degree, the recruiting opportunities, and the information learned (mostly outside the classroom) about how the economy and society actually work. ~~~ siong1987 "the recruiting opportunities, and the information learned (mostly outside the classroom) about how the economy and society actually work" The recruiting opportunities are part of the connections too. The information that you learned outside of class is mostly from your connection outside the class too. This may not be a strong case for a local resident in US. For my case, I did have a stronger connections(friendship) than in my country(Malaysia). I am sure that I cannat achieve what I have done so far here if I decided not to further my college in US. ------ ftse Yes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
We Finally Know How Wombats Produce Their Distinctly Cube-Shaped Poop - kw71 https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-wombats-produce-their-distinctly-cu-1830414749 ====== lysp Dupes: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wombat&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wombat&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1542499200&dateEnd=1543017600)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Facebook Timeline - equilibrium http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline ====== 27182818284 There is something I've pointed out before, but it is interesting and, I think, worth repeating: If they lost half of all of their users overnight, it would only set them back about two years in terms of growth.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Recess Labs: A Pre-Idea Incubator - xenophon http://www.recesslabs.com ====== RepressedEmu I love this idea! Its like a side-project focused sabbatical. I wonder what kind of startups are going to come out of it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
IPhone 4 Teardown - icco http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/1 ====== icco From their press email: "We went to extreme lengths to acquire the iPhone 4. Kyle flew to Japan, expecting to take advantage of the 16-hour time difference. He had his camping gear all ready to wait in line outside the Ginza Apple Store tonight. But then, in a last-minute twist that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the ongoing iPhone 4 release drama, FedEx delivered some iPhone 4 units to customers two days early. One of those customers, an engineer at a Silicon Valley startup, provided us his phone. And we are taking it apart. I present to you the first legal teardown of the iPhone 4: <http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/1> We have confirmed that the iPhone's A4 processor has 512 MB RAM, unlike the iPad's more limited 256 MB. This decision may have been made fairly late in Apple's development cycle, because early leaked prototype phones only had 256 MB. The teardown is in progress, and we will send you a summary of our findings once we complete our initial analysis. Here is a high resolution photo: <http://s1.guide- images.ifixit.net/igi/y1RInG6BsFCuADov.huge> We will also be performing an ultra in-depth silicon analysis of the A4 and the new gyroscope, but the results will not be available for a few days." ------ ZeroGravitas So the glass is just Gorilla Glass from Corning, same as the Motorola Droid, Dell Streak etc. I wonder if that's what they're using on the back too? edit: quick Google suggests maybe not, since someone managed to scrape the back, which is pretty hard to do with Gorilla Glass: [http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/23/yes-you-can-certainly- scr...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/23/yes-you-can-certainly-scratch-the- iphone-4/) ------ grinich They say that they found the gyro here: <http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/2> But to me that looks like the motor for vibration. I would assume the gyro to be mems. ------ borisk Nice picture interface on this site.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Solyndra (SV Solar Startup that got $535m guarantee from govt) fails - pitdesi http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwoody/2011/08/31/what-solyndras-bankruptcy-means-for-silicon-valley-solar-startups/ ====== salemh Wow..Last year they were hiring ~200+ engineering types of roles (our firm was trying to "get in" with recruiting for them). They were sort of a "standard" of "do you know Solyndra?" or "where do you see yourself in Solyndra's space?" re: EnPhase, a few manufacturers FOR solar tech, etc. Solyndra's gig was commercial flat-root tech for solar. "Solyndra could not achieve full-scale operations rapidly enough to compete in the near term with the resources of larger foreign manufacturers," [http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&i...](http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=has+china+won+the+green+tech+race)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Growing X20 without spending an extra penny on hosting - ilhackernews http://www.geektime.com/2014/03/10/growing-x20-without-spending-an-extra-penny-on-hosting/ ====== igoldny An interesting approach!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Case for the Fat Startup (2010) - a_d https://a16z.com/2010/03/17/the-case-for-the-fat-startup/ ====== thinkingkong Going out an raising an initial metric boat load of capital seems to fly in the face of modern convention for pure digital services. Notable exceptions seem to be businesses where a high capez model is repeatable geographic basis (ride sharing, scooters, food deliver, rental spaces). Considering how quickly the competition in those spaces need to scale, and the winner-take-all dynamics, it seems natural that that path would exist. For the majority of us though, purgatory might also be “I raised too much to be a billion but I have a nice 100M company” and thats just dandy. ------ zakum1 Ben’s book “Tge hard things about hard things” gives a more detailed account of this story through a series of lessons learnt. It is a phenomenal story and leadership guide.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why falsificationism is false - viburnum https://necpluribusimpar.net/why-falsificationism-is-false/ ====== noego The author makes some good points, but does not propose his own criteria for what distinguishes a good theory from a bad theory, which seems like a cop-out to be frank. I imagine a big appeal of falsifiability in its early days, stemmed from its opposition to religious dogma. Imagine dealing with someone whose answer to every question comes back to God. _" Why did the patient die?"_ _" Because God decreed it."_ Talking about germ-theory must have been a massive improvement over theology, hence why ideas like falsifiability must have arisen to provoke people to think in more critical ways. My own standard for evaluating theories comes down to the following: The _simplest_ explanation that best _fits existing data_ , and makes _useful predictions_ for the future. _" Simplest"_ because we need to prevent overfitting. _" Fits existing data"_ because the whole point of a theory is to explain what we see around us. And " _useful predictions_ " because it will actually provide practical benefit to us. As opposed to a theory like _" God decreed it"_, which may be extremely simple and error-free, but provides us with no practical benefit at all. As I see it, falsifiability is a side-effect of the second and third requirements. If a theory is making useful predictions, we might as well check to see if it's accurate. And if it's not, there's no point in holding on to a theory that's making faulty predictions. Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful and fit any data at hand. ~~~ thethirdone > The simplest explanation that best fits existing data, and makes useful > predictions for the future. My main issue with that definition is what makes it a useful prediction. Does a theory (for particle physics) that predicts the Higgs Boson more useful than one that didn't? If not, then before we collected the data to reject other theories they all would have been equal. I would rather suggest that the properties of a good theory are best fitting existing data and having specific predictions for future measurements. > Falsifiability, in this perspective, isn't a requirement in and of itself - > it's a natural consequence of the requirement that theories be useful. If you are of the opinion that any good theory is falsifiable (in the sense described in the article), then presumably you disagree with the rejection of falsifiability in the article. Where would you say the error in logic in the article is? ~~~ gliop A useful prediction is a prediction that matches experimental results. ~~~ thethirdone You can't possibly know what will match experimental results in the future so that doesn't help determine good theories in the present. And I would say that Newtonian gravity was a useful theory despite not matching experimental currently because when it was the best it mostly explained observations. ~~~ chii > Newtonian gravity was a useful theory despite not matching experiment "Useful" in this context means useful for a future theory or experimentation, not utility. Newtonian theory certainly predicted many results, and all of them were useful in the above sense. A prediction doesn't have to exactly match observations to be useful, but that the theory produces a prediction which _could_ be tested against. Even flat-earth theory makes useful predictions - albeit already proven false as time and time again, it predicts the wrong results. What isn't useful is an unfalsifiable theory, which means the predictions it makes is not able to be tested, or the results of such a test could be construed to match if you squint a bit. A theory like creationism, for example. ~~~ thethirdone I am a bit confused by your comment. I'm not sure if you agree with gliop or not. I am simply saying that Newtonian gravity is useful (in pretty much any sense) and that it did not match all experiments. Particularly in the orbit of Mercury could not be explained. > Even flat-earth theory makes useful predictions - albeit already proven > false as time and time again, it predicts the wrong results. I definitely agree usefulness is independent of fitting experimental data. gliop would seem to say flat earth theories are not useful. ~~~ noego I don't think the value of a theory can be evaluated in isolation. It can only be evaluated relative to its competition. During its time, Newtonian gravity, even if it didn't perfectly fit all data, was still superior to its competition on an aggregate of the 3 criteria mentioned. Only once Einstein's theories were put forward, were we able to replace Newtonian gravity with a superior alternative. ------ outlace This article attacks falfsificationism in part on the basis that scientists don’t seem to actually behave according to “naive falsficationism” in which you supposedly should immediately throw out a theory as soon as you get some conflicting empirical data. The article notes that collecting empirical data to falsify a theory depends on auxiliary theories (eg testing the idea that smoke causes cancer in rats depends on our ability to precisely define and identify when cancer is present) and so most scientists will question these auxiliaries rather than the main theory if conflicting data comes out. This is presented as evidence that scientists don’t actually practice falsficationism. This whole discussion completely ignores uncertainty and the fact that theories describe not only relationships between variables but also involve parameters that need to be estimated. If I fill a rat cage with smoke and the rats don’t get cancer, I don’t immediately assume all previous studies were wrong. This isn’t ignoring my duty to falsify, it’s realizing that the theory that smoking causes cancer describes a causal relationship between variables (smoking -> cancer) it also implicitly or explicitly depends on parameters (in this case, how much and how long a rat must be exposed to smoke to cause cancer at some incidence rate). Given that many other studies found the causal relationship, it is more likely that my experiment messed up the parameters of the causal model (eg I didn’t administer smoke long enough) rather than messed up the causal relationship. And parameter estimation is subject to uncertainty. Now if I’m absolutely sure I’m getting all my model parameters correct, and I can only be confident if other people get the same results. Then I’m moving toward falsifying the theory. The point is that science involves positing theories, and theories are descriptions of causal relationships and generally involve parameters. Much of science is just estimating model parameters given that we assume some model to be tentatively true. You assume your model to be tentatively true, eg smoking causes cancer, now you need to estimate the effect size which is a parameter problem. ------ lisper This article attacks a straw man. Being falsifiable is necessary but it is _not_ sufficient to be considered a scientific hypothesis. Such a hypothesis also, and more importantly, has to provide a better _explanation_ of some phenomenon than the current best theory. Experimental evidence is only brought to bear to decide among plausible alternative theories after the vast majority of candidate theories have been eliminated for not providing good explanations. It's easy to see that this must be true because we can only ever have a finite amount of data, and that will always be consistent with an infinite number of falsifiable theories (c.f. Russell's teapot). So data cannot possibly help us choose from among those. ~~~ logicchop Popper heavily criticizes the value of explanation. He gives examples of really great "explanations" that have almost zero empirical value (things like psychoanalysis). Hard to see how it could be a "straw man." ~~~ Animats "Science is prediction, not explanation." \- Fred Hoyle. ~~~ lorriman I heard Fred Hoyle when he came to lecture at my school in the 80s (a prestigious, rich boys school). It was one of the few places willing to give him the time as his views were vaguely in line with Christian creationism though he was an atheist, ironically. It was doubly ironic in that the school was Catholic and Catholic Christianity is not biblically literalist. In fact the inventor of the Big Bang theory eventually became a Catholic priest. hahaha! ------ whatshisface If there's no conceivable experiment that could contradict your claim then it's meaningless. Just because there might be other ways for a claim to be vacuous doesn't mean the necessary condition above doesn't hold. ~~~ smallnamespace There may be some difficulties with the criterion that you just laid out, one practical and another logical: 1\. 'Conceivable experiment' is a changing definition, since the realm of what humans can conceive is always expanding with the growth of technology and knowledge. If we had been around 2000+ years ago, would you have considered Democritus's atomic theory to be meaningless, given the lack of any conceivable path to test it at the time? Either you have to take quite an expansive view of what is 'conceivable', or admit that 'meaningless' here refers more to practical difficulties that may be temporary, rather than anything inherent in a particular claim. 2\. If we turn your statement back on itself, statements about meaning are also statements about the world (after all, what is 'meaning' if it doesn't involve what humans think and believe?). Is your statement that 'only falsifiable claims are meaningful' itself falsifiable? If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it? ~~~ whatshisface > _would you have considered Democritus 's atomic theory to be meaningless, > given the lack of any conceivable path to test it at the time?_ Strictly speaking Democritus's atomic theory is still untestable today because it doesn't include the actual scale of the atoms. For all we know the apparently continuous quantum fields are themselves made of "atoms" (in his sense, not the modern meaning of the word atom). If he had said "things will get clearly atom-y around a nanometer" then it would have been at least conceivable that someone could eventually look that closely. > _you have to take quite an expansive view of what is 'conceivable'_ That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria (and saying that it was a necessary but insufficient condition). > _If so, what sort of experiment would you set up to test it?_ That's kind of like asking what sort of experiment could disprove the law of the excluded middle: not an unreasonable question, but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. To test my claim, you could iterate though every claim about the universe, checking to see if it simultaneously could not contradict with any observation, and yet predicted what you would observe. Good luck actually doing it; but it does technically meet my criterion. ~~~ smallnamespace > That's right, I was laying down a very liberal criteria > but the answer is going to sound pretty silly. Yes, I was trying to illustrate that the line between 'science' and 'metaphysics' is necessarily a blurry one, and the choice of (and justification for) where to draw it itself lies in the realm of metaphysics. The broader the universe of claims you admit as scientific, the more 'testability' and 'falsifiability' lie closer to the realm of theory. However, even theories (and paradigms) that can't be directly placed on the experimenter's bench today can point towards fruitful lines of investigation. On the flip side, we can't but to make metaphysical (and therefore non- scientific) claims and hold them as true, despite our best efforts ... the strong version of 'scientism' (that only scientific claims can have meaning) is a self-defeating one. ------ thethirdone > This means that a theory is never falsifiable simpliciter, but only relative > to a set of background assumptions. Therefore, if we say that a theory is > only scientific if it’s falsifiable, then it follows that no theory, not > even a theory as successful as Newton’s law of universal gravitation, is > scientific. Of course, this is absurd, so falsificationism is false. You can consider the union of the theory and background assumptions to be a single theory. The premises do not imply that no theory is scientific. An analogy to mathematics is pretty apt. The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is falsifiable in the crude sense described, but cannot be proven or disproven without an axiomatic basis. If you were able to derive a contradiction from RH and some other accepted theorems, you would think that falsifies RH. However, if you wanted a more concrete picture of what was proved, you might reduce the other theorems to Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF) so you have the result that RH + ZF is inconsistent/false. Maybe in some other axiomatization RH is true, but the general community accepts ZF so that means RH + ZF is false effectively means RH is false. I do agree with some of the sentiment of the article. There should be thought about how to actually test what we say we are testing (not having a reliance on background assumptions) and to accept negative results rather than just find something to blame. ------ nerdponx What is the point of this article? The content is interesting: falsification is more complicated than it seems at first, and scientists don't practice philosophically-pure falsificationism. But it's wrapped up in some kind of finger-pointing "the emperor has no clothes!" type of exposé format that doesn't make sense and doesn't lead to a satisfying conclusion. ~~~ dang The article explains clearly and at length why the author wanted to write it. But the best thing you say here is "The content is interesting". That's why it belongs on HN! [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ~~~ nerdponx Sorry I was unclear. My comments were meant for the author, not the poster. ~~~ dang Yes, and he goes into that at length in the article. The HN thing was just my addition; shop talk basically. ------ viburnum Well that is definitely not the title I submitted. ~~~ dang The site guidelines call for using the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Judging by the first couple of comments that appeared here, the title is baity, because it was generating shallow reactions—to the top-level dramatic claim, rather than to the rich content in the article, such as its final paragraph. When the comments in a thread are generated from the most-obvious, already- familiar information in an article—which often shows up in the title—than we get a discussion of people reciting things they already know or believe (not interesting!), instead of a learning process (much more interesting). I changed the title to "There are strong arguments against falsificationism", which is a phrase from the article body. (When we change titles, we always look for representative language in the article itself.) A couple minutes later, I wasn't sure, so reverted it. This is a bit of an edge case. To some extent, what to do with the title depends on which direction the thread takes: shallow "I know better" dismissals? or thoughtful responses to the less obvious?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A Deep Dive into Litecoin - toddinsights https://medium.com/todd-moses/a-deep-dive-into-litecoin-ltc-31b7dbbabf3a ====== earthlingdavey Is there a way to get around the Medium paywall?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Book made of ocean plastic / Initial Book Offering - cryptoexile Book made of ocean plastic / Initial Book Offering - http://cryptic.fun ====== cryptoexile I am the founder. Please help me spread the word. Send in your suggestions and Ideas. We are starting from scratch. #AR #OCEANPLASTIC #CRYPTO	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Rethinking Cookies: originOnly - homakov http://homakov.blogspot.com/2013/02/rethinking-cookies-originonly.html ====== ChuckMcM It is an interesting rant about a real problem. Cookies provide a function for their origin web site, every other use is generally not good for the consumer. The challenge implementing something like cookies that can only be consumed by the web server that baked them. Not an easy problem to solve while still supporting proxies and firewalls and things between client and the web server. That said, would love to hear some ideas. ~~~ jjoergensen I don't really see the problem with cookies. They make things easier to implement, they enable a ton of new businesses and they make things easier for the consumers. ~~~ KMag Sorry to be pedantic, but the problems were enumerated in the article. There are multiple major security problems with cookies, and their costs are in the billions of dollars per year. Instead of "I don't really see the problem with X" I think you really meant "I think on the whole the benefits of X outweigh its downsides". Neither the article nor the OP has suggested getting rid of cookies. They're merely trying to broach the subject of re-examining the HTTP state mechanism to see if there are better ways to solve the problem. To suggest that something is sub-optimal is not to necessarily suggest that its net effect is negative. ~~~ jjoergensen Ok i wasn't talking about security problems. Just the problem in general of cookies. And so I don't think it is true that "Cookies provide a function for their origin web site, every other use is generally not good for the consumer." Besides, some people have the illusion that changing the cookies will give them privacy. Well, there are many other ways of following them around although a little less accurate. ------ emily37 Related: Mozilla's sameDomain proposal <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=795346> Some research browser architectures like Atlantis (<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/154698/Atlantis-SOSP.pdf>) go the opposite extreme, where cookies are never sent unless their domain matches the initiating origin. In the case of Atlantis, the reason they have to go this route is somewhat messy: their microkernel architecture exposes a network interface to webpages, and the network interface has no way to differentiate between a request initiated by XHR or by an img/script/etc., so the network interface cannot send cookies with any cross-origin requests, or else it risks exposing private data via XHR. I wonder if it would be useful to see something more flexible than the current standard, sameDomain, or disallowing all cross-origin cookies. When you set a cookie, maybe it would be nice to be able to specify which origins are authorized to send requests with that cookie. ~~~ homakov i believe SameOrigin is enough for everyone. If no - you can make your own mechanizme ------ eps The same logic should be applied to the inclusion of a Referer header in a request. If a page on foo.com is pulling down a .js from code.jquery.com, there should be no Referer sent. Perhaps a more illustrative example is that this will deny Twitter, FB, Google and other embeddable widget factories any tracking and analytics information that leaks with every request for TweetThis, LikeThat and WhatNot buttons, fonts and scripts. There is absolutely _no_ reason for them to be seeing this information. ~~~ homakov agreed. actually referrer is very bad thing for security. have a post on it too ------ Udo It's a great idea, and I think it should be the default behavior for cookies - require users to explicitly agree whenever a cross-site cookie comes up. ~~~ icebraining How would you frame that question in terms that a user who calls IE "the internet" could understand? ~~~ Udo In that case either automatically ignoring the cookie or displaying the equivalent of the "this certificate is invalid" warning would be workable. It's a compromise. Personally, I believe nothing of value would be lost if browsers simply enforced originOnly period (without supporting anything else). ------ sirclueless I'm curious if you have ever expanded on your problem #2 claim: Google doesn't provide solutions for client-side clickjacking prevention in Chrome, because they have a competitive advantage in detecting it server-side. Are there such protections in other browsers such as Firefox or IE? Were there proposals for Chromium that got shut down? ~~~ homakov there is NoScript for FF. There is no noscript in chrome because of poor API. im pretty sure clearclick will not come up for a reason i told ------ pekk Stupid question. Is this originOnly proposal about the problem that a document from evil.com can drive requests to victim.com (e.g. img, iframe, clickjacking form, AJAX) and that these user-unintended requests to victim.com will stupidly include the cookies set by victim.com? Or some other problem? ~~~ MindTwister As far as I understand it, yes. The basic idea is that any requests that do not originate from the domain will not send the cookies, preventing CSRF, clickjacking and the advanced CSRF discussed here yesterday (from stackoverflow: <http://stackoverflow.com/q/2669690/3287>) ~~~ homakov Yes! ------ sandstrom Assuming a single page js app: wouldn't storing a session token in localStorage, and appending as a header on every xhr request, solve some of these problems? ~~~ homakov no, it will create only new, already solved. u cannot make localstorage httponly. if attacker steals it - session is lost..	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hard Times For The Venture Capital And Seed Founding Industry - csbartus http://metaman.tumblr.com/post/841759647/hard-times-for-the-venture-capital-and-seed-founding ====== adrianscott eehh... perhaps hard times for vc but NOT hard times for seed funds seed funding is where the action is there is NO bubble yet -- it'll take quite some time before there's a bubble in seed funding. we're still early on in the curve / market cycle.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Eradicate Business Plans: Give them the same respect that merits I.E. the Sixth - govind201 http://blog.semantics3.com/post/16752084868/eradicate-business-plans ====== ishan123 Hahahha. Good one	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is an offline version of gmail coming? - azsromej http://scobleizer.com/2008/03/19/google-about-to-drop-the-other-shoe-on-microsoft/ ====== stcredzero I want a version of Gmail that can run offline on my iPhone. I currently use Gmail, and it works fine with my iPhone's Mail program, but the paradigm shift between it and Gmail is a bit of a pain. iPhone's Mail doesn't have search, and doesn't organize things by thread. If someone at Google can port offline Gmail over to the iPhone, that would be two shades of awesome! ~~~ hbien Can't wait till google gears is available for mobile Safari. It'll make my ipod touch more fun to use (I'm not always around wifi..).	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Last Galapagos tortoise dies - JayInt http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/24/12386484-lonesome-george-last-of-its-kind-galapagos-tortoise-dies?lite ====== bdfh42 The edited title gets it wrong (when the original was correct). last of a particular sub-species dies - there are still lots of others.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ISP Association Nominates Mozilla as “Internet Villain” - pjc50 https://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-announces-finalists-for-2019-internet-heroes-and-villains-trump-and-mozilla-lead-the-way-as-villain-nominees/ ====== readyp1 It says in the link that Mozilla was nominated "for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK". So... for circumventing censorship, then? ~~~ sdfin Is there any disadvantage about activating it? Is the default ([https://mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query](https://mozilla.cloudflare- dns.com/dns-query)) adequate? ~~~ dcow Requests take orders of magnitude more data because you have to negotiate TLS each time. Not the end of the world obviously but you will generate more traffic and observe slightly reduced performance. ~~~ icebraining > you have to negotiate TLS each time It's not so bad, because HTTPS supports keep-alive, so you can make a bunch of queries with a single TLS handshake. ------ stordoff Hero: > Sir Tim Berners-Lee – for spearheading the 'Contract for the Web' campaign Contract for the Web: > [Governments will] Keep all of the internet available, all of the time > So that no one is denied their right to full internet access. > Respect people’s fundamental right to privacy > So everyone can use the internet freely, safely and without fear. > [Companies will] Respect consumers' privacy and personal data > So people are in control of their lives online. [https://contractfortheweb.org/](https://contractfortheweb.org/) Villain: > Mozilla – for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a > way as to bypass [censorship and prevent ISPs viewing DNS queries] I'm sorry, what? ------ ljm And how important is ISPA.org.uk? If you’re up to date with our government’s ideas about internet censorship (aspirational to China, in a nutshell) then this org and post has no credibility. The UK government has a serious axe to grind against any aspect of the internet they don’t like. They are trying to censor in their favour, using children as an excuse. DNS over HTTPS is a thorn in their side. But of course, never mind Google and GDPR, they don’t give the slightest shit about any of that. Never mind that DNS over HTTPS enhances the security of their own digital gov. movement. ~~~ devoply You must not be a wanker unless you register to be a wanker. Also no wanking teens. Their innocent eyes must be protected from depravity. \- UK government ~~~ DonHopkins If only the word wanker had another, more general, less sexual connotation, that did not involve literally having sexual intercourse with ones self. Then there would not be so much of a stigma associated with registering as a wanker. ------ DoctorNick I have to give them credit; because of this article, I found out that Firefox now supports dns over https and I just enabled it in my browser. Thanks! ~~~ climb_stealth For anyone else searching for the option: > Firefox -> Preferences -> General -> Network Settings -> Enable DNS over > HTTPS ~~~ StavrosK This overrides my DNS server, right? I use dnsmasq to rewrite all local addresses to their local IPs when I'm on my LAN, but it looks like this will break that. ~~~ hcs One option is to use the .local TLD for local domains, those will never be resolved via DoH.rDoH. ref [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Trusted_Recursive_Resolver) ~~~ fanf2 .local is reserved for multicast DNS so it is a really bad idea to use it for private DNS ~~~ hcs Thanks for pointing that out, I'll stop recommending this. ------ dmix If the future internet is going to look anything like how their site looks I don’t want any part of it: [https://i.imgur.com/EyljrGA.png](https://i.imgur.com/EyljrGA.png) 90% of the content is needlessly covered, including the ridicolous EU cookie policy that interferes with millions of websites while providing almost no practical value to privacy. ~~~ Avamander The GDPR prompt wouldn't even be required if nothing shady is going on :P ~~~ squiggleblaz The GDPR prompt doesn't make me safer though. ~~~ dmix I never read them, like everyone else. ------ lgierth If I were in an ISP's shoes, I'd be thankful for Mozilla to neutralize the legal attack surface which apparantly is running DNS for customers. ~~~ leblancfg I didn’t know that either! For anyone else wants to try it out: [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a5evhr/configure_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a5evhr/configure_dns_over_https_in_firefox/) ~~~ lgierth Umm I think you commented under the wrong parent ------ nathancahill Mozilla should use this in ads. Like Snowbird's 1-star ad campaign [0] [0] [https://www.snowbird.com/one-star/](https://www.snowbird.com/one-star/) ------ realshowbiz Considering my past personal experiences with IPSs, Mozilla must be doing something right. ------ nine_k ISP Association makes a controversial move, gets publicity. Mozilla gets a controversial nomination, also gets a bit of publicity. News outlets have a bit more to write about. In a cynical way, it's a win-win situation. It also somehow resembles me a move by a n acquaintance of mine, a professor, who wrote to his students something like: "We recommend to use [this list of expensive textbooks]; the use of free textbooks available at [list of URLs] is not officially endorsed." Because, you know, want to let the students know about the free textbooks, but can't do so in a positive way. ------ dredmorbius Since we're also talking about OpenWRT[1], you can enable DNS-over-HTTPS via DNSMasq for all software and devices on your LAN.[2] 1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356811) 2\. [https://openwrt.org/docs/guide- user/services/dns/doh_dnsmasq...](https://openwrt.org/docs/guide- user/services/dns/doh_dnsmasq_https-dns-proxy) ------ dredmorbius And: ISP A&A have donated what would have been their ISPA membership fee to the Mozilla Foundation: [https://twitter.com/aaisp/status/1146803916853645314](https://twitter.com/aaisp/status/1146803916853645314) ------ rocky1138 After reading their reason, I would like to say to Mozilla: keep up the good work. ------ judge2020 Wait till Google pushes the Chrome update that includes the UI for enabling DoH. Google Chrome already supports DNS over HTTPS (just the UI is not available on non-mobile)[0] and they're working on eSNI[1]. 0: [https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Enabling-DNS-over- HT...](https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Enabling-DNS-over-HTTPS) (bromite exposes this flag) 1: [https://crbug.com/908132#c14](https://crbug.com/908132#c14) ------ apsdsm On my phone this website throws up a giant banner over the bottom 30% of the screen telling me I have cookies disabled and that I really do need to turn them back on please. Riiiight. Moving on then... ------ wmf In other news, Mozilla names all ISPs Internet villains. ------ sys_64738 DNS over https is coming to Chrome shortly: [https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/16...](https://chromium- review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/1639663) ------ amatecha At the risk of sounding a bit sensationalistic, I think any org that calls Mozilla an "Internet Villain" just instantly loses any credibility to discern the hero/villain status of any other organization in the future :P ------ Mindwipe It's worth noting that IPSA has a complaints procedure open to customers of their member ISPS. I'll certainly be making a complaint about their board tomorrow. ------ black6 > Mozilla – for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a > way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining > internet safety standards in the UK In other words, for keeping the Internet true to its philosophical roots—to transmit information from A to B, regardless of the number or complexity of steps in between. ------ lone_haxx0r Obviously, they are not stupid enough to really believe this. There are evident political interests in this nomination, but it's still amusing how they're saying it with a straight face. I'm sorry for breaking my composure, but I'm laughing my ass off at these people. 10/10. ------ pixxel Noob question, if I may. I have Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 enabled on my devices via each device's own network settings. How does enabling Firefox's "Enable DNS over HTTPS" at browser level factor into things? Is one ignored or conflicted? Firefox's Cloudflare DNS Resolver* collects less data than 1.1.1.1. Would be nice to use Firefox's Resolver at system level, heh. *[https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-priv...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-privacy/privacy-policy/firefox/) ------ jchw Hmm, maybe Mozilla should nominate the ISP Association for something similarly flattering given how absolutely absurd a conviction this is. ------ ddingus Great! I am in the process of returning to Mozilla as primary browser. This helps. ------ preinheimer The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Close this as "works as designed". ~~~ squiggleblaz 1990s era myth. Falsified entirely nowadays but anyone who's ever been in a non-first tier democracy. The internet drops packets and they don't get through. And we're not just talking about the Great Firewall of China. More or less democratic states - and sometimes the free market of ISPs - will effectively censor you. That's precisely why Mozilla has tried to create a new protocol to deal with the censorship. A bunch of people doing work to negotiate and implement a new protocol is not "the internet" unless you have the most depraved view of people or a view of "the internet" so broad as to be completely meaningless that we even had the internet in mediaeval Sweden. ------ borland Association of criminals nominates the police as "City's worst Villain" ------ RaleyField And I, as a member of the esteemed assembly of contributors to this thread, am pleased to nominate Internet Services Providers’ Association as the 2019 Internet Villain. Congrats.. ------ aussieguy1234 For introducing DNS-over-HTTPS to circumvent censorship. This will be great in dictatorships, where anything the dictator doesn't want you to see is censored. ------ kangnkodos Where is the great firewall of China on the list of villains? Surely that is doing more harm than Mozilla. ------ ipsum2 Wow, this got flagged off the front page really quickly, even though it has 183 votes in the last 2 hours.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why is there no really successful Ruby on Rails CMS solution - etewiah I know there are a lot of Rails CMS solutions out there but the ones that became popular a few years ago are now pretty much dead. The newer ones don't seem to be gaining traction and there are now so many half-decent options that it is really hard to pick which to use. What is the reason for this? Is it likely to change or is there something about Rails that makes it unlikely there will ever be one dominant CMS solution? ====== ezekg Because the Rails community seems to prefer small, single-purpose gems over frameworks/multi-purpose gems. There are not a lot of plug-n-play gems aside from Spree for e-commerce. And besides, Rails makes it super easy to spin up a custom CMS, so using a gem is pretty overkill. For example, to build a blog, all you need is a few models (users, posts, maybe comments), CRUD controllers, admin auth with Devise, Shrine/Paperclip/Carrierwave for image uploads and you're done. And all of that can be spun up rather quickly. ~~~ etewiah Yes, I think a lot of people in the Rails community do think using a gem for CMS functionality is overkill. I strongly disagree with that opinion though but before trying to make the counter argument I would like to understand your point of view better. Have you written a real world app that require WordPress like CMS functionality that you were able to code in less than 40 hours? ~~~ bigmanwalter I don't use Rails, but a similar framework in Python. My clients love my CMS. The reason being that I can tailor an admin backend to their specific needs. Every single button in my backend has a purpose, and all the more complex settings are hidden behind code. In a WordPress site, you practically need to be a WordPress dev just to do basic modifications. ~~~ whatthecrep Out of curiosity what framework do you use in Python? ~~~ bigmanwalter I use web2py. I find it strikes a great balance between having an elegant API and getting shit done. And it generates Bootstrap compatible forms out of the box :) ~~~ whatthecrep Thanks, I'll definitely take a look at it. How does it compare to Django and Flask? ~~~ bigmanwalter I found that Django makes too many assumptions for my taste, and you really need to fight it if you don't like them. You can get around the bad design decisions by using plugins, but they're not all compatible with each other and I found it got messy. Flask on the other hand, comes with too few features out of the box. Getting an application with user auth, file uploads, an ORM and form generation can take over a week to set up perfectly. Web2py was created by a professor at DePaul University who got tired of Django after teaching it in a web development course. He built Web2py to have feature parity, but, IMHO, he has a much better aesthetic when it comes to API design. So rather than a design-by-comittee behemoth like Django, you get a succinct and intuitive API designed by a great programmer. Beyond that, it has a handful of features that I find unmatched, notably its data grids and bootstrap compatibility by default. I really love the bootstrap compatibility because it allows me to grab a theme off wrapbootstrap.com and everything just works without any tweaking. For small projects it works out perfectly :) It also has a very active Google Group where the framework's author frequently helps people out! The only thing I miss is the Werkzeug debugger that Flask comes with by default, and which can bet set up to run on Django. That thing is beautiful. But Web2py's debugger is good enough, and Web2py surpasses the competition in every other way. To really grok how amazing web2py is, I recommend working through the tutorial. It's not too long and it shows off Web2py quite nicely. A lot of what makes web2py so great are subtle design decisions. It fixes almost all the problems I had with the other frameworks and introduces practically none of its own. ~~~ whatthecrep Thank for the answer ------ sn1de I ran into the same issue a couple of years ago. We had an existing WordPress site. Issues were continuous paving over by consultants resulting in a overweight and fragile site with zero support for true mobile-responsive content authoring. When we discussed our needs with consultants the universal response was to just use WordPress. Clearly Wordpress had frozen this space with their just barely good-enough solution. The other factor at play was the rise of site builder SaaS platforms like SquareSpace and Wix. Their tooling was very slick, but not something you could consider a true development platform, i.e. something that developers and content authors would both consider truly meeting their needs. I liked Locomotive a lot and they used to have a page on their site that really nailed the WordPress shortcomings, but they were in the midst of working on their next major release and we couldn't wait. We ended up going with a cloud based, platform neutral CMS, prismic.io. We got our responsive authoring capabilities and fairly easy integration with our Rails stack. It has worked well. I think our content authors would say they would like more control over the presentation, but I would say that is part of the reason why we like it, because they can't hijack the entire page which inevitably leads to quality issues because the authors are not prepared to test their work in multiple browsers and mobile devices. It also lacks the out of the box blogging structure that WordPress has, but if you are looking for a more versatile publishing capability then it may fit the bill for you. The market has evolved, I'm sure, and I have not kept up with it. I would recommend looking at Locomotive and prismic or other cloud based CMS options but I don't think anything is going to emerge as a dominant CMS platform al la WordPress any time soon, if ever. ------ nik736 LocomotiveCMS is very good, I use it for countless client projects. The only thing I dislike is the reliance on MongoDB, which basically was a no-go for me in the beginning but it runs fine for years now. ~~~ etewiah Locomotive does look interesting but I can't seeing it expanding much beyond a niche market. The use of MongoDB is certainly one reason. Also it seems to hit a bitter spot: a bit too complex for a non technical person but doesn't really give much power to a dev/ ~~~ nik736 Have you actually looked at it? It's capable of doing a lot. ------ godot I may be off the mark but I feel like managed web hosts play no small part in this. Managed web hosts that run Apache still almost predominantly support PHP only for a scripting language (if you don't count Perl CGI stuff). For us in silicon valley this seems unthinkable, but these web hosts still run a ton of sites on the internet.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
U.S., companies: Internet surveillance does not indiscriminately mine data - ennuihenry http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-company-officials-internet-surveillance-does-not-indiscriminately-mine-data/2013/06/08/5b3bb234-d07d-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story_1.html ====== btilly If I were a Chinese official reading this, my #1 priority would be to try to get access to PRISM. No matter what checks and balances the US may employ to make sure legitimate access stays within bounds, any time you have an automated system, you're open to the possibility that someone can get access and automate it in ways you don't like. ~~~ tsotha >If I were a Chinese official reading this, my #1 priority would be to try to get access to PRISM. No it wouldn't. You'd be after the things Chinese spies are already after: trade and military secrets. They don't care who's calling who. ~~~ btilly Just to clarify. Prism is separate from the Verizon data dump. We're talking access to information that Google, Facebook, and other internet giants can track about you. Including emails. China is demonstrably interested in this. When they broke into Google's network, they went straight for the private emails of Chinese dissidents. (With, apparently, much less success than they would like.) When they broke into the NY Times, they went looking for any information about dissidents that the NY times might have. From the sounds of it, access to PRISM gives them that, all nicely gift wrapped and correlated with other signals of interest, tools to locate known associates, etc. Why are they interested in this? The Chinese leadership apparently do not see a war with the USA as their top risk. (Though they do prepare for the possibility.) That is because they know that the USA is not in the habit of lightly invading nuclear powers which could easily level multiple US cities in retaliation. But overthrow by revolution is something they are terrified of, with good cause. ------ dclowd9901 They simply don't get it: I DO NOT BELIEVE THE US GOVERNMENT HAS ANY RIGHT TO VIEW MY DATA THAT I ENTRIST TO PRIVATE COMPANIES. In the event they somehow have stumbled upon the right, I should be notified that my data has been examined. ~~~ dm2 How can you trust the US government less than private companies? Data mining exists at every company because of its value. I'm much more concerned that private companies (Lexis Nexis I'm looking at you) have access to so much of my data and have no obligation to inform me of what data they have. The US government exists to protect the United States and its citizens. If we put left vs right politics aside, why is there inherit distrust of the government? What would make you trust them? More transparency? If anybody is to blame it is congress. As elected representatives, they should have ultimate responsibility as to what happens in this country. They should also be held liable for ALL of their actions, but good luck getting them to approve that. How can congress enact laws that only affect themselves or give them more power? That is corruption and should be considered treason. ~~~ protomyth > How can you trust the US government less than private companies? The US government can throw me in jail, private companies cannot. The US government can sick the IRS, FBI, and Secret Service after me; private companies cannot. Congress has a lot of the liability, but so does the President. Read up on FDR's use of the IRS and what happened to the various Tea Party groups in 2010 with 501(c)4 status[1]. This is why the expansion of federal government reach is feared. 1) someone will argue about the nature of 501(c)4 so just remember that Obama's reelection campaign relaunched as one to advocate for his political agenda for his 2nd term. ~~~ dm2 What is your point about the Tea Party groups and 501(c)4? In my opinion, that is just another loophole that needs to be closed, same as religious organization tax exemption. ~~~ protomyth One side was treated different than the other. Pure and simple failure to follow the rules. When government agencies don't follow the rules and treat all as equals then we have problems. Clearly having a 501(c)4 with a political bent isn't the problem or else Obama's reelection campaign relaunch would have seen the same scrutiny and rejection. > In my opinion, that is just another loophole that needs to be closed, same > as religious organization tax exemption Regardless of your wish to close loopholes, the current law needs to be followed: equally and fairly. Going back to how taxes should work is a side trail and not relevant to how the government has acted against different parties. ------ OldSchool The best thing the government could do to legitimately appease citizens is pass a statute that nothing gathered through these means will be used to prosecute anything but terrorism or threats to national security. If that's the real purpose, then they should have no problem putting it in writing. ~~~ bilbo0s Just playing Devil's Advocate here... What's to stop them from classifying... say .... computer hacking... as a threat to National Security? ~~~ tsotha That's what happened with RICO. When it was passed they told us racketeering was only organized crime. Now you can get RICO charges doing just about anything. ------ jtchang Two ways I could see this being set up: 1\. NSA goes to Facebook and tells them to install a server/rack in their data center. The server needs to be on a port that can "see" all traffic unencrypted. The servers then transparently record data and analysts on the backend parse it into something useful. 2\. NSA puts servers on premises but instead they are pushed formatted feeds of data. This would require them to work more closely with the company to make sure they provide a feed that is workable. They would store the data and as requests for data came in the server would feed it back. ~~~ dm2 You're assuming that the NSA requires physical access to unencrypted data. The NSA has been in the IT security game for a very long time, they employ the best of the best, and have practically unlimited funds. I'd imagine that very complicated algorithms determine who to monitor and what keywords to look for. Images from the middle east or a VPN are likely more heavily analyzed than images from a college campus inside the US. Why set up shop at specific social media companies when they have physical access to backbone routers and root certificate private keys? Yes, it would be easier to just ask FB/Google/Apple to give them unlimited read access to their databases, but that would be a scandal waiting to happen. ~~~ acqq [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism- server...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server- collection-facebook-google) The slide with the explicit formulation was published, written by NSA, that made claims of "not inside companies" much less believable: "Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple." This supports the claims of Glenn Greenwald's article and is exactly what companies claimed not existing. Read the slide: they explicitely name the collecition on the "fat pipes" under other code names. As they have the access to the big pipes, the real time data (c.f. the other slides, earlier) from the inside of companies is certainly unencrypted. ~~~ dm2 Ok, so the one thing we have figured out in the past couple of days is that the NSA undoubtedly has the ability to collect almost all user data and internet traffic, even for US citizens. Your link is broken, should be: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism- server...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server- collection-facebook-google) Now, what do they do with it? The guardian is claiming that 77,000 reports have referenced PRISM but it is also the name of an internal accounting program ([http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia- prism](http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism)) We have a long way to go with this NSA issue. I believe that they are a great agency but have a very difficult job to preform, and unfortunately their mission sometimes requires questionable actions. They're powerful enough to make anything they want legal retro-actively, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Many people assume that the NSA has been "spying" domestically for decades, because it's arguably necessary in order to sufficiently protect the country. I love technology but am already tired of this debate. You are not going to prevent the NSA from data-mining, end of story. ~~~ acqq Thanks for the link correction. The Federal Aviation Administration's "PRISM" is obviously not the one discussed now in public, and not the one ending in the reports to the president. I invite everybody once again to read the Post and Guardian, they obviously have so much material and try to post only as much as to make the public aware of the legal aspects of the system: the blanket special court orders, allowing companies not to do anything, not even track what is being requested, the orders valid for months and practically automatically renewed. It is "legal." ------ OldSchool Gotta love a headline that's worded in such a way that it looks like a fact. Thirty straight days of these on every major outlet and most people who were not already concerned won't be doing anything differently, if they ever did. As a bonus, no need to worry about breaking the story anymore. ------ fiatmoney Seems to indicate the NSA is performing some sort of MITM, or running intercepts from inside the datacenter after the traffic has been decrypted: "PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises" "From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff." ------ danso Two things about the submission title, which is currently: "WaPo: Execs From Internet Companies Acknowledge PRISM" 1\. The original title for the article is "U.S., company officials: Internet surveillance does not indiscriminately mine data" 2\. The excerpt that the submitted title refers to is this: "Executives at some of the participating companies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged the system’s existence and said it was used to share information about foreign customers with the NSA and other parts of the nation’s intelligence community." Some, not _all_ of the companies involved. So too soon to conclude that the public statements were lies...but Zuckerberg and Page, at the least, could be said to have lied if the companies referred to in the OP are them (both Page and Zuckerberg said that they (they as in "we") had no prior knowledge of PRISM at all) ~~~ waterlesscloud There's definitely some questions here, though. "government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff." What does that mean? Does the company have any oversight over what's being requested? It doesn't sound like it. How does that square with the statements from the CEOs that each request is carefully considered and restricted? “The server is controlled by the FBI,” an official with one of the companies said. “We do not offer a download feature from our server.” This is a very fine distinction that doesn't matter much. Word games are being played here. ~~~ leoc > What does that mean? Does the company have any oversight over what's being > requested? It doesn't sound like it. How does that square with the > statements from the CEOs that each request is carefully considered and > restricted? This was covered yesterday, in the NYT article [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech- companies-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies- bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html) : > The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company > lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is > not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full > access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and > efficient way to hand over the data. So, it seems, there are Google-lawyer mechanical Turks clicking "OK" or "Contest" (or whatever) for each FISA order in the Google FISA-order queue. _If_ the lawyer clicks "OK" it seems the requested information is slurped automatically from the Google user-data servers into the PRISM server's outbox (and/or a live data feed is set up). If the lawyer clicks "Contest" then presumably something messier and more manpower-intensive happens. A system like this raises plenty of questions - but it doesn't at all automatically conflict with or falsify what the tech CEOs said. EDIT: Actually there's apparently a direct conflict between the NYT's version and what WaPo appears to be saying here: > According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA > inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows > “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to > equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly > to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from > the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources > familiar with the PRISM process. That _seems_ to imply that there's no Google-lawyer mechanical Turks reviewing the individual FISA orders. Given that that would contradict both the NYT report and the statement from (for example) Page and Drummond [http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2013/06/what.html](http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2013/06/what.html) this is a big deal. Given the WaPo's demonstrated ability to misunderstand information from NSA sources, for the moment I'm inclined to assume that the _Post_ has got this wrong, too - but let's see. (Another possiblity might be that some companies are waving FISA orders of the form "give us the personal data of Suspect X" through automatically, while others still have a lawyer clicking "OK".) ~~~ danso This passage confused me too. But this part: > _According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA > inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows > “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to > equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly > to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from > the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources > familiar with the PRISM process._ Could refer to queries on accounts/targets that have already been approved. In that sense, it's not much different from a traditional wiretap...once it's in place, the government investigators want the ability to monitor it continuously...the difference in this context is that this "wiretap" encompasses Internet activity, which may require active querying beyond passive listening. ~~~ leoc Could well be. (Though I'd assume that as long as a "virtual wiretap" is in place on an individual the NSA gets a firehose of everything which happens to that user account (or at least everything the FISA order permits) and then just filters out whatever doesn't interest it.) For my part I wouldn't be surprised if "The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises" just turns out to mean "The connection between the on-site server and Fort Meade is protected by SSL" (and probably dedicated fibre). To someone looking at the NSA as the bad wolf here it sounds like an odd thing to emphasise, but from the perspective of an actual NSA agent the security of these off-site servers handling top-secret material (in an environment full of highly-technical leftists and libertarians!) must be an obvious concern. Just for a start, you wouldn't want anyone at Google _other_ than the appointed lawyers taking a look at what you're requesting surveillance on... But that's just a guess of course. ------ l33tbro One question: Where is Anonymous in all this? I was expecting all kinds of DDOSing going down in the last 48 hours, but they have been unusually quiet. ------ waterphone > “The server is controlled by the FBI,” an official with one of the companies > said. “We do not offer a download feature from our server.” Now we know why they phrased their statements so specifically. ~~~ runn1ng your comments seem to be helbanned (i am writing it here since it's the newest non-helbanned comment of yours) ------ detcader Some guy on Tumblr picked apart Yahoo's carefully worded denial, actually [1] turns out it's totally bunk [1] [http://peterhassett.tumblr.com/post/52499296411/exclamation-...](http://peterhassett.tumblr.com/post/52499296411/exclamation- setting-the-record-straight) ~~~ Kylekramer Analysis of text related to subjective ideas can make anything bunk ("What do they mean 'all men are created equal'? Isn't our individualism what makes us great", etc.). Line by line analysis are particularly insidious because any idea can be proposed and appear to be a reasonable response without any likelihood of response from the original party. If you want to find problems with the various companies' responses, you sure can. I am positive things have happened with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, etc. and the government that most people would find offensive. But playing semantic games that push particular agendas without the full story is misleading and imprudent. ~~~ josephagoss But he makes some good points, especially about the heavy use of the word "volunteer" and also "give", all which imply Yahoo! isn't freely giving access to the NSA. Yahoo! never said that they were disallowing NSA lawful requests for bulk data, which is the topic of concern. (Of course Yahoo! isn't volunteering information, that is not concern at all, if the NSA demands then its not volunteering information) The issue is that all the PR from Facebook, Google and Yahoo! are using very specific non-broad language to say they are not doing a very certain thing, a thing that is not the concern. The concern is about lawful access to all servers and not one piece of PR said this was not happening. (In the current definition everything the NSA is doing would be considered lawful as the Government post 9/11 is able to use its various provisions to allow for a whole manner of things that we might disagree with, but we are not writing the law, they are.) ~~~ dclowd9901 He misses the part about them not giving the government "unfettered" access. That's narrow enough to meet the criteria of "otherwise" access. That's the problem with all of these statements. They're very specific with their language. ------ joe_the_user Can anyone say exactly what this paragraph is supposed to mean (or really mean, if there's a difference): _Intelligence community sources said that this description_ [direct access] _, although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff._ So they get data from an ad-hoc query without interaction with the company's staff. And yet it is not direct access? I've read the other back-and-forths but I'm still not sure what this could even trying to imply. Edit: and read - _According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources familiar with the PRISM process._ But that the meaning is no more clear. Or the meaning is, we buy an "indirect access cable at Best Buy and so everything is OK", ie, the distinction is nothing but word games. ~~~ leoc There's a major apparent contradiction between that second quotation and other sources (the NYT, Google itself) - see my other comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847846) ------ efsavage yet	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Curiosity, Luck, and the Flip of a Switch Saved the Moon Program (2014) - dctoedt http://motherboard.vice.com/read/john-aaron-apollo-12-curiosity-luck-and-sce-to-aux ====== dmd > (For the astronauts, speeding into space at one and a half times the speed > of sound, a mile and a half up, time, according to Einstein, was literally > slowing down.) Indeed! Those intrepid relativistic explorers, at Mach 1.5, would experience 0.99999999999855 seconds for every 1 we poor earth-bound non-moving folks did. Of course, once they were on the way to the moon, moving at the far faster 11 km/s, then they'd _really_ start to get some relativity going on: 0.9999999993 seconds for every 1 in our rest frame. ~~~ ubernostrum The relativistic effects of just being a satellite in Earth orbit are enough that GPS has to correct for it. Don't discount the impact of even tiny errors in this stuff. ~~~ rimantas Don't discount the importance of context. ------ Animats This is a dumbed-down version of a story told in more detail in various histories of Apollo. I think it's in Mike Collins' book. Anyway, there are key points here that the story doesn't mention. The Saturn V booster's control system was completely independent of the crew capsule systems. It had its own guidance, gyros, computers, and telemetry, those were all working, and the ground knew they were all working. The astronauts had no control over the booster anyway; they could abort, but that's all. They weren't driving at that point. As long as boost phase was going well, there was no urgent reason to abort; more altitude offered more return options, along with time to fix the problem. The Apollo stack had a good grounding system; the possibility of a lightning hit had been considered. Lightning didn't, in fact, do any significant damage to the onboard systems. ------ quesera > There was a driving rain on Cape Canaveral on the morning of November 14, > 1969 ... Interestingly, Cape Canaveral didn't formally exist in 1969. The name was changed to Cape Kennedy six years prior, and restored four years hence. Great article though. _Vice_ has come a long way. ------ raverbashing Funny how there was a small fumble with the 'SCE to AUX' and they didn't try to use the phonetic alphabet to solve that ------ grecy > _burning some thirteen metric tons of fuel per second_ Whoa, the mind boggles. ~~~ noselasd I suppose when you have 5 of these, [http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/eande-...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/eande-f1scale.jpg) , you can push a lot of fuel through.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men? - bootload http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/why-are-senior.html ====== Tichy "It is not acceptable if women are forced to choose between a family and a career in science." Why not? Since family has a price, how else could it work than having to make choices? I don't want to pay for other people's children, cute as the little things are. ~~~ Retric I could not help but thinking is she really that bad at logic and math, or does she think so little of her audience that we would let it pass? Microscopic sample + delayed effect = no meaningful data. PS: My sister was working as a plant geneticist for a while until she quit teaching yoga. Their might be an ongoing disparity but guessing from small samples is not enough.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Man agrees to pay $25,000 for abusing YouTube’s takedown system - headShrinker https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/man-agrees-to-pay-25000-for-abusing-youtubes-takedown-system/ ====== ropiwqefjnpoa If he had just incorporated himself he could do that legally along with all the other predatory "companies" doing this to YouTubers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hacker News currently not accessible in China - null_undefined http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=news.ycombinator.com ====== mckee1 Seems okay to me	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When Companies Don't Verify Email Addresses, This Is What Happens - srameshc https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianmorris/2017/08/01/when-companies-dont-verify-email-addresses-this-is-what-happens/ ====== smn1234 verifying identity by confirming personal details used at sign-up would probably be most effective to verify if the email address registered is most correct	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Gaming company Ouya is reportedly putting itself up for sale - lladnar http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8509005/ouya-android-microconsole-reportedly-seeking-buyer-debt ====== empressplay This was never going to end well. When you have a small form-factor platform with a large reach, and you attempt to introduce a larger form-factor with a small reach, it becomes impossible to convince developers to spend the disproportionate amount of money necessary to generate higher-resolution assets to accommodate it. It's just not worth it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
git-issue – Track issues within Git repositories - gaxun https://www.gaxun.net/ideas/git-issue/ ====== alphapapa > This is just an idea so far! If you think you know how to do it, I'd love to > hear about it. > Don't be too hard on me, I'm just dreaming in public. Then mark it as an idea in the headline. This is deceptive.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How To Steal From Your Competitors Using Twitter - outcyde http://www.adpoppr.com/blog/2009/07/how-to-steal-customers-from-your-competition-using-twitter/ ====== jlangenauer There's been a bit of debate lately amongst a few Australian bloggers about how Twitter is viewed by marketers as just another place where they must impose themselves, to shout their message. Not a damned consideration that we might not want it to be a commercial space, but instead would prefer it to be a social space. (As the blogger Stilgherrian notes below, there are boundaries, within which, commercial action in social networks might be tolerated. But the sort of thing the OP advocates is certainly not within any conception of those boundaries that I have.) [http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/conversations-are- not-m...](http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/conversations-are-not-markets- people/) ~~~ bjplink The problem with complaining about being imposed on via Twitter is that you can't be imposed on unless you invite them to bother you. While spammers, scammers and a-holes run rampant on Twitter right now they're only effective if you open the door and let them in. If you don't, your only inconvenience is a lot of fake followers which should only be of benefit to people looking to stroke their own egos with large follower numbers anyway. ~~~ outcyde Well I used to agree with what you said until I realized spammers can't start to chip away at your brand and image on Twitter. One new tactic they've just started is using @replies to show up in your stream. Just recently I've had a sex toy company and a female escort service @ reply using my handle. While everyone knows I am not a sexual deviant (at least I hope they know that.), I don't think this is good for anyone's personal or company brand. One way I have found to combat this is by just blocking the persons account. Then the @ reply disappears. But once spammers figure this one and out these types of @ replies become rampant, how long will I have to spend blocking these people?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hackers Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers’ Sex Lives - 001sky http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/24/hackers-stole-secrets-of-u-s-government-workers-sex-lives.html ====== mindslight "U.S. Government Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers’ Sex Lives" Public understanding needs to shift to condemning those who collect and aggregate such data. Once it's aggregated, the question isn't _if_ but _when_ it will be copied wholesale. ~~~ bketelsen Came here to say the same thing. Why is the government collecting secrets of its workers' sex lives? Why is it being stored? All data is subject to theft. The bigger question is why it was collected and stored in the first place. The government is responsible here. ~~~ Someone1234 So they'd have blackmail material to use against potential leakers or defectors. They certainly did in the Edward Snowden case (remember the whole "girl is a stripper" thing that was meant to damage him but backfired?). ~~~ ianstallings These are investigations for clearances. They ensure that the candidate doesn't have anything that can be exploited by a foreign government. The article mentioned this. Before you get a clearance you'll have to go through a _very thorough_ background check. In the case of top secret information they'll dig into your entire life and even give you what's called a "full lifestyle polygraph", meaning no topic is off limits. ~~~ Someone1234 I was more answering their second question: "Why is it being stored?" ------ Someone1234 > Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told > lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a “classified session.” Does anyone get the sense that often times "classified" is just a cover for "embarrassing?" Essentially information they know their political opponents have, but really wish to conceal from the American public? The whole American intelligence machine is (and related, like secret courts) is very creepy. Definitely starting to wonder if the whole thing can be kept under any kind of control with the levels of indirection. Congressional oversight is a nice theory, but when the people who do the overseeing are either former spooks or in the pockets of monied corporate interests who sell kit to the spooks, you really have to question how powerful oversight is in this case (and if negative reports will too be "classified"). ------ Tangokat In case anyone was wondering the SF86 form that many people apparently had to fill out is available here: [http://www.gsa.gov/portal/forms/download/116390](http://www.gsa.gov/portal/forms/download/116390) It's the single biggest form I have ever seen. Storing this information along side "information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity." seems insane. The arrogance required to think this is a good idea blows my mind. ------ tdaltonc This is the consequence of the NSA/CIA/etc preference for an insecure internet. They'd rather keep there offensive edge as opposed to contributing to a secure web that improves everyones defense. Perfect security is impossible, but things could be a lot better. This might not have happened if the US intelligence system were dedicated to making the internet a more secure platform. ------ ljk doesn't government workers have all the intimate details of every U.S. citizen?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Textual configuration has comments, GUIs don't. - raganwald http://machinesplusminds.blogspot.com/2011/06/textual-configuration-has-comments-guis.html ====== synnik "There is no good way to put comments into GUI." Maybe he hasn't seen any, but this seems a harsh conclusion. Whoever wrote the GUI could track history of changes, make comments required, and show it in the GUI. There is a vast difference between "there is no way", and "I haven't seen it done right" ~~~ bradleyland We've solved this type of problem before with a set of meta-config entries. Each field gets an entry in the meta-config table. There is a small mouse-over widget next to each config field that allows you to view/edit comments for that specific config item. It's no where near as simple as comments in a text file, but it's more "user" friendly, where the user is someone other than a programmer. The primary reason one builds a GUI around a configuration is for guidance. Text based configuration is great if you're accustomed to reading error messages that contain line numbers, but GUI interfaces are able to provide a lot clearer direction for visually oriented people. With a GUI, you can highlight the issues using color, weight, and even motion. You can also provide guidance for correcting the error directly next to the item with the issue. ------ rlpb A bigger feature missing in most GUIs is that I can't tell what has changed from the defaults. On the other hand, most text configuration files contain _only_ what has changed from default, which is exactly what I want to know. ~~~ nodata I would say the biggest problem with text configuration files is that you can't ever be sure what the default is. The problem is that: 1\. Config files need _visible_ defaults 2\. Config files need to show current values 3\. _Config files need comments_ 4\. Config files need to be small or they get unreadable Doing all four is tricky. Postfix gets close: postconf will show you all config entries. Add -d to get defaults instead. Or try -n to show settings which have been changed. Even with Postfix you have the big file/comments problem, so what you do is refer to a copy of the original main.cf file, or one stored in the docs under /usr/share/doc/postfix for a thorough explanation of all settings and keep a bare minimum config file with comments in /etc/postfix. ~~~ rlpb > I would say the biggest problem with text configuration files is that you > can't ever be sure what the default is. Arguably defaults are always there, whether configurable or not. Thus you cannot claim to be familiar with an application unless you know how it behaves in its default configuration (whether that is in a GUI or a text file). I think this is fundamental and not an issue that configuration (text, GUI or otherwise) needs to deal with. > 1\. Config files need _visible_ defaults I agree, but I don't see that this should be in the config file. I do think that there should be a way to see what these are. Your postconf example is perfect for this. Like you, I'm in favour of keeping the bare minimum config file only. Comments should only describe something local about the site (just like "i += 1 # add one to i" is wrong). Documentation of configuration variables should be somewhere else. ~~~ nodata > Arguably defaults are always there, whether configurable or not. Thus you > cannot claim to be familiar with an application unless you know how it > behaves in its default configuration (whether that is in a GUI or a text > file). I don't agree with this part. The best way of learning about a program is to play with it. Knowing how a program is expected to behave is key, and without defaults you don't. Even if someone knows the defaults, they will change. (I agree with the rest of what you wrote) ------ pohl Unless the config file uses JSON as a format. Then no comments for you! ~~~ orangecat I've done something like this: {"height": 100, "width": 150", "__comment__": "This is a comment"} Of course depending on the implementation details this may keep the comment string in memory. I agree JSON should have native comments, as well as optional trailing commas. ~~~ alavrik I don't think JSON as a _data interchange format_ should have comments. Key factors contributing to JSON's popularity and great practical value is simplicity and the fact that JSON is a final specification (i.e. no versioning, no extensions, no backward compatibility requirements). Although JSON is human-readable, it wasn't specifically designed for human interaction. There are other projects and languages that address this specific topic. For example, Yaml and Piq. (Piq is the one that I'm working on as a part of the Piqi project -- <http://piqi.org>). ------ rauljara While I do prefer text configuration over guis, I had two thoughts that kind of run counter to his point: 1) There's nothing inherent about guis that prevents them from having a space for comments. Perhaps gui designers should consider leaving spots for comments in complex config situations. 2) A lot of the comments I see in config files are little notes about what this or that setting actually does... comments that are generally not needed in a well designed gui. But then again, I am not a sysadmin. YYMV. ~~~ burgerbrain Comments in configuration files are approximately equivalent to those "tooltip" things GUIs sometimes have. I think comments are a much better method though since GUIs often seem to be missing their equivalent and even when present, it's a pain in the ass to use. ~~~ Someone I disagree. Comments in configuration files can serve (at least) two purposes: \- to explain what a setting does. \- to document why you chose a value for the setting. Tooltips can do the former, but not the latter. ~~~ burgerbrain Yes, I am revering to point 2 of the GP. ------ Hoff Use whatever is appropriate and suited for your needs. GUI. Text. Front-panel register toggle switches. Wire wrap. Jumper boards. Whatever. Each of these has its adherents, of course. A single problematic XML configuration editor is not a sufficient justification to cling to the morass that a manually-edited configuration file can provide; to paint a whole class of tools. It's probably a better justification for making improvement in the tools you're using; annoyance is a powerful motivator. If the current configuration editor is insufficient for your needs, consider fixing it. There are good configuration editors, and there are bad ones, and configuration file errors can run from subtle to blatant, and have definitely introduced legions of errors. And as with most everything UI in this industry, there are trade-offs between what an experienced user needs or wants here (or the pain such a user is willing to endure, depending on your perspective) and a UI that will utterly drown a new user. (And these days, and beyond a classic GUI configuration file editor, tossing the underlying configuration file settings into a DVCS certainly has its appeal. Consider the ability to do a git bisect on a buggy startup file, for instance. Possibly through the GUI, or at the command line. ) ------ hollerith Loosely related: a lot of the directories on my hard drive contain comments about the directory in a file named .header, and I redefined ls to cat .header if it exists. A graphical file browser could do the same thing. ------ albertzeyer We at OpenLieroX actually tried to solve this for game settings. OLX is a 2D shooter-like game. In the game settings dialog, for each setting which was changed by the user, it shows a 'reset' button next to it. Also there is a way to just show the changed settings. You can also filter the settings by how advanced you want to go (a bit similar like in VLC but with more levels). And when you hover one setting, there is a comment section below the dialog which describes the setting. ------ jasongullickson I myself have definitely learned more about something from reading it's configuration files than clicking through a "Wizard".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Western diet increases Alzheimer's risk (2016) - jamesknelson https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160825102121.htm ====== Nomentatus A genius experiment designed to track down just what the difference in diet is and does: [https://medium.com/@russjj/choline-is-it-the-key-to- modern-i...](https://medium.com/@russjj/choline-is-it-the-key-to-modern- illnesses-5da8f831a04b)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
HTML5 New Target for Cybercriminals - 8ig8 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16005053 ====== nextparadigms I'm getting really tired of the "cyber" warfare. It's obvious they are just now starting to push hard for it, thinking they'll get people to give up even more rights and let them spy all their activities online, so they can _maybe_ catch some "cyber-criminals". ------ 8ig8 How does this article get published? It has a single source who happens to run a technology firm... Plant fear. Profit. Is there no money left in news that the reporter could not make some calls to verify or dispute these claims?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Biotech in the Garage - cindywu123 http://sethbannon.com/biotech-in-the-garage ====== searine Yes there are "bio-hacker spaces" and yes, you can outsource a lot of the more delicate methods, but we won't see software-level start-ups for biotech for several decades for three reasons. 1\. Biology usually doesn't work. Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work. This requires precise, expensive, equipment and endless optimization of protocols. The result is a tremendous drain on resources to get what usually amounts to a negative result 2\. Bio is inherently perishable. You can't let a start-up project linger as you chip away at it for 3 years. Reagents expire, lab-cultures will mutate, equipment rusts/breakdowns/gets contaminated for stupid unforeseeable reasons. 3\. There is a stupidly large legal burden if you ever want to commercialize. At every step of the process the USDA, EPA, FDA, and patent office have rules and regulations to slow you down. It might take decades to take a product from the lab to the store self, if it gets there at all. Bio isn't computing. As a geneticist, I've seen it a hundred times where some start-up know-it-all walks into the biotech field and thinks its "just like software". It isn't, and never will be. ~~~ dnautics Wait what? > Biology usually doesn't work. No. This is not true. Biology usually works, it's that the most interesting academic things tend to be on the bleeding edge, and that's where things are not robust. Of course, I'm not saying that there isn't debugging to be done, but it's not THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult _literally in my garage_ right now (growing a strain with a doubling time of about 6 hours). I can reproducibly make the anticancer compound in one of my strains and am working on debugging and getting a second strain running. ([https://benchling.com/ityonemo/f/cHjBceoz-project- marilyn/et...](https://benchling.com/ityonemo/f/cHjBceoz-project-marilyn/etr- etHejg9x-culture-test-2/edit)) > Even the simplest wet-lab reactions take very exacting conditions to work. Not true. For example I have done over 300 gibson assembly reactions and have taught an intern to do this, he made 50 constructs in _2 months_ , with time left over for him to biochemically test 25 of them. My procedure was literally, take 1 microlitre of each DNA (don't even bother measuring), and throw on top an equal volume of gibson mix, and then go. Worked nearly every time. It is quite true that equipment requires a high capital expenditure and it's hard to start up, but those problems are able to be overcome. (e.g. [http://blog.indysci.org/starting-a-lab-under- budget/](http://blog.indysci.org/starting-a-lab-under-budget/)) For example, I have bacterial growth incubator that was being thrown out by herbalife when they upgraded their microbiological QC lab. ~~~ DaveWalk > it's not THAT hard. I'm doing something relatively difficult literally in my > garage right now That's great for your cell-based experiments; and many of the greatest biology discoveries were made with this toolset in the first half of the 20th century. But what about in vivo experiments with mice and rats? What about X-ray crystallography? What about high throughput screening and counterscreening in the range of millions done _before_ a compound is even considered to be a drug candidate? This is hard stuff, and it's necessary stuff. Exacting conditions are absolutely essential to achieve the highest chance of reproducibility. Even so, it has been famously reported that somewhere around 11% of published findings can be reproduced independently[0]. [0] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html) ~~~ dnautics A five armed mouse study for an anticancer drug runs in the 10-60k range (I can't give my exact quote at the moment). This is inexpensive. The expensive stuff is when you go into humans. ~~~ DaveWalk I guess if you're outsourcing it? In my time in academia I knew labs that burned through $25,000 per _month_ in mouse cage costs. I can only guess what "five arms" you are referring to, but toxicity studies and efficacy studies often require different animals. Not just mice but transgenic mice, or nude mice with xenografts, etc. This has to be pricey to get the statistical power you need for a drug candidate. I've also heard that the FDA likes to see more than one animal, so either rats or monkeys may be dosed as well. It all adds up. ~~~ dnautics Well no one is going to get a drug approved for the FDA exclusively from the garage, but there is a reasonable amount of initial stage research that you could conceivably do from your garage. My project is to push that out to the 'xenograft' stage, which in my opinion is close to the limit, if not the limit. Full disclosure, I'm doing the chemistry in a rented chemistry lab space because I don't want to suffocate myself with chloroform. Five arms, refers to an experiment with three dosages, a null control and a positive control. Yes, you can outsource things, which is exactly what I'm doing (it's cheaper _and_ more ethical), but also the model has become really good where you don't have to sack an animal for each time point. That cuts down on costs by a lot. ------ willholloway > the cost of founding a biotech startup is dropping precipitously. If current > trends continue, biotech companies will soon be founded in garages, funded > off their founders’ credit cards. > A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get > paying customers for under $2,000. Trivial marginal cost to start a company is a disruptive triumph for sure, financially supporting the founders basic human needs is now the primary obstacle. And of course he that hath wife and children have given hostages to great fortune. Having no full time employment responsibilities on your horizon is the greatest boost in cognitive and creative power I have ever experienced. I made a mad dash to get a hardware product built and funded before my small savings stash was depleted, but missed the mark. I had to go back and get a job so that the mission could continue. Going back to solving other peoples problems feels like a lobotomy. The distraction of full time employment is immense and soul crushing. I was living in a house of science and beautiful innovation, and I hit a brick wall. But of course to paraphrase Russel Brand, god and a lack of liquidity is my enemy, just obstacles to clamber over and damage to route around. Luckily my product is something people want and get excited about and now that I've proven it works seed funding is now on the way, but goddamn what a bummer running out of runway is. When the world wakes up and humans get over their miserly aversion to sharing, and realize a guaranteed basic minimum income is in their own enlightened self-interest we will really cross the threshold and reach the innovation singularity. ~~~ digi_owl Stuff like this is what makes one ponder citizen wage as something other than a flight of fancy. ~~~ rezistik I think culturally, and perhaps it's generational as a Millennial but I doubt that[1], I think culturally we have to ask ourselves why people work? I don't have enough information to state this factually, hopefully if someone does they'll chime in but maybe the reasons we wake up and go to work are changing. If we are moving towards a society where we look more for meaning than for money we can very easily come to the conclusion that basic income wouldn't break the economy, but bolster it. Instead of doing menial labor to pay bills we'd try harder to find our way as artists, engineers and other specialized trades that offer fulfillment. Certainly some people will use their basic income to avoid work, but what is the percentage of that? I don't know many people who embrace boredom. Most people want to do something of value, and many people need to do something of value. We are either approaching a reality we as humans have always wanted or shifting our societies desires depending on historical information(that I don't have). Inching closer and closer to post-scarcity will be very interesting indeed. [1]I don't think Millennial's are all that special even if we think we are. ~~~ dnautics Because working ensures that you're doing something that is useful to someone else. "Most people want to do something of value." A universal basic income is kind of this wierd bourgeois selfish projection wrapped in this veneer of being altruistic: To be 'freed to do whatever one prefers' is really saying "I want to do what I want, regardless of whether or not it's socially beneficial". The wierd thing about free markets is that although one can be selfish and money-grubbing, even the most mendacious and stingy person must do _something_ in the service of another to accrue capital. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _The wierd thing about free markets is that although one can be selfish and > money-grubbing, even the most mendacious and stingy person must do something > in the service of another to accrue capital._ And the failure mode of that is people ending up doing things in service on someone else that do a net damage to society, while other people do something in service of someone else to undo the work of the first group. Not to mention people stuck in positive feedback loops that waste increasing amount of resources on cancelling each other out. See marketing for a good example. Just because something is useful to someone, doesn't mean it should be done. ------ reasonattlm The incentives here have been changing in favor of progress and the breaking down of the life science academic priesthood for years, but this piece omits a very important part of the landscape, which is regulation and the present state of law. People in the diybio community are justifiably very cautious about what they say and do, as there is there very real threat of getting thrown in jail for no real reason other than they have a lab. The war on drugs on one hand and hysteria about terrorism on the other have done a great deal to make it risky to do home life science work. Beyond that regulation makes it hard to impossible to do near anything useful with animal tissues on a garage hacking basis, and if you're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point, really? Might as well build a cat webapp if your horizon is limited to glowing plants. So there is a lot of tension here between what is possible and what is permitted. That has been an issue in early stage research for decades now, and has cost uncounted lives and years of progress. This is just the stage in which that becomes more apparent as more people could, in theory, participate. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _and if you 're not improving the state of medicine, what's the point, > really?_ There are tons of applications not related to medicine in any way. Replace "bio" with "nano" (the former being a particular implementation of the latter) to see them. ------ roadnottaken From someone who works in the biotech industry, this is utter rubbish. Most good ideas in biopharma are wrong and don't work. You don't get to really test them out in a meaningful way until you get into human clinical trials. It costs 10's to 100's of millions of dollars to get there. No matter what you do in your garage, it's going to take lots of capitol and hard work before there's a glimmer of hope of a sale-able product... and even then it's just a glimmer. Comparing biotech to IT is just stupid, despite a few superficial similarities. ~~~ charlesdenault With a formal education in biology, I've always thought the industry was much like the computer industry a few decades ago. Jobs & Gates arguably took something that was limited to corporations and Universities, and brought it to the masses. It's a matter of time before there's a startup that revolutionizes something from their garage. Just think where we were before PCR was around, imagine what's next? With open source tools, OpenWetWare, etc, it's lowering the barriers to entry. Who says it's restricted to pharma and human clinical trials? There's plenty of room for innovation in many other areas (GMOs, synthetic bio, methods, tools). Plus, Bill Gates (loosely) agrees. [0] [0]: [http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you- biolo...](http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biology- hackers/) ~~~ DaveWalk I don't think you're the first person to have this vision, and most all bio- entrepreneurs I've spoken too felt this way at some point. Right now there's quite a gulf between the technology we have and the masses' utility for it. While I have never gotten use out of OpenWetWare's wiki of loosely edited protocols, I could see companies with the nonprofit mindset of Addgene paving the way for that visionary future. ~~~ DaveWalk But actually, the more I think about it, I enjoy your analogy. The missing tools for sure in "DIYbio" are consumer-oriented lab technologies. Something like a 3D printer for budding biologists to gather themselves around...but nothing really comes to mind. Even a homebrew qPCR machine or sequencing platform leaves out many cruicial components like incubators, ultracentrifuges, etc. Can't even get started on mass spectrometers, flow cytometers or other "Core" technologies that not even every lab can own. To stretch the analogy more, though, I don't think there is a "Homebrew Biotech Club" in the same groovy, sharing sense than that which Jobs and Gates had way back when. ------ TeMPOraL I think equating biotech with medicine is an error, made here both by the article and by commenters. Yes, it's true that most ideas in biopharma don't work, they require superexpensive trials to figure out which are worth anything, that you have tons of expensive tests to pass and licenses to acquire before anyone lets you give your product to people. But biology is not just medicine. Life itself is an advanced nanotechnology that was not build by us, and that we don't control _yet_. Replace "biotech" with "nanotech" and suddenly, whole other fields of potential applications appear, many of which may not (yet) require the amount of testing and care you need when dealing with patients. Obvious areas include manufacturing and chemistry. We already genetically modify organisms to produce chemicals we need. There are people working on reprogramming bacteria and viruses to fabricate nanostructures for better batteries and solar panels. Recently on iGEM a team of students designed bacteria that can extract rare earth metals from the soil. There are many other potential fields - grown textiles, biofilters, materials that regenerate (potentially cutting down infrastructure maintenance costs), computational matter... I wouldn't discard the DIYBio movement just like that. There are many areas in which it could shine. ------ pcrh What the author is describing is two separate trends. One trend relates to the rapidly dropping cost of genetic studies -- this leads to easier and cheaper identification of human mutations, novel microbial species, comparative genomics, etc. The other trend is for outsourcing of specific biological experiments to what used to be called "contract research organizations" (CROs) and now are "startups". The "silicon valley company" "Mousera" referred to seems to be one of these re-branded CROs. This particular trend has been encouraged by the flight of experienced scientists from the rapidly contracting amount of basic research performed in Big Pharma (check the resumes of those involved). While this combination makes it easier for a "virtual company" to get off the ground, it does not really equate to the sort of startup that the software industry is familiar with -- it might be more similar to hardware startups (though that's not my field, so feel free to correct.) As to costs, the cost of genetics will continue to drop, but the outsourcing of experiments will not render them any cheaper than before (most likely), as the neo-CROs also want to profit. ~~~ technotony there's a reason these companies are startups not CRO's, because they are applying technology to solve problems and that means they can grow fast. Outsourcing costs are falling fast for the same reasons that hardware startups costs are falling: software eating the world. In this case a convergence of automation/internet of things technologies with lab technologies means lower cost experiments, more leverage from researchers (code once and anyone can reuse your code) etc. ~~~ pcrh You're correct that specific technologies can drive a small company (Heptares in the UK [0] -- springs to mind). Mostly, though they are business-to- business, rather than the typical view of startups. [0][http://www.heptares.com/](http://www.heptares.com/) ------ jqm Biohackers were among the first hackers. In thatched stables and open fields. Thousands of years ago. (Although it's true the potential scope has grown considerably...) ------ akehrer It's great that the tools and services the article mentions are out there but I think the author misses the wide gulf there is between limits of what can be done in a garage or shared lab and the resources, time and capital to do things like synthetic biology and drug discovery. It would be interesting to see where the DIY biotech movement could apply the biotech research tools and methods to where people are already doing home "biohacking". Could home brewers and fermenters gain insight into what's going on inside their jars? Maybe small scale farmers would be interested in quantifying the bacteria in their soil. Larger brewers are already using PCR to check for spoilers in their beer, could this be turned in to BaaS (Biology as a Service) and expanded, or trickled down to the home brewer? ~~~ DaveWalk BaaS, hah! The rest of the world calls 'em CROs :) In theory, one could develop a CRO for DIY biologists, but I just wonder how many of them there actually are. We've made comments downpage about releasing biology to the masses like Jobs and Gates did with their PCs and operating systems...but it really feels like something is missing. The passion of the Homebrew Computing Club? The public's aversion to science, or maybe its short attention span for failed experiments? ~~~ akehrer Yeah, BaaS :-), but what CRO would take on those type of jobs when they can't charge what they do for clinical trials or drug discovery. I'm not sure how much interest there is either and I agree that something is missing. Maybe affordable kits similar to how PCs became more accessible to the masses as IC prices came down. Maybe bringing modern scientific equipment in to school biology classes to expand public knowledge beyond test tubes and bunsen burners. ------ VLM A negative area to avoid in the discussion would be the computing analogy that having computing as a hobby is a complete waste of time because a brand new CPU fab line costs in the billions and uses all kinds of non-garage compatible toxic chemicals, or the standard automotive analogy that no one can or should be a gearhead because so few living rooms have space for a supercomputer cluster to do finite element analysis and fluid dynamics simulations. I predict long term that bio will be much like electronics or ham radio where the population drops by maybe half at each tier or level, but there sure are a lot of people at lower levels of the hobby...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Browser GUI - SeanDav How would you go about writing a GUI that would run in most browsers on all platforms that support those browsers, even if offline? An example might be a Spreadsheet application that would still work offline but have extra abilities online (cloud storage, collaboration etc). The ability to display charts and simple animations/sounds would be a requirement.<p>Some other things to discuss: 1. How would this picture change if offline ability was not a requirement? 2. What if the application was very graphics/sound intensive (game)?<p>(Hope this isn't too general a question) ====== spooneybarger Hope this isn't too general of an answer but... you might want to take a look at the Cappuccino web framework ( <http://cappuccino.org> ) that 280 North ( <http://280north.com> ) used to build 280 Slides ( <http://280slides.com> ). Also take a look at SproutCore ( <http://sproutcore.com> ). Both of those would be good places for starting an application like what I think you are getting at. From there, some of the other stuff might follow from there. ------ petervandijck Flash comes to mind.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My "Chrome to Phone" knockoff app for iOS - checker659 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jumping-url/id388521070?mt=8 ====== checker659 Link to website : <http://www.jumpingurl.com>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Help create this image - aeliassen http://image.andreaseliassen.com/ ====== oftenwrong Got an error: >Error. >An error occurred while processing your request. ~~~ memming Same here. But the history still says I added a point. ~~~ aeliassen I was stupid enough not to check if the colors were actual colors before generating the image. Fixed now :) ------ nathanb When I went there, a number of the "latest" pixels were attempted SQL injections. I'm not sure what table they were expecting to drop, but I found it highly amusing. ------ danielweber Other collaborative projects: [http://www.lunchtimers.com/](http://www.lunchtimers.com/) [http://www.drawball.com/](http://www.drawball.com/) ~~~ nobodysfool tiles.ice.org was good, now they have a new site, but it's not quite there yet, the forums are filled with spam. It was a collaborative art project, where either you were given a tile to draw of a larger piece. Either you were shown only the edges of the adjacent tiles, or you were only shown the adjacent tiles, but you had to fill in the blanks. It was fun to participate. ------ chippy Love the idea. I wonder how long before someone games the system. ~~~ Ecco Not long. while true;do curl '[http://image.andreaseliassen.com/'](http://image.andreaseliassen.com/') -H 'Cookie: __RequestVerificationToken=q5IL6oao6oM_BsNUv7Zz05G_tQ12JIqMwOcRRQFVUgKVNRkIoahQV3Jh07WlQ00jqO6mOnrd28xWc0uDyl9JbjUsXe1WDEkZYSY- jprDMoU1; _gat=1; _ga=GA1.2.1424136150.1412779486' -H 'Origin: [http://image.andreaseliassen.com'](http://image.andreaseliassen.com') -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' -H 'Accept-Language: fr-FR,fr;q=0.8,en- US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4' -H 'User-Agent: OhOh' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www- form-urlencoded' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp, _/_ ;q=0.8' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' -H 'Referer: [http://image.andreaseliassen.com/'](http://image.andreaseliassen.com/') -H 'Connection: keep-alive' \--data '__RequestVerificationToken=XIWebCA-B3ppZ8xCFfRfzk0cHweqxeRBQPL8BXVsBsrYKW9ptd2y8UcMKm9x8GjgCiGKyjnvvMhRZ0YstYUXybdUiVsIFXuNyv_GgW9WFSI1&colorHex=%23ff1717&userName=SystemGamer' \--compressed;done ~~~ aeliassen I guess I should stop it from working, but it creates a nice pattern when multiple people do this. ------ louhike Do you try to test something with this? ~~~ aeliassen I'm just really curious about how it'll turn out. ~~~ danielweber Someone's trying to draw a picture, but they're not accounting for other people inserting pixels, so it's ending up shifted. ~~~ juanuys I'm a bit of a pixel bender, so chucking a Johnny Cash up there knowing others will skew it :-)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: NeuralDraw, an AI-powered speed-drawing game, on your iPhone - soonpls https://apps.apple.com/app/neural-draw/id1440577395 ====== beezle suggest 'on your iPhone' if it is not also available on the Android platform.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google Launches Ingress, a Worldwide Mobile Alternate Reality Game - sek http://allthingsd.com/20121115/google-launches-ingress-a-worldwide-mobile-alternate-reality-game/ ====== blocke I've been so waiting for something like this. While I'm expecting to be disappointed by this early effort the idea is exciting and something that was inevitable. There was a great anime series that sadly doesn't have distribution in the US called Denno Coil[1] that is required viewing for anyone interested in augmented reality. The series follows a group of kids in a city that grow up with Google Glasses type functionality with virtual pets and software as "magic". The kids lead a life based upon this augmented reality laid over the real reality. If you like anime this show is worth tracking down a torrent for. It's also worth checking out the Halting State series from Charles Stross if you're up for some reading. [1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil> ~~~ lmm If you like that kind of thing I'll push Kaiba as a further-future look at a world where the ability to edit memories and change bodies makes personal identity much more nebulous. It's all emphasised with these amorphous visuals that are a great example of something that's only possible in the animated medium. ~~~ Raphael Sounds like Dollhouse, which was live actors. ~~~ lmm You could tell the same story in live action but it would be pretty much impossible to get the same kind of visuals (even the _A Scanner Darkly_ technique wouldn't be enough) - and it's the way the visuals dovetail with the world and the story that makes Kaiba so great. ------ lancewiggs I like the underlying customer cause here - Let's get people off their chairs, on to the streets and meeting each other. Let's create interestingness in the mundane. Let's create a world which rewards interaction. A lovely antidote to the trend for us to all walk around with heads down, checking the latest irrelevancy on our smartphones. ~~~ criley I love the underlying engineering cause -- let's get everyone to keep a GPS/data link open while they walk around popular city attractions and roadways so we can build an amazing pedestrian pathfinding system. ~~~ ralfn Bingo. We have a winner. ------ jobu It's scary how much this sounds like the world envisioned by Daniel Suarez in Daemon: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(technothriller_series)> Google has diverless cars, Glasses that overlay information on top of reality, and now is making a sort of game out of it. ~~~ sown Also reminded me of Vinge's _Rainbow's Edge_. ~~~ jonnycowboy And of course the Metaverse in Snow Crash. ~~~ TeMPOraL And then Black Oceans by Jacek Dukaj. One of the most idea-dense book I ever read. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czarne_oceany> ------ rescripting I find it odd there is no discussion about what Google's motivation/business case is for Ingress. Reddit user Sharper_pmp has a compelling theory that it's an attempt to collect pedestrian route data to compete with Nokia's newly announced turn-by-turn routes for pedestrians. He also brings up instances in the past where Google has created mutually beneficial ways to have people voluntarily build their data sets. [http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launches_ingress_a_worldwide_mobile/c71v7yv?context=2) ~~~ shaper_pmp _Shaper_ _pmp, but thanks for the mention. ;-) ------ Osmium It seems to me that, with the ubiquity of smartphones and how powerful they're becoming, it's only a matter of time before there's a constantly-evolving digital facsimile of the real world. We've started to see how, for example, many geo-tagged photos can be reconstructed into a pointcloud (see Microsoft's Photosynth amongst others), and how everyone is now carrying a location-aware camera-computer in their pockets... Projects like streetview would become obsolete. The possibility for alternate reality games will be immense, but I suspect that's just scratching the surface. We've only had this smartphone technology for what? 5 years or so? And so far all ours uses for this technology have been fairly superficial and mundane (by which I mean, if you'd gone back a decade and asked people "what would you make if you had a smartphone that could do _x_?" you'd probably get decent predictions of the present day). But in 10, 20 years I imagine it'll have evolved to something far beyond what we can currently imagine. ~~~ dansingerman Didn't you know? We are living in a simulated reality: <http://www.simulation- argument.com/simulation.html> (Probably) ~~~ RivieraKid "We are in a simulation" is a meaningless statement. It's like saying that there are millinons of invisible unicorns on Earth. ~~~ rictic Nitpick: "We are in a perfect and undetectable simulation" is a meaningless statement. If e.g. someone found a privilege escalation in our reality's VM that would be quite meaningful. ~~~ rubinelli Reality hackers? Let's badger Charlie Stross to write a novel about it. :) ~~~ BoppreH There's a great novel based on this very concept: Fine Structure ( <http://everything2.com/title/Fine+Structure> ). Definitely worth a read. ------ wfn There's some nice discussion about Google's possible motivations for doing this here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launches_ingress_a_worldwide_mobile/c71v7yv?context=2) Granted, speculation, but rather convincing. >TL;DR: Whatever the plot's about, the point of it is to quickly and cheaply build an unrivaled corpus of pedestrian-accessible routes, locations and journey-times for the next generation of foot-enabled Google Maps and Navigation apps _Edit_ seems that user 'rescripting' somewhere above has already made a reference to that discussion. ------ Finster Seems like more of an Augmented Reality Game and not really a traditional ARG (Alternate Reality Game). The difference seems trivial but is quite significant. ~~~ jlees It's both. The ARG trailhead is at <http://www.nianticproject.com/> ------ biot This is very reminiscent of EA's Majestic game: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)> It was like X-Files conspiracy theories meets The Game (the Michael Douglas movie). Sadly, it didn't last very long. I'm hoping this will do better. ~~~ ben1040 I wonder if Majestic would have done better if it didn't launch a month and a half before 9/11. People were on edge then, and a game that ends up making mysterious phone calls to you probably wouldn't go over well. I actually thought it was a pretty cool concept from at least what little I played of it. ------ dirtyaura It resembles so much Shadow Cities (<http://www.shadowcities.com/>) that it almost feels like copying. ~~~ nixarn Yeah, I wonder if Grey Area is involved with this? ~~~ shawn-butler Not the first to, shall we say, draw extensive inspiration from shadow cities: <http://qonqr.com/> There is so little shame in the industry anymore, but it is admittedly a very difficult task to be creative in a gaming startup. Competition is a good thing I guess. I'd hate to be competing with Google though. Their fanboi base is suffuse with a devotion that borders on unquestioning faith which plays well in the gaming segment where the hard part is initially attracting critical mass for the underlying game dynamic to be fun. ~~~ saraid216 Did World of Fourcraft predate Shadow Cities? <http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/world-of-fourcraft/> ~~~ shawn-butler No, shadow cities predates that game by over a year, but it remained a fairly European presence at the time. And the games are fairly distinct, that looks to be simply a "squatting" game with little strategy. Look at the other 2 games linked and you find they are not only disturbingly similar in game mechanics but the graphics are also fairly derivative. ------ rmrfrmrf A nice play to refine their map accuracy with Waze-style gamification (plus advertising, of course). ------ jchrisa Looks like they are paving the way for a Google Glass world. ------ incision Very cool, I've been talking about something like this on and off for several years now with friends. I've been continually fascinated with the possibilities of AR since about the time of Eye of Judgement [1] and even more after fooling with Layar [2] on my OG Droid back in 2009. The possibilities seem endless, not just games or gamification but public safety, education - all sorts of things. I'm a bit disappointed to find that this project is invite only, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how it plays out. 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP4TjzUfOeU> 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08> ------ forgotAgain The name is a surprise. The Ingres database is still kicking, it's an OSS project that's was a commercial product for 20 years before that. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)> ~~~ herbig But "ingress" is also an English language word, with a definition unrelated to what you're talking about. ------ aditya Lots of interesting stuff going on in this space. Shadow cities is another one that's doing pretty well. The big question to me is, where's the Zynga of this world? Can you make casual location aware ARGs? ~~~ pavel_lishin I tried playing Shadow Cities, and the interface was mostly confusing, so I stopped. ~~~ aditya Hmm. Are you a gamer? I'm not, and I don't play Shadow Cities anymore for the same reason but it seems to be doing well with people who're more active gamers, which is why I was wondering if there's a way to make the games more casual for people that don't want to live in that universe all the time. Foursquare is close, but it doesn't feel like a game at all. ~~~ pavel_lishin It wasn't the casualness of it - I literally had no idea what to do about nodes "near me", or what "battling" those sprite things did for me. Plus, those were the only two game mechanics I saw - I could battle things, and then I could click on nodes, and neither really seemed to progress me anywhere. I feel like that game should have had a much more thorough tutorial. ------ vyrotek Does anyone know if this is _really_ 'multiplayer' or if your experience is in any way influence by the progress of others? I've toyed with a similar ideas but the problem was that your GPS location doesn't guarantee you are really there. There are plenty of ways to spoof your location. So, my point is it will only be a matter of time until there are bots that walk around for you. If this is purely a 'single player' game then personally I think it's a neat idea but I don't see it being that entertaining. ~~~ tripzilch Couldn't you use physical QR code stickers for such proof of location? They can be fairly small and merely need to contain a random UID code (or an URL with the code as query parameter). Of course that only works up until people start sharing those codes online, even though you can tweak game mechanics to discourage players wanting to do that, it's impossible to prevent. ~~~ vyrotek _it's impossible to prevent._ Precisely. Which is why I think this will have a tough time succeeding. Even casual gamers will eventually get frustrated. This is also the sort of thing that is difficult to repair once the damage is done. ------ mixedbit Next on a TODO list: an Alternate Reality Game of which players are not aware. ~~~ TsiCClawOfLight YES! let's build the matrix! who's in with me? ~~~ mixedbit I would, but I'm busy selling stocks. ------ marcoamorales I've been wanting to play some ARG since I read Little Brother, can't wait to try this out. ------ andre A blog post I wrote back in 2007 (on Noah's blog) comparing Google and Daemon: <http://okdork.com/2007/06/18/is-google-the-daemon/> ------ DrewHintz [Edit: Looks like I currently have no invites left. As I get more, I'll give them out and update this post.] I think I have a few invites to give out. Let me know if you'd like one. P.S. I'm Resistance using the name drew ~~~ PhearTheCeal I'd like one, email address is pheartheceal@gmail.com ~~~ xshoppyx Anyway you can send one after joining? xshoppyx@hotmail.com ------ mcantelon The toolkit will be interesting to see once it's developed. ~~~ saraid216 I had some ideas for a "discover your community" ARG two years ago that might be able to take advantage of this. ------ jongraehl I hope the game (if it catches on) is sensitive to traffic congestion, or decreases rewards for driving in traffic, and further, doesn't steer people toward areas of increased smog, car-on-pedestrian accidents, or crime (I'll bet the EULA disclaims that liability). Getting shut-ins outside where they can be hit by cars may have net health benefits (and people can choose for themselves). ------ cail This looks really interesting to me. Fascinating to see more augmented reality concepts being pushed out. I am interested to see if this will eventually be tied in with glass. Google really seems to be pushing towards ubiquitous computing lately. Can't wait to try it out if I get an invite from them. ------ contingencies I find it more than a little scary that, coming from a company with as much influence as Google, the subliminal message here is that pro-technology people are "enlightened", and anyone else is "resistance". ~~~ adrianhoward And to me 'enlightened' sounds like hippy-religious-rubbish so I'd probably immediately plumb for resistance. With games like this you need to have both "sides" have an attractive "we're the goodies" pitch. I thought it was rather clever naming since I think I could argue myself into either camp quite easily. ------ skannamalai This is somewhat alarming for my team as we've been working on very similar stuff for a while now (albeit for iOS). Oh well, full steam ahead, I suppose. ~~~ vyrotek I'm curious, how are you dealing with cheaters via spoofed GPS locations? ~~~ skannamalai sorry, was sick all weekend! So far we haven't worked out anti-cheating strategies, because we haven't really structured the initial challenges around rewards or achievements, but rather around personal interests. As we add more traditional rewards and scoring type stuff (it hurts my soul to type gameification with sincerity) we'll have to start addressing cheating, particularly if we release clients on other platforms or a direct API to our system. ~~~ vyrotek No problem! I hope you can figure it out. I've had many ideas for GPS-based games but as an avid gamer I couldn't help see all the ways I could cheat my own system. Somewhat related... I'm not sure if you checked out my HN profile but I actually founded a gamification platform company called <http://IActionable.com> a few years ago. We started it before the word 'gamification' even existed got to watch in horror as people turned it into a cheap gimmick instead of properly implementing it. We actually don't like the term 'gamification' and the baggage that comes with it. Dealing with cheating was a high priority on our list when we initially targeted social applications but we eventually found the enterprise market to be the best fit for our technology. Basically, we were able to avoid the cheating problem because we made the 'game' involve people you really knew which naturally discouraged cheating. ~~~ skannamalai Thanks! I completely get what you are talking about re: the merits of meaningful game features vs just a cheap "gamification" job... something we'll have to keep an eye on as we move forward. This is my first company/product (ever) so it's a bit alarming how many things we've already realized we don't know. Thank you for your comments, I'm definitely going to check out your firm's site and from a business and personal interest standpoint because frankly it seems like you've thought through at least several things we haven't quite gotten to yet. For example, I hadn't realized (although perhaps intuitive in hindsight) that the context of whom you are playing with/against can effectively curb anti-social behavior like cheating. ------ truebecomefalse Sadly it seems to require an invite at this time. :( ------ piotr_krzyzek This is eerily similar to the show H+. Not on the same scale of course, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post. ------ sherjilozair Is this game available in all locations? Does anyone have an idea if this is available outside US? India? ------ rocky1138 Trailer seemed cool, but I'd like to see an actual gameplay video. Anyone have a link to real footage? ~~~ MattRix I think the stuff you're seeing the device screens in the trailer _is_ the gameplay footage... You go somewhere, scan around for "energy", and "hack it" or whatever. ------ syassami This is very cool and creative and will hopefully push the envelope for mobile alternate reality! ------ ajdecon If anyone has invites.... ;-) see profile for email address. ------ dvulises This make me remember Sword art online (anime) a little bit. ------ pibefision I want an invite! Tks ------ raghav305 Hi ... can someone please send me an invite .. Thanks in advance! ------ superphil0 Could someone please give me an invite key? :) ------ bnegreve Hum, since Google is an ad company I assume that bonus will magically appear in Starbucks and McDonalds. ------ raghav305 can anyone please invite me .. raghav305@gmail.com Thanks, ------ mikeevans Anyone have invites? ------ raghav305 can anyone please invite me raghav305@gmail.com thanks in advance! ------ raghav305 will this work in India? ------ indiecore So I'll ask the obvious question. Resistance or Enlightenment? ~~~ liberatus Be careful which you choose. You'll be shown specific ads on google based on it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Compiling OCaml directly to a new cloud operating system - nl http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2010-hotcloud-lamp.pdf ====== mathgladiator Woah, this is like my dream on steroids. during my weekends when I work on node.ocaml ( <http://github.com/mathgladiator/node.ocaml> ), I occasionally think "gosh, If I could just get rid of that pesky OS, then I would have the most perfect server ever!". ~~~ avsm that's a great project you have there too, the more the merrier! :) I'll drop you a note in a few days describing my libevent replacement in Mirage; it's basically using LWT to convert async events into synchronous looking code. Would be interesting to compare notes... ------ wmf There may be some good ideas in this paper, but I find them obscured by problematic details. _Under normal kernels, the standard OCaml garbage collector cannot guarantee that its address space is contiguous in virtual memory and maintains a page table to track the allocated heap regions._ They couldn't find ~1 GB of contiguous address space (out of 128 TB available) under Linux, so they threw out Linux completely? _Each Mirage instance runs as on a single CPU core, and depends on the hypervisor to divide up a physical host into several single-core VMs._ GIL getting you down? Just define away parallelism and let the programmer handle it! _x86-64 does not have segmentation, and Xen protects its own memory using page-level checks and runs both the guest kernel and userspace in ring 3. This makes system calls and page table manipulation relatively slow, a problem which Mirage avoids by not context-switching in ring 3._ That processor has hardware virtualization acceleration for a reason. Working around performance quirks in obsolete hypervisors doesn't sound like a good use of time IMO. ~~~ gaius It's explained in practically the next sentence: _In tight allocation loops, the page table lookup can take around 15 % of CPU time, an over-head which disappears in Mirage_ Functional languages like OCaml allocate and deallocate memory much more often than traditional languages like FORTRAN. So while you are perhaps correct in some situations, this approach would seem more optimal for functional programming. ~~~ wmf My point is that I don't think they needed that page table and its overhead in the first place; they could just allocate the heap contiguously. ~~~ avsm (author here) Yes, the principles described here could easily be applied to a full Linux kernel. In fact, one of the hacks on my TODO list is to statically link a Mirage application against a Linux kernel (without a userspace) to run them on the bare metal. The point of defining a single address space and the smallest possible C runtime is to start from the other end: rather than stripping away 14 million lines of C code, I preferred writing a few thousand lines and jumping straight into my runtime. It is an awful lot easier to experiment with something like [http://github.com/avsm/mirage/tree/master/runtime/xen/kernel...](http://github.com/avsm/mirage/tree/master/runtime/xen/kernelthan) the full Linux kernel by quite a long way. Note that the current tree isn't finished yet; I'm pulling out dietlibc entirely at the moment, so the final kernel binaries float around the ~200KB mark for a typical webserver. Then, also consider hypervisor-only features like live migration or PV suspend/resume that can be further optimised heavily and more easily in a minios instead of Linux. Or that Mirage is single-vCPU and event-driven only (no interrupts), and it starts to look quite different from Linux. The Mirage IO library is also very portable; an application which uses only TCP/UDP (instead of the lower level Ethernet) will compile on Linux/*BSD using select/epoll/kqueue sockets to be "just" a high performance webserver. The cool thing is that by using these APIs, we can also build applications that compile to small specialised operating systems, while developing them as usual on UNIX. For a final entertaining hack, they are also portable enough to run directly in the browser as Javascript applications thanks to Jake Donham's ocamljs project. We're still integrating the Websocket code in to make this properly finished, but it's a fine side experiment into portability :-) ~~~ wmf For the specific problem of a contiguous heap, I don't even think kernel modifications are necessary; the VM should be able to look at /proc/self/maps and find the appropriate address space. In general I realize that y'all are looking for rationalizations for an exokernel-style design, but IMO they need to be fundamental issues and not bugs. ~~~ avsm I think you missed the bit of my reply where I explained how this could all work on Linux too. And you seemed to have also missed the other bit where I explained why a microkernel is nicer (hint: concurrency, no need for multiple processes or user space context switches, etc). ------ benatkin Why not erlang? Seems better suited to this use case. In erlang, compiling erlang from within erlang is a normal way of doing things, since things are broken down into tiny erlang processes. <http://www.erlang.org/quick_start.html> ~~~ avsm Part of the Mirage goal is to experiment with different parallelisation frameworks on top of a very simple serial core: Erlang's OTP is one way to do this, but there are many others. Personally, I love OTP but dislike the Erlang syntax and lack of static types, hence my choice of OCaml (and also, there are very reliable OCaml-to-Xen bindings available around as part of the Citrix XenServer project). As another poster on this thread put it (being sarcastic I think, but actually spot on): _GIL getting you down? Just define away parallelism and let the programmer handle it!_ We are indeed building multiple parallelisation strategies on top of Mirage, which work across cores and hosts seamlessly. But first things first, and getting the efficient serial version out is top of the list right now... ------ TheAmazingIdiot Wow. Why does it feel like a throwback to the Transputer and Occam. Though, I have always wondered why an idea of a free distributed operating system was never implemented. With the old HeliOS, all you needed to do is add it to the serial links and processes would migrate to it as needed. And when a machine was turned off, those processes just migrated elewhere.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Surprising effect of light could change solar power generation - merijn481 http://smartenergyshow.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/surprising-effect-of-light-could-change-solar-power-generation/ ====== dhs Source paper: “Optically-induced charge separation and terahertz emission in unbiased dielectrics” [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&v...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCkQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.eecs.umich.edu%2F~scr%2FFisherJAP2011.pdf&rct=j&q=%E2%80%9COptically- induced%20charge%20separation%20and%20terahertz%20emission%20in%20unbiased%20dielectrics%E2%80%9D&ei=g6vTTeiFG8_Tsga3mv3dAg&usg=AFQjCNHhDNA0v13PZ- bzYTGjzH_ksOUicA&cad=rja) ------ jerf This doesn't actually sound promising at all to me for solar power generation. In the original press release [1] they _speculate_ that they may _eventually_ reach 10% efficiency, which we _already have_. Given that the effect requires stupefyingly absurd amounts of light and that they're going to have to improve by _several_ orders of magnitude to harness this effect to do real work without causing the medium to explode due to a sudden influx of a huge amount of light, all to obtain an efficiency we already can, I do not see this as likely to be useful for solar power generation. I criticize the need to try to attach every bit of research to the buzzword _de jour_. This is legitimately interesting on its own and the odds of it having some further use either scientifically or for some other engineering purpose is quite good. They've established a new boundary condition on some very venerable equations, which can't hardly help but be useful at some point. Tenuous connections to an application that it probably won't be useful for weaken the point, not strengthen it. [1]: <http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8368> ------ dhimes The authors argue that, in a dielectric medium, light can induce an electric dipole moment _in the direction of the light propagation_ by shifting the average location of atomic electrons in that direction. This moment becomes a means of storing energy, and they expect that heat loss would be much less than in traditional semiconductor solar cells. ------ dylanrw Is it just me or does the Smart Energy Show logo look like: [http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a56/Billy2600/512px- Apertur...](http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a56/Billy2600/512px- Aperture_Sciencesvg.png) :D	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Learn how to work remotely from people doing it every day - Jasber http://remotehabits.com/?ref=hackernews ====== Jasber Hey HN! Here's a small side-project I've been working on to help remote workers. I noticed when I switched to full-time indie dev, I experienced some new problems, like building discipline, habits and healthy routines. I don't like most productivity advice, as Paul Buchheit says most advice is limited life experience + over-generalized to fit your situation. I thought a good way around this would to just tell stories about remote workers, how they got started, what they like, what they don't like, routines they've found that are helpful, etc... So that's what the site aims to do—interview remote workers so you can learn from their experiences. One cool thing about the site is you can deep dive specific questions, like * What do you like about remote work? [http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-like...](http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-like...). * What do you not like about remote work? [http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-not-...](http://remotehabits.com/interviews/question/what-do-you-not-...). Let me know what you think, thanks! ~~~ chasd00 the best thing is no commute, the energy overhead of a long commute is terrible. The worst thing is missing out on conversations/decisions being made at the office. My corporate office is in San Diego while I'm in Dallas, even though I'm a director and the buck stops with me in engineering, lots of sidebar conversations and decisions get made in Sand Diego face-to-face and not on conference calls and slack channels. ~~~ zip1234 This is very difficult to address. I think people (in the office) need to buy in and use chat or email as communication mode number one. Either that or someone needs to come out with some better tele-presence for remote teams to interact with people in the office. ~~~ dotancohen Think about what you are saying. We should forgo direct communication with people next to us, in favor of an online alternative? Even though your goal is noble (enabling remote workers) your method is unnatural. I agree that a way to better integrate remote workers is essential. However disposing of direct communication is not the way to do it. I don't have an answer, we need a novel approach. ------ chasd00 I've been remote for about 5 years now. Once thing often overlooked is the perception of working remote by significant others. It took a handful of fights with my wife until we came to an understanding that from 8-5 i'm at work, even though I'm home, I'm still at work. Granted, there's give and take like with all things in a marriage but when I "leave" for work and shut the office door I may as well be 30miles away in an office building until 5. ~~~ throwaway284726 As someone who’s not married it also isn’t good for relationships in general. Staying home all day basically makes you the least interesting person in the world. You never have any crazy stories, weird colleagues, office romances, and whatever else normal people talk about. How do you answer “how was your day” and make it interesting? ~~~ richardbrevig I know I'm unusual about this, but I really try to keep my conversations away from simply just normal happenings. I recognize this is probably a necessity to share our days, but I value people that speak about ideas more. ~~~ jschwartzi Yeah, I work remote and I don't talk to people about my job at all other than to describe it if they ask. Frankly my job sounds boring and the industry I'm in is totally unglamorous so the less I say the better. I'd rather talk about all the stuff I do outside of work. For the record I love my job and the company I'm with. ------ mettamage > I see a ton of new freelancer make the mistake of charging $15 or more from > the jump without 0 reputation to back up that value. You can't expect to be > paid what you want without having a way of proving that value in some way. > [1] To give a counter point. I have done the opposite with 0 reputation, I charged between 60 to 70 euro's per hour. I now increased my rate to 75 euro's per hour, since I know a couple of bootcamp graduates who charge the same. Why do they charge the same? Well, one got into a dev shop and he quickly realized he was the best web dev and got rented out for a 100 euro's per hour. Though per haps one difference is that I knew people who needed a freelancer _now_. They couldn't find anyone and I was still studying CS and therefore available. Finding clients on your own with that rate may be harder. I think understanding supply and demand really important, as well as building trust with your client. Can you get the job done? If yes, then what's the going rate for any other freelancer and charge that. With all that said, it is just one interview that I am quoting. It is also interesting to see such diversity in there! [1] [http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a- full...](http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full-stack- web-developer-who-works-remotely) ------ omnimus Well advice from one of the freelance webdevs ([http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a- full...](http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full-stack- web-developer-who-works-remotely)) is to start to charging 10usd. He calls it reasonable pricing. I mean i live in quite poor country but 10usd is pretty hard wow. The great twist is that he works for YCombinator backed company as lead front-end dev. Way to go lol ~~~ slow_donkey Oh boy. Please no one take that advice of charging 10/hr. Remote does not at all justify making < minimum wage ~~~ illuminati1911 How much do freelancers usually get in different countries/regions? Or on average in the US and Europe? When I was still living in Finland (few months ago) the market rate was usually around 80-120 EUR/h => 90-140 USD/h. ~~~ puranjay I work remotely as a writer living in India. I charge the same rates as any writer living in the US. I haven't yet seen any client dispute my pricing. I don't see why I should charge less for my skills just because of my geographical location. ~~~ dzhiurgis Time zone can be somewhat of a filter if your client has a large team with daily standups. ------ andyfleming It would be nice to have a way to separate full-time remote employees from consultants/freelancers and part-time remote contractors. I feel as though the constraints and consequences are very different between the two. ~~~ Jasber Good suggestion, I've tried to tag Freelancers/Consultants where appropriate but this is something that can be improved—thanks! ------ samat Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. ~~~ ddtaylor I am curious, what kind of provider is this and what kind of bandwidth limits could be burned through by a basic HTTPS website? I tried to do a reverse DNS but it only came up with a generic "com.remotehabits.in-addr.arpa" I only ask this because even my very poor $2.50/mo server gets 500GB to 1TB of bandwidth allocated to it which is enough for millions of standard page loads. ~~~ duggan Some whois sleuthing suggest a company called Conseev who operate a shared hosting service[1] with a 250MB bandwidth limit. [1]: [https://www.purespeedhosting.com/shared- hosting/](https://www.purespeedhosting.com/shared-hosting/) ~~~ steve_adams_86 Is it not 250GB Data Transfer? That would be a lot more than 250MB. Still hard to guess how they would get over that limit. ~~~ duggan Hah, yes, whoops. Hard to imagine blowing through 250GB of bandwidth via HN traffic in only a few hours. ~~~ TeMPOraL Reason #2384 to keep your site lean... ------ mlthoughts2018 My experience after having fully remote jobs and onsite jobs in companies with satellite offices and other remote workers, as well as managing and hiring for a team that includes on-site and remote engineers, is that you are generally practicing all the same skills needed for working remotely even if you are based on-site. You have to fight through the distractions of the surrounding environment and practice self-discipline, you’ll have a video call option for every single meeting (and often even other in-office participants access the call by video rather than walking to the conference room), all “water cooler talk” is deliberately moved into a medium like Slack, other on-site people work from home often, even managers using video calls to talk about your yearly performance review. I’m sure many people making the transition could still use a service like this for good advice. But generally, on-site experience in many types of tech / ecommerce companies these days imparts so much of the identical skills used for remote work that you would find pretty much the sole difference is the utter bliss of not being in an open-plan office. Similarly when hiring for remote or on-site roles, I find years of experience specifically working remotely plays no role. It does not make a candidate more or less likely to fit in a new remote role. And lack of prior remote experience rarely ever factors in even when hiring for a remote role. In other words, most types of prior work experience already prepare you well to be a remote worker. There’s no special “being good at remote” skill that most on-site jobs fail to exercise, though some people might occasionally feel that they _personally_ or idiosyncratically need more help with certain aspects, unrelated to what general job experience offers them. ~~~ matt_the_bass It sounds like in your opinion “no open plan office” is the sole value of working remote? As I misunderstanding your comment? My office does not have open plan offices. Some of us work remote about 20% of the time. But I think we all generally enjoy working on site too. ~~~ mlthoughts2018 That has definitely been my experience from a worker’s point of view. People assessing costs, etc., might have other opinions. The second-biggest benefit is not spending time on a commute. And if you have child care needs or other family arrangements to tend to, the flexibility offered being at home is a benefit. But by far the biggest benefit is that it lets you get away from working in open-plan offices. At one past employer that had a mix of on-site and remote workers, the company had an amazing policy of letting on-site employees work from home as often as they wanted, no questions asked. During one especially difficult design and implementation phase for a certain project, I worked from home for three weeks straight, because otherwise it was literally impossible to get the work done with noise distractions and lack of private space to think and tinker while at the office. Personally, I like working on-site (in private offices) most of all, but the downsides of open-plan arrangements are so severe that I’d practically use any other type of working arrangement, even being fully remote, if it allowed me to avoid an open-plan office. ------ fcanela I am getting a 509 Bandwith Exceeded error. The sites is still accesible via [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jNN8m0q...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jNN8m0qEa2EJ:remotehabits.com) ~~~ fcanela It seems like the cache link I previously pasted does not allow to click on deeper links on the site. Sorry. At least it helps to have a quick view to the content. ------ johnc113 Hey guys, I saw a few people quoting my interview here and I appreciate the criticism and wanted to clear a few misconceptions is the word? up! For reference: [http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a- full...](http://remotehabits.com/interview/interview-with-john-a-full-stack- web-developer-who-works-remotely) When I say charge $10 USD that is what I started charging personally as I felt it gave me the most competitive edge as I was a recent graduate and JUST starting out. The minimum wage in Puerto Rico where I live is $7.50 so it definitely made sense to me and I'm the type of person who doesn't like overselling themselves or feeling like I'm being cocky/arrogant, plus I was starting out I barely knew anything haha. It's a personality thing you know. I am however by no means saying hey charge $10 USD to start out, that made sense to me and worked for me because I was a recent graduate, have no debts and no family to support. Someone with all these things to consider $10 USD would be DISMAL to even accept and I get that. What I was trying to convey above all is be reasonable with your pricing, charge something that for you recognizes your value and needs and ALSO Values your client and their needs if that makes sense! Also someone mentioned me being a lead front-end dev at OpenSea which YES is backed by YCombinator but I wanted to clear up one thing which is I said main dev not lead front end dev as I have been with them from early on, that title belongs to the co-founders haha I'm sorry for that confusion and wanted to clear it up, I hate taking credit where credit is not due! I am/was the lead front-end dev for a startup called freshChefs in shanghai for their food delivery app though which was an AWESOME experience! Finally, I have upped my rates considerably from my early days starting out and now usually charge $50/hr so I definitely climbed those up over time, I just started at a reasonable price that worked for me but in no ways mean works for or should be done by everyone. Thanks guys! And I hope the article gave you some insights and it's crazy to see it somewhere like HackerNews! PS: I'm actually 24 and that picture was from my graduation day back in 2015 because I abhor pictures, I still have a baby face though XD ------ TallGuyShort If you're looking for folks to interview, I've been full-time remote for almost 5 years and have managed to do it quite successfully. I'd be happy to share thoughts. ~~~ Jasber Sure! Can you email brad@remotehabits.com and we can get something setup. ------ hoyin_remotes This is great website! I think we need more things like these to make it easier for people to learn how to work remotely. I have outlines some of comments in this video message I recorded for you: [https://www.useloom.com/share/3e8262418d7c4f1187d3b92b037624...](https://www.useloom.com/share/3e8262418d7c4f1187d3b92b037624ca) ------ senatorobama The key difficulty for me is finding a remote job (from scratch) in a name brand company i.e listed on the NASDAQ. ~~~ bitlax A lot of major companies offer remote work, but why is that important? Are you using that as a proxy for salary? ~~~ senatorobama How do you find them? ~~~ jambalaya Are you based in the US? weworkremotely.com has worked well for me in the US ~~~ mmikeff Shameless plug here, my side project [https://www.mikesremotelist.com](https://www.mikesremotelist.com) finds about 10-20 newly listed remote positions a day, they are not all US based, but the majority are. ------ tomcooks Death by hugs, 509 bandwidth exceeded~ ------ stockkid It was working but now I'm getting "Server Not Found" when I click the link. I find the content very helpful. How do you plan to keep producing such good quality content in the long term? I've seen many Show HNs like this with meteoric launch getting abandoned after some months. ------ Oras Bandwidth Limit Exceeded ------ geoffrey123 I am looking for a remote developer role myself [https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreycallaghan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreycallaghan)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Distributing Covid-19 vaccines could be a major problem - hoomank3 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-distributing-a-covid-19-vaccine-could-become-a-big-problem/ ====== hoomank3 Because most COVID vaccines require 2 doses, and greater demand for the flu shot, health systems could be overwhelmed with 5.1 times the demand for injections compared to a regular flu season.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Google ‘Tricks’ Users into Sharing Location Data - cybernot https://www.sherbit.io/how-google-tricks-users-into-sharing-location-data/ ====== joesmo They use a similar trick in Hangouts where one cannot delete multiple conversations, only one at a time. Not sure what the motive for that is other than pissing people off which is mission accomplished. Regardless, UI like this that tricks people is no different than social engineering and should be therefore be treated as a UI design security risk.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The problem of China's huge bike graveyards [video] - heshamg http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-china-43999482/the-problem-of-china-s-huge-bike-graveyards ====== stephengillie This is a failure of collection because buying new bikes is apparently cheaper than the cost of collecting and repairing existing bikes. [0] It's reminiscent of glass bottle deposits in the USA and other places.[1] Should municipalities charge a mandatory $20 bike deposit? If nothing else, it would incentivize beggars and others looking for a quick buck - they could collect rogue bikes and return them for a deposit. Not sure how to incentivize fixing bikes over replacing, short of a tax or regulation on new bikes. Especially in cultures where even cell phones and computers get replaced instead of fixed. [0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964298) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation) ------ dang Related recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16961726)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Nephrology nursing and the wearable artificial kidney - axson http://www.nephrologynews.com/nephrology-nursing-and-the-wearable-artificial-kidney/ ====== axson This is an interesting development to follow. If they can make it really lightweight it could make a huge improvement in quality of life for renal failure patients.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Maybe Type and Its Consequences - bensummers http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/MaybeType ====== tel The author seems to be learning a lot from Haskell, but still unable to really accept the larger picture _Fortress goes beyond Haskell in that the type Maybe[\T\\] extends type Generator[\T\\] so that it can be treated much like a set that will generate either one item or no items at all. One can conveniently use generator syntax to extract the contained item of a Maybe type, bind a variable to that value, and then execute a chunk of code---but only if there is in fact a contained item_ The following examples are both _trivially_ available in Haskell as the very general monadic binding (>>=) or a case statement. It's great that other languages are learning powerful lessons that the strong typing in Haskell can teach, but if they're going to do it they might as well learn all that they can instead of stumbling down the same path again. I bet in no time Fortress will have do notation.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter blocks, why no last message? - haaen Someone on Twitter blocks you. You think he made the wrong decision. But there's no possibilty to tell him about that: no possibilty to tell him that you want to offer your excuse, no possibility that you just made a joke. Why doesn't Twitter allow blocked people one last tweet to people by whom they've been blocked? Sorry for my bad English! ====== arshubham11 It would me a nice feature. However most of the people I block are spammers anyway.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The U.S. Military’s Force Structure: A Primer - tacon https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51535 ====== daltonlp There's a nifty interactive tool for playing with costs! [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54351](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54351) I gave it a whirl. There are some built-in constraints. For instance, you can't take away minuteman missiles. Nor can you cancel dental insurance for servicemembers. Also, you are not allowed to entirely disband any component. There must be at least one aircraft carrier, one army brigade, etc. Force reductions in general staff are limited to 50%. But I tried. I took away everything I could. Cranked every slider to its minimum value. For a total reduction in personnel of 1,071,000. For a grand total annual savings of...$184 billion. That savings is roughly 30% of the actual us military budget (depending on what year you compare with) In other words, if the US military shrinks to its absolute minimum level, it somehow still costs 2/3 of the money. According to the CBO's online slider tool, at least. ~~~ anovikov Does it work well other way around? If you wanted to massively increase the capability, does it scale up well? ...checked, it does... just +120B makes a force that really kicks ass, +50-100% of the current. why not just do it, then regularly practice overseas deployments to seriously scare shit out of the Arabs and get better oil deals for everyone, doesn't it save money in the end? ~~~ Fjolsvith > then regularly practice overseas deployments to seriously scare shit out of > the Arabs and get better oil deals for everyone, doesn't it save money in > the end? No. Pulling tax money out of everyone's wallets to make gas at the pump cheaper doesn't save everyone money. ~~~ anovikov It does. Money spent on the military is spent domestically with only a small fraction of them leaving the country, the rest being spent inside and boosting the economy; the money spent buying all foreign oil is all just going away... so even if we are to spend somewhat more than $1 for the military to reduce oil spending by $1 that will make perfect sense, net result for the economy overall will be positive. ~~~ Fjolsvith But, if the US is a net exporter of oil [1], where is all that $1 going, really? 1\. [https://www.ft.com/content/9cbba7b0-12dd-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e5...](https://www.ft.com/content/9cbba7b0-12dd-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e548a)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
FCC Designates Huawei and ZTE as National Security Threats - css https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-designates-huawei-and-zte-national-security-threats ====== css PDF: [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-365255A1.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-365255A1.pdf)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Reusability and NIH - ColinWright http://irreal.org/blog/?p=982 ====== ColinWright This is an alternative viewpoint to that in the article here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360345> In that article it is suggested that it's better not to call out to the operating system to perform tasks that can be re-implemented in your own program, thereby reducing dependencies and preventing context-switches in future readers. But sometimes using well-known, well-tested, long-standing existing code really is better than re-implementing basic operations in your own code. Yes, if it's just "rm" then perhaps write it yourself. But when it's more substantial, and someone else has already done it, and it's there ready to be used ... Use it. ~~~ EvilTerran My go-to example these days is the `find` utility. Sure, you could try to recurse through directories yourself -- but links (both sym- and hard) make it surprisingly non-trivial to get right.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pwd alias hell - hrjet https://gist.github.com/hrj/2efd3f8f9b465e01fe09 ====== lokedhs This is purely the cause of the shell having a builtin pwd command that displays a path that is consistent with the argument to the "cd" command that was typed to enter the directory, not the actual path you're in. The shell does this to provide a consistent view for the user when following symlinks. You can always type /bin/pwd to avoid this and you'll always get the correct path. ~~~ hrjet > You can always type /bin/pwd to avoid this and you'll always get the correct > path. Yes, but it affects other programs as well. See the `cat myFile` example in the gist.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What do you use to monitor website performance from client perspective? - lambdadmitry Also known as "Real User Monitoring". There are a lot of SaaSes doing some form of it, but I know none avoiding third-party JS or requests and most don't support First (Contentful) Paint. What's your experience? What do you use? If you hacked something together in-house, what stack did you use and how do you build reports on top of it? ====== Scullwm We use pepperreport.io to have information about how every release impact our reponse time. It doesn't require anything on our stack and is a correct estimation of the impact for our users.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How the Internet will (one day) transform government - briangonzalez http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html ====== briangonzalez I love how Clay thinks society should implement git-like concepts into how we interact. Could it actually work? ~~~ rmason I think that it stands a better chance to get started on a local level. Not just with Git, can you imagine a MINT style presentation of city or township budgets? Only a handful of people provide input on budgets because of the difficulty of getting their minds around it. People complain how the money is spent or not spent after the fact. Radical transparency is the key.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
DOM elements with ID's are global variables - bhalp1 https://dev.to/buntine/dom-elements-with-ids-are-global-variables ====== hdhzy The funny fact is that some browsers (Chrome?) did not have this behavior initially but it was introduced to match what others (IE?) did.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Very simple tool for creating polls - nicohvi http://poll.nplol.com ====== mkoryak Ill give you some real feedback though since I did sign up: when adding a new option, it should gain focus so i can start typing right away. viewing a poll that has no votes yet is weird because the whole screen is white and you have to scroll down to see that you have things to click on below the fold you maybe shouldn't be able to share a poll without any options added to it Logout icon is not intuitive to me. Coming from a mac where that icon means something completely different logged in view is not responsive, I think it should be pretty easy to fix that. delete poll button should give you an "are you sure", its too easy to delete a poll ------ mkoryak Ok, but your register button is incredibly hard to find. Its a tiny 50x50 rocket image. I had to hover over all the text before I realized that was the login button. If you are going to tell me that I need an account to post a poll, please put a big green "register" button at the end of that sentence. It would be interesting to install clicktale on this site and see how bad your conversion rate is because of that tiny "button" ------ warcode I closed the tab the moment I had to register. ~~~ marcoms Exactly. At least make it obvious that the user needs to sign in beforehand. ~~~ Saiyan1 I dont think it will change the "must login" bounce rate. I always prefer a "product try" before register, for people like us :P ~~~ marcoms Except there is no "\"product try\"" in this case. ------ nicohvi Thanks for all the comments! I mostly made the website for the laughs (i.e. the rocket ship), but I'll definitely make it more user friendly as I increment on the (still rather silly) design, taking your comments into account. As for the login hassle, it's basically just linking your google account (two clicks, no need to write down anything) - but I do get the point about making polls as a guest before registering. Anyway - appreciate all the feedback! ------ Saiyan1 Hi. Just for traction, I suggest you let users create (and share) one Poll without registration (you can easily check this out with cookies). Then ask for registration :) I really wanted to try it but I do not have time/feel like to registrate. I think about doodle.com, did you try it? Hope it helps ~~~ nicohvi That sounds like a great idea! About the registration though, it's just linking your google account (which is not mentioned at all, I realise) - so basically two clicks. I love doodle, and I wish there was a way to create polls there as well! ------ motyar osm as hell ~~~ Saiyan1 what is osm? ~~~ motyar Sorry. Its Awesome... ~~~ Saiyan1 Okok I didnt know, Im spanish speaker, now i know :) Thanks ~~~ jscheel English speaker and I didn't get it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? - tech4all My wife will be undergoing significant oral surgery in a few weeks and there is a SMALL chance she may lose the ability to speak. I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input.<p>My ideal would be an open source "deepfake toolkit" that allows me to provide pre-recorded samples of her speech and then TTS in her voice. Unfortunately most articles and tools I'm finding are anti-deepfake. Any recommendations?<p>Fallback would be recording her speaking "phonetic pangrams" and then using her pre-recorded phonemes to recreate speech that sounds like her. I feel like the deepfake toolkit is the way to go. Appreciate any recommendations... There must be open source tools for this?? ====== audiohermit Hey, speech ML researcher here. Make sure you have different recordings of different contexts. fifteen.ai's best TTS voices use ~90 min of utterances, some separated by emotion. If you're having her read a text, make sure it's engaging--we do a lot of unconscious voicing when reading aloud. Tbh, if she has a non-Anglophone accent, you're going to need more because the training data is biased towards UK/US speakers. If you want to read up on the basics, check out the SV2TTS paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf) Basically you use a speaker encoding to condition the TTS output. This paper/idea is used all over, even for speech-to-speech translation, with small changes. There's a few open-source version implementations but mostly outdated--the better ones are either private for business or privacy reasons. There's a lot of work on non-parallel transfer learning (aka subjects are saying different things) so TTS has progressed rapidly and most public implementations lag a bit behind the research. If you're willing to grok speech processing, I'd start with NeMo for overall simplicity--don't get distracted by Kaldi. Edit: Important note! Utterances are usually clipped of silence before/after so take that into account when analyzing corpus lengths. The quality of each utterance is much much more important than the length--fifteen.ai's TTS is so good primarily because they got fans of each character to collect the data. ~~~ grogenaut I came here to say this. My brother has a PhD in chemistry and no coding experience. He was able to create a voice model of himself using basic nvidia example generators in a week. My dad lost his voice and it would have been very nice to have a TTS that was much more close to him. I personally would think it would be worth it to have that database. But obviously also attend to the human matters as well, eg spend time. ~~~ audiohermit I work in pathological speech processing/synthesis so I'm unfortunately familiar with your father's position. It really sucks that these people didn't know that archiving their voice would've been useful. I hear snippets that people manage to glean from family videos right after listening to their current voices and it makes me really sad. On the upside, your father can choose any celebrity he wants to voice him! Tons of celeb data is publicly available (VoxCeleb 1 & 2). ~~~ vervez Is Morgan Freeman the most used celebrity? ~~~ core-questions I'd go for Stephen Hawking, myself. (Not using his voice synth, reconstructed using ML, because it should sound more natural that way ;-) ~~~ shagie I recall that the "say" program on the SGI from the mid 90's was approximately Hawking's voice. Hawking gave his speech for the Whitehouse Millennium Lecture at SGI also, and while I wasn't able to attend I found the transcript of it and fed it in there... there were some jokes that he had that only really came through with the intonation and pacing of a voice synth -- its the ultimate dead pan voice. [https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16112](https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16112) [https://youtu.be/orPUQm1ZRSI](https://youtu.be/orPUQm1ZRSI) And his voice was his - even with the American accent. [https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/why-stephen- ha...](https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/why-stephen-hawkings- voice-computer-spoke-with-an-american-accent/news- story/d4529ffb6341278d8c1b33e06cd3099c) > “It is the best I have heard, although it gives me an accent that has been > described variously as Scandinavian, American or Scottish.” > ... > “It has become my trademark and I wouldn’t change it for a more natural > voice with a British accent. > “I am told that children who need a computer voice want one like mine.” Somewhere, I recall a NOVA(?) program from the mid 80s where it showed him using the speech synthesizer and the thing that he said with it that still sticks in my mind is the "please excuse my American accent". In later years he was given the opportunity to upgrade it to a more natural sounding voice - but that voice was his. ~~~ egypturnash Near the end of his life, his original voice computer started to fall apart. He managed to get in touch with the people who wrote the software, who started a mad scramble to find source, and ultimately ended up emulating the whole setup on a Pi. [https://theweek.com/articles/769768/saving-stephen- hawkings-...](https://theweek.com/articles/769768/saving-stephen-hawkings- voice) ------ kemiller2002 My mom lost her ability to speak, and what you are going to find is that your life and how you interact with everyone will have to change. Human verbal communication is very fast. She will find it difficult to be part of normal conversations. Without lots of help, she will start to fade into the background of conversations, because she can't keep up. You will have to help her be a part of things. It will be a depressing experience for her, and you will have to help her. People will look at her differently like she is mentally handicapped. (I know she won't be, but people will assume that she is even unconsciously). I recommend finding her a therapist if she has to go through this transition. ~~~ bergerjac Seems like a great application for Elon's Neuralink. ~~~ mhh__ Who needs therapy when you have technology that doesn't exist yet! ------ fxtentacle Record her reading the texts of a standardized text training corpus. That way, you can retrain an existing AI to do text to speech with her own voice. Edit: here's a link to the corpus that I believe Mozilla uses [http://www.openslr.org/12/](http://www.openslr.org/12/) ~~~ asveikau Is she on board with this? I can imagine a lot of people being severely put off by being asked to record "a corpus of approximately 1000 hours" in advance of what sounds like a stressful surgery. ~~~ joshribakoff Seconding this, also, reproducing her voice with an AI may not be something she is on board with, it could make her feel like you don't accept her with or without a voice. It may also be unhealthy for you, similar to how spending too long on social media can become a dangerous source of dopamine. It might make sense to consider making a recording that is more meaningful, and focus on giving her emotional support rather than building an AI that could be perceived as a replacement. ~~~ netsharc It's not like OP is replacing her entirity with Alexa, if I were the wife I'd think "sure, let's 'backup' my voice, having it available in case I lose mine would be useful, so that people can still hear my thoughts in my voice instead of a robot's."... ~~~ badRNG > if I were the wife I'd think "sure, let's 'backup' my voice" That very well seems to be the OP's position as well. That's a far more generous reading of the situation. It makes sense that someone here would have the mindset of "lets keep a backup in case we want access to it later." ------ Rotten194 I would also suggest looking into learning American Sign Language (of course alongside this project). While communicating via keyboard is workable and good for communicating with the wider world, ASL would be much more convenient for communicating between you two -- and a very interesting language to boot. It is a foreign language thats not related to English besides a few loan words, but there's tons of online resources and most universities have classes as well. Plus, you also can experience beautiful Deaf culture, with a rich storytelling and poetic tradition that blends language, gesture, acting, and pantomime in a way thats just impossible to translate to a spoken language. The downvoted commenter was being a jerk, but I do think learning ASL is an option worth looking into. ~~~ krisoft I think your answer misses the point of the question. Learning ASL can be done after the surgery if she lost her voice. The question was what can be done now before the surgery. The kind of things which, if it comes to the worst and she loses her voice, cannot be done after. ~~~ saltcured I wouldn't discount the value of having some rudimentary signs to communicate immediately after surgery. It seems odd to me to focus on some dream of a perfect TTS synthesis if these more basic needs are not addressed first. If you've ever had a mouth injury that inhibits talking, or been in a foreign environment where your speech is totally useless, it can be very stressful to be unable to communicate. I think the couple should consider learning some of the basics ahead of time, so that communication is possible without typing or any other apparatus. Considering post-surgery recovery window, I'd want to be able to express very basic things like: I am comfortable I am in pain I am hungry I am nauseated I need to urinate/defecate I want to rest I love you When will you return etc. I might suggest trying to boil down one or two inside-joke kinds of phrases as well, to be able to lift each others spirits in private or intimate way. ~~~ whatusername a pen and paper would suffice for immediate communication needs. ~~~ bluGill If it must, but it isn't as smooth as conversation can be. sign language is a real language, and you can have real conversation, with all the pros and cons of real conversation. ------ quiet_hacker I have a progressive neurodegenerative disease and lost most my ability to speak about 3 years ago. What you are proposing is super cool, but you might be overthinking this. These things (text to speech, etc) are more awkward than practical in real life. Also, make sure your wife is completely on board. Seeing old clips and hearing my voice is actually kind of depressing to me. Here is my actual advice: Outside of social situations, it honestly hasn't been that big of deal for me. As a remote developer, my job has remained the same. My managers and co workers have been super supportive. I send messages during meetings to one person who will read it aloud for me. With text and social media, I still keep up with friends and family. Most medical appointments, etc, can be made online. SprintIP relay is free for deaf/speech impaired, and it allows the caller to type what they want to say and a representative will relay this to the other party. It works via the web or a mobile app. [https://www.sprintrelay.com/sprintiprelay](https://www.sprintrelay.com/sprintiprelay) Banks, brokers, or anything involving personal info (like SS#) usually requires a voice phone call. I have my wife call and explain the situation. I can whisper yes, as they occasionally require me to give permission. Some call center representatives have no idea how to handle this situation, and will just stick to the script saying they have to speak to me the entire time. My wife just thanks them, calls back, and hopes for someone more understanding. There are awkward encounters where people don't know you can't speak, and will respond by speaking louder and slower. These people will also assume you are not intelligent and be dismissive. This is just one of the things you have to deal with. I sincerely hope the procedure goes well and you wife doesn't have to deal with this. Just know that even if the worse happens, she can have a normal and productive life! ~~~ aspaceman > There are awkward encounters where people don't know you can't speak, and > will respond by speaking louder and slower. These people will also assume > you are not intelligent and be dismissive. _This is just one of the things > you have to deal with._ It sucks you have to just deal with it. ------ happycry We get quite a few requests for this at Resemble ([https://resemble.ai](https://resemble.ai)). We can get her to record right on our website or you can upload an existing file (along with a video of her consent) on the platform. Feel free to shoot me a message and I'd be happy to help build a voice for her. ~~~ cdolan I dont know how to send messages but I researched this space a few years ago. Unfortunately a family member of mine had a surgery result in loss of his speech. We have a lot of tapes around of his voice, from voice mails to family videos to some things from his work. If you are open to reaching out that would be awesome, I’ll check out the site as well. Edit: I’ve wanted to make some sort of soundboard + “text to talk” setup for this family member. He often can’t participate in conversations because he writes on a whiteboard, and the speed of chatter moves faster than his writing ~~~ happycry Feel free to shoot me an email: zohaib[at]resemble.ai We also have an API that you might find useful for the soundboard project: [https://app.resemble.ai/docs](https://app.resemble.ai/docs) ------ mattlondon I don't know if you have kids/grandkids/nieces or nephews (or plan to have those) but it might be nice to record your wife reading some books out loud. Not only will you have your own personal "audio books" of Harry Potter/The Hobbit/Chronicles of Narnia/Oi Frog/Alice in Wonderland/Roald Dahls etc etc for any kids/grandkids/relatives etc that will hopefully be something treasured in its own right, but you'll also have a large corpus of training data from well-known texts that you can retrain over and over as the tech improves in the future. Might be worth chucking in some other well-known texts to avoid over-fitting on a "kids' story voice" \- maybe something plain like inauguration speeches/declaration of independence/magna carta/etc. Obviously I'd focus on gathering raw material now, and focus on the reconstruction later when you've all recovered mentally and physically to whatever happens. The more data the better when it comes to this sort of thing. There might not be something "simple" right now (e.g. you could probably implement the WaveNet or similar paper yourself today, and training it up on some GPUs in your spare room etc, but in a few years there might be a nice WYSIWYG/SaaS thing for it), but with the recordings safely stored you'll obviously be able to use it in the future. Best of luck to you both. ~~~ Zenbit_UX I like this idea but the specific examples you give would almost certainly be a terrible idea. A voice trained on Tolkien or old American legalese like the Magna Carta would train a model with a lot of thee, thus, therefore and though art and undertrain it with modern English. His wife would sound like the second coming of Jesus or Shakespeare and less like a normal human being. ~~~ mattlondon From what I understand, it is not the words themselves (thee etc) but the sounds that make the words - so the "th" and the "ee" are still legit sounds in modern English words. The network would just be synthesising the words you tell it to - it won't be picking the words for you. I might be wrong though. ------ kerkeslager I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do. ~~~ Someone Is it? My first thought was _“is your ideal also her ideal?”_. We cannot rule out she wants to spend quality time with her partner instead of spending time in a recording studio, so that, if the worst outcome comes, her husband can remind her of what she lost. ~~~ kerkeslager Presumably the guy is better at guessing what his wife wants than you are, and his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong. ~~~ thaumasiotes > his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong She can, but she might not. A lot of that depends on how he presents the idea to her -- it might seem like something that's important to him. ~~~ pugworthy It's sad that people trying to discuss the emotional side of this are being down voted. Honestly there is no doubt a very large emotional/personal side of this, irrespective of who's idea it is and who supports it. Technology isn't the solution for all problems and challenges in life. ~~~ at_a_remove No, it isn't. But good lord, sometimes trying to get technical help on the Internet turns into this rabbithole of people who are specifically looking for ways _not_ to be helpful. "Did you really want that?" "Did you consider alternatives?" "What you _really_ have is an XY problem." ~~~ pugworthy _" Truly identifying a problem means looking deeper at the symptoms, the customer, the impact, the alternatives, the opportunity, and the relationships between them, while avoiding the “solution bias” (often known as “The issue is that the customer does not use my solution”)."_ #1 item from [https://www.molfar.io/blog/yc- questions](https://www.molfar.io/blog/yc-questions) ~~~ at_a_remove Or not. Not everything has to be this super-deep, six whys exploration of how craving and attachment is the cause of all suffering and if you would only stop wanting a solution you would no longer be in pain. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. ~~~ pugworthy If it was a cigar he’d just ask the technical question of how to capture and simulate someone’s voice. ~~~ at_a_remove "I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input." He then goes on to say "My ideal would be an open source 'deepfake toolkit' that allows me to provide pre-recorded samples of her speech and then TTS in her voice." That sounds like wanting to capture and simulate someone's voice. ------ covercash Other resources you may want to explore are r/mute and r/deaf subreddits. Both also have Discord servers listed in the sidebars. Having spent a good deal of time in hospitals, a few things I recommend... 10’ phone cable since outlets can sometimes be far from the bed, cheap slippers she can wear to walk around (stepping in a hospital hallway mystery puddle wearing just socks is very unpleasant), comfy clothes that you don’t mind having ruined (T-shirts, underwear, shirts, pajama pants - they can temporarily unhook the IV so she can put a T-shirt on), earplugs, eye mask. If she’s going to be on liquid-only diet, bring your own since hospital food is not great, not terrible. Soylent/Orgain/Ensure if she’s permitted that, otherwise good quality Italian ices are such a nice treat and most hospitals have a patient fridge/freezer you can store them in. Broth, but go to a restaurant or grocery store/farmers market with hot soup bar and fill a container with just the broth from the chicken noodle soup. It’s INFINITELY better than boxed broth. Hopefully all of your research and preparation will be for nothing, I wish you and your wife a successful surgery! ------ dawg- Speech-language Pathology student here. I would recommend going to see a speech therapist. It will likely be covered by your health insurance. Find an SLP who specializes in AAC (Augmented and Alternative Communication) who can help your wife communicate if she loses her speech. Your DIY approach could work, but having support from an SLP to help her learn the system, and come up with other options if it doesn't cover all of her communication needs, will go a long way. ~~~ stevenbedrick Upvoted and agreed 100%, from an AAC researcher. Your best bet is definitely going to be to reach out to an SLP with AAC expertise. ------ coronadisaster Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data. ~~~ lostlogin “This conversation is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes.” Should be stated before each new interaction. The legal requirement will vary by jurisdiction but a lawyer can advise on that. And yes, I’m joking. ~~~ coronadisaster While this can be true, it depends in which state that you live in: [https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent- states/](https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/) . In Illinois, it is apparently legal for the police to record you without consent but it is illegal for you to record the police... ------ korethr Others here are addressing technical solutions, but I don't see anyone here covering non-verbal communication. IMO, that's going to be just as important. I am going to assume that your wife and you have a healthy relationship with strong communication, in part because you've developed an intuition for her body language and other non-verbal communication methods. In the scenario where she loses her ability to speak, even if she happily and completely takes to whatever technical solution(s) you offer to replace that, I think it's likely she will reflexively lean more heavily on those non-verbal channels, and you're going to need to get better at reading them than you are now. ------ uberman This might get you started: [https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice](https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice) I imagine if MS offers custom voices then the other text to speech providers do as well. Good luck ~~~ tech4all Thank you - great lead. ------ thaumasiotes Some (decades old) research on this involved a research team creating a video of JFK saying "I never met Forrest Gump". I found a writeup in Google Books: [https://books.google.com/books?id=mQtGVQeQplcC&pg=PA208&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=mQtGVQeQplcC&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=%22I+never+met+forrest+gump%22&source=bl&ots=k3PobhFWaY&sig=ACfU3U3VlGf4aIdU1Q_JRllhb8AwVNzeLA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT7dyxkvrpAhUrHDQIHVUfDwQQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22I%20never%20met%20forrest%20gump%22&f=false) > We evaluated our Kennedy results qualitatively along the following > dimensions: ... naturalness of the composited articulation; ... Obviously the state of the art will have advanced, but maybe this can point the way toward more current research. While I tend to agree with everyone else that this _can be_ a great idea, my instinct is to float the idea to your wife first and see how she responds. I can imagine someone taking this negatively. ~~~ foepys There is a YouTube channel called "Speaking of AI" that makes short fake speeches of some US public figures. The quality is quite good and a bit frightening. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID5qusrF32kSj- oSGq3rJg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID5qusrF32kSj- oSGq3rJg/videos) ------ watertom If she loses her ability to speak there are many ways to help her out, but nothing can replace the sound of her voice, especially for those important moments. Just in case. Record specific messages for various people in her life, that can be used repeatedly, Children, Mom, Dad, siblings, in-laws, friends, messages like: "X, I love you", "X, I miss you.", "Mommy loves you!" "Give me a hug". "Holiday Greeting", "Happy Birthday","I'm so proud of you!" favorite happy saying, frustration saying, You get the idea. ------ arethuza What about recording messages to other people for future events (e.g. graduation of a child, birth of grandchild etc.)? Recording a message to a yet unborn grandchild is maybe something we could all do! ------ jasonhn9999 When my dad lost his speech, we had Boogie Board Jot devices all over the house. It made writing short notes and simple dialogs much less tedious. We also used the Verbally premium iPad app to help give him a voice and make transactions on easier. Wishing you all the best. ------ fxtentacle The paper "Generalization Of Audio Deepfake Detection" gives an overview. The paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05441](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05441) has a list of spoofing methods. Here's one method as paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf) And here on GitHub [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) ------ probably_wrong For an open-source approach, the MaryTTS project has a guide on how to add new voices to their tool: [https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTuto...](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTutorial) ------ mbreese You may want to look up what was done for Roger Ebert. He has lost his voice due to surgery, but because of the vast corpus of audio recordings of him, a viable text to speech engine was able to be created. It’s a bit dated at this point, but I imagine the research has vastly improved since then. It’s a very good question though. A decade ago this was able to be done for one man. Is it now possible to be done for anyone? Like others, I’d guess the first step is to record everything while you can. ------ echelon I wrote [https://trumped.com](https://trumped.com) You ideally want five hours of clean speech (good microphone, no background noise, high sample rate). It should be spoken clearly, in a single tone or mood. My model sounds awful because the data isn't consistent, and the room tone and microphones are terrible. If you want different prosody or moods, don't mix them in the same data set. You can experiment with transfer learning LJSpeech with Nvidia Tacotron2 right now. Glow-tts is also promising. You'll start to get results with fifteen minutes of sample data, but for high quality you want a lot of audio. Have your wife read a book and record it. The training chunks will be ~10 seconds apiece, so keep that in mind for how to segment the audio. Focus on getting lots of good sounding data. Hours. The models will improve, but this may be your only shot of acquiring the data. Download the LJSpeech dataset and listen to it. See how it sounds, how it's separated. That is a fantastic dataset that has yielded tremendous results, and you can use it for inspiration. ------ nutanc At a minimum get the following list of sentences recorded in her voice, [http://www.festvox.org/cmu_arctic/cmuarctic.data](http://www.festvox.org/cmu_arctic/cmuarctic.data) Make sure the recordings are of a good quality. This will ensure that you will have a baseline TTS of her voice at the minimum. ------ asdfman123 Here's a simple and practical solution: Get a decent audio headset, have it record the audio to her phone, and spend hours talking to her about whatever. Preferably in a reasonably quiet environment. Just spend a lot of time talking. You don't have to talk to her through a headset. Just make sure hers is recording her voice. It would be easy, painless, and probably good for the relationship too. ------ arslnjmn (off topic) Record a few things for her future self. E.g. favourite quotes, frequently used phrases. ~~~ zxter Good advice! Maybe a few shoutouts to your future children. ------ bcatanzaro Make sure to record with the best microphone you can find and in the quietest room you can find. Makes a huge difference in the resulting TTS. ------ adrianmonk You might look at resources for ALS patients. Since ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's disease) is a degenerative motor neuron disease, people with ALS can pretty much count on eventually losing the ability to speak. So "voice banking" is apparently pretty common. ------ anaisbetts Not exactly what you're asking for, but I wrote an app for this scenario: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anaisbetts...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anaisbetts.sirene) This is a text-to-speech app with a very keen emphasis on _Day To Day_ usage - the UX will put the focus at the right places, help you reply faster, etc. I used it for a full month when I was unable to speak after voice surgery and it made a big difference, other folx have reported the same ------ da39a3ee This is probably a really stupid suggestion but just in case. Do you and your wife drink alcohol a bit? If so might it be worth having a couple of drinks in a quiet setting with her one evening with microphones running? I'm not suggesting getting wasted! I'm just wondering whether it might help to catch her getting more animated or "natural" in conversation. I was thinking this might help make the resulting synthesized speech capture even more of her personality than reading children's books or subsets of AI corpora etc. ------ shockron22 I have had good results with this. [https://www.resemble.ai/](https://www.resemble.ai/) It is based on this open source work. If you want to run it yourself. [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) The voice cloning can be done in a matter of minutes. (< an hour) Its also very easy to use the website. Best of luck! ------ kw9 Strongly suggest reaching out to Dr. Rupal Patel ([https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupalvocalid](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupalvocalid)) of Northeastern University ([https://coe.northeastern.edu/people/patel- rupal/](https://coe.northeastern.edu/people/patel-rupal/)) and VocaliD ([https://vocalid.ai/about-us/](https://vocalid.ai/about-us/)). She's a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist ([https://web.northeastern.edu/cadlab/publications/RupalPatel_...](https://web.northeastern.edu/cadlab/publications/RupalPatel_CV_WEB.pdf)) and she and her husband, Dr. Deb Roy, did the Human Speechome project ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Speechome_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Speechome_Project)). She was also my doctoral advisor and I feel confident saying she would be very interested in talking with you. ------ benjohnson Do you have children? Perhaps - record her reading a few favorite children's books. ------ DoreenMichele Not to discourage you from making voice recordings and all that, but as someone who is handicapped and sometimes has trouble speaking because of it: 1\. I spend a lot of time online. It doesn't matter so much there. I do a lot of typing. 2\. My oldest son, who had serious output difficulties as a child, is talented at inferring what I need from a gesture and a grunt. This has proven enormously helpful. 3\. Consider using her phone as a communication device. It's small and people tend to take their phone everywhere and she can type out what she wants to say. 4\. Writing tweets can help a person learn to say things more succinctly. I do freelance writing and figuring out how to say things succinctly is a talent you can develop. (It's something I have to work at -- I'm a "would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time" type of person.) This can help enormously when you face communication barriers. 5\. Take some time to deal with the emotional stuff. It matters. I'm sorry you are facing this. Best of luck. ------ jitendrac ML will require a lot of samples for getting it as desired. I will say, let your wife carry an attached microphone and meet all the people she wishes to talk at least once. collect all the audio data, and you can use it later. <ake all the available moments memorable for her like If you have child record a message from your wife for next 10 birthday of child. ------ underdeserver Consider investing in a good microphone for recording. A Blue Yeti is ~$200. ------ seesawtron Here's a recent work [0] where you can train the model with 10s audio and convert any "text to speech" (all doable in the browser). I tried with Google Colab demo [1] and its performance fluctuates with the training audio sample that you give it so might need some trial and error to get the sweet spot. Also the model is not saved in the browser with Colab so you might also want to do it locally to save it eventualy (if it comes to that). All the best mate! [0] Main repo: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) [1] Google colab repo to try it out: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning/blob/ma...](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning/blob/master/demo_toolbox_collab.ipynb) ------ ardenwood Hi, I like your idea for your wife. Hope the surgery will succeed without damage to her speaking. I'm from Nvidia and know well the team behind NeMo toolkit. Happy to connect you to the team if that helps. You may send me an email to ardenwood.bruin_at_gmail.com. -- Michael ~~~ maps7 That's really good of you. It's amazing to see this community be so helpful. ------ jameswestgate This may also be useful. Free and open source. [https://www.tobiidynavox.com/en-gb/software/web- applications...](https://www.tobiidynavox.com/en-gb/software/web- applications/message-banking-2/) ------ totetsu The mycroft voice assistant has some tooling they used to create voices. [https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-2-is-live/](https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-2-is- live/) [https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic2](https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic2) Search Results Web results Festival Speech Synthesis has a tool for recording speech databases, and some tutorials for training festival voices. [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/research/projects/speechrecorder/](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/research/projects/speechrecorder/) ------ disabled You need to do voice banking. It is imperative that you do so, so that your wife keeps her identity no matter what. What you need to do is spend the entire next 3 weeks doing voice banking. This will give your wife a text-to-speech voice (SAPI 5 voice, or others, for example). You record phrases that the voice banking service wants you to speak, with a _high quality headset (best if wired) in a quiet setting_. The more sentences (samples) you have, the better the voice will be, obviously. But, there are services out there that will update the recordings, as the technology gets better, and that is the way to go, in terms of choosing the "best service". The voice banking services that people typically use are here: [https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management- of-m...](https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management-of-mnd/aac- for-mnd/voice-banking/equipment-and-services/) I would say that Acapela my-own-voice is currently the best technology. Obviously there are open source technologies, but you do not have the luxury of time to figure all of that out. However, you should do your own voice banking for later post-processing on your own with open source stuff. There is also a free version of voice banking available, but I would only recommend it as a secondary tool: [https://www.modeltalker.org/](https://www.modeltalker.org/) This app (iOS and Android) for example, allows you to use your personal voice banked text-to-speech voice, to talk: [https://therapy- box.co.uk/predictable](https://therapy-box.co.uk/predictable) This is another great app that allows you to use your personal voice banked text-to-speech voice: [https://www.assistiveware.com/products/proloquo4text](https://www.assistiveware.com/products/proloquo4text) Source: Disabled engineering student, who is extremely interested in assistive technology. I would love to be a rehabilitation engineer. ------ stevewillows It might also be worth recording normal conversations you have around the house as a fallback. You can always cut it up later and feed it into these systems. Best of luck to the two of you. I really hope you don't ever need this technology. ------ KhoomeiK You might want to try DIY'ing something like this [1] depending on the extensiveness of her surgery. It basically records electrical signals (EMG) emitted by the vocal chords (subvocalizations) and can convert it to text with ML/other signal processing algorithms. Basically a rudimentary version of the transhumanist Brain-Computer Interfaces that would enable telepathy. [1] [https://dam- prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE...](https://dam- prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE6.pdf) ------ nighthawk454 This can be trained using only 5 Seconds of reference audio: [https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation/) [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf) It's been mentioned a bit already, but thought it was worth calling out. This may be one of the lowest-overhead ways to start experimenting, at least in terms of data collection. ------ abjecton Your approach towards the situation might determine the life quality of you and your wife. I can't imagine how it's like to think in a logic way while you're in the middle of such of an emotional event. ------ The_rationalist [https://dathudeptrai.github.io/TensorflowTTS/](https://dathudeptrai.github.io/TensorflowTTS/) is the state of the art and feels natural enough ------ ooopsnevermind First off I'm sorry you're going through that, it sounds really tough. We sometimes have families use us for this ([https://trysaga.com](https://trysaga.com)) as a way to collect voice recordings of loved ones, to record and share a large number of memories and stories in their voice and have them saved forever. You can download all the recordings to keep. It's free right now and I'd be happy to help out and make sure it got you what you needed, let me know. ------ cl0rkster Probably not what you were seeking, but I have to imagine it would be similar to long periods I have spent in a non-verbal state. Being allowed to exist and just smile or laugh as a "part" of the conversation around me was like sunlight on a dark day. The range of human emotion and expression often overlaps enormously between people. Sometimes pretending you're voice is really the good you hear around you and not the throat mumblings that cause so much conflict is the most beautiful dream. ~~~ cl0rkster Also... Learn sign language. Some of the most beautiful and overlooked people are non-verbal. I've met several truly speechless people who had families that never learned to sign. It's sad for them. ------ redsh Sorry about this. Record as much voice as you can now (stereo too?), then you’ll have time to find the right solution and improve it as the technology gets better in time ------ erogol Hope I am not repeating any comments here. My suggestion is that you start recording as soon as possible and as much as possible without worrying about technicalities. You can also use if you have any old voice records or videos with a relatively good voice quality. For now maybe she can read a book aloud in a silent room. After you have the data I can also help if you like to create a TTS model. ------ YAFZ You might contact the following company: [https://www.acapela- group.com/solutions/acapela-voice-factor...](https://www.acapela- group.com/solutions/acapela-voice-factory/) There's also open source TTS from Mozilla: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS) ------ m463 I went through something similar with a parent years and years ago. I wanted to be able to do things to help with what would eventually be lost. I have to say I didn't help as much as I thought I could and afterwards I was always wondering if I could have used this technology or that and done more. So - I think you should recognize that you can only do so much, we're doing the best we can, and in the end we are all winging it. ------ hvaoc This is not open source but this was very good from their demo in terms of your own voice reproduction. [https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai) I hope good folks in there will help you, try reaching them. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnFC-s2nOtI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnFC-s2nOtI) ~~~ unstatusthequo Love Descript and think it’s a great way to both record and get transcripts. ------ TriNetra I've recently seen these two software on HN that maybe of some help: deepfake for voice: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) Reproducing emotional voices: [https://www.sonantic.io/](https://www.sonantic.io/) ------ rajacombinator Is this a time sensitive procedure? I think I’m stating the obvious - (maybe not) - but this is not something you should just wing a few weeks before, nor is it something you should try to figure out on your own without _thoroughly_ discussing with your wife. “Surprise honey, I deepfaked your voice!” is not something most people would appreciate. ------ abinaya_rl You are trying to do a beautiful thing. I don't have a knowledge of this subject, but I really wish you good luck on this project. ------ inspectorG4dget Nobody has mentioned VocalID and voice surrogacy [1] yet. This organization might be able to recreate her voice from historic samples for speech-to-text [1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_un...](https://www.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_unique_as_fingerprints) ------ meristem All sorts of feels here. I had a positive outcome from exploratory throat surgery that had a chance of obliterating my voice. Prepping the way you are doing is amazing. Please balance it with time well-spent with your wife, being present in the moment. Sounds trite and yet takes focus to not just concentrate in the possible negative future outcome. ------ peterwwillis Here's a story from the San Francisco Chronicle on saving Stephen Hawking's voice: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon- Vall...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest- to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php) ------ loph You might look at what Jamie Dupree has done. [https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/health/dystonia-jamie- dupree-...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/health/dystonia-jamie-dupree-radio- no-voice/index.html) He uses a text-to-speech system that sounds more-or-less like him. ------ jimlikeslimes This is very much a short term solution if they are unable to talk immediately after surgery, for up to a few days. My wife used a small portable whiteboard and magic marker to write messages on in the same situation. It worked really well. Even with our 2 year old, it helped her to understand something unusual was going on. ------ offsky I’m sorry that the both of you have to deal with this. I’ve read many of the replies here and I’m surprised there isn’t already a self-service website that does this. Pay some money, record some text, and boom here’s your voice. Something like this should exist. Someone should build this. ------ moooo99 I don't really have anything to add to all the helpful comments under your thread. Do the preparation as much as you can, as long as your wife also wants this. You said there is a small chance, so I really wish you and your wife the best of luck that she and her voice will be fine after the surgery. ------ eschaton2023 If she has time get here to read the most common english words. Then parse the text and play the audio for the known words and use traditional speech synthesis for the outliers. It will not be perfect but you can then possibly train an AI to pronounce the outliers. ------ egwor I would also think of various phrases that need a lot emotion applied. e.g. for sensitive situations like someone's death, or for positive feedback like a wedding or a birthday or a thank you Maybe also if she has a favourite book or a favourite quote, get those recorded too. Back it all up! ------ mathnode If you don’t have any children (yet) you should get her to record herself reading some of her favourite children’s books. At the very least she will be able to read along with them. Children’s books are quite sparse, so a page per-track is easy to do. ------ jll29 Just let her read a couple of pieces of texts and record in high-quality (44 KHz). Beyond the techical answer, you may want her to record some nice personal words addressed to your family that you can listen to later. You don't need to do anything until the worst case materialises. ------ voicevoice50 For recording training audio: [https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training- recorder](https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training-recorder) The recorder works with Python 3.6.10. Need to pip install webrtcvad also. ------ bb123 There is [https://www.descript.com/lyrebird- ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai) which is in private beta right now, but looks to serve your needs exactly. Maybe reach out to them? ------ techbio Confident as I may be that OPs intentions are good and pure, a quick CTRL-F on the comment threads finds no references to “abuse” or “ethics”, and I propose that synthesis of voice raises issues for which society has few natural defenses. ------ mproud Roger Ebert has some articles about his troubles he encountered that may be worth a read. ------ diggum [https://www.modeltalker.org/vrec/](https://www.modeltalker.org/vrec/) is a project for "voice banking" that might be able to help. It's not perfect yet. ------ bigmasterofnone Good luck with what you are doing and more importantly, I wish your wife good health. ------ PopeDotNinja My first thought was to spend some time together not speaking. See how it goes, so there’s less fear going into it. Maybe take a couples mime class or something! Just making it real and not living in fear is the point. ------ josinalvo IDK about the tech, but I would not worry about it right now. You dont need to play with the tech unless the bad unlikely outcome comes to pass. The only tip I have is from a bit of amateur sound editing I did: collect many samples, and beware of big phrases: Like, ask her to say the same thing many times. And ... sometimes ... to ... stop ... at ... each ... word. And ... so ... me ... ti ... mes at each syllable. Otherwise, if you ever need to create a sample that contains a single word/syllable, you cant. It is weird how much sound that contains clearly distinguishable syllables for the human ears still is not separable when you go to edit it. Also, you might want to check wordlists by frequency to get a menu of common words, and ipa notation, to ensure you cover a good range of sounds ~~~ JDEW > Otherwise, if you ever need to create a sample that contains a single > word/syllable, you cant. It is weird how much sound that contains clearly > distinguishable syllables for the human ears still is not separable when you > go to edit it. Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Thought it was insightful. ------ suchoudh Please do keep us posted on the final outcome. We all pray for the surgery to go successful. ( Really appreciate your efforts for preparing for the worst case scenario) ------ techwraith I recently learned about a startup that is working on this kind of tech: [https://phonetic.ai/](https://phonetic.ai/) ------ fenesiistvan These are the things i am coming always back to ycombinator.com. There are always valuable, intelligent replies here for all kind of issues you might have. ------ vinniejames Take a look at Lyrebird [https://www.descript.com/lyrebird- ai?source=lyrebird](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai?source=lyrebird) ------ csisnett Vocalid.ai has an vocal bank where you can record yourself, and use other people's voices as well. It could be a good choice for her to use her own voice ------ lowercased what dangers are there of someone 'stealing' your voice to impersonate you later? it seems mostly theoretical right now, but perhaps the more high- profile you are, the bigger the dangers might be, even today? if you had a large body of your voice already recorded (prepped for voice processing systems), is that data high-risk? ------ ponker Make sure to not have her read too much. The vocal cords can get inflamed and increase the chance of complications/damage. ------ smolPotat There's an app for that! It's called Vocable, it's open source and iOS and Android!!! ------ diegoperini Please let us know the good news if they arrive, preferable with Tell HN or something similar. Good luck and best wishes! <3 ------ pkinnaird get a great microphone and have her read her favorite books. Go for books with lots of dialog and emotional content. Later, you can extract all the phonemes you want from it and you will retain the emotional expressiveness of her voice. She should probably sing some songs -- lullabies, rock, etc. Go for emotional diversity. ------ glonq > I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice > from keyboard or other input. Is this something that she wants? She's got a lot on her plate (emotionally and logistically) to prepare for this surgery, and maybe doesn't need a big geek project inflicted upon her just because there's a small chance of a bad outcome. ------ werdnapk How small of a chance of her losing her ability to speak are you talking about here? ------ dragoon7 Learn sign language. ~~~ klyrs These suggestions are getting downvoted, but my girlfriend needed surgery wherein she wouldn't be able to speak for about a month. I know sign language, and tutored her for about a month leading up to the surgery. It was empowering, and she was able to teach friends, family and coworkers a few basic signs which made a lot of interactions go smoother. This low-tech solution doesn't need batteries or internet connectivity, and can provide a much smoother flow of conversation than typing things out. ------ chubs Acapela.com has a voice banking service ------ ghoshbishakh Please. There is a small chance you said. Everything will be fine. But still carry on your research on the problem since it might help others. ~~~ swyx even if there is a small chance, the preparation may help lesson the blow of what would still be a tremendous loss. also it might just help pass the time since OP has 3 weeks. ------ kangaroozach Descript.com has the tech. Reach out to Andrew Mason. ------ dazuaz Not bad for as a niche product Idea ------ evmolesworth Does your wife want you to do this? ------ kangaroozach Descript.com Andrew Mason ------ pezo1919 Did you ask her about that? Make sure she is not freaking out of that.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
A million lines of Lisp - muriithi http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/06/million-lines-of-lisp.html ====== ajross This kind of loses me towards the end. I mean, sure, emacs is a freakishly large lisp program. I get that part. But, what's the point here? The abstractions in emacs (modes and hooks are the ones discussed in the linked post) really aren't that strange, or unique, or even lisp-specific. Nor are they without analogs in other tools written in conventional imperative languages. An emacs written in python, frankly, wouldn't look that different. A mode by any other name would hook as smooth. ~~~ ken You're right that the features he mentioned seemed to not be terribly unique to Lisp. But note that your claim wasn't really true before Python 2.5 (less than 2 years old). Imagine trying to write one of Emacs Lisp's most common special forms, save-excursion, in Python without context managers. Even (especially!) Python programmers would admit that Python 2.5 is more powerful than Python 2.4. Emacs has a million lines of Lisp written with this feature not easily emulated in Python 2.4. The Lisp in my Emacs here uses save-excursion 9000 times; is there any Python program in the world that uses context managers 9000 times yet? I'm impressed that a 20+-year-old language can hold its own with a 21st- century one under active development by somebody willing to (somewhat) break backwards compatibility. That's not to say that Elisp was this great 20 years ago -- it had, what, one kind of loop? -- but macros let it grow in directions that its users wanted. You can't really add editing-specific features with custom syntax to Python. ~~~ jrockway save-excursion could just be a function though. Here's what the implementation would look like. I don't know Python syntax, so I'll use Lisp, but I'll keep Python's featureset in mind. No macros, no lambdas. (defun save-excursion (function) (let ((point (point)) (mark (mark)) ...) (funcall 'function) (set-mark mark) (goto-char point))) Then you would say: (defun do-something nil (...)) (save-excursion 'do-something) Ideal, no. Possible, yes. ~~~ jrockway That should be (funcall function). I shouldn't post code before I have coffee :) ------ JesseAldridge Ok, this is probably me being ignorant, but can't you do stuff like this to get macros in Python: import os, subprocess def macro(string, filename="~/macro.py"): program_name = os.path.expanduser(filename) out = open(program_name, 'w') out.write(string) out.close() command = ["python"] command.append(program_name) subprocess.Popen(command) macro("print 'Hello macro!'") It seems like with a bit of ingenuity you could achieve any level of abstraction using a technique like that. ~~~ Hexstream Nice Lisp macro features your naive scheme lacks: \- Lisp macros are expanded implicitly at compile-time so you don't have a big mess of temporary files; \- Lisp macro calls look just like the built-in operators, unlike your proposed "python macros" where all your macro invocations are a string \- For all but the most trivial cases your string-based scheme will force you to use concatenation and it will really get ugly really fast. In contrast, with Lisp it's much easier to represent code as data. For example, (+ 1 2) is the code to add 1 and 2 while '(+ 1 2) is a list representing the code to add 1 and 2 and you can then interpolate that easily in the generated code \- And your example is really awesomely constrained, it works but it also doesn't really help with anything. With Lisp, the macro facility scales from trivial problems where the macro code fits in 4 lines to very complex ones where the macro code spans 4 files. ~~~ gaius This is one reason I like Tcl, it's not far off Lisp in the sense that it's a "programmable programming language" and I can get away with using it at work because they think it's just fancy shell-script :-) For an example see <http://wiki.tcl.tk/917> ------ brandonkm I've been really interested in Lisp lately, for someone that knows next to nothing about this language, this is a pretty interesting read.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Myth of Usability Testing - phsr http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-myth-of-usability-testing/ ====== ugh “Usability Testing: It’s not a Myth”, a reply from Lukas Mathis: [http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/20/usability_testing_n...](http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/10/20/usability_testing_not_a_myth/) ~~~ blasdel If you follow his reasoning, the logical conclusion is to ditch all the sociological hand-waving with asking people whether they feel good using the software and focus on the hard results -- productivity, conversions, etc. ------ spokey There's a lot of good advice there about asking the right questions of the right people, but I don't think it is fair to assert that because different teams came up with different problems the usablity tests were a failure. Consider the possiblity that each did really did uncover unique serious problems. The goal of UX testing shouldn't be to identify all the problems but some of the serious ones. Test, change and iterate. Once you've addressed a few of the top issues the context of the application has changed anyway. (Also, I wish there was more detail on the individual tests. This sounds like an interesting experiment.) ------ sp332 Maybe the user interfaces totally sucked, and the teams only had time to uncover and report on a percentage of them. Having seen the old Hotmail webpage, I think this is likely. ------ timcederman _Contrary to claims that usability professionals operate scientifically to identify problems in an interface_ Who claims that? I think usability testing is one of the most subjective practices out there. Oh right, the author of this article (and the authors of the previous studies too!) is muddying the waters of what is "usability testing" and "usability evaluation". Usability testing normally implies testing with a user. This sounds like all these studies were heuristic evaluations. If everyone had the same set of heuristics/best practices, then yes, it would be surprising for there to be a difference. ------ omouse This is precisely why Gladwell's books are dangerous. He may say that he wants to inspire people to learn and think more, but he uses sloppy methods. In this blog post, the writer uses Gladwell's shaky arguments to support their own ideas.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How E-Books Make (A Lot Of) Cents - newacc http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/21/ebook-iphone-oreilly-technology-breakthroughs-ebook.html?partner=contextstory ====== HoneyAndSilicon O'Reilly talks about success of "iPhone: The Missing Manual" as an iPhone app. The app has outsold the book, and O'Reilly explains the business model validates as, " the data suggests that they have created growth without sacrificing print market share. "	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Monzo’s Response to Cloudbleed - obeattie https://monzo.com/blog/2017/02/24/cloudbleed/ ====== libeclipse Even though they weren't affected much and no one would have called them out if they didn't do this, the fact that they did such a nice job of dissecting the situation and deploying the appropriate measures is really, really good. Love monzo. <3 ~~~ lumisota While it should be applauded that they responded promptly, it needs to be remembered that this is a regulated, licensed bank that proxied sensitive customer information via a (now compromised) third-party. We should expect this kind of disclosure from such organisations, not be surprised by it. ~~~ mintplant My thoughts exactly. As a bank, allowing Cloudflare to MITM their customers' financial data, presumably so they can save on bandwidth, seems inappropriate. ~~~ shawabawa3 Did you read the post? They don't use cloudflare to MITM customer data. ~~~ grzm Please don't imply that someone hasn't read the article. From the guidelines: _" Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ------ deckiedan Great that they respond so clearly and quickly. One question - does anyone else feel that having NGINX as the only link in the summary kind of suggests that it's an nginx problem? I could imagine my previous boss reading the article, and 3 months later saying, "Wait what, we're using nginx??? Isn't that that shit that made cloudbleed happen?" ~~~ zzzcpan While they are not being precise in their response, you cannot consider nginx more secure. Nginx is still part of the problem, it had many CVEs too, even very similar memory disclosure vulnerabilities. ~~~ Filligree It's written in C, which is part of the problem. I'd be very interested in a similarly-featured webserver (reverse proxy, mostly) which is written in a memory-safe language. ~~~ atmosx Caddy[1] is written in Go and has a nicer, simpler syntax. I'm sure NGINX has many more features though. [1] [https://github.com/mholt/caddy](https://github.com/mholt/caddy) ~~~ fortytw2 Caddy has less than half the performance of Nginx - not really a viable replacement at any sort of scale. [https://hackernoon.com/caddy-a-modern-web- server-vs-nginx-e9...](https://hackernoon.com/caddy-a-modern-web-server-vs- nginx-e9e4abc443e#.wps7udz6x) ~~~ Filligree Depends on what you're doing. If it's fronting an expensive web-app, then the couple hundred CPU-microseconds needed to proxy a request isn't going to be noticeable... Caddy can serve 5,000 requests per second per core. I would flip your statement on its head, and say that a minority of people need anything close to that. The few companies that do, can probably afford to keep on top of CVEs for their frontends as well. ------ mseebach Honest question, this is far from my area of expertise: I get why you would put Cloudflare on a public website -- but what is the benefit of wrapping the authenticated, dynamic parts of a website/service in Cloudflare? These are things you would want to never get cached, and, I suppose, you would want end- to-end TLS'd into your own network? ~~~ otabdeveloper Because the "HTTPS everywhere or you're a dinosaur and you don't deserve to live" hysteria forced everyone to put HTTPS even in places where it doesn't belong. ~~~ jon-wood I'm pretty sure "in front of the API for people's bank account" is exactly the place HTTPS belongs. ------ rodionos The Monzo's response is much more re-assuring compared to Cloudflare's: > "We've seen absolutely no evidence that this has been exploited," he told Reuters by phone. > "It's very unlikely that someone has got this information." [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-cloudflare- idUSKBN16...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-cloudflare- idUSKBN1630RT) ~~~ sverige I agree. Cloudflare's public statements have not inspired confidence. When you get publicly called out by Google's security chief, you need to bring your A game in damage control. ------ _pmf_ > A bug in an NGINX module used by Cloudflare’s edge proxies More precise: a bug in a proprietary closed source module for NGINX used in- house at Cloudflare. ~~~ nailer Not sure why the parent post is being downmodded: it's entirely accurate. From what Google wrote [1], the module is part of a CloudFlare ScrapeShield, which is a proprietary nginx module that does DOM manipulation to obfuscate pages to fight scrapers. Mismatched tags were causing arbitrary bits of memory to leak into responses. [1] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=11...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=1139) ------ overcast What the heck is Monzo? I read the About, is this another Paypal 20 years later? ~~~ aembleton It's a prepaid credit card that immediately notifies your phone every time you make a transaction with the amount and location. It is particularly useful overseas. I was in Belgium at the weekend and all my € spend was immediately translated into £ so I could clearly see how much I was spending. I could also find the café that I went to for breakfast the previous day because it's location is right there in the Monzo app. The other useful feature is when I'm out drinking. If I loose the card, I can freeze the card from inside the app. Also it means that the next morning I can see how much I spent. ~~~ mintplant > It's a prepaid credit card that immediately notifies your phone every time > you make a transaction with the amount and location. All of my regular financial accounts (bank, credit cards) can do this. There's typically a page in the account center with settings for sending SMS and email alerts when various types of transactions exceed a certain monetary threshold. I set them all to $0 and get notified of everything as it happens. ~~~ aembleton That's really good to hear. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case in the UK, at least for my accounts (Barclaycard and Halifax). I think our banking system is a bit antiquated. Monzo have built a tech stack that is far more advanced than any of our incumbant banks. ------ anc84 If I understood the issue correctly, then "Transaction information" and "Customers’ personally identifiable information" via the Developer's API _were_ potentially affected. ------ brad0 Great response from Monzo. I live in Scotland and it's amazing the difference companies like monzo have compared to regular banks (see the tesco bank fiasco) ~~~ pidg Without meaning to sound rude, why does it make a difference where you live? I feel like I'm missing something. ~~~ cesarb The place where someone lives changes the set of "regular banks" one's exposed to. ~~~ pidg Ah. I live in Scotland too and wondered if Monzo had some connection (Tesco Bank is based here but operates UK-wide) ~~~ OJFord Monzo is also UK-wide, but only UK-wide. Anecdotally, it seems Scots are more likely to say Scot* vs UK than are Welsh/English to offer the equivalent. I certainly grew up (in England) with the feeling that one had to be careful to say 'UK' if one really meant UK, for fear of similar reprimand to that when using a gendered pronoun that may or may not be correct. ------ mdekkers excellent response	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: G – Google Assistant in Your Terminal - ushakov https://github.com/mishushakov/g ====== thecodrr Wow. Wow. Wow. This is cool. Although I am not a huge fan of Google Assistant but still. Having this in your terminal is pretty cool. Keep it up. Hope this gets more up votes.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Path/Curve Editing in the Browser - mattdesl http://mattdesl.github.io/path-illustrator/demo/advanced.html ====== kolev Source Code: [https://github.com/mattdesl/path- illustrator](https://github.com/mattdesl/path-illustrator)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Learning Bluetooth Hackery with BLE CTF - okket http://www.hackgnar.com/2018/06/learning-bluetooth-hackery-with-ble-ctf.html ====== agumonkey [https://archive.fo/02dUk](https://archive.fo/02dUk) just in case ------ baby That looks awesome! Reminds me of the Riscure challenges that requires you to flash a chip every time or the chip whisperer that teaches you power analysis attacks via an all-in-one chip	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Amazon to Build Second HQ in North America - blasdel http://www.amazon.com/amazonHQ2 ====== Johnny555 This is a dupe of this post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15190555](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15190555) Same title, same source link.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
NYC Helmet, I’m Giddy With Excitement - onreact-com http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/08/26/nyc-helmet-im-giddy-with-excitement/ ====== imd According to <http://www.bhsi.org/guide.htm> : "Most bike helmets are made of EPS foam with a thin plastic shell. The shell helps the helmet skid easily on rough pavement to avoid jerking your neck.... Beware of gimmicks. You want a smoothly rounded outer shell, with no sharp ribs or snag points." I don't think a hat over a helmet is going to skid as easily as slick plastic. Also, "Dark helmets are hard for motorists to see," and this helmet looks like it only comes in black. ------ noss Am I alone being very comfortable wearing screaming red colors when i bike through traffic to get to work? Camouflage green and grey do not seem like strikingly good color choices. They wont even go well with the crimson red blood splat you'll leave under the truck that turned right and didnt notice you. ------ blasdel It's a lame skate helmet with a hat on top. [http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2009/08/slow-and-steady- tort...](http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2009/08/slow-and-steady-tortoise-and- helmet.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
On Task Systems - evantahler http://blog.evantahler.com/blog/on-task-systems.html ====== roskilli Looks similar to what Kue <http://learnboost.github.com/kue/> already does. I wish node had less fragmentation and more consolidation on these types of libraries/frameworks. Nice article breaking down the features and patterns of queue/task engines if nothing else! ~~~ evantahler Cool! I haven't heard of Kue. I'll take a look! Source for the curious: <https://github.com/learnboost/kue> ------ nolliesnom The article's statement "Putting them within a transaction is also no good, as you can't read and make decisions on the result (is the result of the select null?)" is not correct. You can implement task assignment in a SERIALIZABLE- capable RDBMS using a single "UPDATE ... SET assigned_to = 'me' WHERE assigned_to IS NULL" statement, or the equivalent of "SELECT FOR UPDATE" at the beginning of a transaction in order to examine the row in advance. ~~~ evantahler good call, I'll update that. I generally assume mySQL's feature-set, which I probably shouldn't do without clarification. ------ SeoxyS In my experience, I've found that it is much more reliable to use message queues instead of databases as the backing for job scheduling. Learning a complex but powerful MQ like Rabbit can be a little bit of a chore, but it more than pays off in the long run.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Is JavaScript the Future of Programming? - clwen http://mashable.com/2012/11/12/javascript/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+(Mashable) ====== trimbo All linkbaity headlines posed as a question are answered should be answered with "no", but I'm going to make the "yes" argument. Right now, Javascript is the most comprehensive, accessible, documented environment for someone who is, say, 12 years old. When I was that age, it was BASIC or Logo. Then it was Turbo Pascal / Turbo C. Next it was PHP. Right now, it's Javascript. And someone can grow with that. Chrome and Firefox are on the verge of being (if not already) IDEs for Javascript. There's of course node.js. Anyone can go into the code from websites and pull it apart (see Hanselman's post [1]). Codecademy is based on Javascript, and so on. That's my argument for "yes". Not because Javascript is at all good, but because it's the most ubiquitous and accessible language for the next generation. And on top of that, more energy is being poured into it than anything else. [1] - [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheInternetIsNotABlackBoxLookI...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheInternetIsNotABlackBoxLookInside.aspx) ------ mansoor-s As a JavaScript developer who loves JS, I really hope not! Its a great and fun language but it has far too many flaws. Updates to the language specs aren't coming fast enough. ------ xentronium Are Linkbaitish Titles the Future of Journalism? ~~~ nine_k Why, they are the present. ------ kls Despite the lack of love by many of those that consider themselves to be "true" or "hardcore" programmers or developers, JavaScript much like VB before it has a place and it does a good job at what it is designed for. JavaScript much like VB serves the purpose of gluing together apps that are close to the user and doing so rapidly. There is no denying that developing an app on a HTML/CSS/JavaScript front-end and a Node.js back end is fast probably one of the fastest stacks to develop in that I have seen in my career. Probably the only thing that was faster was back in the days of CGI/Perl but that is comparing apples to oranges as back in those days interactivity was minimal. It is almost as fast as building a traditional VB desktop app, which is pretty amazing given the infrastructure needed for web apps. There is definitely a place in the mainstream for JavaScript but it does not get all the credit, projects such as Node, Modernizr and Dojo have done just as much work to make JavaScript a rapid development choice as the core language guys have. ------ shaydoc Javascript is certainly addictive and fun to program with. Obviously the driver is, that it is part of every browser, and now the server. While flawed, it is so very expressive as a language. I think now that we are seeing some serious architectural concepts implemented and documented in the various libraries, it is making development much easier and faster. I recently discussed this with a colleague, and we agreed, that the ability to do JavaScript client and server (node) side has made it a no brainer, end to end javascript over RESTful services is the best way for "us" to go. I like that in windows 8 you can reference class libraries written in c# directly in your is project also. So I see a bright future for JavaScript :-) ------ nicholassmith I'll throw in with "Please no, never", but if we continue the expect trend of shift towards web apps over the next 5-10 years then obviously JS is going to become a defacto tool, unless something else takes off but I can only think of Dart which compiles to JS anyway unless it's that build of Chrome with the VM in. So what's next, an attempt a making a wide reaching client side language to usurp JS, or more languages that just compile down to JS and we treat it much like assembler gets treated now? ------ benhoskins Wow; node.js comes along, and its like there's a hole in collective memory. Both Netscape and Microsoft had javascript rocking serverside late nineties / early 2000's (the same time as VBScript and CGI). Also, other language interpreters ran code client-side (IE ran VBScript as I remember). It would be nice if history was as clearly delineated as stated, but it isn't. The jist of the argument is accurate tho; even people writing VBScript thought js was 'hacky' on the server :o) ------ eli_gottlieb God I hope not. ------ taylodl Maybe we need to think of 'JavaScript' as a term representing a set of uncompiled languages targeting the browser runtime environment. With that definition I would say, sure - 'JavaScript' has a very bright future. ------ alter8 No, it can't be the future because it's already the present. The future comes when something else replaces it. ------ SenorWilson JavaScript is useful for some things; it can be used for all things, but that doesn't mean it should be. ------ swalsh Whenever I see a headline such as "is x the future of z", the answer is almost always "not exclusively". ------ arikrak News titles exaggerate. They just mean that Javascript is growing in popularity. ------ skrebbel Can every tech mag article that ends with a question mark be answered with 'No'? ~~~ tsahyt I like to be careful with forall statements but in this very case, yes. ------ general_failure Sure, why not. It's better C++ and STL. ------ anonymouz No. ~~~ ubersoldat2k7 +1 ------ drivebyacct2 That a language is usable on the server and client is cause for it to be the "future of programming"? What an unbelievably outlandishly over simplification of everything that is part of this implication.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why Poland will never have hygge - MiriamWeiner http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20171107-the-polish-phrase-that-will-help-you-through-tough-times ====== dozzie The original title is "The Polish phrase that will help you through tough times". Please don't change the title, especially from something that describes the content quite well to your own sentence that doesn't reflect the article's topic in the slightest.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Yahoo's Fireeagle Project open for business - sh1mmer http://fireeagle.com/ ====== ggruschow This is fantastic. I totally needed to make it easier to track my every move. I'd use it, but without the ability to post my social security # and bank account passwords, it seems useless. ~~~ sysop073 I honestly don't see the utility of this. I don't think anybody wants to broadcast exactly where they are, even to their friends, and narrowing it down to what city you're in seems fairly useless for everyone ~~~ natrius "I don't think anybody wants to broadcast exactly where they are, even to their friends" This is wrong. _"Oh, you were at the mall this afternoon too? I wish I knew you were there. We could have hung out."_ Knowing where your friends are and telling your friends where you are is clearly very useful. The problem is doing it in a way that people feel comfortable with. ------ Kate Looks like Brightkite with some of the features removed and Yahoo integration tacked on. Not that Brightkite broke completely new ground either, but Fire Eagle really looks like a knockoff. ~~~ alaskamiller Fire eagle has been in the works at Yahoo for years and years and year and years. ------ tocomment1 Could someone build an iPhone app that sends your location to fireeagle? I'd do it but I don't have my license yet. (Or maybe I could write it and someone else would be willing to upload it onto the store?) ~~~ aditya Something called SearchQuest already does it. It's kinda unstable, though... ------ th0ma5 any connection with ze frank as in ride the fire eagle danger day? ~~~ simonw That's where the name came from, yes. No connection to Ze Frank otherwise.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Data initialization in C++ - Tsiolkovsky http://woboq.com/blog/data-and-initialisation.html ====== apaprocki File-level static non-POD instances are a big no-no. If you really (really) need a global static, move it into function scope in a function which returns the static (singleton pattern). (Additional tricks can be used to ensure it is only initialized once in a thread-safe manner.) e.g. [https://github.com/bloomberg/bsl/blob/master/groups/bsl/bslm...](https://github.com/bloomberg/bsl/blob/master/groups/bsl/bslma/bslma_mallocfreeallocator.cpp#L40) ~~~ nanidin Static init/de-init order were huge issues at my last job, working on embedded devices. When I say huge, I really mean issues that would seem to come and go randomly with builds, and in some cases brick devices until someone could JTAG it and get it up on a debugger to load a new boot block or determine the root cause. As the guy that got to do this, let me tell you that stepping through the ARM assembly of the runtime library made me feel like an uber hacker, but it wasn't exactly fun. The nifty counter pattern[0] ended up being the most helpful for generating a static initialization and de-initialization order without conflicts. The tradeoffs are that it increases codesize and that it looks like magic to a lot of people. I don't remember the exact reason that wrapping everything in functions returning references didn't work - I think it was more to do with the de-init side of things, since the function wrappers guarantee the init order but not the de-init order. [0] [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C%2B%2B_Idioms/Nifty_Count...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/More_C%2B%2B_Idioms/Nifty_Counter) ~~~ huhtenberg Uhm... but why would you have globals with constructors in a code where de/initialization order matters? ~~~ nanidin Massive, legacy codebase, C wrappers around new C++ functionality... to be honest I don't remember the exact reason. It mostly had to do with concurrency primitives not being initialized when they needed to be due to a lack of a way to initialize a class instance the same way POD instances are initialized (aka int x = 0 in global scope.) You work with what you're given, sometimes! ;) ------ kruhft This is my first exposure to constexpr and it looks very interesting. According to this article it's a second C++ metaprogramming language: [http://cpptruths.blogspot.ca/2011/07/want-speed-use- constexp...](http://cpptruths.blogspot.ca/2011/07/want-speed-use-constexpr- meta.html). The more I learn about C++11 the more I like it. There's some really amazing new features that I've only seen in Lisps, plus there's full static typing, which is the one thing I miss from Lisps. ~~~ pubby The more I use C++11 the less I like it. constexpr has many problems: \- Its syntax is that of C++s, but limited to a single statement and so is about as expressive as a block of wood. Templates are much closer to functional languages and so are naturally more expressive. Seriously, use templates instead! \- It's inefficient. If you want to do heavy computations then you're better off writing a program to generate code. If you want efficient run-time performance then good luck optimizing a single statement. \- It's specification is full of quirks and pitfalls. Quite simply, constexpr does not follow the path of least surprise. Plus, I hear it was a nightmare for the compiler writers. ~~~ kruhft After reading up on Lisp macro programming (PG's on OnLisp and others) you will see that it is always advised to use only purely functional code when doing metaprogramming. In Common Lisp and all the others Lisps I've seen, this is not strictly enforced by the language and only advised. The code should be purely functional because you don't know when and how many times it can be called by the compiler leading to some grand mysteries when something does not go as expected during compilation due to unintended state. The constexpr design is taking this to heart and enforcing that the code to be purely functional. I don't see this as a disadvantage but take it that designers of C++ are forcing best practices for the features they are adding. Best practices are generally not the most convenient, but by doing it this way, they're giving you less 'rope to shoot yourself in the foot'. Lisp was more of a research language woring as a testbed of features that are now moving into mainstream languages now that there is some experience with how to use them in the least damaging way. Purely functional programming is not as 'easy' to write because almost everyone learns imperative first, which is the most natural way to code (do this, then do this, then do this,...). Using functional code requires you put the control that you would normally put into code into the _data_. It's a different way of thinking and is not natural in the way that imperative programming is. And regarding that implementing constexpr wsa a 'nightmare for compiler writers', it should be! Strong abstractions are difficult to design and implement, but once they are complete everyone benefits. Compilers are the one things that should take on the hard features since everyone uses them. Thanks for your experiences with constexpr and I'll form my own opinions of it after some practial use and maybe i'll find it just as lacking as you do in the end :). I'll stand by my statement that C++11 is heading in the right direction, even though it may have some warts and tradeoffs that it can't be avoided, like anything that matures. It will be interesting to see what C++ goes in the next 10 or more years. ~~~ pubby Hi! Thanks for your thoughts :) I pretty much agree with everything you said, with the exception of defending constexpr. What follows is more ranting on constexpr and praise for templates. > The constexpr design is taking this to heart and enforcing that the code to > be purely functional. You're falling into the common trap of confusing purity with functional. constexpr is only enforcing code to be free of side effects; it's even less functional than C. Templates on the other hand, are functional. With templates, you get pattern matching, easy recursive data types, high order functions, and more. You can literally take Haskell code, change the syntax a bit, and end up with a complete metaprogram. That's not possible with constexpr. Templates can work with values, but more importantly, they can work with types. Being able to actually to modify the types and code of the program is essential to metaprogramming. None of that comes with constexpr. Hell, I wouldn't even consider constexpr to be metaprogramming. In addition, templates can actually form abstractions, even ones that aren't functional. Boost.MPL, over a decade old, emulated C++-style containers at compile time using only templates. As a personal experience, I've implemented a stack-based language akin to Forth using templates, see: [http://pubby8.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/stack-based- template-...](http://pubby8.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/stack-based-template- metaprogramming-in-c-11/) Well guess what? Templates suck. They slow the compile down to a crawl, their syntax is incomprehensible, and don't get me started on their error message. The only reason to use them is because there is nothing better. C++11 had a chance to fix this. Instead, we got constexpr.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Why We're All Shy Sometimes - dwynings http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250350893404916.html?mod=dist_smartbrief ====== rcfox "...Unlike introverts, who prefer to be socially withdrawn, shy people want to be social. Making matters worse, shy people are often misunderstood—thought to be snobby or aloof." I wish people would do some research about introverts before labelling us all as social outcasts.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Switzerland Tried Negative Rates in the 1970s - pseudolus https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-22/swiss-history-of-negative-interest-rates-is-ugly ====== roenxi ~ Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. There remains something bizarre about how the language of international trade is couched. I still don't see downsides from having a strong currency that are so bad it needs such a response. The basic problem is you want Swiss Watchmaker to be able to swap watches for, say, Italian tomatoes. Devaluing the Swiss currency doesn't cause him to be able to buy any more tomatoes; it just forces him to sell more watches. If he was happy to swap watches for tomatoes at that rate, he already had the power to sell his watches more cheaply. Honestly, I don't like transfer payments but they are better than trying to hold down a currency with financial shenanigans. If the market says it will give you 10,000 tomatoes for 9,000 watches, the gain of forcing the equilibrium to 10,000 tomatoes and 10,000 watches is highly questionable. And any individual watchmakers could already force the equilibrium in that direction if they wanted to without any help. ~~~ bobthepanda He may not be able to sell his watches as well with a strong currency. For one thing, if his inputs are mostly Swiss (suppliers and labor) then they too have gone up in price, so he can’t slash prices in response. And if the Swiss watches get too expensive people may start looking to buy some Japanese watches instead because they’re relatively cheaper. ~~~ roenxi > For one thing, if his inputs are mostly Swiss (suppliers and labor) then > they too have gone up in price, so he can’t slash prices in response. But this implies he's taking resources which could be productively used in Switzerland and redirecting them to foreigners. No individual would be worse off, and the net would be better, if the market was left alone except for some transfer payments within Switzerland. Option A) Sell A watches for B tomatoes, some transfer payments to even out who gets the tomatoes. C watches worth of resources remain with the Swiss. Option B) Sell A + C watches for B tomatoes, no transfer payments because the tomatoes are distributed as A. Neither of these solutions are the capitalist one (which is A but no redistribution). However, if the government is going to pick one, A looks better. Possibly dropping prices would result in more resources entering, but if the watchmakers didn't think dropping their prices initially was a good idea then this aspect is almost surely going to lead to worse use of the resources than leaving them in Switzerland. It is too complicated to reason about the effect that would have; but it certainly isn't at all obvious that it would be a good thing vs the benefits of a strong currency and consuming resources internally. > And if the Swiss watches get too expensive people may start looking to buy > some Japanese watches instead because they’re relatively cheaper. I don't see this as countering my original compliant; the Swiss government doesn't need to force watchmakers to drop prices - they can do that on their own. My point here is that this is ultimately a redistributive policy. Roughly the same amount of resources are coming in to Switzerland, but instead of going to a small group of watchmakers they are going to a larger group of watchmakers. Ok. No worries. But why is a key part of the plan subsidising Italian consumption? By government mandate? Through a very-difficult-to-measure-the- exact-effects process of negative interest rates and worrying about currency strength? Could they not just institute a struggling watchmaker payment funded by a gentle tax on capital inflows without the strange dance? It would be much easier to measure the effects of a gentle tax than mucking around with interest rates. This is a solution that works because nobody knows if they are the one paying for it. But it is going to cost more than a plain tax-and-spend scheme, because it has many opportunities for strange market-bending side effects. ------ jaclaz It seems to me that bloomberg omits fully describing the situation (political and economical) in the '70's and '80's, at least in EU countries there was instability (petrol crisis, terrorism, among others) that induced many (right or wrong) to fear for the future and use Switzerland as a huge moneybox. ~~~ nwellnhof Also, the article doesn't back up the claim that Switzerland's policy was a failure. To me it seems that things would have gotten even worse without negative interest rates on foreign capital. ~~~ tom_mellior Also, the policy described was a lot more than "let's try mildly negative interest rates". And the oil crisis was _probably_ not Switzerland's fault. The headline is scaremongering. ------ s_Hogg Apropos of this, one wonders if the Swiss shouldn't permanently take on exchange rate instead of inflation rate targeting. It works very well for the Singaporeans and their economies could be said to be similar in some ways. ~~~ H8crilA They used to do that prior to 2014 or 2015, don't remember. It was pegged to EUR by constantly printing CHF and selling for EUR. Then one beautiful day the peg was dropped without a warning. Many people and brokerages went broke in a matter of a minute. ------ k5hp _Prior to the downturn, official unemployment figures only acknowledged 81 unemployed people – yes, 81 – in a country of 6.4 million._ Incredible number. ~~~ steve19 Often unemployment numbers are at least partly political. There are many ways the number can be manipulated. Unemployment of 1% is considered __extremely __good. The International Labor Organization defines being employed as anyone who works just one hour a week, which is 10 days per year (at a 40 hour work week). This leads to countries such as Cambodia (0.3 - 0.5%) and Thailand (0.7%) claiming crazy low unemployment because grandmother sweeps the farmhouse flood once a week [0]. In reality the stats hide poverty. Another way to have high unemployment is to have most of the work done by migrants and deport them as soon as they don't have a job (UAE, 1.6%), or ensure the rent is high enough they are forced to leave if they lose a job (Gibraltar 1%). In a functional developed economy you need people to move between jobs as supply and demand change, so a certain level of unemployment is expected. [0] [https://www.cambodiadaily.com/editors-choice/cambodias- low-j...](https://www.cambodiadaily.com/editors-choice/cambodias-low-jobless- rate-hides-harsh-reality-106803/) ~~~ ACow_Adonis Absolutely. The presence of frictional unemployment in a super tight labor market would alone result in a higher number of unemployed people than that for a population of ~6 million, so I would assume any economist reading the stat quoted in the article would immediately proclaim it to be, in technical terms, "poppycock". ~~~ Rexxar That really depends on the law that manage transition between two jobs. It's seems perfectly plausible to me. For example, if the law mandate to warn fired people 3 months in advance, they have the time to find another job before losing their current one, specially if the economy is doing well. ------ H8crilA Just how insane the climate was that -40% yearly interest rates didn't stop the CHF mania! I'm speechless. _> In January 1975, the Swiss government held an emergency meeting and then took the extraordinary step of slapping a 41% annual penalty on foreign deposits. But even this failed to stem the tide. The franc continued to appreciate against the dollar — a total of 70% in nominal terms between 1971 and 1975 alone._ ------ skybrian I wonder what happened to the money raised via negative interest rates? If used to fund UBI, maybe everyone would be happy? ------ Varqu Could someone explain like I'm 5, why doesn't SNB just print (digitally) more money to weaken the Frank? Would that drive their inflation crazy? ~~~ s_Hogg It definitely can, but it's not guaranteed. Japan has been effectively printing money for ages, but it hasn't really led to inflation because demand is so weak - nothing gets bid up. ~~~ marvin They should just throw money out of helicopters. That ought to do it. Dunno why nobody has tried doing that yet. ~~~ s_Hogg Australia avoided recession in 2008-09 by doing almost precisely this. Everyone got A$900 or thereabouts (a month's rent or more for some). Worked fantastically. Think of it as applying a defibrilator to all parts of the body at once because there's no central point you can target. Infrastructure projects aren't as good as this because they take time and only really effect one particular geographic region with some spillover if you're lucky. ~~~ blackbrokkoli Defibrillators literally kill people after which you can manually revive them because their ventricular fibrillation is stopped. Maybe the metaphor is still fitting but I'm not sure you were going for it... ~~~ dredmorbius Langauge is metaphor. A vfib patient is already dead, or on their way there. The heart has lost all rhythm, isn't effectively circulating blood (though it's expending energy like mad), and in a few minutes, further classifications of clinical death (brain death, organ death, cell death) will inevitably follow. What a defibrillator does is _stop an invariably fatal loss or order_ , and allow the heart's normal rhythm to be reasserted. That may happen spontaneously or via further artificial stimulation. Vfib itself is described as "an electrical disorder of the heart", which is what distinguishes itself from other forms of cardiac insult, most especially a coronary infarction, which is a _physical blockage_ of blood supply, generally from accumulated plaque, blood clots, or both. The analogoue to financial systems is at best imprecise, but what a financial stimulus shock such as the apocryphal "helicoptor drops" does is to provide free cash (spending credits) to a large fraction of the population in a case where spending has dried up. The idea being that the availability of money will get economic activity flowing again. In a case where normal activity has stopped, it's at least a fair analogy -- a one-time widespread cash shock which may start flows moving again. The key point being that complex interactive systems operate on an ordered _dynamic_ state. The heart needs to contract and relax, with a regular rhythm. The economy needs payments, receipts, and wages, exchanged on a regular basis. Stopping, blocking, or disrupting the regular flows is what's fatal. Defibrillation isn't killing the patient. It's restoring regularity. ------ zeristor So what are the downsides for Switzerland using the Euro? How much of Switzerland is tied up in it having its own currency? ~~~ beberlei Switzerland would first need to be part of the European Union to be able to be part of the Euro Currency region. They voted against this in 1992 and again in 2001. I am not swiss myself so take this with a grain of salt, but a quick research showed that overwhelmingly swiss citizens are against joining the EU to keep their independence and their unique way of doing democracy (direct votes on issues) probably couldn't work so well anymore. ~~~ lagadu > Switzerland would first need to be part of the European Union to be able to > be part of the Euro Currency region. That's incorrect, there are non-EU countries using the Euro too like Andorra. ~~~ tonyedgecombe Andorra has a population of 70,000, you can't use it as an example of what Switzerland could do. ~~~ Rexxar Kosovo and Montenegro (1.7M and 0.7M habitants) are unilaterally using euro. Other (bigger) countries have their money pegged to euro : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_status_and_usage...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_status_and_usage_of_the_euro#Pegged_currencies)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Insane "underwater" startup. - noonespecial http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/13/smallbusiness/subprime_sub.fsb/index.htm ====== mixmax Either this is nothing special or I just hang around a weird crowd. I know a some guys that made three submarines, and they go to 1500 feet. The biggest one is the largest amateur submarine in the world. See pictures here: <http://www.submarines.dk/> They are currently working on commercial spaceflight: The goal is to make a rocket that will get one person suborbital but weightless and back down. They expect to do it within a couple of years. They just had their first public motor test, you can see a clip here: [http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&cli...](http://ekstrabladet.dk/nationentv/klip/?clipid=17454&clipfra=1) . (links are in Danish) And they're just a couple of guys with no money to speak off, but they are crazy and they believe they can do it. So do I. ~~~ ryanwaggoner I'm pretty sure you just hang around a weird crowd... _pages through Facebook to see if anyone's status is building submarine or hobby rocket_ Yeah, just a weird crowd :-) ~~~ mixmax Looking forward to a trip on top of their rocket though :-) ------ sspencer Is there a particular reason underwater is in quotes here? It IS an (insane) underwater startup. The fact that it is underwater does not need to be quoted. I think people have completely lost touch with what quotation marks mean. Sorry to be nitpicky, but I am getting tired of seeing completely wrong uses of quotation marks everywhere. ~~~ noonespecial I used underwater in this case because it is often said that a startup is underwater when they are in debt. The quotes for the double meaning. Apologies if I got it "wrong". :) ------ sfphotoarts I wonder just how much of the world would have been explored had Shackleton, Columbus etc worried too much about if their boats were insured. Antarctica...ummm, that's all very interesting sir, but tell me again how much personal accident liability you have on The Discovery... :) ~~~ hugh Interestingly, googling "Shackleton insurance" gives this New York Times article from January 16, 1914: [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E6DC1730E733A25755C1A9679C946596D6CF) It's not clear to me from the article who actually took out the insurance policy, though. ------ bigthboy I, like many of those who commented in the article, think the guy is pretty smart. I mean he did build his own submarine from scratch and furthermore made it profitable. However, I also agree that the bull headed and risky approach he has with the whole thing is a bit... unnecessary. I would like to see him approach it not thinking he's better than everyone and that he can simply get around the law. For as many dumb laws there are there are at least half as many good ones. Not allowing people to take other people to dangerous places without being certified and having insurance is one of those good ones. ~~~ noonespecial The point he made was that the certification would have cost him more than the sub. He is barely profitable as it is. There are a whole set of laws in the first world that create an absurdly high barrier to entry for certain activities. Instead of making the activities safer, as intended, they simply make them impossible/unprofitable/implausible. A soup kitchen that fed the homeless near me was forced to close because they could not afford to install a centralized halon fire extinguisher system to meet commercial kitchen code. Instead of making the volunteers and the homeless marginally safer, the volunteers went home to watch TV and the homeless were SOL. Law->Fail. Different cultures experience risk/reward in different ways. Safety _above ALL else_ is a distinctly first-world/western notion. ~~~ bigthboy I'm not saying they all work out I'm saying that some are good. In your example of the soup kitchen closed because it couldn't install some fancy- pancy fire extinguisher system, yeah, that's a bad law and a bit of an overkill. Telling someone that they can't legally take other people 700 feet below the water in a sub that isn't certified is a bit of a different story. He may have barely have been making a profit but the fact of the matter is it would've cost him $100,000 to get papers/certified but he instead spent $200,000 on a new sub. It just seems like the kind of thing that would actually be considered an investment because it could make you more profitable and definitely adds more credibility. ~~~ noonespecial Eventually you end up with a choice. The older, smaller $100k sub with $100k of permission seeking added on (and somewhat known risk) or the newer larger $200k sub with somewhat unknown risk. In the first-world, that choice is made for me (and likely results in no sub ride at all). I'm glad that there are some places in the world where I can still choose for myself. I'd take the sub ride. ------ josefresco Would you trust/encourage a guy who shoots a horse in the head just to see something on the bottom of the sea floor eat it? ~~~ rudyfink Yes, while I don't see it as something I would do, I can't find any fault with it. I'd guess it's probably just the cheapest price point for meat available to him. If he bought a pallet of horse meat from a butcher, it would seem far more ordinary I think? That said I can't fault the logic of just going right to the source and saving money. ~~~ noonespecial Its the same cultural problem that some people have with eating dog. Its just a different world. The meat in this case even walks to the place where its needed! If it was a cow or a pig, it would probably seem less objectionable. Horse seems to ring up as "pet" in my mind and so colors the issue for me. If you think about it, he doesn't _need_ to shoot the horse first. Dropping it to the bottom of the ocean with cinder blocks attached would do the trick while possibly attracting more sharks. It be cheaper and cleaner boat-side as well. He would probably find it morally objectionable to do so though. If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more vegetarians. ~~~ reeses > If more people had to kill their own meat, there'd be a ton more > vegetarians. For about a week until we got over the social conditioning. Then we'd start wondering what else we've been missing all these years, and start killing and eating koala bears, kittens, and people. ------ wastedbrains I saw ads for this when I was scuba diving and Honduras, kind of funny to see this story on CNN about a year later. ------ sireat This sounds like a lot of fun, till someone gets hurt. Even in Honduras that would spell trouble. I would probably take the risk though. ------ Allocator2008 I am not an economist, but I think this is a lesson in the area of risk/reward. Sure, as a tourist I might have qualms about taking a ride in an unlicensed sub. However as a human being who loves knowledge, I would be intrigued by the chance to see a 14-foot shark close-up. The risk involved is offset by the chance for knowledge. Evolution hard-wires self-preservation into us. But perhaps it also hard-wires a certain risk-tolerance for the sake of a greater good. Put it another way: it is better for the gene to lose a few gene-carriers along the way to aquiring a big new advantage, than to not lose those handful of gene-carriers but also not aquire the big new advantage. So businesses like this that understand the hard-wired tolerance we have for risk when others don't understand that, have a competitive advantage - they can get to work while their competitors are still worrying about paper work. In a word, the selfish gene should be proud of this guy! :-) ~~~ seano You could get the same knowledge from watching a video. ~~~ dmv Knowledge, perhaps, but by no means the same experience (which is what the commenter probably meant). There is no question that I appreciate how a shark moves through the water far more from my experiences as a diver than as a Shark Week viewer or aquarium visitor. ------ markm Now that's a maverick. ------ mtw killing the horse just to get tourists see sharks and other sea predators is imo stupid and unelegant	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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