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Bringing FPGA Development to the Masses - johncmouser http://notryan.com/webfpga ====== godsendit Fucking cloud shit	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Teleportation on the command line - liquidwax http://thecakeisalie.in/blog/2014/01/11/teleportation-on-the-commandline/ ====== euank It looks like no one has posted what, in my opinion, is the most powerful of the "jump" programs: fasd. My workflow for getting around is just to type "z <fragment of directory name>" and I almost always end up where I want. If I just want to edit a file, not a project, I do vim `f <filename fragment>` and likewise get the file I want typically. The readme makes it pretty clear how awesome it is and I've stuck with it after using autojump, z, and others. [https://github.com/clvv/fasd](https://github.com/clvv/fasd) ~~~ a3_nm Second this recommendation. fasd works extremely well, and better than z and autojump for my usage. I use it all the time. ------ res0nat0r Just use auto jump [https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump](https://github.com/joelthelion/autojump) ~~~ gaving lighter (non python) alternative to autojump [https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z) ~~~ mtrn Since I discovered `z` I haven't typed in cd, except for changing into $HOME quickly. ------ shurcooL > Nobody types an entire URL like [https://example.com/example- > page?input=sample&another-input=...](https://example.com/example- > page?input=sample&another-input=2). We bookmark it and give it a keyword > like ex or something. From then, we just type ex and hit return to access > the website. I don't wanna sound negative, but just being realistic. I don't rely on bookmarks primarily. I rely on "most frequently visited gets auto-completed first" and fuzzy search of Chrome Omnibox. If I do bookmark something, it's to indicate to the algorithm "I care about this, make it easier to fuzzy find it later". But it's a good step in the right direction, good job! Edit: From the description, it sounds like autojump does something close. ~~~ JelteF You should try out fish[1], one of the features that makes it great is that it does exactly what the chrome omnibox does, just with commands. It shows what it will complete after you press ^F and it is a lot of times correct. It also has lots of other features, like tab completion that tells you what the options of commands do. So reading the manpages or typing -h is generally not needed. If you do try it, also try one of the themes of oh-my-fish[2], most of them have a git thing that lets you know if you have uncommitted stuff and on what branch you are. [1] [http://fishshell.com/](http://fishshell.com/) [2] [https://github.com/bpinto/oh-my-fish](https://github.com/bpinto/oh-my- fish) ------ Webster Why not just use the CDPATH variable in your shell? If the directory is one you go to frequently, add it to CDPATH, then just cd to it. ------ scribu I'm quite happy with [https://github.com/huyng/bashmarks](https://github.com/huyng/bashmarks) Also, the built-in pushd and popd commands are enough sometimes. ~~~ vezzy-fnord _Also, the built-in pushd and popd commands are enough sometimes._ I came here to say this. A small wrapper around these commands would make for a sufficient script. ------ Morgawr Interesting scripts are being posted in the comments, really neat tricks guys. One thing I'd like to add, if you're like me and don't want to install too much "extra" stuff on your machines: Bash has native commands called pushd and popd[0]. They work as a stack, pushd will push the current directory onto the stack and jump to the new target, then you're free to move around, do whatever you want and then call popd to pop the latest directory from the stack. I find these very useful, especially if I'm on a machine without additional installed software and just want to do my thing effortlessly. [0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushd_and_popd](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushd_and_popd) ~~~ anon4 For a one-level undo there's always cd - Passing a single dash as a parameter to cd takes you back to $OLDPWD and each invocation of cd sets OLDPWD to the directory you were in. ------ akerl_ I use a similar method, which I based on a previous HN post: [https://github.com/akerl/dotfiles/blob/master/.bundles/marks](https://github.com/akerl/dotfiles/blob/master/.bundles/marks) I'm addicted to one/two-letter aliases, and between that and ZSH completion ([https://github.com/akerl/dotfiles/blob/master/.completions/_...](https://github.com/akerl/dotfiles/blob/master/.completions/_marks)), the mark functions get me super-simple bookmarks I also wish people would stop providing "curl this into .bashrc" as the primarily installation method. That's a really bad habit to get into, especially with a file like .bashrc. It's a bit less risky than piping the curl into bash, but still not a great plan. ------ ehm_may I don't get it. Why not just use aliases? alias <name>='cd path/to/<name>' Then you can just type: $ <name> You can even set up an alias to add a new alias -> alias ea='vim ~/bash/alias' ------ bnegreve Nice. This quick and dirty trick has been in my .bashrc forever and I still use it: function md(){ pwd > /tmp/md_tmp function gomd(){ cd `cat /tmp/md_tmp` so `md` marks the current directory and `gomd`go to the marked directory. Unlike bash builtins like pushd and popd, it uses the file system to store the marked directory so you can pop up a new terminal and just do gomd. (you can't with pushd/popd since the bash processes of the old and the new terminal are not related) Edit: I see that your script uses links, I'll check this out. ------ MattFlower Some time ago I put my directory changing tools up on GitHub at [https://github.com/mattflower/bashcd](https://github.com/mattflower/bashcd) In addition to the bookmarking style capabilities other people have already mentioned it also includes integration with the locate database, the mac spotlight/mds database, and the plain old find command. It can switch to a sub directory containing a particular file. It also supports bash completion. ------ jck With zsh, you could just do w/c/p/w/s<TAB> ------ coley I made a tool a year ago to do the same thing, Metis: [https://github.com/srcoley/metis](https://github.com/srcoley/metis) I like a solution that goes where ever your dotfiles go, instead of having to install a fuzzy search on each system. Metis will list all of your currently saved Metis aliases as well, just by typing "metis". You can also tell Metis which dotfile you want to save your aliases. ------ csense Why not just use a symlink? ln -s ~/super/long/nested/directory/name ~/short If you don't want to dump them in your home directory, just make a directory with a single-letter name for your links: ln -s ~/super/long/nested/directory/name ~/l/short ~~~ biscarch Personally I do something similar. I set up an alias in .zshrc from project names to commands. This allows me to do things like source environments as well. alias proj="cd /this/that/foo/projects/myproject/ && source .hsenv/bin/activate" ------ damaru Well I though it was nice, but the script if quite buggy! works well when cleaned up ------ sgs1370 Thanks - all of the alternatives look interesting but this one seems to be the shortest of them, and since "mark" installed after a simple cut & paste into my profile, I'll try it out for a while. ------ ClayFerguson This is sort of why I always just put everything in a shell script. Creating a text file with .sh extension is not that difficult, and I almost never use the command line interactively. Plus I use a GUI and just mount folders I need to browse. It boggles the mind how so many people still equate "Linux==Command Line Hacking". I actually had a boss once who said to me: "If you don't use the command line that much why do you use Linux instead of Windows?" You see, in his mind Linux was all about the command line. Yeah maybe in 1990 it was, but nowadays it's a normal OS like any other. ------ rasengan0 I enjoy posts like this because it brings out timtowtdi: pushd, cdpath, ln and aliases ------ ses4j Does any flavor of this functionality exist for Windows command prompt? ~~~ elarkin Windows makes this a little easier than bash does. batch scripts in windows behave like scripts on unix do when you source them. That means that you can write a batch script called "foo.bat" with the contents of "cd \whatever\directory\you\please" and it will change your current directory when run. From there, it would not be difficult to write a batch script that in turn wrote batch scripts like "foo.bat" above. With bash, you would have to create functions or aliases to get the same effect. ------ sreejithr Did anybody try the script in ZSH? ~~~ a-b [https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my- zsh/blob/master/plugin...](https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my- zsh/blob/master/plugins/fasd/fasd.plugin.zsh) ------ dmourati Tab works for me.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Google’s New Logo Is Trying Really Hard to Look Friendly - snake117 http://www.wired.com/2015/09/googles-new-logo-trying-really-hard-look-friendly/ ====== kenOfYugen [http://i.imgur.com/x7HQW.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/x7HQW.jpg)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New trojan targets Firefox, masquerades as Greasemonkey - dhimes http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081205-new-trojan-targets-firefox-masquerades-as-greasemonkey.html ====== dhimes This link is actually more interesting [http://www.bitdefender.co.uk/NW900-uk --BitDefender-detects-n...](http://www.bitdefender.co.uk/NW900-uk-- BitDefender-detects-novel-approach-to-stealing-web-passwords.html) but, what was [removed]...?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
When a designer joins a startup: In the name of pixels - rominak http://www.zemanta.com/blog/designer-startup-pixels/ ====== k__ divas ;)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Hacker News Almost Real Time.(Automatic loading of updates/every 5 minutes) - danfitch http://toseeitlive.com/ ====== danfitch This is my experiment using Comet, Faye, Sinatra, and Redis. Let me know what you think. I keep it open all day and watch stories move up and down without missing the ones that fall off the front page. If you mouse over the items they will highlight, other users can see the mouse over as well. More Info is on the About page <http://toseeitlive.com/about> ~~~ duck Seeing mouse overs of other users seems pointless and the faint change from black to gray made me a little dizzy. Also the "Users Online" doesn't seem to load, but it sounds interesting. I like the idea though, just seems like it could be presented better (I almost missed the green arrows). ~~~ danfitch Yeah The Users Online will update every 5 minutes, and I will improve the presentation, just kinda doing it for myself and wrote it in a few hours so haven't put much style into it. Thanks for checking it out! I could have it update every minute and the arrows would be noticed earlier and maybe I should move it closer to the number of the article. ~~~ danfitch Yeah this is not a fully bullet proof system, it is just an experiment, something that I use and thought I would share, if you want to play around with the technology check out the urls on the about page. ------ SlyShy Sorry to ruin it for anyone, but this is a _hilarious_ April Fools prank. Edit: Apparently that wasn't the author's intention. It's just that the application has funny injection vulnerabilities. ~~~ axod Sorry guys :( I'll stop now. Note to author: Give an idiot (me) a toy, and he'll play... ~~~ danfitch Eh... Go play, I built the site to learn how these technologies would work together. I learned that its cool and very simple to hookup but that means with simplicity comes some extra work to secure it. I'll work out the kinks later and do a writeup but what I learned and post the source. ~~~ axod Is it hard to validate things server side? From the little I know about the setup it seems like you publish from a client, and it gets pushed out to all clients automatically. Hopefully there's a way to deny certain publishes from clients, cleanse input, validate etc etc on the server, before it gets relayed to the other clients. For example the channel '/client_count' should never accept any publishes from outside the server. Wonder how easy that is to adjust. It does seem pretty nice and responsive though :) Nice job. ~~~ danfitch Yeah Faye makes it dead simple to set up the channels to communicate on but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of filtering for the channels. I am sure it is something that could be added, but I didn't take the time yet. Thanks! ~~~ jerf Web frameworks/libraries/apps that make correct HTML encoding possible without much fuss are a pleasant surprise on those rare occasions when I encounter them. Web frameworks/libraries/apps that actually do it right knock me over. I don't know of very many examples that even come close. (This isn't my only metric, but it's a good start: Set a variable to ampersand, then do the basic string output that your template library or whatever has, feeding it that variable. If you get & automatically and have to ask extra hard for a bare ampersand, you've officially gotten me up to "Hey, wow!" That's just one metric I use of many, but making the safe thing easy and the dangerous thing harder is a good start! This knocks out almost every web framework/library/web templating system I've tried.) ------ chanux Down arrows in red would be good. ~~~ danfitch Yeah I will make that change good point. Done ------ gojomo Is this why HN has been sluggish the past week or so? ~~~ danfitch I only poll it every 5 minutes. I didn't want to over do it, and the frequency didn't matter that much to me. I just like to see the change over time. ------ w-ll this domain remind me of the bill o riley outrage	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask YC: is MVC the best solution? - Tichy Somehow my intuition is always a little bit at odds with MVC (as found in current web frameworks). It feels more natural that the view would request the data it needs, especially if it is putting together a mosaic of different sources. <p>For example, I guess most web applications have some sort of layout view and include the content into it. But what if there are different kinds of things to include? For example there could be a list of logged in users to be displayed in the sidebar, or any number of widgets. It seems unnatural to have to gather the data for those in every controller call. <p>My experience is with Java frameworks, where usually the flow is through one controller - how does for example Rails deal with that sort of thing? For Java I guess the proposed solution is Portlets, but I haven't seen their wide adaption yet, and they seem to be another headache (those Java specs should be made shorter and more concise). <p>What is the best solution? ====== optimal I don't think the most tangible benefit of MVC is reuse, but rather code organization. In MVC, if you're looking for something, you know where to find it. That saves a lot of time. It's easy to write an application, but harder to maintain it. Also, imagine an application with a Web view displaying a data set returned from a controller. Now the client/user wants an OS-native version of the app. That's simple, just build a native (OS-specific) window view and call the same controller for the data set (model). Or maybe an API is needed for external consumption. In that case a web service "view" can be built to return the same data set from the same controller. We're just swapping views here--it's plug- and-play. It's a clear separation of responsibilities. I believe that used to be called "modular" programming. ;) ------ yariv It seems like you've run into limitations in the frameworks you've used, not in the MVC pattern itself. In ErlyWeb (which I created, so I'm biased -- but not too biased), components are implmeneted by a controller module and a view module. Any component can include any other component. The controller decides which subcomponents to include, and the view decides where to put them after they've been rendered. This design makes it natural to separate a page into different controllers + views that can be reused in other pages. It also maintains the MVC philosophy that the controller should decide what should be rendered, and the view should decide how to render it. MVC is an elegant design pattern, but I think an MVC framework must provide a simple way for components to include other components. Otherwise, I can see why you would find it frustrating that your main controller has to do all the work. ------ gregwebs Many people accept the MVC dogma as the word of god. In truth, it is a design trade-off just like anything else. You should really look at SeaSide or UncommonWeb. In SeaSide the view and controller are combined into a component in the way you describe as intuitive. In Rails best practice is to create partials (partial views) that can be re-used across views, put code into the model instead of the controller, and use before_filter to trigger re-usable functions. ------ jimbokun "For example there could be a list of logged in users to be displayed in the sidebar, or any number of widgets. It seems unnatural to have to gather the data for those in every controller call." Aren't these things conceptually separate views, each having its own controller? However, mentioning MVC and web applications gives me an excuse to engage in nostalgia and once more mourn the passing[1] of WebObjects. It was simple in WebObjects to make any reusable part of a page into its own component. Also, MVC has a much bigger payoff when you have development tools designed to support it. WOBuilder allowed you to graphically build interface components, then just drag connections between properties in your controller object and the widget you wanted to display them in. And not just top level properties, but you could drill down through the relationships of any object (e.g. user.shoppingCart.numberOfItems, Google "key value coding" if interested). (And yes, this is just like Cocoa and Interface Builder, came out of the same technology base originally.) I have yet to see any web development tools[2] that come anywhere close to the productivity enabled by WebObjects. And I didn't even get into the Enterprise Objects Framework... [1] WebObjects is still very much alive inside Apple (iTunes store, Apple Store, pretty much everything Apple does on the web) but for outside developers it is quite dead. The only life support is ant + Eclipse plugins, but that defeats the whole purpose as the development tools were the whole point of WebObjects. [2] Tools as distinct from programming languages. WebObjects was Java, so nothing special there, but real old timers still miss the Objective C version. ------ HiddenBek Rails has filters that can run before, after, or around some or all of your controller actions. This can be done on a per controller basis, or it can be application wide. In this case you'd probably define a "load_widgets" before_filter in your application controller, then set your view to display whichever widgets it had data for. ~~~ qaexl There are other pieces of this puzzle besides before_filter. In Rails, you don't necessarily have to have a monolithic view. On more complex sites, you use fragments, called partials. Sidebars can be easily created by having a "shared" view directory full of partials. Further, there is a content_for helper in Rails views. Views render late; you can set an instance variable in the subviews that will affect what gets rendered in the layout. Trying to keep track of that can get hairy, so content_for abstracts that for you. Combined with the partials and the before_filter in the controllers, you can get a view to produce a number of things without having to resort to pulling DB info inside the views -- that reminds me too much of the bad old days of PHP. In the logged-in users example, in what is normally in the sidebar, you use a render :partial => 'shared/users' if @users; then add a before_filter in the site-wide application layout to pull in the data if someone is logged in. A more complicated example is to render a "sidebar" partial, which renders more partials depending on some array of sidebars you want to display ... then use a before_filter to figure out what you want to populate the sidebars with. Any controller or actions can override or add to that sidebar array. The main thing that sucks about this kind of organization is having the code scattered in a number of different files. This is where using an editor that knows the relationship between the files is important -- you can hit some key combination and jump between the different fragments without having to hunt them down in the file browser. ~~~ myoung8 I think having that degree of modularity is a great thing (granted you have a good text editor). It makes it much easier to understand what's happening in the code and much easier to maintain it (and get someone new up to speed). I was helping out on this one site built in PHP a while back where the code _wasn't_ organized this way. It took me about a week to figure out where things were, which was a huge productivity drag for the other guys. ~~~ qaexl I just found this out five minutes ago -- You can get a plugin called "embedded actions" for Rails (2.0, and probably 1.2.x). The README is here: [http://dev.notso.net/svn/rails/plugins/embedded_actions/trun...](http://dev.notso.net/svn/rails/plugins/embedded_actions/trunk/README) A snippet from the README: Unlike partials, embedded actions also let you define business logic to be performed before the partial is included. That logic is encapsulated in the already well understood metaphor of an action inside a controller. So a simple call like <%= embed_action :controller => "songs", :action => "top10" %> lets you include an html fragment containing the top 10 songs into any of your pages, regardless of which controller, action or view wants to do the including. \---- In other words, you call "embed_action" from within a view which will call the controller-action and embed whatever result is there. You still get the organizational benefit of MVC without the hassle of rolling your own partials. As an additional note to what I was saying about partials, Rails 2.0 also has a concept of "partial layouts", allowing you to switch out the surrounding content of a partial. ------ davidw Try Rails and see. It's pretty impressive. Django is supposed to be pretty good too if Python is more your thing. ------ mrtron To answer your question in the title...MVC is a good solution. The way frameworks implement it also varies, but basically the idea is to setup a way to separate things into a few layers. I have found MVC-based systems easiest to implement and modify because of this separation. Caveat: My MVC experiences have been mostly with Java (Struts) and Python (Django) Then to get into your actual points: 1) The view CAN do the work of determining what will be shown. To quote the Django site: "In our interpretation of MVC, the "view" describes the data that gets presented to the user. It's not necessarily how the data looks, but which data is presented." 2) Anything that is a common widget should be abstracted and included on the page in some sort of "include". Either have some sort of base page that does the work, or on the individual pages do some method of "include". This really doesn't relate to MVC, other than your point about adding the data to your context/session, which should again be done generically and non per-page. 3) The general idea for any MVC system is to have the flow go through one controller. This controller may delegate to sub-controllers, but the idea is everything goes to one spot. 4) What is the best solution? There are many good solutions for writing a web app. ~~~ jamiequint "The view CAN do the work of determining what will be shown" 1) In Django the controller is called the view and the view is called the template, same principle but unless you want to get confused you should think of it as MTV == MVC (if you want to equate the two, Django seems to be perfectly happy making up its own interpretation of MVC for no apparent reason). Really the controller (in the MVC sense) is doing the work here. ~~~ mrtron Sorry I think its just the wording that is confusing here. The controller is doing the work to determine what will be shown, yes. I meant once the controller determines which view should be used, the view then can manage the specific data being shown. Django does separate the view into a 'view' and a 'template'. One does your work, and the other does the displaying. ------ icky The trick with MVC is to realize that it's not some immutable magic spell, it gives results by enforcing a separation of concerns: data-modeling (and its manipulation and constraints) in the model, control-flow (and selecting and ordering the data to be presented) in the controller, and rendering it a certain way in the view. If you, as you suggest, have the view (essentially a glorified HTML template) request the data it needs (e.g. from multiple sources), then your data- selection and visual-presentation become tightly coupled. (The point of a view is that you can have _multiple_ views of the same data). If the original view is handling things like data-selection and complex control flow, then when you want to create an alternate presentation of the same data, you'll end up copy- and-pasting code (c.f. "Don't Repeat Yourself"). So the best solution is to get a really good feel for separation of concerns, code-non-duplication, etc., and then organize your code accordingly. When using MVC, use every bit of it to keep your code simple and decoupled; if you just slap code into units called "models", "views", and "controllers" wherever you like, then you will receive NO BENEFIT (or negative benefit!) from using MVC. But, used properly, it can be a powerful tool. ------ DanielBMarkham The Best Solution for what? Client side mashups? Greenfield development? Mixed-platform interop? Speed and threading? Flexibility with changing requirements? Not trying to be a jerk, it's just a complicated question. I guess you mean greenfield web applications? Even then I'd have to ask things like how heavy you were client-side, what languages you knew -- most importantly, where's all the data? If you're delivering data basically from the server to the client and back, does most of the processing take place on the client or the server? Some MVC paradigms are crazy to push into Javascript. Some are crazy to use for simple projects. Lately for Web 2.0 Applications, I'm using a framework that has a lightweight MVC (very lightweight!) in Javascript and pulls information using JSON from various sources. But I wrote it myself, so I'm biased. MVC is a paradigm that can be applied a lot of ways, in a lot of situations. Most frameworks emphasize the controller, when the model is really what you're after. Your controller classes can "dumb down" in many scenarios to be so lightweight as to not require a separate class. Hard to do that with a pre- canned framework. I guess I would be extremely careful in confusing the framework with the architectural conceit it uses -- two different concepts. ------ boucher The biggest benefit of MVC, in my view, is the amount of reuse it encourages. When a view has no knowledge of what it has to do, you can reuse it an infinite amount of times. A table view is a table view, it shouldn't need to know what its displaying. A button shouldn't need to know anything about your app, because its just a button. This is what makes Cocoa/IB so powerful. In some instances, you don't even need to write a controller, you can just use a stock controller, like Cocoa's array controller. I would also say that this is one of the biggest drawbacks of current client side web frameworks. Reusing views is much more difficult than it should be, especially if you want to do anything remotely custom or complex, since subclassing is essentially not possible and delegates are very infrequently used. ------ sadiq I tried using Struts for a project a few years back and after I realised how much easier it was to maintain the codebase with a proper enfored separation, I never looked back. Though I found myself, in many cases, writing more code than I would have without a framework, I found the maintenance benefit more than compensates. Things have got more complex in recent years with more and more complex interaction logic embedded in webpages with Javascript and i'm not sure i've seen many frameworks address this. Admittedly, there are now better frameworks out there than Struts (this was Struts 1) and I think i'll have to do a bit of exploring for my new project's website but we'll see. ------ jsmcgd I think MVC suitability is dependent on the language used. MVC works well with imperative languages but isn't necessarily desirable if developing for example in a functional language. ------ eduardorochabr Java also has a good component oriented framework: Wicket. I think MVC it's a nice and simple solution, it does the job. However, IMHO component oriented frameworks are conceptually better and reuse is much easier.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How do I start learning about personal finance? - shry4ns I understand that "learning" personal financial management can only happen by actually doing it, but I'd like to start by knowing some basic concepts and maybe some advanced stuff too. Where can I do that and what are the best resources to get started? Any recommendations are welcome! ====== tjr For getting started, I like this book: [https://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial- Life/dp/1401911...](https://www.amazon.com/Yes-You-Can-Financial- Life/dp/1401911250/) ------ rayray07 'Smarter Investing' by Tim Hale	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How much time/effort did Heartbleed cost your team? - ubi Looking for time or dollar impact of Heartbleed on your team:<p>1. < hour 2. Hours 3. Days 4. Weeks 5. Unknown ====== caw Probably around 1-2 man-hours directly. The first bit was myself and my coworker running around trying to figure out what this was and how big of a deal after seeing the post on HN. I manually patched a few non-essential systems to make sure the patches took without a huge dependency tree update, then my coworker rolled it out automatically to all the systems. We spent some follow up time checking Amazon's site to make sure our ELBs were updated (because it wasn't by the time we patched) and sending out the post- mortem to the team. Our certs were already going to expire, so we renewed them and updated them again via automation. ------ stevekemp Applying the security update took minutes, even on a large number of hosts, thanks to automation. The harder part was working out how to treat things from there, did we need to assume we'd been hit in the past, and regenerate certificates? That took a good couple of hours of debate with different people. Call it half a day to be generous. ------ debacle We run + manage our own servers, have ~4 dedicated servers and a large amount of VPSes. We lost about 7 man-days patching, cleaning up, updating certs, PR, etc. ------ bowlich About a half-day of work. Fixing our systems went pretty quick, but had to go track down a lot of clients' accounts and systems to rekey their certs. ------ akg_67 I spent couple of hours for installing the patch, sending users security alert email and updating users' dashboard with security alert. ------ anthony_franco About 10 minutes. Just had to check and see if we had an affected version. ------ kogir 1-2 hours of my time. ------ SomeoneWeird few hours for our sysadmin, I suppose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Germany can no longer ratify Unitary Patent due to Brexit and AETR, says FFII - zoobab http://blog.ffii.org/germany-can-no-longer-ratify-the-unitary-patent-due-to-brexit-and-the-established-aetr-case-law-says-ffii/ ====== lioeters The punchline hits hard.. "Such an unprecedented takeover of the EU’s institutional powers by external, international organizations, of which the Unitary Patent system consists, is dangerous and can undermine permanently democratic governance and with it, economic development and sustainability in entire states in Europe." ------ stuaxo I hadn't heard of the Unitary Patent before, this looks like it is one of the few benefits of Brexit. ~~~ growlist > few benefits of Brexit ...in your opinion. Please don't forget a majority of voters in the UK voted for it, and their opinion likely differs from yours about the benefits. ~~~ ThePowerOfFuet A slim majority, with a significant number having said they'd have voted Remain in the absence of propaganda later revealed to be a lie, such as that regarding the NHS. ~~~ growlist Whilst Project Fear was all completely based in reality I suppose? ------ taejo This press release is basically meaningless to me, and I consider myself somewhat informed of the general area. It does not say what the Unitary Patent is (and also uses "Unitary Patent" to refer to a _treaty_ or _agreement_ about patents, rather than a patent or type of patent). It does not define FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), AETR (European Agreement concerning the work of crews of vehicles engaged in international Road Transport), TFEU (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), EPLA (European Patent Litigation Agreement). The German version is only slightly better.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Getting Started with C# - ingve https://www.microsoft.com/net/tutorials/csharp/getting-started ====== piotrkubisa I must admit that Microsoft is champion of creating tutorials and documentation about their programming languages. It is difficult to find the equivalent number of resources dedicated to one programming language as C# has. ------ SliderUp I really wish there was an IDE for this that was NOT Visual Studio. ~~~ piotrkubisa There is Omnisharp [1] - plugin for Atom, Brackets, Emacs, SublimeText, Vim and is built-in VisualStudio Code [2]. Also you may try Mono-develop/Xamarin Studio [3] but it worth noting they were made especially for Mono. Both solutions are really pleasant to use and personally I prefer the second one since I use macOS/Linux a lot. [1]: [http://www.omnisharp.net/](http://www.omnisharp.net/) [2]: [https://code.visualstudio.com/](https://code.visualstudio.com/) [3]: [https://www.xamarin.com/studio](https://www.xamarin.com/studio) ~~~ dogma1138 I think he meant for the tutorial :P ~~~ piotrkubisa Examples in tutorial uses Monaco [1] which is integrated in various Microsoft tools not only VS (Code) and also open-sourced. If you do not like it then there is i.e Ideone [2] which gives possibility to play around with C# online without tinkering with the VS installation which may be too lengthy. [1] [https://microsoft.github.io/monaco- editor/index.html](https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/index.html) [2] [http://ideone.com/](http://ideone.com/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
PC Shipments Post Steepest Decline In History, Now Lower Than Whale Shit - ctovision http://ctovision.com/2013/04/thanks-in-large-part-to-windows8-pc-shipments-post-seepest-decline-in-history-worse-than-all-estimates/ ====== lifeguard I hate to pass up a chance to point out Microsoft's failings, but "its the economy, stupid": from 'Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession' "In the fourth quarter of 2012, the demand for goods and services (actual GDP) was about $975 billion (5.8 percent) less than what the economy was capable of supplying (potential GDP). This large output gap, which is manifested in a high rate of unemployment and substantial idle productive capacity among businesses, is the legacy of the Great Recession. Congressional Budget Office projections show the gap closing slowly over the next several years as actual GDP grows only moderately faster than potential GDP. GDP grew at a 0.4 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter. A period of growth of 4 percent or better would be needed to propel the economy back toward full employment more rapidly." [http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3252](http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3252)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Check Out – GoWemy – Ultimate Style Rating Social App - gowemy Hi guys,<p>We would love your feedback on this one. We are in pre-launch phase trying to get enough subscribers for beta release.<p>When we get around 10.000 we will release the beta.<p>Please take a look at our promo video and subscribe if you like it.<p>Any feedback is welcome here ! :)<p>ABOUT www.gowemy.com ----- Ultimate Style Rating Social App<p>Can't decide what to wear, what to buy or simply how something looks on you?<p>GoWemy is a fun way to share your style ideas with fashion lovers from all around the world!<p>In a matter of seconds you can get an objective vote on what looks good on you - and what doesn't! Snap a photo or a selfie with your mobile phone and get an instant impartial vote on your clothes, makeup, accessories, hairstyles... !<p>Stop spending hours in front of a mirror before going out. Post on GoWemy and decide what makes YOU look good quicker than ever before! ====== gowemy Also for all who subscribe for betta all features (new or old) will be free forever :) Thank you for your feedback in advanced	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Fast Charging Stations Damage Tesla Car Batteries After Just 25 Charging Cycles - olivermarks https://www.science20.com/news_staff/fast_charging_stations_damage_tesla_car_batteries_after_just_25_charging_cycles-246206 ====== olivermarks Paper this article is based on abstract: Development of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with high energy density has brought a promising future for the next generation of electric vehicles (EV). In order to make EVs more competitive with combustion engine vehicles, development of an effective fast charging technique is inevitable. However, improper employment of fast charging can damage the battery and bring safety hazards. Herein, industry based along with our proposed internal resistance (IR) based fast charging techniques were performed on commercial Panasonic NCR 18650B cylindrical batteries. To further investigate the fast charging impact and electrode degradation mechanisms, electrochemical analysis and material characterization techniques including EIS (electrochemical impedance spectroscopy), GITT (galvanostatic intermittent titration technique), SEM (scanning electron microscopy), and XRD (X-ray diffraction) were implemented. Batteries that were cycled under industry based fast charging showed 78% increase in internal resistance after 120 cycles along with rapid capacity fading. Mechanical distortion of the battery case occurred around the 60th cycle for industry based fast charging. In contrast, IR based fast charged batteries showed 29.4% increase in internal resistance over 120 cycles. In addition, mechanical distortion was not observed and the relative capacity fading was on a moderate level. Furthermore, this work could pave the way for the optimization of fast charging techniques to secure the lifespan and safety of various types of lithium-ion batteries. ------ Dahoon Interesting to see what Elon will come up with in defense. ~~~ olivermarks In Tesla's defense it's a fast evolving (we hope) field and incremental improvements in technology are inevitable.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Live revolution from Kiev – EuroMaydan Square - deiu http://www.ustream.tv/channel/euromaydan-falcon ====== matteotom As somebody half way around the world in the US, is there anything I can do to support the protesters in Ukraine? Would calling my Congress-people be worth anything? The State Department? ~~~ apskim You can donate: [http://helpeuromaidan.info/donate](http://helpeuromaidan.info/donate) This page has multiple links. Depending on your opinions on Maidan, you can support logistical needs, paramedics, or media. ~~~ matteotom Thanks!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Video Screenshot Software for Documentation Purposes? - chwolfe Can anyone recommend a free software tool that will capture the actions on my screen and output it to a standard video format? Currently working in Windows. Thanks! ====== twohey I believe you want the following thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436523> FYI, I found this by using searchyc on "screen capture" ------ mg1313 Try <http://www.screentoaster.com> or <http://camstudio.org>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) - jgrodziski http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/ ====== cousin_it I admit that I don't completely understand Lisp's claim to fame. Yes, programs in the language are represented by a built-in data type, and you can write a self-interpreter quite easily. But the same is true for a simple assembly language, if you know the instruction encoding! You can represent a program as a code pointer, and it's easy to write an analog of "eval" by hand, using just a handful of arithmetic instructions and conditional jumps. What's more, such an "eval" won't even depend on a garbage collector or other niceties that Lisp self-interpreters take for granted. ~~~ RodgerTheGreat Lisp gets a great deal of undue credit as being some kind of timeless enlightened wisdom, which I see as ignorant of the history of the language's development. It took years to develop approaches to garbage collection (the earliest prototypes used bump allocators and crashed when they exhausted a heap), years to finalize the syntax of the language (you'll notice that the "maxwell's equations" are written using M-Expressions, a syntax for the language which was discarded for ease of implementation and later rationalized because homoiconicity can be handy), decades to realize how important lexical scope (versus dynamic) is to maintaining encapsulation. Modern Lisps are substantially different in syntax and semantics from these earliest ideas; we're just still calling them Lisp. It's very easy to make Lisp look elegant when you brush all the implementation details under the rug. ~~~ Delmania No language that is developed is perfect on release. The timeless wisdom of Lisp, as you call it, rest largely on macros and lambdas. Those ideas are powerful in their ability to allow you to build abstractions and customize the language to your needs. Basically, Lisp allowed for DSLs before the concept of a DSL was even recognized. ~~~ vinceguidry You can't call it timeless if it took time to develop. ~~~ nights192 Yeah- you're right. Pythagoras' theorem obviously isn't timeless; the fool took time devising the formula! ~~~ vinceguidry Pythagoras did not discover the theorem, it's just named after him. He _may_ have been the first to record a proof of it. It's conceivable that the very first peoples to become seriously interested in geometrical calculation would have discovered it as a matter of course. It does meet the definition of timelessness whereas Lisp does not. As Wikipedia notes: "Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians are all known to have discovered the theorem independently and, in some cases, provide proofs for special cases." ~~~ nights192 ... which is irrelevant. The point posed was that the ephemeral form heralds the so-called 'revolutionary' concepts, and stating that a prolonged delivery of the concepts invalidates their usefulness is the result of an overly literal interpretation of a common phrase. ~~~ vinceguidry Usefulness? When did I say Lisp wasn't useful? ------ jgrodziski Hi, Submitter here, I stumble upon that article from my bookmarks while pouring my latest side project ([http://www.learn-computing-directory.org/languages-and- progr...](http://www.learn-computing-directory.org/languages-and- programming/compilers-fundamentals.html)) and thought about submitting it to HN. By the way, feel free to give me feedbacks about the directory! (in still in very alpha state but already online). I only fill for the moment the "Algorithms and Data Structures", "Compilers" and "Theory of computation" topics. Two great articles that complements perfectly the one submitted are LISP interpreters in Python from Norvig: [http://norvig.com/lispy.html](http://norvig.com/lispy.html) and [http://norvig.com/lispy2.html](http://norvig.com/lispy2.html) Also, the book "Understanding Computation" ([http://computationbook.com/](http://computationbook.com/)) can be a great companion as there is a section about Lambda Calculus. Jérémie. ------ nabla9 While this is nice academic view. As a Lisp programmer, the Power of Lisp comes from being big ball of mud, see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud#In_programming...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud#In_programming_languages). Usable and efficient Common Lisp implementation can be build from just ~25 primitives (more than core LISP but still very elegant). Elegant derivation of Lisp world does not matter when the atoms and the molecules can't be distinguished. Is the object system and meta-object protocol implemented as primitives by people who designed the Lisp implementation, or is it external library? Who cares. Only performance and correct function matter. ------ samatman I understand why Alan Kay said what he did, but a closer analogy would be to Euclid's Elements. If one follow's Lisps axioms, one ends up with Lispian Computation, elegant, clean, tail-call optimized. Other axioms of computing lead the user in different directions, notably Hindley-Milner. Lisp carves territory in mathematical state space, not physical reality. ~~~ abecedarius Maxwell's equations in the usual Heaviside form aren't even the most elegant way to write them: [http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell- ga.htm](http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm) I'm curious how people might carry that through the analogy. ~~~ MeadowTheory I'm rather partial to the differential form version. Something about the neat almost symmetry (in the layman's sense) of the two equations. And how deceptively innocent looking they are. ------ adamgravitis I just noticed this was authored by Michael Nielsen... co-author of _the_ text on quantum computation, and now a huge open-academia advocate. And he's open- sourced the micro-lisp he wrote in this article: [https://github.com/mnielsen](https://github.com/mnielsen) ------ mvc If you're near Boston/Cambridge, the Clojure Meetup Group is showing a live video of William Byrd talking about this tonight. [http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Clojure- Group/events/218650142/](http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Clojure- Group/events/218650142/) ------ quarterwave Any chance of a resurgence in Lisp machines? Especially in view of the changes in CPU architecture due to semiconductor scaling challenges. ~~~ hga I've been thinking hard about this lately, and the first question for me is "What would a 21st Century Lisp Machine _mean_?" Lisp Machines were created in part due to the desire to get the most performance possible back in the days when CPUs were made out of discrete low and medium scale integration TTL (there were also ECL hot-rods, but their much greater costs across the board starting with design limited them to proven concepts, like mainframes of proven value, supercomputers, and the Xerox Dorado, after the Alto etc. had proven the worth of the concept). Everyone was limited: maximum logic speeds were pretty low, you could try to avoid using microcoded synchronous designs, but e.g. Honeywell proved that to be a terrible idea, as noted elsewhere memory was very dear. E.g. the Lisp Machine was conceived not long after Intel shipped the first generally available DRAM chip, a whopping 1,024 bits (which was used along with the first model of the PDP-11 to provide graphics terminals to the MIT-AI PDP-10), etc. etc. So there was a lot to be said for making a custom TTL CPU optimized for Lisp. And only that, initially: to provide some perspective, the three major improvements of LMI's LAMBDA CPU over the CADR were using Fairchild's FAST family of high speed TTL, stealing one bit from the 8 bits dedicated to tags to double the address space (no doubt a hack enabled by it having a 2 space copying GC), and adding a neat TRW 16 bit integer multiply chip. The game radically changed when you could fit all of a CPU on a single silicon die. And for a whole bunch of well discussed reasons, to which I would add Symbolics being very badly managed, and LMI killed off by dirty Canadian politics, there was no RISC based Lisp processor, Lisp Machines didn't make the transition to that era. And now CPUs are so fast, so wide, have so much cache ... e.g. more L3 cache than a Lisp Machine of old was likely to have in DRAM, the hardware case isn't compelling. Although I'm following the lowRISC project because they propose to add 2 tag bits to the RISC-V architecture. So, we're really talking about software, and what was the Lisp Machine in that respect. Well, us partisans of it thought it was the highest leveraged software development platform in existence, akin to supercomputers for leveraging scientists (another field that's changed radically, in part due to technology, in part due to geopolitics changing for the better). For now, I'll finish this overly long comment by asking if a modern, productive programmer could be so without using a web browser along with the stuff we think of as software development tools. I.e., what would/should the scope of a 21st Century Lisp Machine be? ~~~ quarterwave Thanks for the detailed perspective. My limited & roseate view of a 21st century Lisp machine is based on an old theme - a massively parallel computing system using bespoke silicon logic blocks. As you have noted below, not only are the cache sizes in a modern CPU monstrous, there's also the compilers optimized for these caches, instructions, branch prediction units, etc. No point in ending up with a chip that is much slower than an equivalent one running on a specially-designed virtual machine, which is itself much slower than MPI. Dreaming on, such a Lisp machine would need a vast collaborative academic effort with substantially new IP design, in say the 32nm silicon process node. That's the most advanced node where lithography is still (somewhat) manageable for custom IP design. ~~~ hga Well, there's the first Connection Machine architecture, very roughly contemporaneous with Lisp Machines (I had to regretfully tell my friend Danny Hillis that LMI wouldn't be able to provide Lisp Machines for Thinking Machines Corporation in time (which had to be formed because the project needed 1-2 analog engineers, which MIT was structurally unable to pay, no one gets paid more than a professor). He was really, legitimately pissed off by what Symbolics did with Macsyma, a sleazy licensing deal to keep it out of everyone else's hands (and they tried to get everyone in the world who'd gotten a copy of it to relinquish it). Later neglected, even when it became the Symbolics cash cow.) Anyway, if you're not talking ccNUMA, the limitations of which has got me looking hard at Barrelfish ([http://www.barrelfish.org/](http://www.barrelfish.org/)), e.g. if you're talking stuff in the land of MPI, again it's going to be very hard to beat commodity CPUs. Although in that dreaming, look at lowRISC: [http://www.lowrisc.org/](http://www.lowrisc.org/) looking at things now, they propose taping out production silicon as soon as 2016, and say 48 and 28nm processes look good. From the site: _What level of performance will it have? To run Linux "well". The clock rate achieved will depend on the technology node and particular process selected. As a rough guide we would expect ~500-1GHz at 40nm and ~1.0-1.5GHz at 28nm. Is volume fabrication feasible? Yes. There are a number of routes open to us. Early production runs are likely to be done in batches of ~25 wafers. This would yield around 100-200K good chips per batch. We expect to produce packaged chips for less than $10 each._ And with a little quality time with Google, the numbers look good. Ignoring the _minor_ detail of NRE like making masks, a single and very big wafer really doesn't cost all that much, like quite a bit less than $10K. And we now have tools to organize these sorts of efforts, e.g. crowdsourcing. But it's not trivial, e.g. one of the things that makes this messy is modern chips have DRAM controllers, and that gets you heavily into analog land. But it's now conceivable, which hasn't been true for a very long time, say starting somewhere in the range between when the 68000 and 386 shipped in the '80s. ------ unoti There's nothing inherently unnatural about taking a bottom up approach to solving problems. Sometimes, knowing you're going to need a particular tool and doing that first makes sense. I think of it like the cooking technique Mise en place [1], where you lay out all the ingredients before you start cooking. Neither bottom up, nor top down, is always the most natural way to attack a problem. Sometimes you can attack a problem from both sides at once. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place) ------ gobengo What does Lisp provide on top of e.g. the lambda calculus? I'd expect the latter to be even more fundamental. But I suppose one could reasonably argue that that wasn't 'Software', just Math. ------ jheriko surely this is actually that a short lisp compiler or interpreter is the maxwell's equations. the analogy is way off the mark for software as a discipline in total. you can know nothing about lisp and understand pretty much everything... thats not true of classical electromagnetism and maxwell's equations ~~~ one-more-minute Not necessarily. You learn a ton about electromagnetism before you ever get to Maxwell's equations. ~~~ MeadowTheory Faraday sure did. ------ keithgabryelski for what it is worth, here is a version of a lisp interpreter I wrote in python: [https://github.com/keithgabryelski/plisp](https://github.com/keithgabryelski/plisp) I used _Interpreting_LISP_ by Gary D. Knott as a guide. ~~~ lisper Lisp in Python in 137 LOC: [http://www.flownet.com/ron/l.py](http://www.flownet.com/ron/l.py) ~~~ keithgabryelski not really, but it is interesting. ------ kazinator That half a page of code isn't "Lisp in itself". I do not see any low-level I/O routines, or a reader to scan expressions and convert them into objects. I don't see the actual function call mechanism: where the subroutine linkage is set up and torn down, and what goes into what register. I don't see a garbage collector. A whole bunch of hand-written assembly language made the code on that page work. ------ charlieflowers Shouldn't [2012] be appended to the title? I've seen the article discussed on HN before. [1] [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867) ~~~ eridal I thought HN wont allow to re-post the exact same url, so to bypass people add noise to the url. is date of post also considered? ~~~ andyjohnson0 As far as I know, re-posts are allowed after some period of time has elapsed. I don't think this is documented anywhere though. ~~~ samatman I've always figured the URLS just fall off a queue, so there's no absolute period of time involved. No actual knowledge, just a guess. ~~~ eridal sweet, so we could attempt to find out the queue size!! ------ GFK_of_xmaspast Disagree with premise, Maxwell's equations are useful in practice. ------ phkahler I hate that. The half page of code is not Lisp. Not even close, and I'm not talking about a standard library. There is no parser in there. Eval is operating on Lisp data, not lisp source code. There is no support for efficient math, or strings, or anything really. If that is lisp, then a byte code interpreter loop is every interpreted language: read_opcode, inc_pc, call a function indexed from a list indexed by opcode. It can be written in one line of C. This BTW translates to hardware a lot easier than the half page of Lisp. That one line of code by itself is also just as useless as the half page of Lisp. It's still interesting, but people need to stop claiming it's Lisp defined in this tiny little block of code.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Think You’ve Got Your Credit Freezes Covered? Think Again - el_duderino https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/think-youve-got-your-credit-freezes-covered-think-again/ ====== kxyvr Since I was having a hard time finding the link in the article. Here's the page to add a NCTUE security freeze: [https://www.nctue.com/consumers](https://www.nctue.com/consumers) Here are the pages for adding security freezes to the other big four agencies: [https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo...](https://www.freeze.equifax.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp) [https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/landingPage....](https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/landingPage.jsp) [https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html](https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html) [https://www.innovis.com/securityFreeze/index](https://www.innovis.com/securityFreeze/index) Most people don't know about Innovis, which was mentioned in the article. That said, I've never run into a company where I've needed to lift an Innovis freeze. Anyway, I agree that it's tiring to constantly track which data brokers allow (are required to) adding a security freeze. In my opinion, better legislation is needed to curb this activity and data brokers in general. ~~~ organicmultiloc I tried to fill out the NCTUE freeze page several times, it keeps claiming there is a reCAPTCHA error despite me clicking it out correctly and getting the green check. Seems to be intentionally broken to avoid people freezing. ~~~ Jwarder I've seen the reCAPTCHA issue a few times this month on other sites. My guess this is a result of Google shutting down the reCAPTCHA v1 API. ------ Dirlewanger It's all so tiring. It's seriously going to be decades until we get politicians in power that understand the Internet and start holding companies accountable that don't give a shit about security (namely, all of them). ~~~ rcthompson Will it ever happen? When the current generation of children reaches office- holding age, a majority of them may understand internet _culture_ , but I don't think a significant fraction will ever understand the internet in a technical sense. ~~~ InclinedPlane What is your reasoning behind that? This is seriously one of the dumbest "kids these days" statements I've ever read. Kids will become technologically sophisticated, many kids already are. Many kids will attain higher technical proficiency than _you_ ever had, for example. Why would it be otherwise? ~~~ JoeAltmaier There are 100 reasons - the innards of technology boxes are less accessible. Programming languages are more abstract, and few dig down to the lower layers (which used to be all there was). Its changing faster and hard to get a mindshare before it all changes again. I don't think its a 'kids these days' statement at all. More a 'technology these days' ~~~ gaius Right. Take 2 10-year-olds. Give one a C=64 and a paper manual, and one an iPad and an internet connection. Which one is more likely to learn to program? ------ reaperducer Bottom line: Whenever possible, wherever possible, pay cash. I used to laugh at my father-in-law whom I once considered to be a conspiracy theory whackjob with his off-the-grid lifestyle. As more and more of his "crazy" insights turn into New York Times headlines, I'm starting to think he was ahead of the curve. ~~~ gascan Am I missing something here? Paying cash doesn't prevent the opening of fraudulent lines of credit in your name. Equifax et al don't particularly care if you pay cash, they have some form of record on you either way. ~~~ jessaustin I guess the idea is that if one were "off the grid" enough not to have a phone, one's details wouldn't be in their DB in the first place. That would make one's identity harder to steal, which would cause the thieves to move on to the next victim. ~~~ drablyechoes The SSN of someone "off the grid" would actually be perfect for doing what is called synthetic identity fraud. If a given SSN has no credit history, you can make up a fictitious person and apply for a credit card with it. The application is probably declined, but a record of this SSN associated to a completely fictitious identity now exists in the credit reporting agencies databases, which makes it more likely that a future credit application will be approved. If there is no other identity using this SSN, then the likelihood of the fraudulent activity being dectected is low. This is why SSNs belonging to elderly people, children/teenagers, and the recently deceased are of relatively higher value for a lot of people out there doing identity fraud. ~~~ jstarfish Stealing someone else's unused SSN is not synthetic identity creation, it's just fraud. There is a living person associated with that SSN, even if they are off the grid. Synthetic identity fraud involves you making a bunch of inquiries with completely fake SSNs and squatting on them for a few years, maybe bringing them out of cold storage every so often to make a few more inquiries to keep them on the credit-building radar before you ultimately qualify for actual lines of credit and do a bust-out. There is no oblivious meatbag being used as a patsy-- the identities are completely fake, which is what makes them synthetic. ~~~ drablyechoes There is more than one way to construct a synthetic identity, but in most cases that I've been aware of, a stolen SSN is used to construct the totally fake identity. Using a completely fake SSN instead of a stolen SSN is what distinguishes "synthetic identity theft" from "synthetic identity fraud". The identities in both cases are completely fake, but only in the identity theft case is the synthetic identity backstopped by a legitimate SSN that belongs to a real person somewhere. If that real person is a child or "off the grid", then the CRAs have no idea who the real person is and their SSN is ripe for creating a synthetic identity that will probably go undetected for years. ------ hex1848 I am tired of people calling me a "victim" of identity theft. I'm not the victim. The companies and government agencies that allowed themselves to be defrauded by someone posing as me are the victims. If you didn't do your due diligence in properly verifying the identity of the person you handed out cash, goods or services too it's on you. That being said, the entire system is broken. I've had 5 cellphones taken out in my name, I've had multiple credit cards opened using my social security number. I've been interviewed by a special agent with the State Department because someone tried to get a passport using my data. I'm sick of dealing with other peoples fraud problems. Fix it already! ~~~ dragonwriter > I am tired of people calling me a "victim" of identity theft. I'm not the > victim. Usually, the person whose identity is stolen is the victin. > The companies and government agencies that allowed themselves to be > defrauded by someone posing as me are the victims. They are also victims, but until you—often at considerable personal effort—have gotten all the debts and other bad marks by the fraudster dissociated from your identity, you are disadvantaged by it, and if you are disadvantaged or have had to pay a cost to escape that disadvantage, you are a victim, too. ~~~ typomatic > They are also victims, but until you—often at considerable personal > effort—have gotten all the debts and other bad marks by the fraudster > dissociated from your identity, you are disadvantaged by it, and if you are > disadvantaged or have had to pay a cost to escape that disadvantage, you are > a victim, too. You seem to be misunderstanding the point badly--the situation you have described is nonsense. Firstly, what do we mean by "having your identity stolen"? I submit that this is not an attack on me as a person, it is an attack on a fictional representation of me held by a conglomerate of corporations. This is the point of OP: I am not involved in these transactions! I haven't committed a crime, purchased anything, or interacted with either the party who has defrauded this conglomerate nor this conglomerate. In fact, due to the way this information is collected and stored, I may not have _ever_ had any direct relationship to either party. So what's happened here is that a conglomerate of companies have been defrauded and now insist that I am to make amends for it. It's nonsensical, and no amount of repeating the facts of the current situation will make it anything but ridiculous. ------ dsfyu404ed I'd pay money for a service that monitors who all the services are in the credit reporting space and freezes my credit at them for me. ~~~ Shivetya I would rather anyone opening a line of credit be required to obtain proof of acceptance by the person named on the account and until doing so they are 100% liable for all debts incurred. How this is defined will require regulation. The burden is increased at any time a request is made outside of the state and city of residence ~~~ njarboe This is already the law. You are not responsible to pay debts incurred by another person. The problem is when the bank or company that gave credit to someone else that used your identity information is allowed to lie to a credit bureau about the fact that it was you who defaulted on the debt. Otherwise you could just tell the bank, "Pound sand stranger, I never borrowed any money from you. Stop bugging me or I'll get a restraining order.", and never have worry about how someone has pretended to be you to a bank. Large fines for banks and companies that libel people by telling information brokers lies is the way to stop this problem. The idea that when this happens it is "identity theft" and the person whose identity was stolen is responsible for the problem is ridiculous. This problem should be called libel and the perpetrators (the entity reporting false info that hurts you) punished. ~~~ jessaustin These proposed "large fines" would still require regular people to deal with putative creditors and occasionally to defend themselves in court. Structural changes are required to make the system as it actually functions more equitable to humans. What are structural changes? For instance, prior to enforcing a debt the law could require the production of an authenticated video recording of the debtor clearly stating, "I am John Doe and I agree that I owe EvilCo $1,000 on May 9, 2018." This requirement would make it more difficult to lend money, so it would be opposed by some very deep pockets. I suspect that any actual solution to the inequity in this area would make it more difficult to lend money, so progress is likely to be slow. ~~~ njarboe I agree. First, it could be made a criminal offense for a company or bank to lie to credit agencies and then public prosecutors could pursue these companies for big PR wins. Second, making giving and getting credit harder to do is probably a good thing for society. Do people really need to take out a half million dollar home loan from their phone a la Rocket Mortgage? Many cultures had/have very strict rules about charging interest on loans. Debt jubilees were common in past civilizations and seem necessary to prevent the masses from creating their own via revolution. Making personal loans illegal and bringing back the loan shark is not the way to go, but making going into debt to buy consumptive goods much harder would be big positive for most people in the US. Like you said, there is a huge amount of money and power behind easy lending, so change seems unlikely. On the other hand, change seems to be in the air these days, so maybe one can afford a bit of hope. ------ PotionSeller I absolutely hate our entire credit system, the lazy way it handles our sensitive info, and the eagerness to extend credit to anyone without scrutiny of their identity. Big incoherent rant incoming: In 2016 someone stole my identity and in about a 1 month period took out tens of credit cards and new bank accounts and phone account which they immediately over drafted. They somehow managed to change the address in my credit file, and so I wasn't getting any failure to pay notices. At the same time it was quite soon I found out because at least one creditor managed to find my real address asking about a 18,000 loan approval for furniture from The Brick. The police were easy enough to deal with and took a report and I had to use this to prove to creditors it was fraud. I had Equifax do their own investigation, and they agreed it was fraud, but they only removed the creditors who happened to appear on file during their investigation. A year past, and I check my credit and it was 799, all clear. Then last fall I get a call from a creditor saying I owe them money, they required I go to their bank to fill out the paperwork. One more cleared. Then in February I'm hearing from yet another bank about an overdraft account. Once again I proved to them it was fraud by providing the police report number. "Ok, well it will take us 30-45 days to remove this from your credit file". Its coming up to 45 days and its still there. I called them to clarify about when it will be removed, and get the same bs. I do not believe their word so I have also sent another dispute to equifax. MY MORTGAGE RENEWAL IS DUE JUNE 1 AND THIS SHIT HAS STOPPED ME FROM MOVING MORTGAGE PROVIDERS TO GET A BETTER RATE. Now during this latest fiasco, I do another credit check and discover ANOTHER phone company on there says I have a bad debt with them and a note that a collections agency is after me. I succeed in having this removed from my credit file after dealing with Equifax, but for reasons beyond me they did not remove the one from the bank I am disputing in the previous paragraph, so I have to hope it will clear when they way it will (30-45 days from early April), or hope my second dispute works. Note that these latest bad debts are still originating from 2016, its just taken the banks that long to pin the blame on me and attack my credit file. So this has been a lot of stress on me, I have failed to secure a new mortgage lender which will cost me in interest over the next 3 years on mortgage payments. In addition, I just discovered my TransUnion file is still a giant mess with shit from last fall on it. Apparently Trans Union and Equifax don't synchronize. Long story short, there isn't shit you can do to speed up anyone helping you. The police are competent and will have your back but they can't stop creditors from attacking your file. Equifax is slow and not thorough in their investigations and make themselves hard to reach. The banks can pin a bad debt on anyone they chose, never mind that the onus should be on them to prove I took out the loans they claim. Like, show me a signature, show me the ID used to get the loan... Oh its fake? Then fuck off. Nope, they will make you jump hoops to prove it isn't you, and then the cherry on top is they will be very very slow to do anything to remove it off your credit file once you have in fact proven its not you. Good luck to all of you, you are all vulnerable to this shit. ~~~ TechieKid The answer is registered mail, return receipt requested, and a complaint with the CFPB, although how on-the-ball that agency will be since the new administrator was appointed is YMMV. ~~~ logfromblammo I'd be more inclined to write a pro forma letter, then sue for statutory damages for technical violations under the FCRA and/or FDCPA the instant the established deadlines pass. It puts the burden of proving the validity of the debts on them, and if they ignore you or drag their heels, you win by default. ------ slumberlust Anyone else getting an unsecured link warning from the freeze link on the NCTUE website? [https://www.exchangeservicecenter.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_Persona...](https://www.exchangeservicecenter.com/Freeze/jsp/SFF_PersonalIDInfo.jsp) ------ just_observing Brian Krebs - can you please change to a responsive theme? Thanks.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
New paint colors invented by neural network - CPLX http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network ====== gfody I want the algorithm for generating server names: Bunflow, Snowbonk, Stanky Bean, Dorkwood, Bank Butt.. these are great! ~~~ rbanffy [https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname](https://www.npmjs.com/package/nsaname) Not a neutral net, but adaptable to what you want to do. ------ avalys This is hilarious. But I don't understand how the network learned the words and color associations for "turd", "poop", "stanky" and "butt", since presumably these were not words Sherwin-Williams used for their own colors and thus would not be present in the training set all. What am I missing? ~~~ kosievdmerwe Probably bias on the author's side where he would select those words over the nonsense outputs or the unfunny ones. The names are done on a letter basis rather than a word basis judging from some of the outputs. ~~~ daxfohl Even still, the algorithm has no knowledge of these words. The likelihood of producing them is infinitesimal. Why would it produce real words more often than gibberish, or words in every other language on earth? I don't think this argument holds. ~~~ Rotten194 If the algorithm is trained on English words, it will learn English phonotactics (i.e., syllable structure, what sounds are allowed at the beginning of words, etc). That makes it much more likely to generate valid words, as the set of strings that follow English phonotactic rules << the set of gibberish strings. ~~~ daxfohl Agreed, but I can't imagine with a sample space of just 7700 paint names that it would generate turdly any more frequently than bvlogd or a gazillion other marginally pronounceable six letter strings, without some additional bias not mentioned in the article. ------ mc32 And there I thought someone came up with a way to mfg "impossible" colors[1] like reddish green. [1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color) ------ kevin_thibedeau HSB or HSV would be a better training set for it to discover human color associations than RGB is. ~~~ saulrh One of the perceptual spaces would probably be best, something like CIELAB. Make the gradient of perceptual change wrt change in the space the same for the entire space and you might get more generalizability. ~~~ AstralStorm A good NN should have no trouble modelling a simple perceptual transform like that on its own. ------ daxfohl This is terrific. AI is going to take so much stress out of naming our next child. ~~~ bryanrasmussen That's what I thought, but my wife is not allowing me to name our son Wintermute. ~~~ stevekemp Some countries would deny you that choice even if you were both OK with it. e.g. [http://mentalfloss.com/article/25034/8-countries- fascinating...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/25034/8-countries-fascinating- baby-naming-laws) ~~~ lauritzsh I am from Denmark; I thought this was much more common in the world. Definitely way more than being part of the eight countries to have these strict laws apparently. Always thought it was strange you could call your child McBurger if you wanted or apparently Number 16 Bus Shelter. I know one who got Jazz rejected even though people still plus twenty years later call her Jazz. ~~~ jaclaz There are some limitations in Italy too, though a little less restrictive than those in Denmark or Germany, JFYI, a rough English translation: Art. 34 (Name Attribution Limits) 1. It is forbidden to impose on the child the same name as the living father, of a living brother or sister, a surname as a name, names ridiculous or shameful. 2. Alien names that are imposed on children who have the Italian citizenship must be expressed in letters of the Italian alphabet , with the extension to the letters: J, K, X, Y, W and where possible, using the diacritic marks proper to the alphabet of the name source language. 3. Childrens of unknown parents may not have names or surnames that may represent a reference to their natural origin, or surnames of historical importance or belonging to families particularly well known in the place where the birth act is formed. I believe that some limitations do exist in all or most countries, the mentioned article just enumerates 8 of them. ------ Clobbersmith Who wouldn't want to paint their walls Turdly brown? ~~~ nxcho I personally prefer Stanky Bean ~~~ pavement ...and Bank Butt might just be an entirely accurate name for that color. ------ oAlbe I find the title of this entry highly misleading. I clicked through expecting to see new _colors_ (even though I knew that was going to be impossible). What I saw was weird color names. ------ strgrd These click bait AI articles with almost no content are becoming more common on YC. The fact that the author made no mention of seeding the results is a lie through omission. A lot of the hype machine around so-called "neural networks" has to do with the language used, that is so far out of touch with the reality of the work: "training", "learning", "creativity", "inventing." These are glorified Markov chains. ~~~ CPLX I found it to be quite the opposite. The title is simple and matter of fact, not clickbait, but the actual article is genuinely hilarious. ~~~ strgrd > New paint colors invented by neural network These aren't new colors, they are new color names. And they weren't invented by a neural network, the names were generated with seed words like "poop" or "stanky", and a language processing algorithm matched the seed words based on certain criteria and statistical models of a 7500-word database. There is definitely an element of "invention" in the sense of "making up (an idea, name, story, etc.), especially so as to deceive." The deception here is that a simple language processing algorithm is capable of "invention." ------ ccvannorman "What color is this room?" "Snowbonk!" "Ah .. " _backs away slowly_ ~~~ irrational Have you ever read the color names on the chips at a home improvement store? Some of them are quite weird. ------ aeleos My favorite is 219, 209, 179 ingeniously called Dope ~~~ mc32 That one was pretty accurate as it approximates the color of dried aircraft dope on aircraft fabric. ------ eljobe I will never see #c5a2ab again and not think, "Stanky Bean." In fact, it looks like stankybean.com isn't registered. I'm imagining just having it be a solid wall of #c5a2ab. ------ slavakurilyak TL;DR It's possible to generate new colors using Multi-layer Recurrent Neural Network (RNN, LSTM, and GRU) based on Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) ------ Sunset I'm partial to Dorkwood. If you're going to use this approach, you need to have it also train on images from a large dataset like something from shutterstock or google imagesearch. ------ IanCal A fun project! The recipes entry further down the page is pretty impressive too. ------ YeGoblynQueenne Observations: 1\. I want to paint my room Caring Tan all over. 2\. At last, stoners can have their own blue. 3\. Turdly is apt. ------ Skylled "Homestar Brown" and "Pubic Gray" got me. ------ Mathnerd314 > 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors The xkcd color survey is a much bigger data set: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/) ~~~ teekert I use it a lot to color graphs in Python / Seaborn [0]. I love to combine Pale Red with Denim Blue and Medium Green. [0] [http://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#using...](http://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html#using- named-colors-from-the-xkcd-color-survey) ------ grapeshot Aren't most of those names Homestar Runner characters? ------ pizza Stoomy brown, Gray Pubic, Dope all made me lol ~~~ mistaken There is also Power Gray which sounds really cool ------ i336_ Okay, I'll ask the question: I stumbled on [https://gist.github.com/nylki/1efbaa36635956d35bcc](https://gist.github.com/nylki/1efbaa36635956d35bcc) recently. This is rather random and chaotic; some parts are interesting, other parts not so much. How could I build a neural network that surfaced information in the style that I've prepared below? The following is taken from the above URL, rearranged somewhat for a certain effect. === Title: CARROT CACOA CHILI CHICKEN Categories: Chinese, Appetizers, Poultry, German, Casseroles, Diabetic, Main dish, Seafood Yield: 25 Salad 2 c Salad oil 2 c Chicken broth Steamed, Biscuits 16 Boull of hot soy sauce 1 ds Pepper sauce 1 tb Creme de carrots 1 tb Fat flour 1 tb Cream, divided 6 oz Published cheese; cut 1 ea Stick semoves and pepper sauce 2 tb Minced fresh celery 2 tb Sour cream or flour 8 oz Semisweet chocolate 1/3 c Flour; for frying 1 tb Hot water; or or salt 1 ts Gelatin shortening 2 tb Butter, ground 1 c Crushed bananas 1 ts Poppy strip powder 2 tb Sesame seeds 1 tb Parsley, dried 1 ts Vanilla extract 2/3 c Lite red pepper sauce 1 ts Ground cinnamon 1/8 ts Pepper Brown sugar Preheat oven to 350. Top with parsley. In a lightly floured bowl, beat the egg/unsalted water 2 minutes. Remove base over chicken in bowl. Add meat in foil. Sprinkle each zucchini; add cheese, salt, flour, salt and butter. Fold each balls of pan, reliated with glaze. Cook until crispy on a plate. Allow feed in baking sheets. Combine flour, baking powder, and baking soda and corn syrup. Sprinkle with green onions and salt. Preheat oven to 375F. To cool completely onto prepared cheesecloth. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, until all ingredients are done. Let them from the heat and spread with a double boiler over high for 10 minutes. Combine sugar and olive oil and oregano. Remove chops. For a couple of dish, pineapple pieces of leek and freeze. Prepare chops to serve. Keep is some mayonnaise to cool spread on a baking sheet, place in a bowl, beat egg yolks, paprika, carrot, celery, thyme, onions, salt, pepper, oregano, and gradually until softened. Combine lemon juice and mozzarella cheese and mayonnaise in a bowl. Add baking chocolate, blending well. Make a little and cooked or all to the cherry and ice cream, and slice the crumbs, and fresh sauce. In a large bowl, beat eggs and cook for 3 hours. Wash pork, freeze up, but not dough back to diet into a layer. YOWL THE COOKIE: ADD 1/2 cup of cheese. Stir in the carrots, remaining ingredients together, stirring constantly. Place the oil in a large skillet over medium heat until chicken is boiled, to the center of the egg mixture. Pour over and roll it for an about 3-4 pounds and can be stored is changes have for sized onion from page in with pan with canned extratty fish on a glass or rounding pan. Cook it with the batter. Set aside to cool. Remove the peanut oil in a small saucepan and pour into the margarine until they are soft. Stir in a mixer (dough). Add the chestnuts, beaten egg whites, oil, and salt and brown sugar and sugar; stir onto the boqtly brown it. In large bowl, combine liquid, and add bay leaf. Microwave each cake; boil 4 hours, until melted too mush of skillet in foil; add remaining 1/4 cup of cheese. Stir together flour, baking powder and leaves to a platter. Sprinkle with basil. Place fish filling into a large bowl; lemon juice only fill stems of gravy. Serve warm or serving colleed. Bake in a skillet into a heavy saucepan. Cover with lemon weed. Stir and saute for about 30 minutes. Remove from heat; fluffy. Drain on both sides of the refrigerator. Grind sauce about 1 1/2 inches in cold water combine with chopped pecans. Cook skillet in a bowl until stiff bowl and stir often on a colored and bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until cheese is evaporated. Peel peppercorns and parmesan cheese, or all flour, 3" pieces, adding the weights: heat over all sweetened corn. Break off doors along with tomatoes. Blend the beans and seasonings. Cook, uncovered, over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, until the figs is absorbed. Store in a high flavors of the meat mixture, and cover with a size of the egg mixture. Stir the beef into the center cups. Bake at high heat and stir over soup and replace 3 tablespoons of the bowl. Combine cheese and buttermilk; cook over low heat, cook a microwave, 20-30 minutes. Sprinkle the beans, then stirring frequently. When the meat is dissolved. Store to medium-side; then dice the fine side. Sprinkle with milk. Gradually remove from heat and simmer for about 20 minutes. Mix vegetables, and add the cornmeal and the celery, and mix well. Let cool. Beat Water and boil until light brown. Cover and cook over low heat 30 minutes. Remove seconds. Place on a lightly floured board in a bowl. Serve the sugar canned cheese with salt and pepper and tomatoes, and remove margarine, vanilla and bacon and sprinkle with milk and cook to the bag. Let cool for at least 4 minutes. NOTE: Cover with delicious dice them bread for about 30 minutes. Source: Stuff Cooking by Chocolate Candy by Sunsafe by The Collection of Cookbook by Pet Farnes Weeks, in Your Rodled, Elmeasian. -- (You have) over the same and roll the edible of the pan of soup. From Electric this unpeelerset Beans Kinch Bar "Suet Brightor, Nanc" and Information To you by Depth Chefs copyrighted by ISBN 0-90828-2 Microwave Optional Collection of Shellies === (YES, it is still random, but I tried to extract the most amusing parts. The full URL doesn't really do that.) ------ KerrickStaley Bank Butt. ------ everyone Thats hilarious. I loled. ~~~ daxfohl Sucks you're getting downvoted. This was the hardest I've laughed in months. ------ tbabb The machines have surpassed us. No human could come up with paint names this good. ~~~ jachee Of all the colors to follow "Homestar" I didn't expect Brown.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Activists crowdsource escape from North Korea - ramisms http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-stream-officialblog/2013/12/27/north-korea-crowdsourcingescape.html ====== notdonspaulding Things like this are what make me a "bad" libertarian. Strict libertarians are all about keeping our nose (and military) out of other people's business. Put yourself in the POTUS' shoes, as the Commander-in-Chief of one of the largest potential forces for good the world has ever known, and tell me why we aren't rescuing the _entire country_ of North Korea? ~~~ natrius Yes, let's start a land war in Asia against a country with nuclear weapons and an arsenal of conventional weapons pointed at the people of Seoul. Feel free to define "rescuing the entire country of North Korea" if you feel I've misinterpreted you. ~~~ gregw134 I thought America's presence in Korea was imperialist until I went to Seoul in April and walked around trying to forget about the missiles that were pointed at my head. All of a sudden I discovered a newfound appreciation for American foreign policy, despite its faults. ~~~ jblow Did you talk to any Korean citizens while you were there? All the ones I walked to wanted us gone. ~~~ cema Did you talk to the older ones or only younger ones? There seems to be a difference. ------ apendleton Random tidbit, but Project for Awesome is run by John and Hank Green, who live in Indiana and Montana, respectively, so I'm not sure where they got the notion that it's a South Korea-based organization. Pretty poor background on that one. ------ ivanbrussik the mass exodus of top war leaders in the country was a start. some brave souls will soon sacrifice their life and assassinate the rest & hopefully overthrow / mutiny will take place liberating all. </my fantasy> ------ notastartup I have another idea. buy hundreds of drones, attach american dollars, attach non perishable food, guns, communication device, ammunition, manuals for guerilla warfare. drop that shit all over North Korea outside of Pyongyang. It'd be Kim's worst nightmare when civilians are armed and not starving and have suddenly very motivated. The North Korean army is weak and starving, they have no fuel reserves to power their tanks (apart from shitty military parades), jets, navy. Only a matter of time. Just need funding from the CIA and we are good to go. ~~~ yongjik Oh, great, American expansionism (let CIA fund "freedom fighters" against villains; what could possibly go wrong?) combined with the American mythology that dictators are somehow afraid of armed people. That "weak and starving" North Korean army would cut through a town-ful of untrained militia like knife going through butter. Really, stop fantasizing about armed revolution just because it once worked for your ancestor 200 years ago. It fails more often than not, and with near certainty when someone foreign nation has the bright idea of arming insurgents. ~~~ notastartup I think if you asked a North Korean today if they wanted "American expansionism" or their current state of affairs, the answer would be what any starving person would do, choose the lesser of two evils that feeds them. I hardly think North Koreans would have a problem with democracy and freedom that feeds them than their leader which have failed them and forced to praise them at gun point. It's funny because lot of left-leaning South Koreans have a naive view of their Northern cousins. News flash: North Korea is a time travel to Chosun Dynasty gone horribly wrong, nothing to do with communism. Some actually believe South Korea is under worse condition because of Uncle Sam that saved the country just as they were about to get overrun by Kim Il Sung, than under Japanese Imperial rule because of "democracy and freedom". I invite these people to defect to the North, and see why there's streams of North Koreans going the other way and staring at you like you are crazy. Vive la revolucion! ~~~ yongjik Well, I concede that some South Koreans have a very naive view of North Korea, but it doesn't logically follow that the US saved South Korea from similar fate. In fact, historical economic data shows that South Korea was as shitty as North Korea in its early years[1]. Nor was its pro-American leader Rhee much better in terms of human rights: he murdered some 100k-200k of his own people[2] for being communists (many of them were anything but). So, what you propose offering to North Koreans is not in fact "democracy and freedom". With high chance, you're offering a civil war, followed by yet another dictator with horrible human right records, except that he would have close friends in Washington DC instead of Beijing, and the US will tolerate this dictator because at least he's fighting bad guys and giving a semblance of "stability" in the region. Honestly I don't think the US could make a better outcome even if it wanted to (which is another question). [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two_koreas_gdp_1950_1977.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Two_koreas_gdp_1950_1977.jpg) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre) ~~~ notastartup Note that the massacre happened during Korean War. If Kim Il Sung hadn't invaded South, none of this would've happened. North Korea had an edge in terms of economic power up until Park Chung Hee came into power and began revitalizing the economy. Again, apples and oranges when it comes to comparing North and South. The other is completely void of rationality. Highly doubt a civil war will be allowed to go alone. United States and South Korea have clear interest to secure nuclear facilities as a top priority. Can't let that fall into another dictator. The real problem is China, as it sees North Korea as a buffer. ------ xivzgrev Why is North Korea such a hot topic these days? Is the US so free of problems, and other countries so free of human tragedies, that we can focus A LOT of our attention on North Korea? I honestly think it's because North Korea is the easiest thing to paint as "the bad guys". Lots of easy "evil bits" for the media to cling on to: They starve their people! They make people participate in charades! They withhold technology advances from their citizens! But did you know there are countries with higher rates of undernourishment? How often have you seen these countries in the news? -Zambia -Ethiopia -Mozambique -Haiti -Eritea [http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...](http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/communications/wfp260272.pdf) Oh that's right. There's not as much "news worthy" crazy happening in those countries. Maybe that's on purpose? [http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013012931871/world/geopolitica...](http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013012931871/world/geopolitical/ferocious- weak-and-crazy-the-north-korean-strategy.html) Or maybe it's because we perceive the government is more "at fault" for the situation in North Korea as opposed to the above mentioned countries. But is that fair? Aren't you equally liable for a starving population whether you've explicitly deprioritized it or not? Let me wrap this up by saying 1) It's great you care about the situation in North Korea. It's terrible. 2) I hope that you'll consider caring about other countries facing similar humanitarian crises. I hope that you consider where to send your money weighing the facts as opposed to which is brought to your attention by the news. ~~~ Crito What part of a country with concentration camps operating for _decades_ would _not_ catch our attention? This sort of comment you have just made is total bullshit: If you are concerned that the situation in Haiti is not getting enough attention, then complain that the situation in Haiti is not getting enough attention. _Don 't_ complain that the situation in North Korea is getting too much attention. North Korea deserves all the attention it gets. We don't need to "deprioritize" our concern with North Korea to have some concern "left over" for Haiti. The situation with North Korea is not being exaggerated into being something worse than it really is.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
If you publish Georgia’s state laws, you’ll get sued for copyright and lose - darkblackcorner https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-activist-violated-copyright-by-publishing-georgia-legal-code-online ====== klez Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13995072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13995072) just 20 hours ago. ------ kriro Pretty ridiculous. I mean I get that annotations add value but if they are required an annotated version should be available to all citizens. Malamud's fighting a good fight here, hats off. _cough, cough_ I wonder if the free version of the law follows all accessibility regulations. _cough, cough_ ------ huffmsa It's technically fine as it is right now. What needs to happen is some bold individual needs to intentionally lose a criminal case because they didn't have access to the annotated texts. Then it becomes a due process issue and can probably get pushed to the US Supreme Court. ~~~ paulajohnson I don't think you would need an actual criminal case. "Chilling effects" (i.e. people can't find out the law, and hence might refrain from lawful behavior) would seem to be sufficient. ~~~ huffmsa Might work, although it might not carry the same weight as full blown criminal proceedings. Now if you could show that the chilling effect was detrimental to something like business in the state, that might be better. ------ tomohawk I do wonder what's cheaper - to allow the publisher to recoup costs in this way or for the state to pay for the service up front? It's troubling though, that such a concern would somehow be more important than ensuring all citizens have open and unfettered access to the law. It's especially galling that local governments routinely incorporate copyrighted "model codes" into law. These model codes are created by unelected, unaccountable groups that have their own agendas. You also end up paying to get a copy of important things such as plumbing/electric codes. ~~~ matt4077 It's the direct result of anti-government propaganda. If you starve the state of financial resources, they will, sooner rather than later, have to cut corners knowing that it will cost more in the long run, just to make the numbers work in the short term. Sometimes those costs are incurred by future governments (lease-back deals), sometimes by the citizen (here). It's the collective version of living paycheck-to-paycheck. ~~~ tomohawk So, the legislature, which is responsible for appropriations, is starving itself? ~~~ moomin The legislature is controlled by political parties. All he's saying is that politicians put their own electoral interests ahead of those of the country. I don't think that's even controversial. ------ dovdovdov The land of the free. ~~~ MertsA Terms and conditions may apply. ------ noahm If I need a apply for a license to read the law, can I also claim that I need to be licensed in order to be actually bound by the law? Obviously I cannot, but the absurdity of the idea that I can be legally bound by something that is not freely available to me is striking. ------ paulajohnson I would have thought that this could be challenged under the 14th Amendment ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause)). "Due process" must surely include being able to find out what laws might apply to you, and a paywall would seem to breach that. ~~~ narrowrail I can't believe this is still coming up in this thread, but reading the other comments one learns that the laws are available to read you just can't publish them because a private company has that contract. Here's the link, read away: [http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp](http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode/Default.asp) Edit: Also, I didn't realize this was a dupe until I responded. This discussion already took place. ------ liareye LOW ENERGY	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam - brongondwana http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/26/mac-os-10-9-infinity-times-your-spam/ ====== nknighthb Have you reproduced this problem yourselves? It sounds like you've seen it with exactly one user so far, whom you've not been able to contact. This strikes me as something that could just as easily be due to a pathological set of rules one user created. ~~~ fredsted Also _lots_ of users, developers or not, have been using the betas recently. I'm no mail server expert, but I don't understand OP's conclusion, that ALL Mail.app clients are faulty. ~~~ brongondwana I mentioned a couple of other bugs in that same post that I _have_ been able to reproduce, and both the Mac users I've spoken to have also been able to reproduce when they set up new accounts. Not showing folders that exist on the server, that's super confusing. Checkboxes that don't work - well, that's a common preferences bug - auto- turning-back-on of settings. And not testing that you're copying to the folder that you've selected, that's a rookie mistake. Any software which makes changes to another machine over the internet should be checking that it's not causing an infinite loop. ------ coldcode Email is always a bitch. Google's implementation of IMAP is a disaster as well. I have yet to find any email app on any platform that I can't swear at daily. I even tried to write my own before sanity returned. ~~~ dmbaggett GMail's IMAP server actually works well... it just violates the spec in several obnoxious ways. For Inky ([http://inky.com](http://inky.com)) we had to devote a bunch of Gimap-specific effort into explicitly syncing flags, for example, because Gimap simply doesn't notify clients of flag changes. Inky has to poll Gimap for flag changes rather than passively learning about them via IMAP IDLE. And the treatment of labels as folders is a mess for IMAP clients, as is the All Mail folder, which -- if not handled properly -- effectively generates a duplicate of every message in every folder. But Gimap does work reliably in our experience. It's a bit slow, but it's less broken than IMAP servers run by other major providers (who shall remain nameless). ~~~ bengotow Is there any way to use Inky without it syncing all of my account passwords to the cloud? It looks awesome, but I just can't do that. ~~~ dmbaggett No. But it's important to realize that we don't actually store any of your mail in the cloud. You're not really syncing to anywhere but the Inky instance on your device. ------ kyro I would very much appreciate an iOS 7 stripping of Mail.app. I've developed this aversion to opening up the app, and if I do by accident, it's a panicked scramble to quit. It's bloated and clunky. I would consistently get connection errors, it would randomly decide to re-sync all of my mail attachments, and more. I've been on Sparrow for a year or so now and have had zero problems. It's funny, across all of my Apple devices, I don't use any of the native mail apps for one reason or another. On iOS, I use Mailbox. ~~~ tomphoolery In Settings > Mail, Contacts & Calendars, there's a section called ACCOUNTS. Click on all of them and turn "Mail" off. This way you'll still get everything else in Calendars, Contacts, et. al., but when Mail.app opens it will be empty. ~~~ newman314 The problem is that most (all?) mail apps other than the default Mail app on iOS do not properly spawn when you are in another app and choose the Send as Email option. I use the Gmail app for most of my mail and Mail for work Exchange. I've caught myself multiple times inadvertently trying to send a funny article using work email. Ugh. ~~~ malandrew This requirement that certain app functionalities may only be provided by Apple's own apps needs to be challenged in court via a class action suit so that they may be forced to unbundle these. These apps should be deletable and you should be able to programmatically assign their responsibilities to another application of your choosing. We've had this capability on the desktop forever. There is not pro-consumer argument Apple could make for denying a setting that lets you change this. ------ eknkc I think it's one user with a fucked up mailbox rule that copies stuff around or something like that. Apple also runs iCloud mail servers on IMAP, I think they would catch that if it was a widespread issue on betas. ~~~ oleganza I know at least 2 people plus myself who have the very same problem with Gmail IMAP and new Mail.app. ~~~ uxp Gmail is a worse offender of the IMAP protocol than Apple Mail.app has ever been. ~~~ dirkgently Thanks for providing compelling evidences that totally beat the ones provided in the original article. ------ hboon Mail in Mavericks is bad. Since the previews, I have not been able to archive emails for Gmail accounts or Google Apps for Business. A subset of mails archived directly on Gmail will appear and stay in Mail's Inbox. I'm not sure where the developers for Mail went to that they didn't have the resources to fix it. Maybe to help with the iOS 7 crunch? ~~~ rsl7 In my head, Mail.app was written for Steve, who I imagine was a read-reply- delete kind of a guy, and not much else mattered. ~~~ ams6110 Mail.app is an old NEXTSTEP app. It's probably one of the oldest apps on the platform, and it's always sucked. There was even a windows version for a while, which you could get if you bought NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework for Windows NT. ~~~ rsl7 Yes, I'm aware of this, which is why I said what I did. ------ ricardobeat > I discovered my second attempt to contact the user about this problem in > their Junk folder tonight. Peeking into a user's mail box? I know it's all plain text anyway, but this article makes me feel a bit uneasy. ~~~ UnoriginalGuy There's a difference between message contents and meta-data. Even the logs often contain the subject, folder, and TO/FROM frields. It is pretty hard to diagnose issues without at least gathering basic information on the state of an account. Not really sure I see the issue. If Google, for example, had an issue and they needed to examine the meta data surrounding individual pieces of my email I'd likely be alright with that as long as they didn't read the message's content/body or any attached files which I view as quite private. ~~~ ricardobeat The subject + from + to fields already expose a lot of information, and should be considered just as private as a message's content. I would expect it to be at least truncated in some way to prevent rough employees from accessing user accounts, still debuggable just as easily. ------ leephillips This is good news: it seems as if Apple's quality control is improving. After all, there is no report here of Mail.app actually deleting messages[0] _[EDIT: oh, well]_ or sending out hundreds of copies of a message.[1] Despite this improvement, however, I think I shall continue to avoid this company's software in favor of more mature, open source solutions.[2] [0]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12758081&tstart=0 [1]http://lee-phillips.org/iphoneUpgradeWarning-4-2-1/ [2]http://www.mutt.org/ (http://www.washington.edu/alpine/ might be OK, too.) ~~~ 0x0 To me it seems like QA is declining. I just experienced data loss with the new Mail.app 7.0: Moving mails out of inbox to another folder left a copy in the inbox. Deleting the copy in the inbox also irrevocably deleted the other copy in the other folder. Smart mailboxes just don't work properly, doesn't auto- refresh, incorrect non-refreshing or just plain random "unread email count" badges, table column "Mailbox" shows "Archive" no matter which folder a mail _actually_ belongs to, random 100% cpu usage for extended periods of time even when left idle, etc. etc. etc. The old version that shipped with 10.8.5 had none of these problem at all. Mail.app went from being perfect to being actively hostile :( ~~~ kbd The QA failure most shocking to me lately is that on 10.8.5 on their newest MacBook Airs, Apple forgot some file necessary to use the video camera in 32 bit mode and therefore broke Skype. Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let that happen. You'd think when you update the camera that you'd check such a popular app as Skype. Point is, it seems like the Mail team isn't the only place QA is lacking at Apple. ~~~ mratzloff > _Microsoft, for all their faults, is notorious for having fantastic QA and > not breaking old apps when they update Windows, and would never have let > that happen._ Windows 8.1 has had a number of severe problems.[1][2][3] [1] [http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win- rt-81-pulle...](http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2013/10/21/win- rt-81-pulled/1) [2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-upgrade- not-working-after-3-attempts-on-2-machines/) [3] Anecdotally, a coworker tried upgrading on two separate devices (after Microsoft pulled 8.1 for awhile and then made it available again). On both it installed fine but disabled all of his Metro apps from starting. ~~~ kbd Relevant: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html) See the parts about backwards compatibility. I'll grant that Microsoft isn't as fanatical about backwards compatibility as they used to be. ------ Lagged2Death _The 4 million message 32 bit limit of the UID field..._ Maybe I don't know how mail works, but shouldn't that be 4 billion? I imagine disk space would become an issue before a 32 bit identifier became an issue. ~~~ blahedo Yes, I noticed that too. I assume this was a brain fart on the part of the OP ---2^32 is definitely 4 billion, not 4 million. (Well, approximately.) ~~~ brongondwana Yeah, sorry - late night. The 2^32 limit is something we've never seen hit by real software. (we do have a testing account with top-bit UIDs and MODSEQs set to make sure nothing is trying to do signed maths with them) ~~~ Lagged2Death Love your service, by the way. ------ davidcollantes I find Mail.app to be OK now. The only think I am missing (and my main gripe) is strict threading. I just hate receiving my daily Google remainder (or lack thereof) and seeing the long list of previous emails with same subject associated on the same thread. Hate it! Does anyone knows if there is a way to get strict threading —without changing the client? ------ RexRollman I've been reading about IMAP for more than a decade and I keep hearing about how hard it is to get right, for both the client and the server. I've wondered why this is. Is the standard too complicated? Is it written in way that allows for too much interpretation? ~~~ jpallas You can't understand the IMAP spec until you have been personally berated by Mark Crispin. Unfortunately, Mark has passed away, so the number of people who understand the spec is only going to decrease. ~~~ grinich Haha so true, RIP. Thankfully his responses are saved for posterity in the imap-protocol discussion list archive. ;) [https://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/mmsearch/imap- prot...](https://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/mmsearch/imap- protocol?config=imap- protocol&restrict=&exclude=&method=and&format=long&sort=time&words=mrc+at+CAC.Washington.EDU) ------ mahyarm Someone suggested [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/) as a replacement email app for OSX in a recent HN thread and I've been very happy with it. Only downside so far is it doesn't have outlook contact integration, so you don't get autocomplete for all the email addresses in your company unlike microsoft outlook. Which is too bad, because airmail + apple calendar is much faster than microsoft outlook. ~~~ eknkc Airmail is really good. I have a couple of problems but the developers are really responsive and bugs are getting fixed pretty fast. ------ apostlion Mail.app has these issues consistently, across versions. Which is a real shame, because UX-wise it is a really fine mail client. Also, threading algorithm changed slightly in Mavericks, leading to many more mistakes than ever before. ------ dmbaggett If you're sick of the mail program that comes with your OS, try Inky ([http://inky.com](http://inky.com)). It's still in beta, but we just put out a refreshed version that fixes a lot of issues users reported throughout 2013. Lots of polishing work still remains, but we're happily dog-fooding it and have a loyal following around the world. (And yes, Linux guys, we're still planning to release a version for Ubuntu -- finally.) Inky is a clean-sheet mail client implementation written with Python and Chrome Embedded Framework. It's taken us several years to get it to this beta stage; give it a try and let us know your thoughts at <hi@inky.com>. It's currently free; we'll likely offer upsell freemium versions at some point, once we're satisfied with it. Mail is hard. ~~~ bdcravens Couple of things that bug me: 1) I have to log in to your service. Why? Makes me think you're storing my mail credentials on your server. If it's a cloud sync issue, use Dropbox/iCloud. 2) Doesn't use my Contacts in To: field. This makes it a non-starter for me. It does look pretty, I think the filtering is very smart, and I like the "smart cards". ~~~ dmbaggett 1) We address the (fairly complex) questions around authentication in our FAQ: [http://inky.com/pages/faq/](http://inky.com/pages/faq/) \-- you have to scroll to the bottom for security details. 2) It will. Give it a little while to find your contacts. :) ~~~ bdcravens How long is a "little while"? ~~~ dmbaggett 5 minutes or so, unless something is wrong. ------ fit2rule _sigh_ I really miss the good ol' days of e-mail, before all these Web 2.0 people hit the scene with their "let us scan your mail for other addresses" this and their "we'll keep a safe copy of your email as a backup, using IMAP" that .. Frankly, though, I blame MS Outlook. When it hit the scene, email became a thorny mess of standards, almost-standards, and not-standard at all .. and it seems the rest of the industry is quite happy following that disastrous path to oblivion set out for us with the MS Outlook/Exchange competition. ~~~ UnoriginalGuy I honestly have no clue what you're getting at with your first paragraph. Email hasn't changed very much in the last fifteen or more years, so I'm not sure what changes the "Web 2.0 people" made you're referring to, your examples are pretty odd ("scan other addresses" what?). Also keeping a backup of deleted messages for a period of time is standard industry practice and has been since before I or Linux were even born. As far as MS Outlook and standards: That little rant reads like it was written about web-browsers and you just replaced "Internet Explorer" with "MS Outlook." MS Outlook uses a fairly standard implementation of IMAP/POP3/SMTP and has since forever. Microsoft have their own ActiveSync mechanism which isn't a standard, but no competing solutions have really appeared which compete with ActiveSync (and replace IMAP) so while you could blame them, you could also blame the complete lack of innovation in this space. ~~~ blahedo I can't speak for Outlook's performance at the MTA level, but the user-facing parts break all _sorts_ of expectations I have from twenty years of standards- compliant email. For instance---just at the tip of a very large iceberg---they have invented a completely new way of representing name/email pairs in the header fields, with the list separator being the semicolon, the email delimiter being square brackets, and a few other things. If I have a list of email addresses from some other source, I have to reformat it just to use it in Outlook. I have to use Outlook Web Access at work (no alternatives), which is even worse than regular Outlook, and I'm keeping a list of all the ways its user- facing interface is broken. I left the list at work or I'd be able to rant for _pages_ right now. ------ lakwn I'm not an iOS user, but doesn't it sound a bit unprofessional for them to write such post on their main blog? Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad practices? I think such rants should indeed be made public, but maybe there was a better outlet for FastMail to do that. ~~~ a-nom-a-ly Out of curiosity, do you mind explaining why you think it's unprofessional? > Won't it piss off iOS users, who are not responsible for Apple's bad > practices? In many(most?) services abuse of the service is met with suspension, etc. IMHO this case clearly counts as an abuse of the system regardless of whose fault it is. ------ lars I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had. The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several times. To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all. ~~~ cmyr I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright. ~~~ Segmentation Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google. ~~~ yapcguy Yep. What real innovation has there been on Mac OS X since Bertrand Serlet left? Where are all the adult engineers? I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps. They commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day. Nice people but they're second tier. They never critique Apple, think Apple is the best at everything, and shrug their shoulders at any technology developed outside of Apple. There's always an excuse for things that don't work, from broken iCloud APIs to Apple Maps. They're competent engineers, they'll do what they are told, but they're not the mavericks who will break new ground. Just my opinion, but perhaps this is something other people have experienced. EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area. ~~~ stephencanon > Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally > referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area. People you know are delusional. The "Bay Area" includes the peninsula, south bay, east bay, and north bay. Some people throw in Santa Cruz, which might be a bit extreme, but I've never talked to anyone who lived there for an appreciable time period and didn't include Silicon Valley (and hence Cupertino). > I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their > customer facing Apps. You've met a couple of employees (or maybe contractors?), and you believe that they are representative of thousands of technical staff? That says far more about you than it does about anything else. ~~~ dmak I met a person in San Jose who told me they were from the city, and I asked "Oh nice, me too! Which part are you from?" He named some unheard of district, and I kept asking questions to try to pinpoint where it was, and I found out he was actually from Palo Alto. That's extreme. ~~~ stephencanon That's beyond extreme. I suppose that Palo Alto _is_ formally a City, but ... ------ grn From the comments I draw the conclusion that a solid, open source, GUI e-mail client would have great popularity. Are there such clients out there? I used Thunderbird under Linux but it feels cumbersome. ~~~ nknighthb I've searched in vain for an alternative, open or closed, to Mail.app on any platform ever since Mozilla lost its mind and released Thunderbird 3. I can't find anything fast, simple, stable, and maintained. The next best option I've found is, of all things, Outlook (Mac or Windows), not that it's particularly desirable, either. ~~~ aidenn0 I've used claws in a pop environment; it beats the pants off of evolution as an e-mail client. I haven't tried its imap though. I stopped using thunderbird about 7 years ago when it deleted messages off of a Pop3 server before noticing that the disk with my mailbox on it was full, thus losing dozens of messages. People tell me it's better now, but I'm currently happy with claws. I've recently been trying trojita as my imap client (have been using mutt otherwis). It's fairly feature simple, but blazingly fast. ~~~ nknighthb Claws disqualified itself by being slow and crashing often when I tried to use it (with IMAP) maybe a year ago. If there's been significant progress since I might give it another shot, but it'd take a long time to have any real confidence in it... I'll poke at Trojita but it'll have the same confidence issue by virtue of being relatively new. ------ Ramattack I already have too a bug opened to apple due to an incorrect handle of uidl with 0 at left... I opened it like one year ago... Still no answer... This bug is in all ios apple mail clients.... ~~~ Ramattack Well no answer.... They told me they knew the bug.... But it's still opened ~~~ heinz Well.... Maybe it is because all of your sentences.... sound like awkward murmuring.... with all those extra periods....... ------ look_lookatme I've generally been happy with Mail.app in Mavericks until yesterday evening when I got a notification center pop-up for a new mail and accidentally clicked the delete option, instead of reply. The email completely and utterly disappeared from the client and the server (google apps imap), wasn't in any Trash or All Mail folder. It was gone completely based off an errant click on a pop-up notification. Kind of scary. ------ msie It sounds like IMAP is a stinking turd of a standard for servers. Is there an alternative in the works? Like IMAP lite? ------ ss64 Apple mail “bug” turns out to be user script after all October 29, 2013 [http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns- out-...](http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/29/apple-mail-bug-turns-out-to-be- user-script-after-all/) ------ matwood Is there another mail client for OSX that also supports gmail and s/mime? After the disaster that is the Mavericks Mail.app, I've started using Thunderbird. It can't be the only option out there. ~~~ dmak I've been using Sparrow since I got my MBP, and I haven't found any better solution yet. ~~~ lobster_johnson Sparrow is no longer being maintained, though. Personally I am pretty happy with the switch to Airmail [1], which has all the same features, at the expense of some minor, not very annoying bugs. [1] [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/) ~~~ matwood I looked at Airmail, but it doesn't support S/MIME yet. ------ fennecfoxen Apple is the new Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft. ------ cochese Great times insulting office software outside of the office. The end result of this article boils down to: who cares?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
20-Year Mortgages Hit Zero for First Time in Danish Rate History - ptr https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-07/nordea-offers-20-year-mortgages-at-zero-interest-as-rates-plunge ====== yasp This seems like a good place to ask the question: how is it that we're seeing $15T of bonds worldwide trading with negative yields? [1] TFA suggests this is due to structural factors--institutions that are required by law to own AA/AAA bonds. Is this some deficiency in the law or corporate governance, that cash in this circumstance isn't considered a substitute for a negative-yield bond? Its net present value would be greater. I can't imagine a scenario in which you would come out financially ahead from owning a negative yielding bond instead of cash. [1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/07/bizarro-bonds-negative- yield...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/07/bizarro-bonds-negative-yielding- debt-in-the-world-balloons-to-15-trillion.html) ~~~ throw0101a > _This seems like a good place to ask the question: how is it that we 're > seeing $15T of bonds worldwide trading with negative yields? [1]_ We've been on a 10 year run of growing economies after the Great Recession and stocks/equities have price-to-earning (P/E) ratios that are really high—as high as what they often were before other corrections and/or recessions: * [https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-ea...](https://www.macrotrends.net/2577/sp-500-pe-ratio-price-to-earnings-chart) * [https://www.starcapital.de/en/research/stock-market-valuatio...](https://www.starcapital.de/en/research/stock-market-valuation/) > _Here’s the price-earnings ratio for the S &P 500 since World War II. Right > now it’s hovering a little above 25. In the past three decades, it has never > reached that point without leading quickly to either a deep correction or a > full-blown recession._ * [https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/12/raw-data-the-...](https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/12/raw-data-the-sp-500-price-earnings-ratio/) So people are worried about equities and "running to safety" of bonds. But there is a lot of demand for bonds, but only a limited supply: when governments tend go to the market and ask for money, usually private investors ask " _what are you willing to pay me for the use of my money?_ ". And private investors get a positive return. But now it's the opposite: private investors are saying " _I 'm so worried about my money that I am willing to pay_ you _, the government, to hold onto it_ ". And so private investors get a negative return—because they're worried having the money in (stock) market could be worse than a predictable negative rate from a government. Between the Summer 2007 and November 2008 the S&P 500 dropped by (IIRC) >40% during the fiscal crisis before the Great Recession: a bond "returning" -1% isn't too bad in comparison. ~~~ refurb PE ratio has declined to 22 since that article was written. [https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio](https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe- ratio) ~~~ throw0101a 2018 was quite the year: > _After closing at an all-time high on September 20, the S &P 500 entered a > bear market on Christmas Eve. The technical definition is a 20% peak-to- > trough drawdown, but I’m willing to give this 19.8% fall the benefit of the > doubt._ * [https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/12/the-forgotten-bear-...](https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/12/the-forgotten-bear-markets/) The S&P 500 then hit another all-time high this year (2019), before dropping back down recently. The US/Trump sabre rattling and introducing tariffs/trade wars isn't helping with confidence either: * [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/tariff-tantrums-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/tariff-tantrums-and-recession-risks.html) * [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3M](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y3M) Various other stock markets are experiencing drama as well: * [https://www.starcapital.de/en/research/stock-market-valuatio...](https://www.starcapital.de/en/research/stock-market-valuation/) ------ aantix Can you get a Danish loan to fund the purchase of a foreign (ehem U.S.) residence? ~~~ aczerepinski This was my reaction too. If any Danish banks are reading this and want to make a juicy half percent, hit me up. ~~~ howlin You'd be taking on currency exchange risk, as the Danes will want to loan you Euros but you'll likely be paying back the loan in USDs. ~~~ alkonaut They'll most likely want to loan you some DKK, not EUR. ------ xchaotic Why would people not buy extra properties with these mortgages “just in case”? Especially the 10 year one seems low risk and worst case you have a property after 10 years? ~~~ viburnum With good regulation (unlike the US before the bubble popped) low rates are not a problem. ~~~ gridlockd [citation needed] ------ p1esk Negative rate morgages seem pretty crazy to an American eye! :) ~~~ alkonaut Zero or negative rates for consumer loans is crazy _everywhere_. But so is having a fixed 30year mortgage of 3-5% when the interbank rates are near zero. ~~~ vonmoltke Why? The bank could loan that money to the US Government for 2%-3% over that same lock-up period. What does the funds rate have to do with it? ------ Shaban I'm suprised no one has mentioned gold. You can buy physical gold and store it. Doesn't take much space	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Pesticides found on nearly all fruits and vegitables - ck2 http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/06/13/apples-can-be-tainted-with-pesticides%E2%80%94but-you-still-need-your-fruits-and-vegetables/ ====== hrasm "And so we're back in the magical world of risk perception, where science can become the tool of bias—conscious or not." I just cannot wrap my head around that one.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Court Rules That EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month Post Is Protected Speech - DiabloD3 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/court-rules-effs-stupid-patent-month-post-protected-speech ====== CPAhem The company in question GEMSA Pty Ltd of Australia got a patent on "Storage cabinets" on a computer. Pretty much a patent on folders or directories. Now they are suing everyone. According to the EFF: "As far as we can tell, GEMSA seems to think that anyone with a website that links to hosted content infringes its patent" [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/stupid-patent-month- st...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/stupid-patent-month-storage- cabinets-computer) ~~~ bufferoverflow How does this not get immediately dismissed by prior art? ~~~ Tuna-Fish In order for it to be dismissed as prior art, it has to make it all the way to court. The business model of patent trolls like GEMSA is that they get a bunch of obviously overbroad and spurious patents, and then they sue a lot of companies for them, offering to settle for less than the cost of defense. If a company actually puts up a legal defense, they drop the lawsuit. ~~~ jandrese I'm a little surprised that the courts don't get cranky at the firm that files hundreds of cases and then retracts pretty much all of them. It seems like red flag behavior that should be investigated. Is there just a lack of oversight on legal firms? It seems to take exceptionally egregious behavior before anybody steps in. ~~~ arcbyte In some states for some actions there is a rule that disallows retracting a suit after an answer is filed. Might be useful for patents in federal law. That's for Congress to take up. ------ livarot > any foreign order censoring EFF would be unenforceable in the United States > under the First Amendment and the Securing the Protection of Our Enduring > and Established Constitutional Heritage Act (SPEECH Act). This way of naming laws is incredibly childish. ~~~ appleflaxen on its face it's pretty stupid: acronyms that are so contrived (or worse, misleading) that you have to shake your head when you hear them. but there is at least a little bit of value to having a brief, specific name to use when referring to it that somehow relates to the topic at hand. ------ bartart This is good for the EFF in the short term, but what if the Australian court finds that the EFF is ignoring its order and so must pay fines? Perhaps in response to US court saying "the Australian court lacked jurisdiction over EFF", the Australian court will say that the US court has no jurisdiction in Australia. The Australian court could conceivably force the EFF to change how its site is shown to people in Australia. Then after realizing that people in Australia can still access the US version of the EFF's site, force the EFF to change its site in all countries. This sort of problem could become more common, such as the case that Google lost where the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Google had to remove results in violation of Canadian law from all Google results worldwide. ~~~ benchaney countries' laws only apply within its borders. An Australian court cannot fine the EFF or force them to modify their website because it does not operate within Australia, they have no ability to "force" the EEF to do anything. Google only had to obey the Canadian Court because it has operates in Canada [0] [0]: [https://www.google.ca/about/locations/?region=north- america](https://www.google.ca/about/locations/?region=north-america) ~~~ vidarh Countries laws apply wherever they say they do. Whether they are able to enforce them is a secondary issue. Some countries do claim jurisdiction outside their own borders for certain types of cases. ~~~ kwhitefoot Generally only for their own citizens. This covers, for instance, cases of sex tourism. ~~~ germanier The German criminal law explicitly covers e.g. all cases of money counterfeiting, human trafficking, and war crimes worldwide regardless of nationality. They have given themselves some binding restrictions on what cases should be prosecuted. Of course enforcement is usually hard to impossible so it does not get used often. But just as an example, a German court has sentenced an Rwandan FDLR president for assisting war crimes even though there is absolutely no connection to Germany. Germany is not alone in claiming universal jurisdiction for certain crimes. ------ Overtonwindow _After its thorough analysis, the court declared “(1) that the Australian Injunction is repugnant to the United States Constitution and the laws of California and the Unites States.._ Wow, now that's a judicial smack down. ~~~ bdonlan This is a term of art, defined in the relevant statute: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4104](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/4104) > Any United States person against whom a foreign judgment is entered on the > basis of the content of any writing, utterance, or other speech by that > person that has been published, may bring an action in district court, under > section 2201(a), for a declaration that the foreign judgment is repugnant to > the Constitution or laws of the United States. ------ kazinator I suspect that the court in fact found the patent to be stupid (not merely "protected opinion"), but stopped short of writing that into the verdict. The EFF substantiate their "stupid" accusation with reason; it's not just schoolyard name-calling. ------ gpvos But can EFF officials still travel to Australia now? ~~~ icbm504 If they are fined or in contempt of court ... I would recommend consulting with an Australian lawyer and then the Australian embassy before boarding a plane to Australia. ------ dogweather It's hard to even call that a legal system, when a court can find "stupid" to be a statement of fact. ------ hamandcheese I’m certainly not familiar with Australian politics or law, but is it not surprising that the Australian court would grant the injunction in the first place? ~~~ CPAhem Australia has some of the most draconian anti-libel laws in the English- speaking world. A judge recently sent a blogger to jail for 4 months for "libel" even though the truth of the matter was not disputed. A book on Chinese bribing of Australian politicians has been withdrawn after defamation threats from these politicians. This was largely unreported in the Australian press, only in the New York Times: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/china- aus...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/world/australia/china-australia- book-influence.html) ~~~ jlawer Was on the front page of abc's news site... not sure how unreported that was : [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-13/academic-claims-hes- be...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-13/academic-claims-hes-been- silenced-by-chinese-government/9142694) ------ em3rgent0rdr Good but unsuprising. A much more newsworthy story would be if a US Court ruled otherwise.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: How to Self-Learn Programming? - __e__ I am self-learning programming for building web apps. Self-learning is not working. I am constantly switching from one language to another, Python to JS, or HTML, or CSS.<p>I don't have enough money and time to join any course or bootcamp.<p>Please give me some advice to self-learn programming. ====== triptych "I don't have enough money and time to join any course or bootcamp." If you don't have time / money how do you expect to learn? There's freecodecamp, udemy, MDN. Start a side project or join an open source project and complete tasks in those projects. You are focused more on the act of learning, and less on the doing of the things you want to learn. Learn by doing. Go make a crappy web project on github and link it to a netlify domain. Takes 10 minutes. Then do it again and again, getting better each time. Go on fiverr and take on some simple HTML projects. ------ rolph learn the way the internet learned, first look at html. learn how the language works, then start "reading html and practice understanding it. then go for JS , then CSS. Here is a catchall of sorts where all 3 and more! are discussed: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web) i suggest find someplaces like this to retrieve some skeletons so you can see simplicity then learn to flesh it up, start small just make a page that says hello world, and displays a kitten pic , or some such thing: [https://linuxwebdevelopment.com/html5-boilerplate/](https://linuxwebdevelopment.com/html5-boilerplate/) how you learn is important top down or bottum up. do you look at the big picture grand scheme and dissect it to find what parts make it up? or do you look at fundamental pieces, and examine how they relate to each other and function as a group? here is a place to experiment with JS script so you can edit a snippet and see how things change: [https://jsfiddle.net/boilerplate/react- jsx/](https://jsfiddle.net/boilerplate/react-jsx/) keep in mind there are many flavours of java, but basically its a programme sitting inside the html. CSS can be confusing to read if you have no context for it. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduct...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduction_to_CSS) basically CSS is a way of enforcing a certain look or layout but there are some cool tricks that can do things like animations, or changing fonts formats and images according to some event in the browser. frameworks come up, this is a not basic aspect ------ silasdb Have a deadline, say, 3 months. Choose _one_ language (no framework). Have _one_ project (a bookstore system, for example). Read official documentation/tutorials as you develop. You may not like the language. You may not like the project. But finish the job with the tools you chose. ~~~ gjvc >> You may not like the language. You may not like the project. But finish the job with the tools you chose. << Real-life life lesson right there. ------ croh start building something simple e.g. website ripper choose any stack. it doesnt matter. important thing to understand is - webapp are becoming more complex these days. so getting whole picture will take some time. you can try below simple project too. 1\. build library project using python. take name of books as input and add/delete/update/list in database like mysql. 2\. now build new database to add/delete/update/list name of students 3\. then add relationships to manage books borrowed by students 4\. do same thing using web. take input from webforms and store in mysql. retrieve them again. for backend you can try flask framework. ------ z3t4 Reading articles, stack overflow, language spec. Doing my own lab. Reading others code. Talking with other programmers. Discussion boards. IRC. But most importantly: working on real projects. ------ thanatos519 Find a problem you want to solve. Solve the problem. ~~~ simonblack Very concise and to the point. My effort is quite a bit more verbose: Get yourself a project. Any project, but preferably not too minor. Write that project in your new language. Many times while doing that, you will need to do a few days or more of solid studying of the new language to get yourself past a hurdle that's blocking your progress. Eventually, you will complete the project. Now, throw that one away. It was just to 'show you the ropes'. (That's commonly said as "Build one to throw away.") Now do that project again with your new, greater, basis of knowledge. Repeat that with several projects. You now have a fair level of self-taught programming in that one language. Repeat that process again but using a different language. There will be hurdles again, but different hurdles. Now you know programming to a reasonable level. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Venmo Five Years Ago - mnewberg https://medium.com/@thenewb/venmo-five-years-ago-3d361563b98f ====== habosa Venmo was started by UPenn alums so it was popular among my friends long before it was a phenomenon (one of my good friends interned there and wrote the BlackBerry app). I used to use it exclusively by SMS starting around 2011. It used to be smart enough where I could text in "Pay John $5 for food" and it would figure out which John I meant and do it. I loved that. It's been amazing to watch Venmo grow to what it is now. If I could only keep three apps on my smartphone, I would choose Uber/Lyft, Venmo, and Google Maps. I can't navigate my life without all three of those. In my last year of college my Venmo year in review showed that I had spent $17k on Venmo and received $18k. So not a huge net, just a constant movement of money in and out among my friends (rent, food, parties, etc). If I had to use cash we would have never been able to make the small things work, and if I had to use PayPal I would have accrued $100s to $1000s in fees. So basically: thank you Venmo. You make my life measurably simpler. ------ superuser2 Venmo is an objectively worse experience to Square Cash in every way. Bank accounts rather than debit cards, difficult Facebook-linked discovery, stupid social networking integration, obtuse UI. Square Cash is beautiful, elegant, and effortless. I encourage my friends to use it over Venmo whenever I can. Unfortunately, Venmo is wildly more popular among people I know. ~~~ nemothekid I'd have to argue with "objectively" \- many of your gripes are subjective. The bank account vs. debit card is one time on setup - and has little to do with day to day interaction. Not do I see how the UI is obtuse - it takes 3 clicks to pay someone. The one legitimate gripe you have (the facebook/social network), is a plus in my opinion - in the sense I can pay anyone by just knowing their name. Friend of so-and-so is throwing a party? I can look up their name and throw in, _and_ there is an in-app log of the transaction. I use Cash to send/receive money to my mom. I never have to worry about the the amount sent, what was it for and when it was sent and who it was sent to because its my mom. Its rarely the same for my friends. ~~~ saturdaysaint "The bank account vs. debit card is one time on setup - and has little to do with day to day interaction. Not do I see how the UI is obtuse - it takes 3 clicks to pay someone." I like Venmo, but I vehemently disagree here. Every time I recommend Venmo to someone who hasn't heard of it, I have to explain why they should give their banking information to a company they've never heard of. It's an onboarding disaster. I recommend Google Wallet to most people now since it's both a trusted name and doesn't require linking to a bank. My conversation is usually as simple as "Hey download Google Wallet - it's an easy way to zap money between people - and send me $x". ~~~ Yomammas_Lemma Also, if your Venmo account gets compromised, it's a fucking nightmare. I think this slate article summed up most reasonable persons' concerns pretty fairly: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/safety_net/2015/02/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/safety_net/2015/02/venmo_security_it_s_not_as_strong_as_the_company_wants_you_to_think.html?wpsrc=fol_fb) ------ moron4hire They were the darling startup of Philadelphia for a while. Proof that Philly could compete and grow successful technology companies. Our hackerspace used them to manage membership dues because PayPal was such a pain in the ass, and we really liked supporting a local business. One of our members was supposedly good friends with one of the founders, got us setup as a non-profit with them so we didn't have to pay transaction fees. A lot of us started using Venmo to share lunch costs both in the space and with our coworkers back at our jobs. I even convinced my landlord to start taking payment through Venmo; he loved it. I remember hearing Venmo talk in one of the local tech press blogs about how much they loved Philly and were never going to move. Then literally a month later they had moved to NYC. And then they conveniently "forgot" about our non-profit status, but didn't email anyone about it, and didn't report on the transaction fees in the same data stream as the rest of the app. I was treasurer at the time, and couldn't figure out why my spreadsheet balance tracking all of our accounts didn't match Venmo's balance. I had to do a special data export to find the transaction fees. And that data export was just to a CSV file, one that didn't quote fields with commas or escape newline characters correctly. I seem to remember the export wasn't even on the account page, you had to go find it under some obscure settings page. I quit using them after that, and haven't looked back. When you're a non- profit, community-owned-and-operated hackerspace (as opposed to a for-profit fab-lab like TechShop), it's really hard to get people to pay their dues on time (or at all). Literally all we needed was money for rent and internet, the management was rotating volunteer basis, nobody got paid. Any amount of money that is expected and doesn't come through is a huge hit to the bottom line. ------ XaspR8d I've yet to see a payment app reach any major usage in my social network, which is extremely fragmented among Google Wallet, Snapcash, PayPal, Square Cash, Popmoney, Simple, bank-specific apps i.e. Chase Mobile... (Weirdly enough I don't know anyone using Venmo, though I'm familiar with it from HN and the like.) It seems like everyone _wants_ a simple payment app, but there's a huge 'sign-up fatigue' from the fragmentation, and no single app has reached a useful saturation. I wish I were seeing the "viral spread" others see and don't really even care much about feature parity. :\ ~~~ avn2109 That's odd. Literally 95% of my friends are on Venmo, with the only holdouts being the people who refuse to grant account withdrawal permissions to a third party. ~~~ cauthon I don't like the "bucket" approach or Venmo's emphasis on linking to Facebook, so I don't have an account and use Square Cash or BofA transfers instead. I'm the exception though, I'd agree that the vast majority of my friends use it. ------ josephpmay For those who are older, Venmo is used today probably more than cash by college students (for things like paying a friend back, paying membership dues, paying to get into a party, etc.) ~~~ RankingMember I'm weird but I feel like cash is superior for those applications and doesn't require me to hand my credit card number out to yet another company. ~~~ untog But it does require you to walk to the nearest ATM, withdraw the nearest round amount to the amount you need, then somehow try to get change from your friend (or just call it even) then walk around with the remainder. I get what you're saying, but it isn't difficult to see why people find Venom a better option. What is exactly that bad about Venmo having your credit card number? You're protected from fraud anyway. ~~~ toomuchtodo Write check, friend deposits with mobile check deposit app. Everyone has a bank of some sort, I have yet to meet anyone who is using Venmo. ~~~ Jtsummers It's friction. If you have two entities providing the same service (money exchange), but one is easy to use and one is much harder to use, the easier one will win (all other things being equal. Check method: Needed items: Payer - checkbook, pen Payee - phone Steps: Payer Payee Write check Give check Receive check Sign check Use app to photograph and submit check Venmo method: Needed items: Payer - phone Payee - phone Steps: Payer Payee Send $x to Payee A similar occurrence in the financial field, mobile banking. Depositing checks via phone is easier than going to an ATM which was easier than making it to a physical branch of the right bank during business hours. Cash is a better equivalence to Venmo, but only works when you're physically collocated. And then requires one or both parties to carry around cash (and it's not as easy to be precise, if you care about getting it right down to the penny). ~~~ toomuchtodo How do you handle someone who won't install Venmo and sign up for their service? Not pay them back? ~~~ Jtsummers Switch back to cash, check or another transfer mechanism. Or have them buy the next round at the bar and call it good. ------ paxtonab I'm really surprised that Venmo started as an SMS service, not a mobile app. It blows me away that the product has been around for that long and evolved to the point that it's at now. Funnily enough this is also how Shazam started. I think it really speaks to the execution aspect of a startup - be good at doing 1 thing, create a committed user base and then scale. According to the article Venmo's target audience was originally college kids who didn't have cash on hand to pay food trucks... Now they're doing $700mm in transactions. ------ habosa Question: does anyone know how/if Venmo makes money or is it just a loss- leader for Braintree/PayPal? I use it for thousands of dollars of transactions a year but I have never paid a penny in fees or seen an ad. People claim that Venmo acts as a bank and invests my carried balance but I can't imagine that's lucrative enough to pay all the bills. ~~~ ahstilde Venmo, I believe, invests the money it holds. This is why it takes 3 days to cash out. ~~~ habosa I tend to get cashouts in 24h now. ------ sksksk Something I find interesting about Venmo, Square cash etc... is how they target shortcomings in the US Banking system. In the UK, pretty much anyone with a bank account can go to their bank's website and transfer money to any other bank account in the UK instantly, and for free. Every bank has their own interface, some better than others, but it works well enough that I don't think Venmo could ever take off here. ------ silveira Venmo is one of my favorite services. A very simple and effective UI. I have been using it extensively since 2011 with a group of friends, and it's amazing how easy it make to split restaurant bills or any other kind of expense. I just wish more people were using it. ------ mlrtime It is spreading like a virus (in a good way) in corporate as well. We use it to pay each other for lunch. I now use it to pay my cleaning lady.... I'm glad to support something that isn't paypal. Hopefully Venmo stays small and lean. ~~~ aaronmacy PayPal owns Venmo. ~~~ habosa I think the exact sequence of events was Braintree bought Venmo for ~$25M and then later PayPal bought Braintree. ------ pkamb > It was riding the twitter wave in letting you interact with handles > (usernames) over SMS. I'm curious, were any of these SMS service comparies successful _as_ interactive SMS services? It seems like most of the services like Twitter, Venmo, etc. "started" as SMS services but quickly moved to apps once the iPhone appeared. And only then did they blow up. But maybe I'm wrong about that. What does Twitter/Venmo non- notification SMS usage look like today? Are there any big/popular _interactive_ services today that are mainly accessed by SMS? ~~~ dublinben M-Pesa moved over a billion dollars by SMS in 2014. ------ kloncks _In summary- it’s so awesome to see how they went from scrappy to a must-have product that does around $700mm in annual transactions._ Where is this from? Venmo should be doing much higher than this figure. ~~~ mnewberg My bad... fixed now. That was from a slate article last year. They are doing much more than that on a quarterly basis. ------ boggie1688 I'm so surprised that Venmo has not been acquired. You think someone like Paypal, Android Pay, or Apply Pay would buy them. ~~~ josephpmay Venmo is owned by Paypal	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Flatris – A fast-paced two-player web game - skidding https://flatris.space/ ====== slowmotarget Excellent! I love the animated feedback when bursting a line. Hope you won't get copyright issues.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Is Perl 5 or Perl 6 still worth learning in 2019? - grepgeek ====== SwellJoe Perl knowledge has been extremely valuable for me, but I first learned it when it was still _the_ scripting language of choice for just about everything (web, CLI, one-liners, etc.). Even Perl 5 is multi-paradigm and that's been helpful for me when I find myself parachuting into a new codebase in some language I don't know well. It's been easy for me to pick up Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Tcl, and even Rust, because of my Perl knowledge. I don't know if many other languages are quite as effective at teaching that kind of cross- paradigmatic approach, and Perl 6 should be even more effective, since it integrates even more paradigms. I still prefer Perl 5 for most CLI scripting tasks, but use Python for a lot of stuff lately because I work with others who know Python and don't know Perl. Perl has better docs than Python (the Python standard docs are almost entirely free of usage examples which is just plain terrible). Perl has better out of the box support for writing good CLI tools. e.g. color and better options parsing are in the standard modules, which require additional modules in Python. I also think Perl has better testing tools included, though this one may be a matter of taste. Perl used to have a better/friendlier community than almost any other language, but that's no longer really the case...it's a lot of old-timers who can be extremely impatient with new learners (there's been discussion of this problem and there is a desire to do better, but it's still a thing). The biggest OSS project I work on is almost entirely in Perl 5, so I still have reasons to keep using Perl, but I also tinker with Perl 6 now and then for fun...it's a cool language that I always seem to learn something new from. I might even take a stab at re-writing portions of our Perl 5 code in Perl 6 at some point. ------ johntdaly I would say it’s only worth learning Perl 5 if you work in a shop that has a lot of old Perl code, otherwise Python is probably the most sensible option to learn (as much as it pains me to say) if you haven’t got a job yet. It will also help you with tools like ansible. Go might also have a future where Perl once thrived since you can compile your dependencies into the program. Dependencies sort of sucks with all scripting languages. ~~~ Grinnz Lots of people agree dependency management sucks. So they wrote tools to help - the most useful wrappers being [https://metacpan.org/pod/Carton](https://metacpan.org/pod/Carton) and [https://metacpan.org/pod/App::FatPacker](https://metacpan.org/pod/App::FatPacker). ------ robertlemmen IMHO there are two different things at work here: one is the tool or language that you are using for your job. This is highly specific, and most people will not be working with Perl 5 or 6 in their day job. However, we all need to learn general software engineering much more as well, and that is a very different piece of problem: here the tools are not specific, you can do that in any language. More importantly, no single language will allow you to truly understand software engineering, you must look at it from different vantage points, i.e. very different languages and development philosophies. In this area Perl, especially 6, is super interesting because it allows you to study a variety of interesting concepts while still being modern and accessible (compared to the alternatives of learning LISP, Prolog and who knows what). So: studying Perl will help make you a better software engineer, you can then apply that in whatever other language is required on that day for the current job. That said, I think most systems I have worked on in C++ and Java could have been written in Perl 5 _or_ 6 equally well. Some things would have been easier, some others harder... ~~~ raiph > More importantly, no single language will allow you to... That's one of the reasons why P6 is actually a braid of languages, plural, rather than a single language.[1] > most systems I have worked on ... Some things would have been easier, some > others harder [using a different language]... That's another reason. The braid (which languages are mixed together), the braiding (how they're braided together), and the strands of the braid (individual languages) in the standard P6 distribution, are all mutable, evolvable, forkable, mergeable, via a principled, governable mechanism.[1] cf Racket, except that P6 adopts the position that s-expressions aren't a good default syntax for most of the core code; macros aren't a good default approach for building up the majority of higher level constructs; automata other than turing machines need to be taken into account; and it all needs to be suitably version based so that various versions of languages in the braid, and of modules written in those languages, can peacefully co-exist. [1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/a4z68...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/a4z68q/what_principles_have_you_adopted_for_your/eblgbzn/) ------ harmil Perl 6 is a great language to learn if your goal is to become a more all- around versed programmer. It has constructs from every major family of programming languages and some features that I've never seen in any other language (NFG strings, operator overloading/declaration with precedence, whatever-code (Lisp has a similar construct), slangs, etc.) But if you want to learn a programming language that you'll use in your day- to-day job, then unless your day-to-day job is fairly unusual, you won't be using Perl 6. It's fairly slow, very light on surrounding modules unless you want to call out to a Perl 5 compatibility layer and in many modern areas none of the Perl variants have a significant footprint (machine learning comes to mind). Don't get me wrong. I love the language and program in it daily, but not for work. I write Perl 6 code because I enjoy thinking in highly abstract ways using whatever programming paradigm comes to hand. I write JavaScript, Python, Bash and rarely Java for work. ------ harmil I gave a separate answer for Perl 6, but as for Perl 5: Yes, absolutely. I think everyone should know Perl 5 if you ever touch a Linux system. It's installed everywhere and gives you the largest power/keystroke for command- line utility. It's more effective to learn Perl than AWK and Perl has incredibly deep Unicode support and what I call 4th-generation regular expressions (pre-POSIX, POSIX, and then the explosion of early Perl/PCRE/Python-re being the first three and Perl 6's full parser engine being the 5th) which, together, make it like the mythical tool it's often labeled as: the Swiss Army chainsaw. Don't make the mistake of trying to write anything over a few lines in it, though. You'll find yourself in a deep hole trying to use Moose and "experimental" features just to get back to parity with every other modern language, and you'll still have thin if any support for many modern tools (i.e. those that entirely post-date 2010). ------ snapdangle Perl 6 is my go to scripting language. The concerns about code styles don't apply at that point because it's all me. And the multi paradigm nature of Perl 6 means I can solve any given algorithm using a style that fits how I'm feeling in that moment. ------ karmakaze I usually consider languages when I'm also choosing what to use it for. E.g. framework/language, or use-case/language such as Go for a small/low-level service. Other than that I'll look at curious languages/implementations that are not yet widely known/adopted (e.g. Pony, Crystal, CHICKEN Scheme) for its own sake but not for main usage. I would be interested in Perl6 if I had a use case for it. I don't write shell scripts that need more than bash and in those cases Python works for me. Anyone know any good Perl6 frameworks/libs (maybe for cli or ncurses)? ~~~ raiph > I'll look at curious languages/implementations Evan Miller felt Rakudo/MoarVM fit that niche. [1] P6 automatically converts an ordinary P6 function call into a documented cli program. [2] Cro, a distributed system framework, is a P6 showcase. [3] [1] [https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning- perl-6.html](https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D16wa- gnFwE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D16wa-gnFwE) [3] [https://cro.services/](https://cro.services/) ------ reddit_clone May not help your resume much. But I would say go for it (Esp. Perl6) just for the fun of it. It is a very modern multi paradigm language which is still accessible to regular folks. ------ raiph Of course. (For some people.) Here are some videos to give a flavor of the last few years of Perl 6 as it graduated from alpha in 2014 to beta in 2015 to the first ready for production releases of the Rakudo compiler in 2016, to outsiders doing videos about it in 2019 (last video). * 2014. "There's this question of belief". 30 seconds. Charming point made by Perl creator Larry Wall (during a long talk). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y&t=37m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y&t=37m40s) * 2014. "My first P6 program". 3 minute "lightning talk" presentation to an audience of Perl folk. P5er Stefan Seifert shows what they learned and pulled off less than 24 hours after first writing P6 code. (This start led to [https://modules.perl6.org/search/?q=inline](https://modules.perl6.org/search/?q=inline)) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Y- lvQP6jI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Y-lvQP6jI) * 2015. "P5 Pigs". 6 minute "lightning talk" with audience participation at a Perl conference. Stephen Scaffidi sings his heart out about tensions in the Perl community about Perl 5 "vs" Perl 6. (In reality it's not "vs". They're different languages in the same family, analogous to the way Clojure and Racket are both in the Lisp family.) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5_7v7q98-g&t=48m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5_7v7q98-g&t=48m10s) * 2015. "Hacking on Rakudo Compiler". 10 minute live coding screencast. Rob Hoelz looks into 3 bugs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUdmol7cLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUdmol7cLU) * 2016. "Perl 6 for beginners". A conference keynote. An hour, or 15 minutes if you're in a hurry. Damian Conway is brilliant and hilarious. If you've never seem him, you're in for a treat. I strongly recommend the full hour. You will not be disappointed. The first link below is for the full hour, the second jumps to the closing 15 minute "crash course on quantum computing". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&t=5m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&t=5m) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&t=46m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2HkAYbG5o&t=46m) * 2017. "How to hack the MoarVM JIT compiler". 47 minutes. Bart Wiegmans, author of [http://brrt-to-the- future.blogspot.com/](http://brrt-to-the-future.blogspot.com/), introduces tools that enable others to make MoarVM go incrementally ever faster. Probably only of interest to the hardest core hackers. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5_drt7TEqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5_drt7TEqE) * 2018. "8 ways to do concurrency and parallelism". Hour+ presentation to P6ers. Like Damian (previous video) Jonathan is another P6er who is also a great presenter. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2fSbOPeSQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2fSbOPeSQs) * 2018. "Perl 6 grammars for simple compilers". 4 minutes 20 seconds live coding screencast. Andrew Shitov creates a toy language, its formal grammar, a parser, and its interpreter/compiler, from scratch, in less than 5 minutes, with full commentary explaining what he's doing as he does it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxaB6m_sQKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxaB6m_sQKk) * 2019. "Learn Perl 6 In One Video". 80 minute screencast. An "outsider" covers P6 basics at speed. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5_drt7TEqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5_drt7TEqE) ~~~ raiph The last link is wrong. It should be [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0zPwhgWTgM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0zPwhgWTgM) ------ vividsnow try and decide	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Interactive SICP - zodiac http://xuanji.appspot.com/isicp/1-1-elements.html ====== zodiac Hello everyone, OP here. This is my first Show HN post. I guess most of you should know what SICP is. I took a class where it was used as a textbook (only the first 3 chapters, unfortunately) and loved it. Most of the syntax-highlighted code fragments can be clicked on and edited. Either click somewhere else after that or press ctrl-enter to re-evaluate the scheme code. There are also some auto-graded exercises which involve writing code, as well as some multiple-choice questions (inspired by coursera) So far only the first section is up. I don't think I can finish converting the whole of SICP to this format, so any help is much appreciated! I've tried to make the API as short as I can, but still able to run arbitrary code (eg for auto-graders). The main code is in isicp/coding.js and the content is stored in chapter-specific html files. All this is done via client-side javascript. I used biwascheme for the scheme interpreter and codemirror for the editor. ~~~ shelf A great initiative. I hope you manage to finish it. I hope people extend the same treatment to non-lisp canonical texts. ~~~ zodiac One reason it was possible to choose SICP was the license (Creative Commons), which I think is pretty rare for a text of this quality. If I could I'd do the same for K&R. ------ dschiptsov SICP is an advanced text, and using it to teach amateurs how to program is, probably, a mistake. Brian Harvey have done a great job to simplify and make it more freshman- friendly. I think his CS61A is the best intro course available (but I don't think that the sentence ADT is a such great idea, and it make things little messier, not more clear). The HtDP2 approach is also remarkable, but problem is it is part of Racket promotion (word dr.racket is used hundred times in the first chapter). The idea to make changes in a program visible, via using graphical primitive functions is brilliant, but controversial one - it is too soon (but it kicks and makes a progress visible) I think that _functions with multiple arguments, first-class "citizens" (values has a type, everything is a pointer), pairs, lists, then generic functions and environments_ must be taught first, and visualized interactively, similar to that python tool. Then, after, you can teach parts from HtDP and then SICP. People who really enjoyed this initiation will go through whole books themselves.) ~~~ dmazin I'm currently doing SICP with Harvey and to be honest after list and cons in general are introduced I wish the course would abandon sentences altogether. ~~~ samrat I agree. I'm doing the same course and because I couldn't get their implementation of Scheme(ucb-scheme) to work, I'm really out-of-sync with the course. I'm doing the examples and exercises in Racket. ~~~ tikhonj Are you taking 61as, the self-paced version? I was under the impression they were either already using, or planning to switch to, a JavaScript Scheme implementation to ease just this sort of problem. I know one of he people who is running 61as, and I believe he wants to move as much as possible into the browser. In fact, they might even use a JavaScript- based Emacs clone instead of Emacs proper next time. I think using the browser should make setting up the environment much easier than using some old, unsupported Scheme implementation! ~~~ dmazin I'm in AS. We aren't using a js interpreter and actually I haven't seen them mention such a switch much. That's news to me. ~~~ tikhonj In that case, I think that's what they're going to be working on over winter break for the next iteration of the class. At the very least, I'm sure it's a possiblity; there's obviously no guarantee that it is practical or will get done. I think it's a good idea, personally. It could also make many of the assignments more interactive. ------ sudhirj The site doesn't seem to need a server to function - so it would be awesome if you could add a cache manifest to make it available offline: <http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/> ------ firesofmay Good initiative. I wish it was done in clojure/clojurescript, would have been great. But still its a nice way to learn. One suggestion. Add paredit mode to balance the parens. Without paredit mode one has to worry about balancing the parens and its a painful experience. It's like coding in notepad. Looks great! Looking forward to more chapters :) ~~~ dizzystar I can't imagine a Clojure SICP really working. The whole idea of SICP is to take a super-simple language and learn to build your own data-structure, psuedo-languages, and clarify _how_ expressions, structures, etc. we use everyday are used, created, and implemented. I really wish people wouldn't look at Clojure and think that it is the same as Scheme, especially the flavor presented in SICP, because it isn't. They're two entirely different languages and conflating the two as the same because OMG Parenthesis is like saying Python and Ruby are the same because they are categorized as scripting languages. Clojure and Scheme attempt to solve very different issues. Scheme does a wonderful job in the sphere allocated in SICP. SICP could theoretically be taught with Clojure, but one must wonder why it hasn't been fully attempted yet. I think that once you try out Clojure, you would see the glove doesn't fit very well, so to speak. The main issue is that SICP is extremely fast and ideally, you'd want a language that takes a day to sort of learn and understand. Clojure certainly does not have this advantage. Clojure has many built-in structures. If you did do SICP in Clojure, you'd effectively be using a Scheme without cons, car, and cdr and using a Clojure without map, filter, etc etc etc. What's the point of that? ~~~ firesofmay I was actually thinking of the whole web app being written in clojure/clojurescript actually. And not teaching SICP via clojure. ~~~ zodiac Oh. Well both biwascheme and codemirror use javascript, and the amount of glue code I have to write isn't that much, so I'm not sure the benefits of clojurescript would outweigh that of being able to talk to these libraries directly. ------ zodiac Sorry for repeating myself, but I really need contributors for this - I can't finish it just working on my own on weekends. ~~~ franciscoap Hey, I thought about doing this 3 or 4 days ago (eerily similar -- I had even decided on Biwa Scheme as well). To avoid duplication of effort, I would rather contribute to your iSICP than start my own. Drop me a line at me@f.rancis.co ------ ghubbard SICP - Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs Is an MIT computer science textbook. [http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and- interpretation-c...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and- interpretation-computer-programs) ------ BlackJack Looks awesome. I think exercise 1.2 is broken. I enter in: (/ (+ 5 (+ 4 (- 2 (- 3 (+ 6 (/ 4 5)))))) (* 3 (* (- 6 2) (- 2 7)))) and it tells me the result is wrong, but wolfram and my own REPL confirms the result. ~~~ zodiac The autograder checks for (+ 5 4 (- 2 ...)), instead of nesting the additions. You can view the source to see the grader. I'm not sure how to make it accomodate all the ways it could be nested though. ~~~ BlackJack Why not check the result and also check for the presence of parentheses? That way you can verify the result and make sure nobody's just copying and pasting in an answer. One could easily do something like (-2.466..) as the answer, but given that you just need a simple way to verify answers, I think my strategy works well. ~~~ FuzzyDunlop I think you could get away with not even checking for parens, if you go with the idea that people doing it properly won't try to cheat it (because they'll learn nothing). For people who do want to 'cheat', the grade is meaningless anyway. ~~~ BlackJack I thought about that, but my reasoning for checking parens is that there's a decent subset of people who might get stuck and just google an answer, but if it gets rejected, then they'll put more time into figuring out the correct answer. I guess I'm trying to view it from the POV of a beginner, as most CS people/programmers can work through this without needing the website. ------ Surio "Green Bar" on the right: It is the navigation menu that comes into focus once you click on it. You can focus on the content w/o getting distracted by the ToC. :) To OP. Don't worry. It is intuitive enough (for me at least (-; ) ------ jyf1987 ok, here is my suggestions: 1, add a on page chat for people, so they could help each other 2, add comment extension for the page, so people could add extra notes or corrects for your error :] , i saw those style here `[http://hgbook.red- bean.com/read/a-tour-of-mercurial-the-basi...](http://hgbook.red- bean.com/read/a-tour-of-mercurial-the-basics.html`) 3, if possible, DO develop an app for mobile device, so you could get income or reputation which could driven you to continue this greate initial and finally done the job ------ Tyr42 uhh, It's got some sort of green bar, but it's stuck waaay over to my right and I can't read it. Chrome OSX ~~~ zodiac try clicking on the left edge of the green bar sorry if it's not intuitive - I wanted the content to not be too wide (for reading) and had an idea to place some non-critical things on the remaining space, but then I decided it shouldn't always be visible edit: I've fixed the page to make the green tab visible by default ~~~ ezyang The best way to cue that it is clickable is to have it "bounce" when you mouse over it, indicating that it is hidden on purpose and can be expanded. ~~~ zodiac Thanks, I've seen those bounces before but it never occurred to me to use it. btw, I love your blog ------ arikrak If I ever get up to Scheme, I'm adding this to my chart of interactive resources for learning programming. ------ zodiac Anyone have ideas for how best to show footnotes? The current version doesn't have them. ------ jyf1987 well, i just planing to post a blog about interactive books, hmm , seems late	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Upgrade Your Office Using Science - floown http://www.slideshare.net/floown/5-ways-to-upgrade-your-office-using-science ====== Finnucane I would expect my upgraded-with-science office to not need PowerPoint slides. Srlsy, should I take advice from someone who thinks PP on the web is a good idea? ~~~ floown Never underestimate the power of good Powerpoint. Or in this case a Keynote...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Triclosan Promotes Staphylococcus aureus Nasal Colonization - greenyoda http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e01015-13 ====== jstalin I now make it a point to look and make sure products I'm buying do not include triclosan. Such a proliferation of antibiotics in everything can't be good. ------ crb002 So toothpaste with triclosan can promote sinus infections? ~~~ rpedroso To clarify, nasal colonization by Staph. Aureus is not equivalent to a "sinus infection". In college I took a class on plagues -- as an experiment, everyone in the class tested themselves for nasal colonization of S. Aureus. Over 60% of the class was found to be colonized by Methicillin-Susceptible S. Aureus (MSSA). However, nobody tested had an active infection. The risks of nasal colonization are somewhat unclear. Some papers have found positive correlations between colonization and subsequent infection. Other papers have found a negative correlation between nasal colonization and mortality rates for subsequent infections. Here are a handful of papers on the topic: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18374690](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18374690) [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15325812](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15325812) [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24996783](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24996783) ------ th3iedkid can it have a different title?Not that its against any guidelines of sorts, but just that a different title might help newbies understand the topic better from its title. ~~~ api_or_ipa I think by saying anything more reductionist will lead to inappropriate conclusions without reading the abstract. It's an interesting article although perhaps a little early to conclude that Triclosan is bad. ~~~ greenyoda There are already a number of other concerns about the negative effects of triclosan. See, for example, sections 5, 6 and 7 of the Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclosan) To address the original question: HN guidelines specifically ask us not to change the original title of the article: "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." [1] [1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Open-sourcing Facebook Infer: Identify bugs before you ship - cristianoc http://code.facebook.com/posts/1648953042007882 ====== guepe The types of issues discovered (they mention null pointer access and resource and memory leaks) is much smaller than what a tool like Coverity will find (I use it). And they analyze C and Java, two languages supported by Coverity, a very mature tool... I am not certain of the proposed value, except it's free to other than Facebook - but not to Facebook, who pays engineers to develop this... Is this some kind of NIH syndrom by Facebook, or is there something I missed ? ~~~ Rezo Coverity is great, but for example on the mid-size service (10s but not 100s of kloc) that my team works on the analysis still takes hours. Therefore we only do it for prod releases, not on every commit or CI deployment. If you want to make static analysis part of the everyday development process, it has to be 1) very quick, ideally seconds; minutes at most 2) preferably something the developer can just run locally before pushing a change. If it's fast and easy enough, it simply becomes another code hygiene tool like a code formatter that you'll run continuously, perhaps even directly integrated into something like IntelliJ. To me Infer sounds like a nice complement to Coverity to catch issues as close to where they are introduced as possible. It might even be Good Enough for many projects to be the only tool, since Coverity is pretty expensive. ~~~ cactusface > If you want to make static analysis part of the everyday development process > [...] Just to nitpick, I think your use of the term "static analysis" is a bit too broad. Every (or almost every) production compiler or JIT does static analysis intraprocedurally, that is, confined within a function / method / procedure. On the other hand, whole program / interprocedural static analysis quickly gets very expensive, usually because an alias / pointer analysis is involved, and that's what you need for null pointer checks and stuff. So I guess my point is, there is plenty of static analysis going on all the time, just not expensive whole program bug-finding analysis. Cheap bug-finding static analysis stuff is common, for example in GCC all those warning options to catch undefined behavior. ~~~ theblatte (Infer dev here) One strength of Infer is that it is inter-procedural, yet not whole-program: each procedure gets analyzed independently. So it's cheap enough to run on large codebases while still able to find deep inter- procedural bugs. ~~~ cactusface If you're analyzing procedures independently, why is it interprocedural? Interprocedural just means that you use some information about another procedure. This is expensive because if the information about one procedure changes during the analysis, you have to go and reanalyze all the dependent procedures. There are cheap but less accurate pointer analyses, is that why it's fast? ~~~ _shb Infer does bottom-up analysis: it starts at the bottom of the call graph and analyzes each procedure once independently of its callers. Analyzing the procedure produces a concise summary of its behavior that can be used in each calling procedure. This means that the cost of the analysis is roughly linear in the number of nodes in the call graph, which is not true for a lot of other interprocedural analysis techniques. It's true that it a procedure changes that you may have to re-analyze all dependent procedures (and calling procedures!) in the worst case. However, in the bottom-up scheme you only need to re-analyze a procedure when the code change produces a change in the computed summary, and in practice summaries are frequently quite stable. ~~~ cactusface Cool, thanks for the details. So... what do you do about cycles? By "change" I didn't mean code change, I meant change in the information about the procedure collected during an iteration of the fixed point computation. But from the sounds of things you aren't computing a fixed point. For example: A calls B and B calls A. You have information A0 and B0 about A and B. Analyze B, you have information B1 about B. Then you go and analyze A using B1. This gives you A1. Now you have to redo B, and compute B2. Use this to compute A2. This carries on until the information is not changing, i.e. An = An + 1 and Bn = Bn + 1. ~~~ theblatte Infer computes fixpoints whenever there is a cycle in the call graph, until it reaches stable procedure summaries or timeouts. ~~~ cactusface Ok, thanks for indulging my curiosity guys! ------ amirmc More OCaml code coming out of FB. Can add this to the list, which includes, Hack, Flow and Pfff [1]. The kinds of bugs it finds are listed at: [http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug- types.html](http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html) It's interesting to see how building tools with languages like OCaml can reduce bugs for teams, _without_ them having to change the language itself. I do wonder what things would be like if such languages we're used directly more widely. [1] [http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html](http://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html) ~~~ aristus Legend has it there is a small room at FBHQ, containing a quorum of OCaml committers, all of them French for some reason, hacking away at level of abstraction beyond the ken of mortal man. ~~~ omouse That's not a legend, it's true since they're doing a partnership with INRIA where OCaml was born. Those French computer scientists know something that American companies don't and that's that theory is important as an underlying foundation for extraordinary results. ~~~ pnathan I'd actually expand that to European - in my grad studies, the European CS world had a much more mathematical bent. Notice the the _Glasgow_ Haskell Compiler, Coq, etc. You can always go from math -> pragmatism, but the reverse is nearly impossible. People get set in their ways, and it takes time to develop mathematical rigor, even if you want to. So when you need to get mathematical expertise, you wind up needing to hire it. ~~~ x5n1 room for all... zuck employs these guys and is anything but ------ ixtli This appears† to be the result of Facebook having purchased a UK company called Monoidics†† in 2013. It's nice to see these types of acquisitions resulting in code getting opensourced. † [https://github.com/facebook/infer/blob/2bce7c6c3dbb22646e2d6...](https://github.com/facebook/infer/blob/2bce7c6c3dbb22646e2d67a2c6ade77f060b4bca/infer/src/backend/CRC.ml#L2) †† [http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/facebook- monoidics/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/18/facebook-monoidics/) ~~~ rattray Companies often get a lot of hate for buying open-source and taking it closed. We should really celebrate Facebook for doing the opposite here! ------ tptacek Can someone explain-it-like-I'm-a-90s-programmer (ELi90s?) why so much symbolic evaluation stuff gets done in OCaml? What does OCaml do that makes it so well suited for this problem domain? (I know a very little bit about symbolic evaluation and have done a very very little bit of it). ~~~ pcwalton In addition to what the other commenter said, pattern matching is really nice for this kind of thing. Of all of the functional programming languages, OCaml has probably the most sophisticated pattern matching engine around (and we basically copied it into Rust, incidentally), supporting or-patterns, multiple bindings, guards, and so forth. Pattern matching lets you essentially match on the shape of subtrees of arbitrary data structures with complex predicates. If you're familiar with old-school compiler construction, this is like having a souped-up BURG built into the language. For example, pattern matching lets you say things like "if I have Load(Var, Add(Var, Constant)) where constant is a small power of two, fold it into the x86 indexed addressing mode" in one line. Unsurprisingly this is useful not only for compiler construction but for any kind of term rewriting/symbolic manipulation. ~~~ tptacek Ok, tangent question: if I wanted an interesting project to learn Rust with, would a symbolic evaluation checker for (say) C code be a really good fit? In the same sense as emulators turned out to be a fantastic fit for Golang? If that's true, what are the features of Rust that make this so, and roughly how would they apply to that problem domain? (I could answer that question for Golang and emulators pretty quickly). ( _Hopefully this question comes across the way I intend it to, which is: I have no plans on using OCaml any time soon, believe the comments that say you want a language with pattern matching to do this in, and would love to tinker more with both Rust and symbolic evaluation._ ) ~~~ pcwalton Sure, I think it'd be a fun project to try! We use Rust for compiler construction, obviously, and it works great for us. Bear in mind, though, that Rust is manually memory managed, and there is significant cognitive overhead of having a compiler that checks that you're doing the manual memory management properly as opposed to just using a GC. I think if you want a really fast symbolic evaluation checker—say, the kind that you're going to run on $BIG_COMPANY's codebase on every checkin—Rust would be a really good fit, because you get pattern matching and excellent performance. Other than OCaml and (maybe?) F#, I don't know of a language that has as sophisticated a pattern matcher as Rust does, which helps a lot with this stuff. But, if you're building a one-off tool, a more dynamic language with a GC might be more convenient. ~~~ tptacek Would it be likely that I could get around that problem just by using arena allocation? Do you think the allocation patterns of a symbolic checker fit that sort of "just allocate everything and forget about it, then free it all at once" pattern? Does Rust make it easy to punt that way? ~~~ pcwalton Yup, you can use arenas for that, and in fact that is likely what I'd do. There's an arena crate on crates.io. [https://crates.io/crates/typed- arena/1.0.1](https://crates.io/crates/typed-arena/1.0.1) ------ sadert What's the difference between this and the Clang analyzer, which comes with Xcode already? I expected that comparison to be on the front page... [http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/](http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/) (obviously it supports Java as well, but I assume Android Studio comes with some sort of static analyzer as well, so same question?) It specifically calls out null pointer exceptions but those... aren't a thing... in Objective-C, messages passed to nil return all 0 bits, and that's _okay_ (unless they mean null dereferences...). ~~~ dulma On iOS there is the Clang Static analyzer. Infer does some things different, in particular reasoning that spans across multiple files. But CSA checks for more kinds of issues and is also more mature than Infer when it comes to iOS: we send big respect to CSA! Infer has only got started there recently. Really, these tools complement one another and it would even make sense to use both. Indeed, that's what we do inside FB! About null dereferences, they are still a problem in ObjC: if you dereference a nil block it will crash, if you access an instance variable directly or try to pass nil to arrays or dictionaries it will crash. We try to find that kind of bugs. ~~~ OxO4 Sorry to hijack your comment but it sounds like you are one of the devs of Infer. I am working on static analysis as part of my PhD and I am going to be an intern at Facebook MPK this summer. Are you located at MPK as well? Any chance we could meet up for some coffee at some point? ~~~ jrmd Part of the team is in MPK. We will happy to have a chat about static analysis once you join us this summer ~~~ OxO4 Cool! Looking forward to it. ------ timtadh I am always interested in what powers these tools under the hood. I had to learn the hard way, you do not write a program analysis tool from scratch, if you can help it. I know I have tried. It is too much for one person to do. So what is powering this thing? 1\. [http://sawja.inria.fr/](http://sawja.inria.fr/) This is a OCaml library for parsing .class files into OCaml datastructures. There is some built-in analysis it uses 2\. Clang and LLVM which is the popular thing to build you C family analysis framework on. I use [https://github.com/Sable/soot](https://github.com/Sable/soot) for Java analysis myself. It is extremely powerful out of the box and can analyze: java source code, jvm bytecode and dalvik bytecode. I recommend taking a look at that if you are interested in that sort of thing. The innovation in the released tool seems to be the incremental checking. Haven't had a lot of time to dig into that but that seems to be the important part. In general it is great that they created something useful and practical, that is always a challenge. ~~~ guipsp >I use [https://github.com/Sable/soot](https://github.com/Sable/soot) for Java analysis myself. It is extremely powerful out of the box and can analyze: java source code, jvm bytecode and dalvik bytecode. I recommend taking a look at that if you are interested in that sort of thing. Soot is also really slow if you're using SSA on large codebases, and the code is a mess. ------ amccloud Looks like facebook acquired this code [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/18/facebook-b...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/18/facebook- buys-monoidics) [https://github.com/facebook/infer/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mo...](https://github.com/facebook/infer/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=monoidics) ------ istvan__ I am extremely happy to see Facebook using OCaml, it is good the get some more traction in that community. I hope it gains velocity over time and becomes a viable option especially for startups where there is no technical debt. It has amazing features and as you can see even very complex problems can be solved in a concise, terse way. Kudos to Facebook on this one. ~~~ aaggarwal As it is pointed out, OCaml has support for algebraic data types and symbolic evaluation, doesn't this make it an excellent language for natural language processing? Are there any more examples anyone is aware of? ~~~ istvan__ I guess so. I am only familiar with the following in this category: [https://code.google.com/p/hunpos/](https://code.google.com/p/hunpos/) ------ amenghra This is what it can find in openssl: [http://marc.info/?l=openssl- dev&m=143406271519649&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openssl- dev&m=143406271519649&w=2) ------ GreaterFool I'm going to completely ignore the tool itself and focus on the fact that it is written in OCaml. IMHO it's a great language that's much underused and as such there's a need for greater library ecosystem (what's out there is generally very good, but there isn't much). Hopefully adoption of OCaml at Facebook will grow and we'll see some interesting general purpose open-source libraries! ------ adamnemecek Seems like mentioning the sorts of bugs this can detect should be the most important thing on the landing page. ~~~ jdp23 The list is at [http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug- types.html](http://fbinfer.com/docs/infer-bug-types.html) For Java, it's Resource leaks and Null dereferences For C and Objective C, the list is Resource leak Memory leak Null dereference Parameter not null checked Ivar not null checked Premature nil termination argument ~~~ Animats Unfortunately, it doesn't detect the big one in C - out of range subscripts/buffer overflows. That's hard, but other verifiers have done it. ------ mofle I made a quick installer for Infer as the default steps are a bit manual. $ npm i -g infer-bin && infer [https://github.com/sindresorhus/infer- bin](https://github.com/sindresorhus/infer-bin) ------ hannob In case anyone cares, this is what it'll find on openssl: [https://bpaste.net/show/4914ab7990c9](https://bpaste.net/show/4914ab7990c9) ------ Cthulhu_ Gave it a quick trial for iOS... doesn't seem great. It doesn't run at all when giving it a whole project (no response, no CPU usage, not even when you feed it BS arguments), it gives a "Starting Analysis" and nothing else for other (simple) files, it doesn't understand the newish 'nullable' keyword, and it will quit with a fatal error if it can't resolve an import (like UIKit), so pretty unusable on single files. I'm not convinced by the bug types it checks for either - doesn't xcode / the Clang analyser do those same checks itself and then some? Just opened the example in xcode, the analyzer itself already highglights a lot of issues, like the nil dereferencing: [http://i.imgur.com/CdiYRYX.png](http://i.imgur.com/CdiYRYX.png). If it's written in more modern objective-C and supports the nullable/nonnull type, the compiler will also warn / fail to build when trying to assign nil to a nonnull type. ~~~ jasonlotito Tried it on one of my iOS project for an app in the app store, and it worked, highlighting as expected. Possibly setting the wrong arguments? ------ hugovie Someone may want to see which Infer shows us, check [http://blog.hoangnm.com/2015/06/12/infer-facebook-demo- and-t...](http://blog.hoangnm.com/2015/06/12/infer-facebook-demo-and-test/) . I just did a test job for Infer and going to apply it into some of my iOS projects. ------ gschrader How does this compare to other static code analysis tools like Findbugs, PMD, Checkstyle, etc? ~~~ _shb To paint these tools with an overfly broad brush, they linter-like in that they perform shallow intra-procedural analysis to identify common bug patterns (e.g., if (x != null) { y = x.f } z = x.f // possible NPE; x was previously checked for null or foo(String s) { if ("x" == s) // oops, should use .equals() for Java String comparison. }). By contrast, Infer performs deeper inter-procedural reasoning that can track the flow of values across long chains of procedure calls to identify subtle bugs that are hard to see with the naked eye. Infer doesn't support as many bug patterns as these existing tools do yet, but it can find some deep bugs that these tools will miss. ------ hatred Layman Query : Can anyone kindly explain what are it's pros/cons when compared to already existing tools which have a quite a bit of features already compared to this ? ------ dcroley At least for Java, this does not look as powerful as FindBugs. ------ defen I clicked through to the description of separation logic - [http://fbinfer.com/docs/separation-logic-and-bi- abduction.ht...](http://fbinfer.com/docs/separation-logic-and-bi- abduction.html#biabduction) \- and I'm having a hell of a time understanding the first couple paragraphs. Is there a typo in there? How is z↦y∗y↦x "x points to y and separately y points to x" ~~~ _shb There was indeed a typo in the description; it has been fixed. Sorry for the confusion! ~~~ defen Thanks! Was worried I was losing it. ------ frik Source code: [https://github.com/facebook/infer](https://github.com/facebook/infer) 71.9% OCaml, 19% Java ------ toolslive What's the advantage for Facebook of doing this, compared to moving their developers to OCaml or Haskell? Or is that just too hard ? ------ seivadmas Sounds like Rubocop for Ruby: [https://github.com/bbatsov/rubocop](https://github.com/bbatsov/rubocop) Fast enough to integrate into a continuous integration build process and catches a lot of dumb mistakes/typos before deploying to production. ------ LukeHoersten It's interesting they're using OCaml for some of their open source projects when they have some of the top Haskell devs working there. I wonder if these OCaml projects they've recently open-sourced are all coming from the same team. ------ capnrefsmmat Are there examples of the types of bugs this finds? The embedded video has a single null dereferencing example, but I assume it does more sophisticated analysis than just that. ------ warmfuzzykitten Unfortunately, infer finds no issues in this simple variant of their Hello.java demo. class Hello { private String s; int test() { return s.length(); } } ~~~ theblatte In this case, Infer is correct: the method test() by itself is harmless, because it could be the case that "s" has been initialised before it is called. Infer does a bottom-up analysis (callees before callers), and will infer that test() expects "s" to be allocated to run correctly. To get an actual error, you need to call test() without initialising s, or with s being set to null by some other means prior to the call. Here is a modified version of your example that will get Infer to complain. class Hello { private String s; int test() { return s.length(); } int foo() { Hello a = new Hello(); return a.test(); } int bar() { Hello a = new Hello(); a.s = null; return a.test(); } } Running "infer -- javac Hello.java" will show an error in bar(). Infer also finds the error in foo() but doesn't report it as it considers it lower- probability. This is a trade-off made in Infer to try and report only high- probability bugs. In this case it could be improved. To see that Infer finds the error in foo(), run "infer --no-filtering -- javac Hello.java". ------ achanda358 It seems, the Rust compiler does a lot of these checks. ------ svraghavan I assume it can also be used for java server side code? ~~~ _shb Yes, it can be used with most Java code you can build on the command line. Just run "infer -- <your_build_command>". Currently, this works with javac, Ant, Maven, and Gradle. See [http://fbinfer.com/docs/hello-world.html#hello- world-android](http://fbinfer.com/docs/hello-world.html#hello-world-android) for a Gradle example. ~~~ warmfuzzykitten I thought I'd try it with a fairly large project (353K lines of Java) at [https://git.eclipse.org/c/hudson/org.eclipse.hudson.core.git...](https://git.eclipse.org/c/hudson/org.eclipse.hudson.core.git/) This is a multi-level project. At both the top level and the individual module level, the command below seems to do exactly nothing. Actual output: org.eclipse.hudson.core$ infer -- mvn build org.eclipse.hudson.core$ cd hudson-core/ hudson-core$ infer -- mvn build hudson-core$	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
People are being victimized by a terrifying new email scam - kenshinsoul https://www.businessinsider.com/new-email-scam-uses-old-password-fake-porn-threats-webcam-video-bitcoin-2018-7 ====== throw03172019 I received one of these without the password leaked a few weeks ago. I was surprised to see people were actually sending BTC to the wallet address. You should google the wallet address and see others are self reporting the wallet address and scam on a wallet review/scam sites. Very helpful. ------ kenshinsoul Can imagine vulnerable people and less tech-savvy people falling victim to this.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
TitanPad shutting down - georgecmu http://blog.titanpad.com/2016/11/shutting-down-titanpad_12.html ====== Pyxl101 > The underlying technologies of the Web are in constant evolution and we > cannot keep TitanPad up to Web standards. Is the web itself really changing in backwards-incompatible ways that would break a web application like TitanPad? That's disappointing if so. I wouldn't want the web to evolve in such a way as that documents need to be actively "maintained" or else risk becoming unintelligible or unusable. The value of having standards is diminished if they are continuously moving targets. In contrast, I understand exactly why server infrastructure faces a large challenge in this area. I'm sure they built their "legacy" service on version 1.0 of something, which ran on version "X" of something else, and now that platform's major releases focus on version "Y" and beyond (and by the way, version 1.0 of something no longer builds on version "Y" of the platform), and the platform team has recently announced "X" has reached end of life and will stop receiving security updates. And so on, and so forth. Bit rot. It happens with system software. Is it happening to the web too? I am distinguishing between the server software that renders the HTML/CSS/JS content, and the compatibility of that content to be displayed and interact correctly in browsers. ~~~ sb8244 Could this be referring to users expecting their tools to be up to snuff with giant tech corporation level? A website from the 90s will still work today but would be laughed at by a lot of tech savvy users. If that is their market, I could see the difficulty. ------ tjmehta If you're looking for an alternative checkout [https://codeshare.io](https://codeshare.io)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Who feels undervalued at work? - tech_crawl_ Feeling undervalued at work. Anyone else feel the same way? ====== J-dawg I'm a web developer in the consulting business of a big international IT company. I'd like to be paid more, but if I'm honest with myself, my salary probably isn't far from market rate. However in terms of recognition of my skills I feel massively undervalued. The management are business consultants rather than technical people, and there's a pervasive culture that technical work is something to be outsourced/offshored and generally done by the lowest bidder. I was hired as a "Technical Consultant" and yet I've repeatedly had to fight to do technical roles. I often think about leaving to get a pure web developer role, but I'm still at quite a junior level and junior dev salaries here in London are awful. ~~~ johnward I'm kind of in the same position. Consulting is pretty thankless. They just expect you to bill as much time as humanly possible (and sometimes more). You rarely get thanks but you are on the hook when things go wrong. I know my salary is below the average rate even within my own company. ~~~ J-dawg It's good to know I'm not the only one here! Yep, pretty thankless sums it up. Plus having to go through a long appraisal process at the end of every year which is essentially a test of how good you are at networking and self- promotion, rather than what you've actually acheived. I keep thinking I'd be happier in either a startup or a corporate dev team, but I guess the grass is always greener on the other side ------ insoluble Would you rather feel undervalued, or would you rather be underpaid? Sometimes you can't have both vocal appreciation and good pay at the same time. Being paid without hassle can at times be the only show of appreciation, at least in contract work. Afterward, instead of trying to buy happiness, it would be more advisable to appreciate yourself. If you don't appreciate yourself, then you may want to find something that gives you a purpose in life, even if outside of work. There are many worthwhile causes in this world -- many things in need of care. If you can find something where (a) you care personally and (b) you can make a difference, then (c) you may have found purpose. ------ andymurd Everybody. Turn your question on its head - who here feels overvalued at work? ~~~ hacknat I actually do right now, and it is part of the reason I'm looking to leave. I got promoted into management too fast, IMO, and I've been told by my CTO I'm being groomed for leadership. I'm not interested. How did I get here? I built new products that were my own ideas, and they generate revenue for the company now. I know our entire stack so I'm able to pretty much build whatever I want. If you do the same for any company you'll start to look valuable in a hurry. Learn your business, apply some insight and make something new. FYI, I didn't work my ass off for this, I was able to do this 9-to-5. ~~~ askafriend What caliber of company is this? How many people are there? Just curious. ~~~ hacknat About 500 people right now. ------ Ishtar A downside of a lack of micromanagement (which I think is a positive thing) is that sometimes I wonder if anyone knows how much work or insight goes into what I have accomplished... Perhaps this is a reverse Dunning–Kruger effect? When each team member has a unique set of skills, how can you evaluate competence in each other, if you are not even able to properly evaluate your own skills until you become an expert? ~~~ Isammoc "how can you evaluate competence" => Do you really want to evaluate competence at this time? Or evaluate evolution of this competence? First is a comparison with others but you are unique in your team; second is a comparison with your past self, and this is easily achievable.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Germany Moves Away from U.S.-Dominated IoT Standards Groups - yahliwharton http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/03/18/germany-moves-away-from-us-dominated-iot-standards-groups/?mod=ST1 ====== legulere It probably will be a failure just like DeMail. I have a pretty bad outlook for the future of our country. ~~~ macco Why? ~~~ DasIch Large infrastructure projects in Germany usually fail, projects involving the internet or technology especially so. If there is such a thing as a most wrong stereotype, german efficiency is it. ~~~ makeitsuckless Which is why Germany has one of the best infrastructures, both physical and electronic, in the Western world? If there is such a thing as a most right stereotype, it's how the Silicon Valley worshiping non-Americans on HN deny the successes and strengths of their own country. Germany is a, if not _the_ leading country in industrial standardization, and especially in the current climate most of the world will prefer to follow Germany's lead over the politically and ideologically compromised American industry. ~~~ npalli Large public works projects are a problem in Germany. [http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/disastrous- publ...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/disastrous-public-works- projects-in-germany-a-876856.html) ------ xnull6guest Surprised not to see comments in here about the use of international standards to fix markets in the favor of one country's exports (versus another's) and for the associated backdooring of technology and standards. "The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet". Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards..." \- [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq- encryp...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption- codes-security) "Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method." \- [http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret- campaign-t...](http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to- crack-undermine-internet-encryption) The Snowden leaks themselves have the GCHQ congratulating the NSA in frank terms for controlling and exporting international standards, noting how it has driven great gains for the US. Given that Germany was one of the victims (including the companies mentioned in the article) of standards-based cryptographic subvertion - the only suprise in this article was that it took Germany this long to announce their own initiative. One can also surmise this as an indicator that the NSA is back to the usual and that IoT standards are being actively influenced for sabotage. ------ jpfr > For machines to communicate over the web–essentially sending data from > sensors back and forth from cloud-based servers—there needs to be a standard > software protocol. For IoT in general, there will be very fragmented protocols. For _industrial_ use cases, the clear winner is IEC62541, aka OPC Unified Automation [1]. There is no real alternative, so that issue is basically already settled. And from a technical point of view, its actually quite good. [1] [https://opcfoundation.org/about/opc-technologies/opc- ua/](https://opcfoundation.org/about/opc-technologies/opc-ua/) ------ pokoleo "You knew what I was when you picked me up," said the snake as it slithered away. ------ alricb FWIW, they call it "Industrie 4.0": www.plattform-i40.de/ ------ niche W3C Multimodal Interaction standards ~~~ Sanddancer Not everything that needs interoperability can, nor should, use HTTP/HTML. For me, IoT includes very small devices still with only a few K of RAM, and requiring an HTTP/HTML stack in amongst everything else will just serve to push up prices and add needless complexity.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Rockstar Jacks Up GTA Price for Steam Summer Sale - giancarlostoro http://armedgamer.com/2015/06/steam-summer-sale/ ====== jeeva It amuses me that the article states that it's only available in bundles, not on-own - then has a screenshot showing it being available.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Linux kernel root-level exploit leveraging three previous vulnerabilities - there http://marc.info/?l=full-disclosure&m=129175358621826&w=2 ====== martinp Did not work on a server running Debian Lenny with 2.6.26-2-amd64. Worked fine on Ubuntu Server 10.10 with 2.6.35-22-generic-pae though (got root shell). The comments mention that the exploit for CVE-2010-3850 is limited in regard to Slackware, Debian and Red Hat "in the interest of public safety". Interesting. ------ JoachimSchipper Note to everyone here: the interesting issue is CVE-2010-4258 (write a NULL to arbitrary memory on OOPS). The other two issues have been deliberately chosen to be exotic and hard to exploit, but * However, the important issue, CVE-2010-4258, affects everyone, and it would * be trivial to find an unpatched DoS under KERNEL_DS and write a slightly * more sophisticated version of this that doesn't have the roadblocks I put in * to prevent abuse by script kiddies. So no, if this happened not to work on your box, you'll still want to upgrade. [EDIT: this was also pointed out by bdonlan, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981738>] ------ ximeng Information on kernel OOPS for others who were not familiar with the term. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_oops> Exploit didn't work on my Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. It does say the exploits are fixed on Ubuntu, but the socket(PF_ECONET,...) call not working stopped it on my box. ------ bediger This didn't work on an Arch linux (x86) box. I think I did pacman -Syu last weekend, so it's reasonably up to date. It also doesn't work on my Slackware server, which has a pretty heavily modified 2.6.23.14 kernel. In the context of the other comments, does this mean that a lack of a software monoculture keeps these sorts of exploits from damaging the entire population of linux machines? ~~~ bdonlan The exploit is specifically designed to only work on a small subset of kernel builds, as indicated in the header: * In the interest of public safety, this exploit was specifically designed to * be limited: * * * The particular symbols I resolve are not exported on Slackware or Debian * * Red Hat does not support Econet by default * * CVE-2010-3849 and CVE-2010-3850 have both been patched by Ubuntu and * Debian * * However, the important issue, CVE-2010-4258, affects everyone, and it would * be trivial to find an unpatched DoS under KERNEL_DS and write a slightly * more sophisticated version of this that doesn't have the roadblocks I put in * to prevent abuse by script kiddies. ~~~ jacquesm What a very responsible way of releasing this. Not that it would take a competent hacker more than a few minutes to figure out how to disable the blocks but at least this rules out a chunk of the 'l33t' crowd from having their way, which just might buy someone enough time to get it patched. ------ bigfoot Any countermeasures, besides not using a kernel supporting the Econet protocol? I.e., does there exist a fix for the first CVE addressed in the exploit's comment? ------ burningion Worked on Ubuntu 10.10 Meerkat. Gotta love it. Instant root. ------ tzury Failed on mine tzury@precision:/tmp$ uname -a Linux precision 2.6.32-26-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 24 10:14:11 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux tzury@precision:/tmp$ gcc nelson.c tzury@precision:/tmp$ ./a.out [] Resolving kernel addresses... [+] Resolved econet_ioctl to 0xffffffffa00705d0 [+] Resolved econet_ops to 0xffffffffa00706c0 [+] Resolved commit_creds to 0xffffffff8108aed0 [+] Resolved prepare_kernel_cred to 0xffffffff8108b2b0 [] Calculating target... [] Triggering payload... [] Exploit failed to get root. ~~~ sgt Read the header of the C program. ~~~ tzury Perhaps that is because I am well patched. Anyway, 2.6.32 <= 2.6.37 (my kernel). Beside, people are here have reported about their Ubuntu boxes which this exploit showed some success at there tzury@precision:/tmp$ uname -a Linux precision 2.6.32-26-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 24 10:14:11 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux tzury@precision:/tmp$ cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS" tzury@precision:/tmp$ gcc full-nelson.c -o full-nelson tzury@precision:/tmp$ ./full-nelson [] Resolving kernel addresses... [+] Resolved econet_ioctl to 0xffffffffa01815d0 [+] Resolved econet_ops to 0xffffffffa01816c0 [+] Resolved commit_creds to 0xffffffff8108aed0 [+] Resolved prepare_kernel_cred to 0xffffffff8108b2b0 [] Calculating target... [] Triggering payload... [] Exploit failed to get root. ~~~ dredge The point was that the comment in the header of the program clearly says: * In the interest of public safety, this exploit was specifically designed to * be limited: * * * The particular symbols I resolve are not exported on Slackware or Debian * * Red Hat does not support Econet by default * * CVE-2010-3849 and CVE-2010-3850 have both been patched by Ubuntu and * Debian	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - tokenadult http://qz.com/559579/the-worlds-favorite-fruit-is-slowly-but-surely-being-driven-to-extinction/ ====== jacobolus This article by the same author from March of last year (2014) is longer, and does a more thorough job explaining the context and the threat: [http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana- industry-...](http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is- killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/) (and HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326)) I’d recommend just reading that one and skipping the current article, which consists of a tiny bit of background wrapped around a link to the recent study [http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...](http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005197) ~~~ pyre > This article by the same article The singularity has arrived! The articles are writing themselves! ;) ------ mcv Not all is bad, though. The Cavendish is not exactly the most tasty banana, and all the replacements that people are looking at (Goldfinger, which is shorter, thicker and straighter, Sedas, which is apparently a resistant Gros Michel) are all tastier than the Cavendish. ~~~ cageface Here in Vietnam I see at least half a dozen different kinds of bananas of all shapes and sizes every time I go to the market. Most taste better than American supermarket bananas too. ~~~ mcv It was the same when I was on vacation in Indonesia. There's clearly a wealth of bananas in south-east Asia. Most of them were really tiny though, and probably hard to sell in the west. ------ tzs Bananas are astonishing. Compare them to apples, from the viewpoint of a North American consumer. 1\. Bananas are grown thousands of miles away. Apples are typically grown within a few hundred. 2\. Bananas have to be transported in refrigerated ships, trucks, and trains, and even then only keep for a couple weeks after harvest. Apples are easy to transport and keep for months. Yet bananas are cheaper than apples! How that came to be is covered in this interesting article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref=opinion&_r=0) ~~~ yrro > Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease > has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not > immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, > maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find > either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough > been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving > little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia. It astounds me that Big Banana has been "slow" to react, given that "By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt"! ------ blisterpeanuts This is horrible news. I love bananas and eat at least 365/year. I recently got a blender so that I could make smoothies -- to fool my kid into eating both a banana and a glass of milk in the morning :) The article didn't make it clear, though, whether every variety of banana is affected, or just the big yellow ones called "Cavendish". When I lived in Taiwan (early 80s), there were all sorts of bananas -- Cavendish, little yellow ones, little red ones. In fact these little reddish-skinned ones with a tart yellow fruit grew in my back yard at the time. Really tasty. Maybe it's time to install a small tropical greenhouse in the back yard and grow one's own bananas. If mainstream bananas become scarce and expensive, this could be like tomatoes -- everyone will want to grow them. A business opportunity for someone, possibly. ~~~ apendleton The particular problem strain of the Panama disease affects the Cavendish specifically. This has happened before; the Cavendish, itself, only became the dominant cultivar after other strains of the same disease killed the previous dominant cultivar, the Gros Michel. All members of a given cultivar are clones, so they're genetically identical and thus very susceptible to being wiped out by disease as they have no mechanism to evolve resistance. We'll probably just have to switch again. ------ im2w1l Between seedbanks and genome sequencing, there is really no excuse for us letting major (sub-)species go extinct anymore. ~~~ BrainInAJar Cavendish are seedless, they only grow vegetatively. They are genetically identical. That's the problem. Panama disease is a fungus. Fungi are nearly impossible to eliminate. ------ 1_player If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend this article: [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life- of-t...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the- banana/) In fact, I recommend any of their articles. ------ NN88 Didn't we have the gros michel? ~~~ msellout Thus the song, "Yes, we have no bananas".	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dr. Hoover wrote 335,000 opioid prescriptions in 7 years, says she did no wrong - jonwachob91 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dr-katherine-hoover-accused-fueling-west-virginia-s-opioid-crisis-n909366 ====== boobsbr Assuming 1 year has 52 weeks, and 1 week has 5 working days, and 1 working day has 8 hours, that's 23 prescriptions/hour, or 2:36 minutes per prescription. ~~~ londons_explore Assuming many of those are "doc, my symptoms are the same as before, can you renew my prescription"? Those renewals probably take 10 seconds. ~~~ jonwachob91 From the article >First-timers paid $450 in cash to see a doctor and get a prescription, undercover investigators discovered. Returning customers paid $150 to a receptionist, who would hand out new prescriptions after asking a cursory question or two about their health, investigators found. So the renewals didn't even come from Dr. Hoover, but from her receptionist using her prescription pad. That's crazy! ~~~ rasz 335K prescriptions x $150 = 50mil / 7years = 7 milion a year :o ~~~ boobsbr Damn, that's a lot. ------ klondike_ I think that the US has been taking a completely wrong approach to the opioid crisis. Trying to limit opioid prescriptions will just inevitably lead to users turning to the black market to get their fix. It's much safer to get opioids from a doctor, even if under questionable circumstances, than to gamble on fentanyl-spiked street heroin.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Islands in lakes in islands in lakes ... - RiderOfGiraffes http://www.elbruz.org/islands/Islands%20and%20Lakes.htm ====== pchristensen Don't forget Isle Royale: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_Royale#Interior_lakes> "Siskiwit Lake, largest lake on the island; cold, deep, clear, and relatively low in nutrients. Siskiwit Lake contains several islands, including Ryan Island, the largest therein, which itself contains Moose Flats, a seasonal pond, which contains Moose Boulder. When Moose Flats is a pond, Moose Boulder becomes the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the world." ~~~ btilly I know this is straight from Wikipedia, but it is incorrect because the Caspian Sea is the largest lake. If you measure by volume, lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake. If you measure by area, lakes Michigan and Huron are technically one lake, and that lake is larger than Superior. So there are a lot of reasons to dispute that Superior is the largest lake in the world. All the rest is true though. :-) ~~~ pchristensen I know, but it's so much fun to say :) ------ vibragiel Somebody should go to Vulcan point in Crater Lake and pee so we could have the largest lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island :-) ~~~ Groxx And then throw a pebble in the puddle for N+1 goodness. ~~~ mahmud Yo dog, I put a drop on your pebble. ~~~ Groxx Oh no you di'n't! (lots of apostrophes for that) I put a piece of _dust_ on yo _drop_. ------ vmind Just lakes and islands, all the way down. ------ jiganti Classic example of where records are set down to the point where the definitions get hazy. ------ niels_bom Funny, the Elbruz site is made by my employer ([http://www.mijnlieff.nl/index.php?c=wie&p=arie&pc=&#...</a>) ------ andrewingram I like this, its awesomeness increase proportionally to its silliness. It's also interesting that even on a planet as big (or objectively as small) as ours, you can only go a few levels deep with this kind of research. ------ asmosoinio The Volcano Lake at Taal is a pretty interesting place -- it is a volcano, with the smallish crater lake, all inside the crater of a bigger volcano. Went there last year, a beautiful place. ------ AlexMuir How would you even go about finding this data out? ------ mattcole How is Australia not an island? It's way bigger than Greenland. ~~~ RiderOfGiraffes For those who are interested in size comparisons, here's an interesting projection of the globe: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_map_unfolded.png> ~~~ senki An interactive version: <http://teczno.com/faumaxion-II/> ------ paulitex Finally - indisputable proof that lisp was, in fact, the language from which the Gods wrought the universe. <http://xkcd.com/224/> ------ bosch I kept thinking of those Russian dolls... ------ roqetman Sounds like someone channeling Dr. Seuss ------ Daniel_Newby Google Maps. [http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=14.0090...](http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=14.009076,120.996069&spn=0.003498,0.006866&t=k&z=18) ------ pilif how is this relevant content for Hacker News? ~~~ pclark over 40 people think its relevant ~~~ paulgb True, but I bet over 40 people think it's irrelevant, too. Without downvoting, the number of votes does not imply relevance. ~~~ shrikant Not really - if over 40 people thought it was truly irrelevant, it would be flagged to death. ~~~ paulgb Not all users can flag, and flagging is more to deal with spam and trolling. (The guidelines mention offtopic posts as well, but community consensus is that flagging is not downvoting.) ~~~ chc Flagging is not downvoting, but it is the sanctioned way to register your opinion that some content does not belong on the site. If your efforts to combat off-topic posts are limited to ranting in the comments after they're posted, it's too late. ------ vladev Pure lake and island oriented. ------ timinman What if I had a dream of a larger island in a lake on an island in a lake? What if I dreamt I had a dream... ------ CountHackulus I can't believe that no one's tried to make an Xzibit joke yet. This either shows that HNers are 2 years behind in internet memes, or have the common sense to not use them everywhere. ~~~ dimarco yo dawg \--- Ugh, look what you've made me do.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: The future of Remote Worker (WFH) technologies - eternalban Back in early 90s I had a software consulting gig with a telecomm company down in Austin, TX. I have completely forgotten the software project itself. What made a lasting impression was the attached small call-center (of the same company), and the fact that the operators were monitored down to strictly scheduled "toilet break".<p>In my opinion, it is inevitable that one day WFH software will be required to be always on, and "remote workers" subject to the same regime essentially as those of the above call-center workers. And that "surveillance free" jobs will replace "corner office" jobs as the new status symbol of wage earners.<p>https://activecollab.com/blog/guest-post/make-sure-you-workers-are-working-full-time<p>What is your opinion of the evolution of WFH technologies? For example, how far away is the "feature" that allows managers to randomly check a video feed of a remote worker? ====== codingdave Many corporate systems already allow them to check your screen. But I absolutely disagree that we are headed in that direction. Leadership that succeeds with remote work does so by trusting their employees to do their jobs well without micro-management. If anything, the tech we have is fine, but we're heading towards a management culture shift that learns how to work well remotely.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tahoe-LAFS encrypted cloud filestorage - pelle http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe-lafs ====== secorp If you want to know anything more about this system, we are having a get together at PyCon tonight at 10pm in Room F (thanks warner!) and then presenting at the RSA Conference at the beginning of March (search the agenda for "tahoe").	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tim Berners-Lee: Spies' cracking of encryption undermines the web - Libertatea http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/03/tim-berners-lee-spies-cracking-encryption-web-snowden ====== binarymax While I agree that its horrible for agencies to be doing this, I must also say - if it is breakable, then it is not good enough. We shouldn't have to worry about whether someone can break encryption or not. We shouldn't have to guard the guards. The factors of morality and ethics and trust needs to be removed from the equation entirely, because there will always be parties that are not moral, ethical, or trustworthy. This is happening at a good time in history. There are people who are doing what they can to make sure it doesn't happen again. We've only had the internet for 30 years. Lets patch it now. ~~~ Nursie >>if it is breakable, then it is not good enough. And if the agencies are steering people towards crypto they know is broken but the public do not? ~~~ venomsnake Then the agencies are endangering their own countries. It is simple math - the world produces much more geniuses that NSA employs (or GRU or anyone). If you deliberately introduce weakness someone will find it. And the entity may not be friendly. The problem comes because the win of the cold war somewhat skewed the western view of their own capabilities. When NSA had adversaries that they deemed worthy - they took the effort to strengthen everyone's communications. Right now while looking at the others with disdain and (wrongly) refocused the efforts on terrorism - they prefer weak networks. ------ onion2k _" Internet security is hard," he says with emphasis. "All systems have undiscovered holes in them, and it's only a question of how fast the bad guys can discover the holes compared with how fast the good guys can patch them up."_ The internet should be thought of as something that transcends the notion of governments and nations; it's a tool for all of humanity regardless of who they are and where they live. The NSA should be considered just another "bad guy" in this scenario - a well-funded arm of a group of people who don't necessarily have the good of humanity _as a whole_ at heart. Literally _anyone_ who wants to manipulate the way the internet works away from an open tool for communication and sharing, to subvert it and break it for their personal gain, or that of their corporation, organisation, government or nation, is the bad guy. ~~~ grey-area I do find this an interesting notion. Because the internet transcends national boundaries and government jurisdiction, it encourages people to think of themselves as part of a global humanity, without loyalty to a specific government or group, and without loyalty to those who try to invade privacy for corporate or nationalist reasons. It's easy to forget that the concept of nation states and nationalism is a relatively new one and not necessarily worth of respect. Perhaps the internet and sharing and protecting our own data will help to obsolete nations and encourage people to be loyal to ideas, not brands or polities. ~~~ dasil003 Nationalism is mostly pretty evil IMHO, but nation states are actually providing a crucial role as a check on the power of corporations, the boards of which would otherwise be defacto global lords. The tension of diplomacy between nation states is critical to keeping everyone honest. My biggest fear for the future of the planet is a consolidated world government with real power (as opposed to the United Nations) because I think serious corruption would be unavoidable over time. ------ Zigurd > _Internet security is hard_ And among the hard things is the fact that you can't have it both ways. In TBL's case this means he has to realize that DRM is Big Brother Inside. Standardizing DRM means building a standard framework for back doors. You can't be an enabler for the big entertainment companies without being an enabler for snooping. Many security experts have not faced the fact that they cannot protect their users from state actors and still be deputized by the same state in crime- fighting. The only way to protect the user is to put the user's data out of reach of both spies and police. The security priesthood is easily co-opted and turned into witting and unwitting tools. ------ Malstrond Then he should stop underminding the web himself with HTML5 DRM. ------ D9u Any country that tries to create what he calls a "walled garden" of the internet would find the value of its GDP drop through the floor. Trade would be disrupted, cross-cultural exchange wither While I agree with the sentiment of the article, I can't help but look to China's version of a "walled garden of the internet" and how that has affected China's GDP. It seems that China continues to do quite well in spite of the aforementioned "walled garden" approach to the internet. Is the rest of the world doomed to a similar situation? ------ pyalot2 DRM undermines the web. ------ knappador The whole cyber arms-race makes no sense. It's like mutually assured destruction when you have the capability to remotely dismantle each others' nukes by publishing your designs. ------ na85 This feels pretty rich coming from the same guy who kowtowed to the copyright industry in order to bring us baked-in DRM on the web. In practice, the singularly boneheaded decision to allow DRM into the official HTML5 spec will have a far greater impact on the average user's web experience than NSA backdoors will. ~~~ eridius Go take your misinformed whining somewhere else. HTML5 does _not_ have DRM. It merely standardized an API to allow media content to talk to a content decryption module. But there is no actual DRM in there. You are right, though, that this will have a pretty big impact on the average user's web experience. Namely, it will let them view protected content without requiring proprietary plugins (e.g. Flash, Silverlight, etc). So it's pretty good for the average web user. ~~~ na85 >HTML5 does not have DRM Yet. From the 14 Nov 2013 draft: >This proposal extends HTMLMediaElement _providing APIs to control playback of protected content_. In other words, they're extending HTMLMediaElement to allow Hollywood to put whatever DRM measures in place that they choose. What this WILL NOT do is increase accessibility. Maybe Tim thought it was a good idea, but the old adage is that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The copyright industry are not the good guys, and they _will_ find some way, just as they always have, to make the user experience worse in the interests of their bottom line(s). But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you just have more faith in the industry that was shipping malicious rootkits on music CDs than I do. ~~~ eridius EME extends HTMLMediaElement to let it talk to Content Decryption Modules, which must be provided elsewhere. This is just a standardized API for being able to handle protected content. I do not understand all the hyperbole surrounding this. You're also a bit off your rocker if you're trying to paint "the copyright industry" as some kind of secretive cabal of people who just want to cram DRM on users' computers. Not to mention the fact that sites that don't use this won't even be affected by it. The vast majority of websites out there won't even care, and the ones that do care _already have a solution to deal with protected content today_ , it's just a crappy solution (e.g. requiring Silverlight). Hell, using EME to handle protected content is a _far_ better experience for the user than requiring the installation of a third-party plugin that can has far more capabilities than just decryption content. So if anything, this actually limits the scope of what protected content playback code can do on users' machines. ~~~ na85 I never said the copyright cabal was secretive but they absolutely want control over our computers' playback mechanisms. There was a proposal, I think in the HDDVD spec maybe, wherein the dvd drive itself would be remotely disabled and prevented from playing future content based on the sole discretion of some nebulous 3rd party. There's the Sony BMG rootkit thing that Mark Russinovich uncovered. Yes, they absolutely want to cram your computer with DRM and you're a fool for thinking they don't. ~~~ eridius They want to control how their content is played back on your computer. That is _not_ the same thing as wanting to arbitrarily stuff arbitrary computers full of arbitrary DRM. Yes, they've gone ridiculously overboard in the past, but DRM is not the goal in and of itself. ------ saraid216 When does "undermining the web" become the new "think of the children"?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Dear Prime Minister Cameron - oyvind http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Dear-Prime-Minister-Cameron--7289954.html ====== robotmay This will hopefully signal a trend of newspapers other than The Guardian standing up against privacy issues (I've no doubt it's already happening outside the UK, but there's a language barrier for me in reading them). In the UK we're pretty much stuffed: most of our papers are owned by powerful people (i.e. Rupert Murdoch) who pretty much control who stays in power, and they're likely avoiding talking about it so as to gain favours later on. As far as I've seen all the other papers are either ignoring the NSA/GCHQ story or actively attacking The Guardian. I've no doubt that the government will completely ignore this message, but I'm really grateful to see the issue being raised outside the UK. I'm starting to wonder if our only way out of this mess is via EU intervention. The tories and their supporters will cry foul, but the EU is supposed to stand for a lot of freedoms and it'd be nice to see it being enforced. Whether the EU as an entity would stand up to the USA though, remains to be seen. ~~~ jacquesm Most EU governments have lots of egg on their face. I don't think the EU as a whole will do anything. Maybe a couple of individual states but the EU as a whole? It would surprise me. They should, after all there is the EU DPD which is violated in just about every way imaginable here. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive) But I don't think it'll happen. ~~~ 14113 The germans are the economic titans of the EU, and from the coverage I've seen the population (both young _and_ old) have seemed pretty outraged by the NSA stuff. I don't think this'll translate into EU policy, or even German policy very quickly, but I do think it'll turn into a lot more support for more liberal parties, and more anti-American parties, which could swing Germany, and possibly the EU. ~~~ c1sc0 Don't forget that it's election season over here in Germany. Privacy is a talking point that resonates well with the population given Germany's not-so- distant past. It's good to see it on the table, but I'm very skeptical anything will come of it post-election ... ------ parley I hope this isn't HN karma suicide, but as pleased as I am (as a Swede) that one of our better newspapers is participating in this, I wish they'd spent the time to rid it of spelling errors and grammatical errors. I think I can be excused for mine in a HN comment, but they can't for theirs in a public letter to the British PM. Other than that, good job. ~~~ gruseom You Scandinavians have it rough—your English is so often so close to perfect that the tiny imperfections that remain stand out. [1] When I studied Russian there was an older student whose mastery of the language was so brilliant that native speakers assumed he was Russian. Unfortunately, his 99.9% mastery left room for 0.1% errors, and these were the kind of errors a native speaker would never make, so they sounded odd to Russians. Instead of recognizing him as a brilliant student, a lot of people took him for an illiterate (literally "grammarless") Russian and wrote him off as an idiot. A foreign accent has its advantages! [1] In case it's not obvious, this being the internet and all, I'm complimenting you and I'm envious. ~~~ parley Thanks. My guess would be that not dubbing TV and movies to our native languages contributes somewhat. Personally, I just played too much video games as a kid. That's an interesting anecdote about near-perfect mastery having downsides! I can provide a different one but on the same theme. I saw a documentary a while back in which an immigrant sadly explained that if she made her absolute best effort to adapt and speak Swedish, she would get really crappy service in stores and such because of her accent and grammatical errors. If, instead, she spoke English (which she commanded better) she would get excellent service from everyone who were more or less racing towards her in order to be polite and service minded (although that's presumably for mistaking her for a tourist instead of an immigrant, letting their politics shine through...). ~~~ robotmay I've wanted to learn a second language for years, and Scandinavian languages are really interesting to me; the benefit being that Danish/Norse/Swedish all have a lot of similarities, so it'd help when learning multiple languages. I also have a lot of interest in the Norse countries as a whole in terms of history and craft. Unfortunately I find it damn near impossible unless I'm actually in the country whose language I'm trying to learn. My only hope now, I suspect, is to find some subtitled English shows (or Scandinavian shows subtitled in English) on the Swedish TV streaming sites :D I really do wish other countries would export more of their own language media to the world. English/American TV shouldn't be so dominant. The only time I get a chance to watch foreign language TV is usually in hotels, where you can guarantee there will be German channels! ~~~ Amadou I think you'll find a bunch of stuff on the pirate bay. Off the top of my head I can think of these Scandinavian shows and movies that are all at least decent if not great: Trollhunter // The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (trilogy) // Let the Right One In // Cold Prey [Fritt Vilt] (trilogy) // The Bridge [Bron/Broen] 2 seasons // The Killing [Forbrydelsen] 3 seasons // Kon-Tiki // Dead Snow // Headhunters // Easy Money [Snabba Cash] // Norwegian Ninja ~~~ robotmay Thanks for the suggestions! The only problem I have with Scandinavian TV is that it's -so dark-. Most of those are semi-horror or crime shows, and that's far from a bad thing but it's hard to watch a lot of it in one sitting :D And Norwegian Ninja sounds amazing. ------ kalms The version on Politiken: [http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/ECE2057284/documentation-r...](http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/ECE2057284/documentation- read-the-open-letter-to-david-cameron-here/) ------ riffraff for people like me who have no idea what this is about, can't really understand it from TFA, I presume this would be the "events of the last week", please correct me if I'm wrong [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-security- sn...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-security-snowden- britain-idUSBRE97K0G920130821) ~~~ protothomas That's part of it but mainly this - [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn- greenwald...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald- guardian-partner-detained-heathrow) ------ wtil Nice way to earn some free publicity I suppose.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
MantisTek GK2's Keylogger Is a Warning Against Cheap Gadgets - infodroid http://www.tomshardware.com/news/mantistek-gk2-collects-typed-keys,35850.html ====== userbinator My first thought is, why does a keyboard even need its own software? There's a reason PS/2 and USB HID are standards... I remember purchasing an HP printer a while ago --- it came with a CD full of useless crap, including drivers that took a full 400MB installer containing, among other things, a JVM, Apache Tomcat, and a bunch of other Java-based bloat for the "management UI". I just used the OS generic HP/PCL driver and it's been working that way since. I have heard that even those drivers phone home now, to report how many pages were printed and ink levels etc. Telemetry --- it's in everything now, and this greatly disgusts me. No doubt it's probably buried somewhere deep in the EULA for this keyboard's software, that you agreed to the collection of "aggregate key usage information" or similar. Read the Windows 10 EULA for some similarly creepy wording. Also, if you're paranoid about USB keyboards containing other "hidden devices", a USB-PS/2 adapter would probably work to stop anything else from getting through. ~~~ jml7c5 >why does a keyboard even need its own software? Setting macros and controlling lights (each key has an RGB light hidden under it). ------ JetSpiegel > These days, most products are made in China, but usually some other local > company acts as an intermediary to ensure that the product is developed to > specification and without other "features" that shouldn't be there. However, > this additional protection goes out of the window when people decide to > purchase directly from Chinese manufacturers via Chinese marketplaces. Come on, it's not like American manufacturers are a paragon of user privacy, was this jingoistic jab necessary? "Obscure manufacturer screws up" doesn't imply "Chinese engineers are completely worthless". ~~~ userbinator Indeed, just Google "Windows 10 keylogger" and see what Microsoft put in the OS itself... Some "obscure manufacturer" collecting this information gets a "warning" article, yet Microsoft, who is probably collecting the same if not even more detailed information about what you type _and everything else_ , generated plenty of "telemetry is good for you" articles instead? Something doesn't seem right here... ------ problems Not exactly just against cheap gadgets - remember the Connexant keylogger from earlier this year? It seems to be a common thing for driver developers to log keypresses for development purposes yet fail to disable that functionality in release... easiest fix? Don't install closed source drivers for 3rd party hardware. [https://www.modzero.ch/advisories/MZ-17-01-Conexant- Keylogge...](https://www.modzero.ch/advisories/MZ-17-01-Conexant- Keylogger.txt) ~~~ monochromatic That's the easiest fix unless it's hardware you need, or it's your work computer, or or or or... ~~~ nerdponx If it's your work computer then all bets are off. It's your employer's privacy at stake, not yours. Moreover you shouldn't ever consider your activity on your work computer "private" since your employer can and probably does monitor your usage. ~~~ monochromatic That’s all true. I’m just saying it’s not always practical to avoid closed source code. ------ singularity2001 Warning against cheap keyloggers: Get expensive high quality keyloggers from Microsoft, Google etc. ------ moonman272 In plaintext, this is the donald trump of malware. ------ retSava Read the original posts and saw the package capture screenshot. It seems like it sends stats on how many keypresses there are on a key-by-key basis, not an actual keylogger (ie it doesn't send the content of what you sent). It sends this in cleartext over http, not https. Again, not the content of what you type, so your url+user/pw is not sent (at least not according to what is known now). ~~~ jnbiche To be clear, if they're sending real-time updates on the keypress counts of each key, it's quite simple to map that to a traditional key logger (ie, the contents of what you typed). ~~~ ac2u Was it confirmed realtime though? Could have been batched, which makes it harder to reconstruct what was typed. Even that's a step too far though, but clarification can help draw the line between careless and malicious.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ATS programming language - huhtenberg http://www.ats-lang.org ====== joe_the_user It might be nice if languages wishing to distinguish themselves could show a simple __other __than factorial. If there is something unique about your language, please, please show it to us. I have seen umpteen "new, great functional language examples" that look like: fact x = [typedef BLAH@#$@#] x * fact(x-10 or o if x==0 Give me something interesting. I really like new language. I think the success of Ruby is showing the "language nerds" that they are relevant but you guys and gals gotta show clear that you've got that makes "easy things easy and difficult things possible". Several common examples that were really clear would do that, so the small things matter. I mean this with the hope of helping folks do better. OK?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Roundup and Risk Assessment - igonvalue http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/roundup-and-risk-assessment ====== bsbechtel >>But how do you prove that a substance is safe? This is more or less one of the central tenets of scientific study....you can't prove anything, you can only disprove things. ~~~ Spooky23 ...except for beliefs. I have a group of old friends who are stident anti-GMO. Monsanto is the devil to these people, one of which probably won't talk to me anymore because I had a spray bottle of roundup in my garage.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Using other videos/music as footage - Copyright issue - huy me and friends are organizing a small TEDx conference and we're making a small promotion video for the event. Then suddenly all the copyright issues brought up when we try to use some other good existing videos on youtube as excerpts.<p>Then it gets me thinking. I saw a lot of youtube videos that use other videos and music (the ones where you create a photo album of your trip's pictures and insert a background music, or making an inspirational video with music etc).<p>My question is, is it legal to do so? Do people usually ask the owner of the video/music/pictures before using them in their videos?<p>The other day I submitted a video to youtube and got and email say the music I used is copyrighted by some music group. I, following other videos, carefully put a note in both the video and description of youtube. I know this wouldn't be enough. But how about other tons of videos out there? ====== what "Common Examples of When You Need a Voluntary License Include: . . . Using a sound recording in a movie, commercial or other visual work. If you want to use a sound recording in a visual work, you need a synchronization license, so called because the music is "synched" to the video. You’ve already created your visual work and you want to put some music under it. You want just the music for your movie, commercial, documentary, sitcom, or any kind of audio/visual presentation, no matter where it is aired, even the Internet. Synchronization licenses are granted by individual sound recording copyright owners." [1] Whether anyone comes after you for not having such a license is a different story. [1] [http://riaa.com/whatwedo.php?content_selector=whatwedo_licen...](http://riaa.com/whatwedo.php?content_selector=whatwedo_licensing)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The New World of Writing: Pulp Speed - marttt http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/the-new-world-of-writing-pulp-speed/ ====== DrScump Site down, as of 19:10 PST (03:10 GMT) anyway. ~~~ marttt It was sluggish for me as well. Seems to be working now, though. Alternative link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20161026214120/http://www.deanwe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161026214120/http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/the- new-world-of-writing-pulp-speed/)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Lyft’s IPO disclosure shows it’s not close to profitability - howard941 https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-lyft-ipo-disclosure-20190307-story.html ====== ChuckMcM Yeah. And while this says a lot about Lyft, for me it really really says a lot about Uber too. It has never been impossible to run a company by injecting money into it to cover the difference between how much customers 'value' the product versus what it costs to provide the product. But the dot com days showed that without a point in the business model where the value exceeds the cost by enough margin to keep the business going, such businesses don't survive. What neither Lyft, nor Uber, has yet provided is a credible 'size' at which they would be a going concern (covering all their costs), nor a really good idea of how being larger scales revenues more than costs in sufficient measure to become profitable. I would love to see a document that describes the 'per driver' costs that these companies incur on a location basis (so costs per driver in Los Angeles CA, and per driver in Minot ND) vs revenue expectations per driver vs total available livery miles (how many people would have to want to go somewhere to support those numbers). Then you could at least see if there were any islands of profitability in that solution space. So far, I've yet to see anything where the answer is net positive. Worse, any positive solution will be very fragile by definition because the barrier to entry is zero and so a third party can unilaterally drain profits out of a ride share company by starting up an unprofitable competitor and funding it out of pocket until it has done the required amount of damage. ~~~ bane What's really interesting, and I think what's unclear is this: what's costs these services so much that they can't turn a profit? Their costs, other than taking a haircut on the ride, doesn't seem entirely clear, or obviously large. A 2017 number says Lyft completes about 360 million rides per year. For fun, let's say they make $1 per ride, are they really not able to run their front- end operations with around 1,000 employees? (assuming an employee costs about $250k-300k/yr)? That seems crazy to me, but I don't know what hidden costs there are. From an outside PoV it appears they need to run a more or less static website, about 4 smartphone apps with some back-end routefinding and accounting systems. What am I missing? ~~~ nabaraz Last I looked at Uber's financials, 90-95% of their expenses was driver earnings. And then you have operating expenses that includes employees, promotions, r&d, regulatory fees, marketing, support, new investments etc. Uber's margin is probably under 5% which simply isn't enough. ~~~ remote_phone You were looking at the wrong numbers, or you didn’t understand if those were the conclusions you came to. ------ chollida1 Sadly for Lyft I think the best comparison will be Snap. And just one look at the SNAP chart will tell you why you should avoid the Lyft IPO. It will go public at an inflated price and hold that valuation for a quarter or two and then people will start asking where either the profits or growth are and Lyft will need to start growing or erasing their huge operating losses right at the same time Uber is trying to grab as much ride share as possible gearing up to their own IPO. So at a time when the market will be starting to really pressure them to cut losses, probably by cutting the driver's portion of revenue and raising prices, Uber will be trying their best to inflate their own ride share metrics by giving drivers more and cutting ride costs. What is the story you can tell that paints Lyft as a good investment over the next 2 year period? Then there is Lyft's dual share structure will get it kicked out of many ETF's. This locked in money is a godsend to most companies as they help buoy the stock price by having locked in holders of teh stock during turbulent times. I think MSCI will put Lyft into some of its indexes given that it just put in 8-10 Chinese companies with dual listing share structures One thing I do like in Lyft's favour is that they could be a counter cyclical stock, ie they do well when the rest of the market isn't, due to people using Lyft to replace a second car or a lease that they've given up. We just haven't had a recession while ride sharing was a main stream thing. > Zimmer, Lyft's cofounder, went on to assert that private car ownership would > “all but end in major U.S. cities” by 2025. Given that people are currently signing leases and payment plans for cars that won't expire by then I'd say this is a bit of a stretch:) ~~~ temporalparts An investment thesis for Lyft is if you expect Lyft to get acquired. If profitability is nowhere in sight, then the end-game is acquisition. Companies that might want to get into ridesharing is long, and Lyft is the fastest (and probably cheapest if the stock tanks) path towards competing against Uber in the US market. Any company that is working on self-driving cars will want to acquire Lyft: Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, etc Any company that is in logistics space will want to acquire Lyft: Amazon, DoorDash, Grubhub, etc. Any ridesharing company will want to acquire Lyft: Uber (defensively), Didi, Ola, probably not Grab, etc. There will likely be a bidding war for Lyft because that's the only reasonable path towards competing against Uber unless you think self-driving car is < 5 years away. ~~~ jonathankoren This is all predicated on someone thinking that the rideshare buisness is profitable. It hasn’t shown that it is. Uber is also losing money on every ride, isn’t profitable, and still has multiple rideshare options, and side hustles of food delivery and freight. Same is true with every other similar company the world over. Nowhere is there the indication that the industry will be profitable anytime soon. People have assumed that if you could just stop paying drivers, the profits will come. They might, but fully autonomous cars don’t exist, and also, they seem much further off than they did just two years ago. Even Andrew Ng publically suggested that pedestrians should just change their behavior, because the AI doesn’t work, and won’t work for a very long time.[0] So betting on magic cars to save the industry is a bit iffy. It’s certainly plausible that at some point, the companies simply burn through all their cash, and investors give up on expecting a return. That would kind of suck, but why keep throwing good money after bad? [0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get- re...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get-ready-for- robot-driving-some-want-to-reprogram-pedestrians) ~~~ linuxftw People are convinced that autonomous vehicles are a 'data problem' and if we just log enough miles and 'train' our 'ai' enough, they'll be perfectly safe. I'm of the opinion it's literal fantasy. Maybe in 50 years, heck, maybe in 30. 5-10? I can't see it. ~~~ repsilat That is a very strong statement -- what odds would you put on a "literal fantasy"? One in a thousand? One in a billion? I'd back "self-driving, in-traffic, no-safety-driver taxi service available to the public in 5 cities in 10 years" at even money any day of the week (so long as it doesn't mean losing half of any money in escrow to inflation...) ~~~ rayiner If we define "city" to include real cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC, I'd take the other side of that bet. Two things will make closing the "last 10%" gap extremely difficult if not impossible. 1) Navigation. The D.C. street grid literally changes daily due to closures, detours, and construction. Google Maps does not keep up with these changes in real time. If self-driving tech can't understand when a construction worker is hand signaling drivers through a single lane for both directions of traffic, it won't work at scale. 2) Weather. Apparently, self-driving tech relies on following lane markings, which routinely are invisible during/after snow. I don't think it's a strong statement. I'm taking the other side of the "everyone will be flying in supersonic airliners in 10 years" bet in 1960. There is a huge difference between tech that kinda works, and tech that works reliably enough to serve as a basis for transportation infrastructure. ------ jeffdavis This article seems excessively negative about a company: * Which provided $8B worth of rides in a single year * Didn't hurt anyone For crimes which amount to: * May cost some IPO underwriters money * May not make all of the employees rich * May cost VCs money The worst thing to really say about such a company is "I enjoy their convenient rides but I won't buy their stock". Instead, the article attacks the founders for their age (too young), ridicules their visions of the future, and compares them to other young founders. Bewilderingly, the author compares the founders to Zuckerburg, which doesn't fit the point of the article at all. Not content with all of that, the author takes a shot at Musk for selling fantasies, when he has done more than many people thought possible. ~~~ themagician Didn't directly hurt anyone in an easily quantifiable way. It's not clear that Uber or Lyft are net positives to society. They are disruptive, but not necessarily in a good way. Yes, they provided $8B worth of rides. But before that people still got around. What the world might have been like without Lyft is impossible to know, but the way it's changed the job landscape isn't exactly a huge net positive. It's put a lot of cars on the road and it's set to new "floor" for jobs in general. Uber, Lyft, Taskrabbit, DoorDash have created a new kind of serfdom. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, necessarily, but I wouldn't say that they didn't hurt anyone. They definitely hurt social progress. ~~~ googlemike They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter. They also radically simplify access to transportation for people of color, women, etc. ~~~ amanaplanacanal > They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter This is cool if true. Does it show up in accident statistics? ------ annon Giving the founders 20-to-1 voting rights over regular investors while losing as much money as they are is insane. This really looks like a lemon, and the VC's want to cash out and leave public investors holding the bag. I don't see how self driving cars are going to help them. Waymo and Tesla are both the farthest along, and they're going to run their own networks - competing against Lyft and Uber. ~~~ nfriedly I don't really disagree with you, but I think (or, at least, hope) that there will be room for more than 2-3 players in the "self driving taxi" market. ~~~ erikpukinskis The thing that would cause that is if there is some requirement for massive amounts of difficult to obtain data that is required to build a competitive system. I do think data is a competitive advantage right now. But I find it really hard to believe that 10 years from now it will be harder to build a self driving system than today. That's just not how tech is. Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can hack a YouTube clone together in hours. Not just will we have more off the shelf software and hardware, but maybe you can license the data too. In the end, I don't see the moat around a self driving cab company. If someone has a good app and a single car that operates in my area, why not switch to them? Sure there are wait times and availability in odd places. But that doesn't inhibit a startup getting early adopters. You could literally just do the same commutes every day and have a profitable business. Lastly, I expect the variety in vehicles and "mobile spaces" will provide a huge landscape of opportunity that a single company will not be able to fill. Just like there is not one "housing" company, there won't be one mobile housing company either. Too much variation in taste and preference. ~~~ askafriend > Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can > hack a YouTube clone together in hours. Ha, good one. Would your clone have large scale spam, fraud, and abuse systems in place? Would it work on all browsers, mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes, etc? Is your streaming tech cost-efficient and can it deliver reliability across all regions? Will you be able to respond to DMCAA takedown requests and comply with IP laws across states and countries? I can go on and on. Simply put, serving a video over the internet isn't rocket science. Building YouTube...is much more like rocket science. ~~~ erikpukinskis You don't need those things until after you hit scale, so I wouldn't include them in an initial quote. ------ Animats _" The dual class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting power with our Co-Founders, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control. Our Class B common stock has 20 votes per share, and our Class A common stock, which is the stock we are offering by means of this prospectus, has one vote per share."_ No-voting-power stock for a company that's losing money? No. Companies that have done that before, such as Google and Facebook, were profitable _before_ the IPO. That's when you want to keep the management team. With Lyft's numbers, firing the current management might not be a bad idea. They've had their growth phase; now they need to move to profitability. If you haven't read an S-1 before, you skip all the happy talk and go directly to "Consolidated Statements of Operations". ~~~ djsumdog To be fair, I doubt any management could make ride-sharing companies profitable. The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable incomes again. ~~~ dnautics > The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable incomes > again. Have you actually been a driver? I can assure you that having been one, in the Bay area, even, the income was quite livable. ~~~ i_am_nomad There’s the common impression - misconception? - that driving for rideshare companies is a losing game, and that drivers end up making very little money after fuel, repairs, and depreciation. For a while, it seemed like every day there was another article breaking this down and “exposing” Uber and Lyft. Having never driven for them, I can’t verify whether this is true, but just a quick back-of-the-envelope guess seems like drivers in the Bay Area could average $40 - $50 an hour. That doesn’t seem like minimum wage level to me. ~~~ opportune The weird thing is I almost never get a driver with more than 1-2k trips. If the job actually paid well, you would think there would be a lot of people doing it full-time for more than one year. Maybe the skew is due to the rapid growth of rideshare in general but I suspect the main reason there don't seem to be seasoned super-drivers is that the job simply isn't as good as it seems ~~~ i_am_nomad It's been said is some of the articles I mentioned that Uber's business plan is to profit of drivers who are financially illiterate, until those people either wise up or break. That seems like hyperbole, but if there is a kernel of truth to it, that would explain your observation. ------ justfor1comment For me the saddest thing is that even if Lyft stock tanks after the IPO the founders Zimmer and Green will have very little impact to their personal finances. The founders along with the investors will be able to move most of their stock through the markets making them billionaires. It's mostly the Lyft employees stuck in the post IPO lock up period who will be hurt by the dip in stock value. Another reason why the rich keep getting richer. ~~~ puranjay Isn't the founders' holding severely diluted? They've gone through, iirc, over a dozen rounds of funding and own very little in the company ~~~ Sohcahtoa82 Even owning 1% of a $15B company still makes you worth $150 million. Dumping even 2% of that $150M would give you enough to retire. ~~~ ztratar 3M is not even close to enough for retirement in Silicon Valley. Also... 1.6M after taxes. ~~~ Kye I thought the usual track was _Move to SV - > Get rich -> Retire somewhere cheaper_. ~1 million is plenty almost anywhere on the planet. Especially if they go the FIRE route. ~~~ puranjay $1M isn't plenty for everywhere. Even in India, $400-500k is what you would need to buy a new 3-4 bedroom apart in a good area of, say, New Delhi. In Mumbai, $1M is the bare minimum ------ throwaway-1283 Basically what will happen is that in some month X after IPO the company will be forced to pull back on new driver incentives (the thing that is really making these companies bleed cash), which will slow driver supply growth, which will increase rider wait times and/or make prices spike, which will lower demand, and thus slow growth, and kill the stock price. I wouldn't touch this at all. Or short it if you're brave :) ~~~ linkregister If/when Lyft decides it can't grow any more, it will dump the unprofitable cities and focus on the cash cows: LA and New York, etc. The large cities are quite profitable and will be enough. That said, it's better for society if the unprofitable cities are served by competing ride sharing services. It's kind of like how the US Postal Service makes money in the cities and loses it in rural areas. ------ willart4food Well same for Uber and we all knew that. It's just the business model (for now). So, in a world where we are all used to Uber/Lyft and there's no turning back, the only way forward is for fares to go up, close to - if not the same - to conventional cab fares. Which will decrease usage, which will decrease the size of Uber/Lyft and therefore their market cap. Sounds like 1999 ~~~ ghaff I honestly, albeit naively, expected that when Uber put in a new CEO, they’d take that opportunity to raise prices to break even levels which presumably end up around where taxis are. Take the volume hit; customers who are only interested in VC-subsided rides aren’t customers you want. But I guess everyone decided to continue to pretend that the current business is sustainable. ~~~ djsumdog They're probably still holding on to the dream of the self driving vehicle ... which is practically at least 15 years out at this point .. probably more like 20~25. ~~~ ghaff Note that holding onto a dream and making public statements to sucker investors are not necessarily the same thing. I agree with your basic point, especially in the areas dense enough to make taxi-like services work well. ------ mattnewton I’m bullish on ridesharing as a segment but bearish on uber and Lyft, simply because I think both have been run like landgrabs - large VC backed pushes to jumpstart demand and find drivers. In this case though I think the land won’t stay “grabbed”. Every driver I have seen is driving for both services and would add a third if someone told them about it and it payed equitably, so I think all the work uber and Lyft have done to make a market can be leveraged by third party competitors if they start dialing up prices to become more profitable. And I think they will need to do that to meet their valuations. This isn’t like Facebook where a larger network acts like a moat keeping competitors out. Instead, I think it actively makes a market for competitors- the friction for drivers is pretty small, and I don’t know the friction involved for getting users to download another app but I imagine it’s pretty low. Because the drivers are the same it’s a commodity, and switching between apps costs me nothing. Disclaimer: I probably don’t know what I am talking about. ~~~ linkregister I agree that neither riders nor drivers have any affinity toward the ride sharing platforms beyond cost and availability. That said, the incumbent in an area typically wins due to the chicken and egg problem of riders and drivers. Didi vs. Uber, Grab vs. Uber, Uber vs. Juno, etc. Lyft's market share is as high as it is because they invented the ride sharing category. Uber's market share is higher because the Uber Black service was present in more cities, so it could use its existing operations staff and rider network (and lobbying presence). ~~~ mattnewton But the chicken and egg problem is partially solved by having lots of chickens already around laying eggs for other services. So I only have to convince people already driving to download my third-driver-app, and then riders have chickens. There is some evidence of this happening in places like Austin. ------ lukewrites I think both Lyft and Uber are pursuing IPOs because the private market has soured on them. The VCs want to get their payout and are starting to fear a down round…so the companies will go public, the investors will get their payouts, and whoever buys will eventually regret it. ------ pochamago What are the big expenses that cost Uber and Lyft so much? The driver takes the cost of owning and maintaining the vehicle, and they're only paid a fraction of whatever rides they get. Aren't the companies just running an app? ~~~ shereadsthenews Because of churn and driver recruitment incentives Lyft pays the driver more than it charges the rider. For example a new driver gets 80% of the fare plus $8 per trip in the first month. If you can pick up 155 people per week, Lyft also eats the entire cost of your vehicle. Also, Lyft is paying 100s of millions of dollars to Amazon and Google to run their app. ~~~ notyourwork I'd be really interested to know what resources they are using in cloud and why it is so expensive. I don't disagree they need resources but 100s of millions seems a bit on the wasteful side. ~~~ djsumdog It's running in hundreds cities in tons of countries with huge pools of drivers. The server costs alone are going to be big. Plus you have to hire and pay for really good reliability engineers. Any outages are going to cost you a lot of confidence, and a lot of money. This is a really big amount of data, more than most people realize. ~~~ kingnothing Lyft only operates in the US and a few cities in Canada. ------ duderific I would gladly pay more than a cab to continue to have the convenience of being able to get a ride when and where I need it. I remember back in the pre-rideshare days, trying to call a cab ahead of time, and having them simply not show up, with no warning or notification. ------ djsumdog Lately my phone will die at 30% charge. I've ordered a new battery but last week it went out while I was looking for a Lyft. I normally don't use taxis but it was cold and I was tired. Luckily I was near a train station and it was still early enough the buses were running, so I knew which transfers to make and which bus to get on without needing a map. Still I thought about how only a decade ago, I could be on this same street and hold up my hand and flag down a Taxi. Today if I really wanted a taxi, they're pretty much only in the city. I'd have to hunt around for a payphone and would need change too. If I didn't know my public transport routes back home or if it was late enough the trains stopped running, I'd be kinda SOL. I realize Taxis not just driving around saves on fuel consumption, but have we lost something by simply not being able to hail a cab without a charged phone or laptop with a Wi-Fi point? I wonder if Uber or Lyft will start putting out kiosks people can use to flag down rides when their phones or out. ~~~ RomanPushkin Yes, we've lost it. However, it can be fixed. I created app so everyone can be a taxi driver. It's PoC, but actually works. There are tons of problems, no critical mass, security. But anyway, I was once able to find a ride back home from San Francisco. This app is for everyone at [https://libretaxi.org](https://libretaxi.org) (non-profit, open source) Disclaimer: I'm founder ~~~ jon-wood As much as I love to see Open source solutions to problems having looked at the website this seems like a disaster waiting to happen without any sort of driver vetting. You’ve effectively made an app where people can broadcast to random strangers that they’re waiting around in the street, carrying cash, and far enough from home to need a lift. Sadly we don’t live in a world where something like that isn’t going to be flooded by people with ideas other than making a few bucks driving people home. ------ aiisjustanif All of this talk sound surprising similar to airlines. \- LCCs (Low Cost Carriers can come in and disrupt your fragile net profit, if you get close to it in a quarter) \- Always pretty much operating in the negative. \- Consumers find a lot value in the company even though the operating cost are insane. \- The only way to solve the issue of airlines being in debt for years was time to slowly cut operation cost and scale, massive scale (albeit, there are a couple exceptions today now). \- Local market competition in cities are hell to forecast and balance out operating cost to how profitable you can be vs competitors. Which create cities you grow dominant and via reputation and government policies. \- They piss off investors because they have to trade off and invest in the operating cost (fleet or employees) some years, which can effect the companies earning for years. I get they the rideshare industry is vastly different than the airline industry in many ways (for example, oil price influencing one more than the other), but I think they are similar in important ways. Uber and Lyft will have to start taking out pages from LCCs in Europe to get ideas on how to become profitable (and probably piss off customers by nickel and diming them) and any ideas they haven't from the taxi industry that they may have over looked. Hell maybe even adapt into the rental space. I don't know the answers, but just sounds like an industry I've seen before that will have to move mountains to been profitable. Sidenote: I will not be surprised just like American, Delta, and United that Lyft and Uber will soon see government sponsored competition (China, Russia, Middle East countries) in future and be pissed because of how unfair they are because they can operate in the negative without consequences of failing. ------ ProAm The problem with both Lyft and Uber is they have MASSIVE VC investments they need to pay back, and while the business model is good its not nearly good enough to payback VC within the 10 year window. Uber will be in the exact same boat next year. ~~~ throwaway-1283 What do you mean "pay back"? If you're talking about liquidation preferences those all go away in an IPO. ~~~ ProAm All the investors that 'purchased' a percentage of the private company with their investment during funding rounds will want to see ROI when the company goes public (or if the company is insanely profitable while private). Most of these VC's expect to start seeing ROI around the 10yr mark. The company isnt remotely profitable still privately held, so lets go public and get other suckers to buy in so the early investors can cash out and hopefully make a buck or two or at least breakeven. ------ thisisit I have been reading Lyft S-1, especially their risk factor assessment. While it is full of normal warnings like limited operating history, competitors etc. One of the warnings stood out for me. _Our results of operations vary and are unpredictable from period-to-period, which could cause the trading price of our Class A common stock to decline._ If this is the case, I wonder how do they can they even predict their future growth? How much credence can be given to the data they present or expect about their growth? ------ popz41 In the past two weeks I've been receiving offers for discounted rides from Lyft. First was 30% off for a week, then yesterday I received a code for 50% off this week. It seems they're trying to inflate their ride numbers quickly. I have not received any promotions prior to this, and I've been a member for over a year. ~~~ scottnyc No question. It's pretty evident they are aggressively spending on acquisition to boost their top line numbers. Timing wise, this effect will probably show up after they IPO and for their first publicly reported earnings announcement. Which will hopefully keep the stock price high long enough for the employee lock-up to expire. ------ angel_j I'm trying to think of some way a large equity firm could make money on shares that are almost certain to go from high to low... ------ throwaway082729 Once Waymo has fully autonomous vehicles on the road, they'll look to acquire Lyft for a decent price. Lyft has the brand value and the infrastructure for ride calling (intentionally not using ride sharing) except that drivers will no longer be needed. Profits will be through the roof when that happens. ~~~ leesec There are 1.4 million Lyft drivers in US and Toronto. Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 1.4 million cars? ~~~ i_cant_speel Those 1.4 millions drivers aren't all driving at the same time. They would only need a fraction of that many cars and they could be built over an extended period of time. ~~~ leesec OK so Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 500k cars? ~~~ throwaway082729 Self-driving cars will be feasible only if LIDAR/camera costs go down to $10k/car or lower. No one is going to pay $250k for a self-driving car. At $10k/car, it's $5B for 500k cars, something that Google can easily afford. ~~~ leesec Google would have to own the cars that this point tho right? They can't just plop a LiDAR on a car and call it self driving. So 10k+ the cost of car. Maybe 50k. ~~~ throwaway082729 Not really. They could sell their technology to a car company and all cars sold by that company could be self-driving enabled. Maybe we'll get true ride sharing then. I'm at home and not planning to use my car for the day. It could be used to give someone rides without me having to go drive. Waymo/Lyft could still own some cars but not all. ------ robot I get a lot of promotions from lyft that make me think they're desperate. ~~~ Invictus0 They're not really promotions. All those 20% off emails only give you 20% off Lyft's fee, not the whole fare. It saves you a total of maybe $2 on an average ride. ~~~ popz41 I disagree, my email yesterday said "50% off your next 10 rides. You have 10 rides remaining. Max savings of $6 per ride. Discount applies to the fare, Prime Time charges, Service fee, tolls, and taxes only." ------ fargo Would it be wise for someone to go work for lift given this information? Asking for a friend... ------ badinsie they are the literal definition of a parasite how are they not profitable? ------ pastor_elm Three words: Ads, ads, and ads. Ads is how you make money. All lyft needs to do is incorporate ads into its platform and it will start printing money. ~~~ tgeo At this point I'm convinced this is a troll account ------ samstave What level of equity are Uber and Lyft drivers given in the company? Any? Are they "earning shares per mile" or anything like that? If not - then screw both companies, and I hope they do poorly in the IPO -- even though ridesharing is such a wonderful service - I really hope they do right by the literal foundation of their existence, which is the drivers. ~~~ EpicEng That seems completely unreasonable. Lyft contracts with more than 700k drivers. How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of options while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company? Let's also be real here; the supply of drivers is endless. It's about as far from a skill position as one could imagine. Would you be ok with their pay being decreased as well? ~~~ Marsymars > How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of options > while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company? Not commenting on the practicality, but when choosing between traditionally cab companies, I preferentially go with ones that are driver/employee owned.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Feedback from Pet-Owners Please? Pet Transportation (Uber for Pets) - jaybul Would you as a pet-owner use a transportation service to take your pet from and to salon, pet-care, pet-sitting or anywhere else while you are busy with your things?<p>How much is there need for such service? ====== bradknowles My vet provides concierge service, if you want it. They’ll even come out to your house and do health checkups, etc... at your home. But generally speaking, I love my cats, and I wouldn’t want them being taken somewhere by some stranger, unless there were truly extenuating circumstances.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Zoobotics - jamesbritt http://www.economist.com/node/18925855?story_id=18925855&fsrc=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+economist/full_print_edition+(The+Economist:+Full+print+edition)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher ====== zby "A tiny flying robot of this sort, equipped with a camera, could get into places that are too small or dangerous for people—enemy bunkers, for example—and report what was going on." Yeah, cameras - I am sure the military will equip them with lethal poison stings. I just cannot imagine how this will change military conflicts. ------ awaz Here is a link to another specimen that I didn't see in the Zoobotics artice : [http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/20/us-robotfish- idUST...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/20/us-robotfish- idUSTRE52J1RY20090320) ~~~ forza Festo has made a number of these over the years, some more lifelike than others. Under "Projects 2006" to "Projects 2010", and "SmartBird", in the left column of this page: <http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/9933.htm> ------ queensnake Adaptive Behavior (<http://www.isab.org.uk/ISAB/>) finally hits the mainstream; representing! every-other-year conference proceedings: [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=from+animals+to+animats&x=0&y=0)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Big Eric Ligman Microsoft EBook Giveaway - dragonbonheur https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mssmallbiz/2016/07/10/free-thats-right-im-giving-away-millions-of-free-microsoft-ebooks-again-including-windows-10-office-365-office-2016-power-bi-azure-windows-8-1-office-2013-sharepoint-2016-sha/ ====== stumpo wget --trust-server-names [http://ligman.me/29ngkYn](http://ligman.me/29ngkYn) [http://ligman.me/29jL5wW](http://ligman.me/29jL5wW) [http://ligman.me/29afIRV](http://ligman.me/29afIRV) [http://ligman.me/29ngkYn](http://ligman.me/29ngkYn) [http://ligman.me/29pyHgR](http://ligman.me/29pyHgR) [http://ligman.me/29dmbfC](http://ligman.me/29dmbfC) [http://ligman.me/29ollRF](http://ligman.me/29ollRF) [http://ligman.me/29pyHgR](http://ligman.me/29pyHgR) [http://ligman.me/29gvv67](http://ligman.me/29gvv67) [http://ligman.me/29gvv67](http://ligman.me/29gvv67) [http://ligman.me/29pzkHg](http://ligman.me/29pzkHg) [http://ligman.me/29CWQ20](http://ligman.me/29CWQ20) [http://ligman.me/29CWQ20](http://ligman.me/29CWQ20) [http://ligman.me/1G0Cm7T](http://ligman.me/1G0Cm7T) [http://ligman.me/1G0Cm7T](http://ligman.me/1G0Cm7T) [http://ligman.me/29dmbfC](http://ligman.me/29dmbfC) [http://ligman.me/29ollRF](http://ligman.me/29ollRF) [http://ligman.me/29vDVrw](http://ligman.me/29vDVrw) [http://ligman.me/29CW4SV](http://ligman.me/29CW4SV) [http://ligman.me/29CW4SV](http://ligman.me/29CW4SV) [http://ligman.me/29G1z1N](http://ligman.me/29G1z1N) [http://ligman.me/29yWAAO](http://ligman.me/29yWAAO) [http://ligman.me/29DHWHq](http://ligman.me/29DHWHq) [http://ligman.me/29DHWHq](http://ligman.me/29DHWHq) [http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm](http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm) [http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm](http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm) [http://ligman.me/29yUVeH](http://ligman.me/29yUVeH) [http://ligman.me/29yUVeH](http://ligman.me/29yUVeH) [http://ligman.me/29ErxWs](http://ligman.me/29ErxWs) [http://ligman.me/29ErxWs](http://ligman.me/29ErxWs) 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[http://ligman.me/29pr2x1](http://ligman.me/29pr2x1) [http://ligman.me/29pr2x1](http://ligman.me/29pr2x1) [http://ligman.me/29oa0kH](http://ligman.me/29oa0kH) [http://ligman.me/29i6ntm](http://ligman.me/29i6ntm) [http://ligman.me/29n7JVF](http://ligman.me/29n7JVF) [http://ligman.me/29fQsQ4](http://ligman.me/29fQsQ4) [http://ligman.me/29fQo2J](http://ligman.me/29fQo2J) [http://ligman.me/29idz8T](http://ligman.me/29idz8T) [http://ligman.me/29fQsQ4](http://ligman.me/29fQsQ4) [http://ligman.me/29dfwlu](http://ligman.me/29dfwlu) [http://ligman.me/29fLliP](http://ligman.me/29fLliP) [http://ligman.me/29i83TI](http://ligman.me/29i83TI) [http://ligman.me/29diypX](http://ligman.me/29diypX) [http://ligman.me/29fNpHO](http://ligman.me/29fNpHO) [http://ligman.me/29oefNf](http://ligman.me/29oefNf) [http://ligman.me/29diypX](http://ligman.me/29diypX) [http://ligman.me/29jGTgC](http://ligman.me/29jGTgC) [http://ligman.me/29crPhL](http://ligman.me/29crPhL) [http://ligman.me/29FUJIk](http://ligman.me/29FUJIk) [http://ligman.me/29jGTgC](http://ligman.me/29jGTgC) [http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm](http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm) [http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm](http://ligman.me/1HGwMgm) [http://ligman.me/1G2oDNG](http://ligman.me/1G2oDNG) [http://ligman.me/1G2oDNG](http://ligman.me/1G2oDNG) [http://ligman.me/29u5uMT](http://ligman.me/29u5uMT) [http://ligman.me/29u5uMT](http://ligman.me/29u5uMT) [http://ligman.me/29rlRt3](http://ligman.me/29rlRt3) etc	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Bitcoin: Lifeline for Venezuela - deanfankhauser http://www.tokentalk.co/TokenTalk/press-release/Bitcoin%3A%20Lifeline%20For%20Venezuela ====== firekvz Venezuelan here, bitcoin is only used as a fast bridge between VEF and USD* mostly money laundering. That's it. So how it works is that people have tons of VEF from different sources, go to localbitcoins and get some btc and sell as soon as possible for usd in other places. The thing got so crazy that USD:VEF black market rate was stable at 1USD:200,000 VEF for like 2 weeks but the "bitcoin dollar" was trading at 1USD:350,000VEF Besides that, bitcoin has absolutely no use. And for the people saying that "mining" bitcoin is good in venezuela, they are totally wrong, mining bitcoin is a business you wouldn't want to go in, there is alot of mafia (because of what i said above) and alot of weird things happening, only those who are related to mafia/gov/drugs/illegal gold mining/corruption in general are the ones who can mine without the risks, if you are the average techie guy you are in huge risk, from like getting all your hardware stolen [1][2][3] to even be jailed and charged as terrorist [4] [1] [https://losbenjamins.com/2018/01/vea-regimen-roba- maquinas-b...](https://losbenjamins.com/2018/01/vea-regimen-roba-maquinas- bitcoin/) [2] [https://www.criptonoticias.com/sucesos/desmantelan-centro- mi...](https://www.criptonoticias.com/sucesos/desmantelan-centro-mineria- bitcoins-once-mil-equipos-venezuela/) [3] [https://www.el-carabobeno.com/pareja-detenida-por- comercio-i...](https://www.el-carabobeno.com/pareja-detenida-por-comercio- ilegal-con-7-maquinas-bitcoin-en-guacara/) [4] [http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/sucesos/incautaron- compu...](http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/sucesos/incautaron-computadores- para-minar-bitcoins-lara_215326) ~~~ CryptoPunk For a counter-point from another self-purported Venezuelan: [https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/60x8wv/freed...](https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/60x8wv/freedom_of_the_masses/) ~~~ jcranmer That's not so much a tale of "how Bitcoin is useful for normal people in Venezuela" as "here's why I, a cryptolibertarian, think Bitcoin is going to beat down fiat currency" where the cryptolibertarian happens to live in Venezuela. ~~~ CryptoPunk It's not just a political statement. He/she provides a practical effect of cryptocurrency on their life: >>I´d rather buy bitcoins from localbitcoins in less than 5 minutes than risk my safety buying USD from some really speculating, shady people. I invest most of my crypto savings long term in alt coins For someone whose private wealth is always at risk of seizure, and is in a impoverished country where the majority are at the brink of extreme deprivation, it seems pretty reasonable that cryptocurrency would help. ------ sebleon I seriously doubt the author has spoken to a single Venezuelan about Bitcoin. A couple realities: \- dozens of miners have gone to prison for exploiting power subsidies. Mining now requires pooling electricity from neighbors to hide high-usage households \- vast majority of Venezuelans don't even know about Bitcoin, remains a niche topic, not a useful currency at the moment \- unlike Bitcoin, the Bolivar has a military and police force behind it, they will squash competing currencies that begin gaining momentum ------ gabythenerd Mining is really riskful. If the electricity spike is noticed they can search your house and jail you. Only selected individuals can do it without consequences, mostly people from the government and military. For example, there is a rumor going around that they are restoring an entire floor of a public university with the front that they are going to "research" how to mine more effectively. It's not a coincidence that it's Vicerector was imposed just last year by the government[1]. I don't think Bitcoin will get more popular in Venezuela, there are other ways to exchange VEF:USD, in hard cash and wire transfers that generates more trust in most of the population. [1] [http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/educacion/vicerrector- ac...](http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/educacion/vicerrector-academico- para-usb-tiene-meritos-academicos_192561) ------ matt_wulfeck This article is exactly 100% correct, but only if you replace the word "bitcoin" with "USD" throughout the entire thing. ~~~ malvosenior The article states: _" According to a recent report by The Economist, Venezuela is the cheapest region on earth to mine bitcoin, because of its cheap electricity and the worthless Bolivar."_ How does that relate to USD? There are hundreds of stable currencies that _could_ replace the Bolivar but due to extremely cheap electricity, Bitcoin is in a unique position to help Venezuelans. ~~~ rat87 USD is most popular ~~~ malvosenior Right, but it's the functional uniqueness of Bitcoin that allows Venezuelans to acquire the USD. They aren't getting it directly. ------ fyi1183 I call bullshit. It's a nice story, and I don't doubt that _some_ Venezuelans benefit from bitcoin somehow. But for BTC to be considered a "lifeline" for the population would require people to actually do day-to-day transactions with it. That's not happening. ~~~ darawk Not really, it could also serve as an inflation hedging store of value. To which you might respond that Bitcoin is highly volatile, and you'd be correct. But it's substantially less volatile than the Bolivar. ~~~ wpietri But way, way more volatile than USD, EUR, or any currency of a neighboring country, as well as being much harder to buy anything with. ~~~ darawk Yep, possibly easier to obtain and/or hide, though. ------ throwoaway90401 The only real use for Bitcoin in Venezuela that I’ve seen is sending money to people there. I did that for a friend a while back, and he was able to exchange for Bolivares and buy food and essentials. He also reported that the exchange was illegal and carried substantial risk, but that the exchange rate was so good $100 was basically a life-changing amount of money and worth the risk. ------ cornholio The original source referenced in The Economist : [https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2018/04/e...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2018/04/economist-explains-2) ------ dbasedweeb This article completely ignores all of the reasons _why_ the economy collapsed, and seems to just happily go on with the unstated assumption that a new currency can help. The truth is that Venezuela is dead, what you’re seeing now is just agonal breathing, not life. Society is divided, the economy is destroyed, so of course the currency based on that failed. How does inventing a new currency on top of that failed system help? How is it not rearranging deck chairs on the Lusitania? Maybe a few miners can strike it rich through money laundering, based on heavily subsidized mining, but that fixes nothing. Cryptocurrency isn’t an escape from reality. ~~~ crypt1d umm...what? The article simply talks about how Bitcoin is used in Venezuela to deal with the crisis, not how it is a solution that will fix all of its problems. Its obviously a pro-crypto website talking about utilization (which is something the space really needs), and there is no harm in that. ~~~ dbasedweeb It opens with a very strong claim. _Bitcoin is a lifeline for citizens and residents of Venezuela._ It actually does seem harmful to frame “pro-crypto” in those unlikely terms. Or in other words, how does inventing an abstraction layer on top of your original failed currency, obtained by burning fossile fuels, help the average Venezuelan trying to buy food and sundries? It seems more like slapping a bandaid on a sucking chest wound and claiming that you’ve helped the patient. I’m not interested in the “crypto space” and what it needs, especially in a discussion of an article purporting to describe what the people of Venezuela need. Unless those two things overlap to the degree that it’s a “lifeline” for those people, it reeks of the usual pumping of cryptocurrency that seems to pervade the “space” in question. Bmelton: Between the distortion of the original Economist article used in this article, and this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16783272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16783272) I’d say that’s not what this is about. This currency is just a laundry for dollar bills. ~~~ bmelton I agree with (some of) your original post in that Venezuela is an ailing nation at best, but at the same time, it shouldn't take too much imagination to see that if you can convert cheap (in Bolivars) electricity into currency that is accepted at a much better exchange rate outside of the country that one can have supplies shipped in. Moreover, we know that in currency crises, black and gray markets spring up like wildfire, so it takes even less imagination to picture a proprietor starting to prefer crypto currencies in exchange for tangible goods vs. the already bad -- and more importantly, still declining local currency. Despite the volatility of crypto currencies, and the fact that they've been on a hard slide lately, it's still a better depreciation than hanging on to Bolivars. ------ foobarbecue What happened with the petro? ------ jamesmurray Hold on. How can the mafia, or government for that matter, systematically stop people from mining small amounts crypto (possibly arbitraging a huge gulf between electricity prices and USD exchange rates)? Other than the electricity cost how can they find you? People have found many more clever ways to hide economic activity in dangerous situations (see black markets in North Korea). I thought the whole point of cryptocurrencies was to exactly to get around this central control. If this wasn't possible, it’s an unfortunate and interesting example of how bitcoins ideologies don’t work in reality. Edit: Huh, what's with the downvotes? ~~~ jcranmer What, you mean the simplified world ideologies don't hold up in practice to the real world? What kind of craziness is this? Less sarcastically... that's kind of the big issue that people forget. The price of bitcoin is approximately the cost it takes to mine it less the cost of capital or so--in other words, you should expect to spend something like 95¢ in electricity to make $1 of bitcoin. Electricity prices aren't consistent across the world, but the notability of bitcoin is such that you have to compete against the lowest-cost places. In order to make a decent amount of money from bitcoin, you have to consume a decent amount of electricity. And that electricity has to be converted into some other form of energy, which usually comes out as heat or (in some cases) RF leakage. What that means is detecting mining is as simple as noticing who's using all the electricity (trivial, if you're the electric company), or walking down the street with a wide-spectrum RF sensor and IR gun. When you look at that kind of power draw, ~~~ jamesmurray >What, you mean the simplified world ideologies don't hold up in practice to the real world? What kind of craziness is this? Your derogatory tone is uncalled for, nothing in my comment was pro-crypto. Stashing of small to moderate currency against a low-quality government or mafia (via the conversion of electricity) seems like one good use case of currencies. If this isn't the case, it would be genuinely interesting to know why. > ...you should expect to spend something like 95¢ in electricity to make $1 > of bitcoin Got a quote for this 95% figure? Yes, I understand efficient markets. Presumably, a lot of the value of crypto is amortized from the hardware. > When you look at that kind of power draw, Your criticism relies on two unstated assumptions. 1\. Large scale. If I can stash a small rig somewhere, then I can produce currency. This process doesn't require scale or major investment, so you could mine at a small enough scale to be below notice (see also: black markets). This seems like a viable way to save funds at a personal/family level. 2\. Has electricity prices risen correspondingly with inflation? I would expect in a dev country electricity is subsidized or small relative to other living costs. The same energy it takes to run a home I could generate a few bucks here. A few bucks in our country is incredibly valuable right now in V.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Am I the only one deflated about the new TLDs? - scotthtaylor Come February 4th we are going to have a distinctively different web. With the onset of domains such as .plumber, .london, etc. Am I just being nostalgic of a world of .coms? ====== jaachan It's a cash grab for ICANN, IMHO. There's no need for anything but country TLDs. How often do you see .aero, .museum or .name? Nobody uses those, why would we need any more? And people are used to websites ending in the normal TLDs, how much recognition would you get that, if you advertised with yourname.plumber, it'd be your website? Maybe it's part of the 'corporations don't want to be bothered by countries' thing that's been going on</tinfoil> ------ caruana Give it a year and half of the new companies managing the some of the TLDs will be filing for bankruptcy ~~~ xandyrox I cannot argue if some people do not like them, I personally do not see a downside but I have not made up my mind if I will be using a new TLD. That being said you think half of the registries will go Bankrupt? Allow me to take you through some Math..although I think this qualifies as arithmetic not math. The bad TLD that was mentioned in this post was .PRO, .pro has 156K domains registered that not many compared to .com's 111 hundred million but Registry charge between 12-20 dollars per a domain. Let's use 12. Let's say this registry own only 1 TLD ( most own a few, donuts owns ~200) Tlds - 1 Domains per a tld - 156K Revenue per a domain - $12 = 1.872M Marketing Expense - 10% of sales = 200K Margin after operating expenses ( check out comps) lowest possible if you ask around is about 25%. = $374K Thats assuming things really do not work out and they only have 1 GTLD. Once you have scale margin goes all the way to 60% which would make earnings 1m and if you sold the domains for $20 earnings would be 1.56M. \- all earnings are pre tax. We will see but I would be shocked if half go under. ------ frou_dh There's already a bunch of weird and superfluous ones that hardly anyone encounters (ever see a .jobs or .pro?), so unless they bother you, I don't think things will be any different come February. ------ skram Put simply: no, you're not the only one	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ancient “su – hostile” vulnerability in Debian 8 and 9 - l2dy https://j.ludost.net/blog/archives/2018/06/13/ancient_su_-_hostile_vulnerability_in_debian_8_and_9/ ====== tedunangst For those unaware, ioctl(TIOCSTI) allows injecting characters back into the tty, where they will be read by the next process to read from the terminal. In this case, that process is the root shell that execed su. ~~~ _wmd I guess you're the right person to ask - why hasn't this just been ripped out of the likes of OpenBSD? edit: seems it already has! [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=149870941319610](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=149870941319610) ------ _wmd Another variant of using TIOCSTI with poor permissions. FWIW this exact same bug impacted Docker and LXC at various points. In the case of lxc-attach, when stdio is connected to a TTY, it creates a new pty within the container and multiplexes between them to avoid the issue. I don't think there is a single legitimate use for that ioctl.. it should just die already tl;dr passing a TTY with stopped privileged jobs reading from it (like an interactive root shell) into an unprivileged location is deadly, as the unprivileged location can use TIOCSTI to load up the TTY's input buffer and then exit, causing the stopped jobs to read that input when they're resumed ~~~ Dylan16807 "Terminal I/O Control - Simulate Terminal Input" ah okay ------ bcaa7f3a8bbc PaX/grsecurity has mitigation to this issue, at least for 10 years. From grsecurity's config for GRKERNSEC_HARDEN_TTY. \| There are very few legitimate uses for this functionality and it \| has made vulnerabilities in several 'su'-like programs possible in \| the past. Even without these vulnerabilities, it provides an \| attacker with an easy mechanism to move laterally among other \| processes within the same user's compromised session. Has one run a grsecurity kernel, the system would not be affected. Some independent developers and KSPP people are also trying to submit this mitigation to the mainline kernel for many years, but so far none of the patch went into the kernel. Since grsecurity is now a private product, you may want to check them out and apply this mitigation to the mainline kernel. [PATCH] drivers/tty: add protected_ttys sysctl * [https://gist.github.com/thejh/e163071dfe4c96a9f9b589b7a2c24f...](https://gist.github.com/thejh/e163071dfe4c96a9f9b589b7a2c24fc6) tiocsti-restrict : make TIOCSTI ioctl require CAP_SYS_ADMIN * [https://lwn.net/Articles/720740/](https://lwn.net/Articles/720740/) ------ im3w1l I'm increasingly feeling that terminals and bash are just too complex and have too many edge cases and footguns and that we'd be better of just starting over with something were security was a focus from day zero. ~~~ lmm Yep. Unix has zillions of ways for processes to interact with each other, which makes for an enormous attack surface. The future is something like unikernels on the server and something like Qubes running them on the desktop, so that each "process" is properly isolated and can only communicate through channels that are deliberately designed for it. We're going to have to rediscover how we do things like pipelines in a safe way, but the current unix design of small processes interacting via unstructured interfaces that mingle commands and data is just untenable. ~~~ MisterTea They fixed a lot of stuff in plan 9 and it's a pleasure to tinker with. Everything is partitioned in namespaces to isolate processes. Since the entire system is file system based, you manipulate the process namespace which is really just a file that lists the mounts and binds which build that namespace file system. Binds and unions are a blessing and eliminate the headache of environment variables. Every object is a file and everything is communicated via the network transparent in-kernel file protocol, 9p. And because of that, Plan 9 is fully distributed. For example: I can share the internet without a router or nat by exporting my internet facing ip stack and mount it on the machines needing net access. As far as the isp knows, a single machine is talking to it. I can do the same with file systems, file servers, network cards, sound cards, disks, usb devices, etc. It's far from usable in production and 9p is a dog over high latency links. but the ideas it has are simple yet brilliant. Best distro to check out for newcomers is 9front (they're silly fellows but don't let that fool you. serious top notch hackers that lot.) ------ peterwwillis This explains the problem a little clearer I think: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=173008](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=173008) ~~~ masklinn So if I understand correctly, the issue is that when su-ing to _more restricted_ privileges a hostile program (immediately executed via -c) can use TIOCSTI to inject commands which will escape su and execute as the more privileged user? Is that also an issue using `su; ./hostile; exit`? ~~~ tedunangst You mean su to root? The same mechanism still exists, though root already has other powers. ~~~ masklinn No, I mean su to a new shell and execute a command there rather than su -c. ~~~ jwilk That would be weird if "su -c" was vulnerable but interactive "su" was not. The former is much easier to fix. In fact, "su" in Debian (which the subject of the submitted article), calls setsid() when you use -c, which defeats TIOCSTI. ~~~ masklinn > That would be weird if "su -c" was vulnerable but interactive "su" was not. Not necessarily, if TIOCSTI just pushes stuff to the term input buffer, this is going to get popped on the next prompt of su, so on an interactive su it's not going to be executed under escalated privileges but is instead going to be executed as the same user that executed the hostile program, while with a non- interactive su it's going to get popped on the next prompt of the su _caller_ and thus get escalated privileges. That's my understanding of it anyway, I could be completely off. ~~~ jwilk I see what you mean. Yes, the exploit won't work if the payload is read by the attacker's shell, rather than the root shell. But it's easy to ensure that this won't happen. The laziest way is to kill the shell before issuing TIOCSTI ioctls. :-) ------ codedokode As I remember, `login` program (that asks for your login and password on terminal) does a "virtual hangup" to prevent such things. ~~~ cryptonector Well, on BSD the way this works is that when the session leader exits the pty/tty will internally call vhangup(2), which in turn does all that revoke(2) does on the tty FD plus it sends SIGHUP to any processes with that tty as the controlling tty. Linux for a long time had nothing like this. It has a vhangup(2), but looking at its implementation it doesn't seem to do what the BSD vhangup(2) does by calling revoke(2): replace all open file descriptors pointing to the tty with one that returns EIO for read(2)/write(2)/etc. Linux does NOT have a revoke(2), or at least I can't find it. There was a patch for that back in 2006 and 2007. I don't know what happened to that. EDIT: Some trivia as well. On BSD SIGHUP is generated by the tty. On Linux and Solaris/Illumos it's only generated by the session leader process on exit, and only if it wants to. This is how bash's disown builtin works: it just doesn't HUP the disown background jobs. The C shell (csh) historically never generated SIGHUP because it's a BSD shell. Back in the early aughts there was some controversy where csh users wanted OpenSSH's sshd to close a session when the pty session leader exits, as otherwise the session would stay open indefinitely. The OpenSSH developers feared this would lose data, and they were right. The source of this problem was that csh wasn't generating SIGHUP on Solaris and Linux, so background jobs stayed alive and held an open file reference to the pty, which meant that they kept sshd from seeing EOF on the ptm, so sshd would not terminate the session as long as those bg jobs stayed alive. This is all still the case today. ~~~ caf When a tty is hung up on Linux, the file operations of all open file structures associated with it are replaced with hung_up_tty_fops, which means all subsequent read(2) returns 0 (EOF), write(2) returns EIO and ioctl(2) returns ENOTTY or EIO. This is basically a tty-specific implementation of revoke(2). Also, when the session leader exits on Linux, the kernel _does_ send SIGHUP and SIGCONT to session leader's process group and the foreground process group (this is in tty_signal_session_leader()). ~~~ cryptonector Oh, that must be pretty new (relative to the early aughts anyways). Sorry I missed it. ------ erlkonig Ah, this looks like the old ungetc() exploit, where (back in the 1980s at utexas.edu) we'd leave a process connected to a terminal, wait for another user to log in, then push characters to their shell from our program using ungetc(). Essentially, each character pushed ends up looking like a fresh input character to the other program. The basic issue is whether all open file handles that shouldn't be there (our hack program, for example) got closed out by the new login session. For something like login, the question is easy, _ONLY_ itself should be connected early on. For su, it's much weirder, since the user may have created background jobs before running su, and su and sudo can't reasonably close all other handles on the original tty device. Further su and sudo can't close all file descriptors of the "sub-session" as it exits, because that the "sub-session" is created by forking, so su/sudo aren't around at the end. Creating a separate pseudo-terminal device to allow for draconian cleanup, and prevent even having both user IDs connected to the same tty device, seems like the best place to start. Hmm, now I want to go update the user-group-setter program I use (which also can set auth user IDs on Solaris, etc) and try having it do ptty allocation for the subjob. In the meantime, try this to get a session and run through the same demo steps: setsid -w su - <user> Won't for _everything_ (no /dev/tty), but it does block the example. You can add a tty if you have one handy, too, by using redirection in the spawned process in this general form, but I don't currently have the cluon for how to create a /dev/pts/<num> from the shell level - if someone can construct the full command, I'd like to see it :-) setsid sh -c 'exec command <> /dev/tty2 >&0 2>&1' ~~~ jwilk > I don't currently have the cluon for how to create a /dev/pts/<num> from the > shell level As I recommended in [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2018/06/14/2](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2018/06/14/2) , use screen or tmux: screen su - <user> script(1) is more lightweight than screen/tmux, but it can't be easily persuaded to run arbitrary commands, such as "su". :-/ ~~~ yorwba How is persuading _script_ to run _su_ not easy? I just tried _script -c su /dev/null_ and it worked as I expected. ( _/ dev/null_ is there to prevent _script_ from logging the interaction to a file) ~~~ jwilk D'oh, you're right. I don't know how I missed this option. ------ carroccio TIOCSTI ioctl [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2992.en....](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/Fahrplan/events/2992.en.html) ------ wilun Posix TTY and more precisely stdin/stdout/stderr inheritance and internals of FD have a completely insane design. There is the famous divide between file descriptors and file descriptions. Hilarity can and will ensue in tons of domains. I nearly shipped some code with bugs because of that mess (and could only avoid those bugs by using threads; you can NOT switch your std fd to non- blocking without absolutely unpredictable consequences), and obviously some bugs of a given class can create security issues. Especially, and in a way, obviously, when objects are shared across security boundaries. Far is the time when Unix people were making fun of the lack of security in consumer Windows. Today, there is no comprehensive model on the most used "Unix" side, while modern Windows certainly have problems in the default way they are configured, but at least the security model exist with well defined boundaries (even if we can be sad that some seemingly security related features are not considered officially as security boundaries, at least we are not deluding ourselves into thinking that a spaghetti of objects without security descriptors can be shared and the result can be a secure system...) ~~~ caf There _is_ a model, it's just not particularly well publicised: a file descriptor is a capability. That's it. ~~~ wilun Is it efficient and sufficient though? And can and do we build real security on top of it? This issue shows systems have been built for decades with blatant holes because it was not taken into account in even core os admin tools. There is the other problem corresponding to the myth that everything is a fd. Which has never been true, and is even less and less as time passes. Also, extensive extra security hooks and software using them are built, but not of top of this model. Finally, sharing posix fd across security boundaries often causes problems because of all the features available for both sides, for which the security impact are not studied. A model just stating that posix fd are capa is widely insufficient. So if this is the only one, even in the context in pure Posix we already know this is an extremely poor one. ------ exikyut Nobody else has pointed this out (!): whatever platform is running at this URL doesn't sanitize input. Notice how the C #includes seem to be including emptiness. Well, <stdio.h> et al weren't stripped; they're still in the source code, un-converted < > (ie NOT converted to < >) and all. ------ pjkundert We used TIOCSTI to attack Unix terminal sessions left open to “write” — in 1985. I was wondering when/if this would show up again! ------ JdeBP This is old news, that keeps being reported over and over. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that people keep pointing to the wrong locus of the problem. Even here, this is being characterized as a _Debian_ problem. This is a _kernel_ mechanism. [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2013-6409](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2013-6409) * [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-6565](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2015-6565) * [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-2779](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-2779) * [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-7545](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2016-7545) * [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5226](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5226) Some kernel people take the view that TIOCSTI is of no Earthly use, and there are other ways to implement line editing, and just make using it an error. * [http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170701132619](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170701132619) * [https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/baecf150995d4609cd1479...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/baecf150995d4609cd147948779361c3152f355d) Others take a different view. * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/03/9](http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2017/06/03/9) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/15/8](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/15/8) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/17/1](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/17/1) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/29/16](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/29/16) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/9](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/9) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/26](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/26) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/27](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/27) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/32](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/30/32) * [http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/31/16](http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/05/31/16) ~~~ AbacusAvenger Usually when something is reported as being a distribution bug, it's because they have some patch specific to their packages that causes the issue. Is that not the case here? Are other distrbutions affected right now? ~~~ JdeBP I say it again: This is a _kernel_ mechanism. Every operating system based upon Linux provides programs with this mechanism. This is not some ioctl() introduced by a Debian patch. This is a mechanism added to Linux by Linus Torvalds on 1993-12-23. * [http://repo.or.cz/davej-history.git/commitdiff/9d09486414951...](http://repo.or.cz/davej-history.git/commitdiff/9d0948641495169728d4074f976fd655e30afedf) Pete French added it to FreeBSD against his better judgement on 2010-01-04. It might have been in an earlier implementation of the terminal line discipline, too. * [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/74b0526bbe6326adb7...](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commit/74b0526bbe6326adb72e26dabfe79ab1fe00ca4b) OpenBSD, which no longer implements the kernel mechanism, _had_ had it since the initial import from NetBSD in 1995. * [https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/df930be708d50e9715f173ca...](https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/df930be708d50e9715f173caa26ffe1b7599b157/sys/kern/tty.c#L847) Illumos has it, and has had since at least the OpenSolaris launch. * [https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/9a2c4685271c2f0...](https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/blob/9a2c4685271c2f0cb4b08f4cc1192387e67af3f9/usr/src/uts/common/io/tty_common.c#L263) It was even in 4.3BSD. ------ bjt2n3904 Just tested this out, can confirm it works on Debian 7 as well. Genius little trick! Not sure about practical exploitation, though. ------ blauditore I'm not a shell pro; what is happening on the sleep line? ~~~ c0l0 $ (sleep 10; /tmp/a.out id) & $ -> the end of the prompt of a "normal" (i. e. non-root) user () -> run everything inside in a forked subshell of the current shell sleep 10 -> "block"/sleep for 10 seconds via the `sleep` executable in your $PATH ; -> after the left-hand side terminates, proceed with the next command on the right-hand side /tmp/a.out id -> fork and exec the program located at /tmp/a.out with the literal byte sequence "id" on its argument vector & -> run this command (the whole subshell that () requests) as a background job When the user exits the shell that spawned the subshell, the whole process group will receive SIGHUP. The backgrounded subshell will still continue running, and after its `sleep` child process terminates, go on to run `/tmp/a.out`. ~~~ blauditore Ah thanks, I didn't understand the subshell forking part before. ------ sandworm101 Lol. Thanks. Work machine. Must have ctrl-tabbed without realizing. ~~~ mikestew Pretty sure you're in the wrong thread, mate. ~~~ qu4z-2 I guess they ctrl-tabbed without realising it...	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The highest paid athlete of all time was a Roman Charioteer - hckr_nj https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/18/the-highest-paid-athlete-of-all-time-was-a-roman-charioteer-if-he-had-lived-today-he-would-have-been-worth-15-billion/ ====== ThrustVectoring When comparing across time periods as broad as this, pretty much the only thing that matters is how you compare purchasing power and adjust for inflation. If you compare something that hasn't gotten appreciably cheaper over time - say, gold, or skilled labor - you wind up with an extremely large number. Compare something that _has_ \- like grain or clothing - and you wind up with a much more reasonable number. Going based off agriculture, back-of- the-envelope math gives about 400k people in Rome and $1000/yr expenses on staple foods for about $400m, which is significantly less than the probably- gold-based conversion scheme the article's source uses. And if you want to be really persnickety, no amount of money in Rome would buy antibiotics, televisions, etc, etc. ~~~ c3534l Comparisons beyond 100 years or so are largely meaningless. You're right about purchasing power, and that leads to your last point which is that what could actually be bought was so fundamentally different that attempting to do so is almost always going to mislead the public and be irresponsible. But it's one of those things that reporters and journalists can't help themselves from doing. ~~~ greggman3 Is 100yrs that hard? I recently watched "The Little Giant" (1933) where the main character claims to have over a million dollars and is kind of retiring. I found it fun to look up what that million dollars would be worth today. According to one site it is $18 million. He went to a hotel in Santa Barbara where he was paying $45 a night for a giant suite. That comes out to over $800 a night which sounds like it might be in the correct ballpark. He gave is girlfriend who he was breaking up with a check for $25k which came out to about $500k in todays terms it seems. He rented a 20 bedroom 12 bathroom mansion for $1450 a month which is apparently $25k today. Sounds reasonable for a 20 bedroom mansion? Those all seem like reasonable numbers. PS: not recommending the movie. It was cute but not great. ~~~ winter_blue $1 mil in 1993 is not worth $18 mil today (ie. in 2020). Inflation has averaged 2% during this time, so over 27 years: (1.02)^27 = 1.7069 $1 mil from 1993 would be worth no more than ~$1.71 today. ~~~ unnouinceput He said 1933, not 1993 ------ papeda Wikipedia [1] has a more sober figure than the $15 billion claimed from the featured article, which is far below the wealth of modern athletes: > In equivalent basic good purchasing power, Diocles' wealth would be between > approximately $60 million and $160 million. This appears to be supported by the table at the bottom of this page [2], which claims that a seaside villa in Naples cost about 3mil sesterces/sestertii. That makes the featured article's claim that 35mil sestertii is $15 billion questionable. Adjusting using seaside villa prices, 35mil sestertii (Diocles' wealth) is more like $7mil. The $15bil figure appears to come from the "enough to pay the whole army for 1/5 of a year" stat multiplied by the modern-day USA figure [3] (by the way, [3] appears to be the source for much of the featured article). As far as the "enough to pay the whole army for a few months" stat goes, the most common figure I can find for "annual pay for a legionary" during Diocles' life is 1200 sestertii, or 240 for 1/5 of a year [4]. 36mil/240 is 150,000, which does sound like a plausible (even high) number for the size of the Roman army. On the other hand, [2] claims that 1200 sestertii buys about 100 lbs of pork, so that means a soldier could expect to get paid about 1 Roman pig per year? Cross-era price comparisons are hard! [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Appuleius_Diocles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Appuleius_Diocles) [2] [http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lac61/ASSIGNMENTS/SectionOne/R...](http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~lac61/ASSIGNMENTS/SectionOne/RomanMoney.html) [3] [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all- tim...](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all-time) [4] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/40310480](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40310480) ~~~ GuiA At 1200 sest. per year, a 3M sest. villa would be 2500 years of labor. A $7M villa, on the other hand, would be only ~230 years of labor for a US solider paid $30k a year. A pound of pork at Safeway today is ~3/lb. 100 pounds would be $300, which would be quite a meager yearly pay. My main takeaway is that pork has likely gotten much cheaper, but not seaside villas. ~~~ thaumasiotes > A $7M villa, on the other hand, would be only ~230 years of labor for a US > solider paid $30k a year. Your parent comment says that, adjusted to modern villa prices, Diocles' entire wealth -- 35 million sestercii, enough to buy 12 standard seaside villas -- would amount to $7M. This would put the price of one villa at only $600,000, or 20 years' labor at $30k / year. ~~~ GuiA Oh! Indeed I misread. Things do align better that way. ------ mci A Polish numismatist, Zbigniew Żabiński, came up with _trofa_ (from Greek _trophe_ 'alimentation'), a universal measure of the value of money. One trofa is defined as an average person's daily ration of food typical for the given place and time. Altogether, it has 3000 kcal: 1800 kcal in 450 g of carbohydrates, 900 kcal in 100 g of fat, and 300 kcal in 75 g of protein. For instance, in late 1970s' Poland, one trofa consisted of 400 g of rye bread, 100 g of wheat flour, 250 g of potatoes, 100 g of beef, 100 g of sugar, 80 g of butter, and 1/2 litre of milk. Assuming that its content has not changed, you take the cost of the food (8.70 PLN in 2016), add 20% for condiments and preparation, and get 10.50 PLN as the 2016 price of a trofa in Poland.[0] In Octavian's times, one denarius could buy you 2 trofas (with content appropriate for ancient Mediterranean lands),[0] Judas's 30 pieces of silver were worth 60 trofas,[1] etc. Unfortunately, Żabiński published in Polish behind the Iron Curtain so the trofa is virtually unknown outside Poland. The Big Mac index is its pale reflection. More information in Polish: [0] A table of trofa's price from Octavian's Rome to contemporary Poland: [http://blognumizmatyczny.pl/2016/03/14/trofa-miernik- wartosc...](http://blognumizmatyczny.pl/2016/03/14/trofa-miernik-wartosci- pieniadza/) [1] Thirty pieces of silver: [http://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media//files/Collectanea_Theologica/C...](http://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media//files/Collectanea_Theologica/Collectanea_Theologica-r1973-t43-n2/Collectanea_Theologica-r1973-t43-n2-s65-75/Collectanea_Theologica-r1973-t43-n2-s65-75.pdf) [2] The purchasing power in medieval Balkans: [https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/8080/1/11_Zb...](https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/8080/1/11_Zbigniew_Zabinski_Sila_nabywcza_pieniadza_na_Balkanach_227-232.pdf) [3] Google search: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Żabiński+trofa](https://www.google.com/search?q=Żabiński+trofa) ~~~ Mirioron While it's an interesting idea, this only captures relative wealth. Places that have higher quality food as standard would be seen as less rich. It's much cheaper to get calories from staples such as rice and potatoes, but a lot more difficult to get it from protein. It's possible to survive on a diet of mostly carbs and little protein, but that can also make you more susceptible to malnutrition, especially if famines are abound. Also, 3000 kcal per day means that everyone gets fat. The amount of intense physical activity you have to do for an average person to use up that many calories is on the level of modern athletes. ~~~ notechback Just to mention that staples like grain have indeed much protein, so your sentence actually doesn't make much sense. The conception of food consisting of vegetable + meat/fish + staple (rice, bread, potato, ..) is an utterly modern one. All across history in most settled cultures will have lived principally of local plants of some kind, with meat being a rate treat. The exception being fishing villages but even there vegetables/grains will always have been a principal source of calories and nutrients. ~~~ Mirioron Yes, and people nowadays are taller, smarter, and live longer. A large part of the Flynn effect is usually attributed to nutrition. Humans can survive with poor nutrition (not getting the right amount of nutrients they need) for a very long time, but it usually has consequences, especially when it happens during childhood. Another thing to keep in mind is that humans didn't evolve to be farmers. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers. Just because for a slice of our existence people ate one way doesn't mean that that's the diet most suited for us. By the way, there's a difference between animal proteins and protein in grain. They aren't quite the same composition of amino-acids. ------ RickJWagner I read a while back where Joe DiMaggio was being interviewed in his later years. The writer mentioned the astronomical sums recent players got, while greats of the past played for much less. "Some of today's players make millions a year. What do you think you'd be worth?" "Oh, I figure I'd be worth close to a million. Maybe 8 or 9 hundred thousand." "But you're Joe DiMaggio! One of the all time greats!" "Yes, but I'm in my 70s...." ------ zw123456 A fun thought experiment is what if you could go back in time to year nnnn, pick a time, and you could only take with you 1 lb of material, or X kg, name some reasonable amount you can carry by hand. What would you take with you ? Fun game. But for a time greater than say 120 years, I would argue 1lb of aluminum would make you a kajillionaire since it was not until around 1900 or so that it was possible to refine it, before then it was one of the rarest materials. You could also name things like a computer, a machine gun etc. This little thought game sort of highlights the issue discussed in this thread. Imagine how much you would have made if you had been able to race that chariot guy if you had say a modern 4x4 (assuming you could find gas) although that violates the 1lb rule:) ~~~ m463 a gun, a solar panel, and a tablet with wikipedia. ~~~ I-M-S perhaps a taser would be even more useful in this scenario since you'd be able to recharge it and not worry about ammo ------ themodelplumber "Diocles is also notable for owning an extremely rare ducenarius, a horse that had won at least 200 races" \--Wikipedia That seems pretty impressive, and it made me wonder how race horses compare (or are treated differently?) today. ~~~ gargarplex It's also possible he had access to rare supplements that enhanced performance; a modern equivalent would be a banned PED or Performance Enhancing Drug. ~~~ ludamad I guess I'm morbidly curious how much better performance a doped horse has? ~~~ teruakohatu I would think much like doping does today, marginal but when all the competitors / animals are all at the top of their game, marginal gains can be the difference between winning and losing. ~~~ ludamad That makes sense, thanks ------ akamoonknight One of the interesting things that stands out to me is that the age range of athleticism is still the same as today. I guess it's not that surprising that his career spanned from age 18 to 42, but the fact that lines up so closely with modern professional sport competitiveness is intriguing at least for some reason. Sample size of one of course, but I guess maybe that even for all the advancements we've made in terms of knowing about the human body, physical limits haven't changed to a drastic degree or something. ------ v01dlight "According to Dr. Struck, chariot racer from Ancient Rome named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, amassed a fortune of 35,863,120 sesterces – the equivalent of $15 billion." ... “His total take home amounted to five times the earnings of the highest paid provincial governors over a similar period – enough to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for one year, or to pay all the ordinary soldiers of the Roman Army at the height of its imperial reach for a fifth of a year” ~~~ qzw So the highest paid provincial governors were typically getting paid $3B over 18 years? Sounds kind of high and makes me rather dubious of how the $15B figure is calculated. ~~~ maxander It's also interesting that the Roman Army apparently ate five times as much as the entire city of Rome. Resource allocation was clearly very different back then (and apparently in our favor.) ~~~ rsynnott Food wouldn’t have been the military’s main expense. In a pre-industrial society weapons and equipment were extremely expensive. ------ dmix This is basically a rewrite of the original article on Laphams Quarterly and a better source (images aren’t miscaptioned and there’s an audio version) [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all- tim...](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/greatest-all-time) ------ 7leafer Seems like the highest paid athlete of these days is this: [https://archive.org/details/37AsterixAndTheChariotRace/page/...](https://archive.org/details/37AsterixAndTheChariotRace/page/n13/mode/2up) ------ zeristor Perhaps slightly askew, I’ve read Norwich’s History of Byzantium and he talks about there being the Green and Blue factions that kept squabbling some thousand years later. It seemed the White and Green had collapsed in previous centuries. I was in the Blue team at my primary school... ~~~ tokai You blues are so full of yourself, we greens are going strong thank you very much. ------ peter303 I compute 35M sesterces = US$140M. A solidus of gold weighs 8 grams and was worth 100 sesterces. A gram of gold $52 today. A sesterces would be about $4. ------ boringg Ok so whats the realistic number here? I was hoping to using this in the virtual trivia game but it has lost its lustre in reading the comment thread. ------ londons_explore Romans didn't have television to broadcast these races to the whole nation. The only way to become rich was through a share of ticket sales. Ticket sales are limited by the size of the stadium and frequency of races. With ~thousands of races in a career and ~thousands of people in a stadium, something doesn't add up... If tickets were expensive enough to amass such a fortune (remembering revenue would also need to pay for other athletes and the venue), I would imagine not that many people could afford to attend... ~~~ Gibbon1 Colosseum sat about 50,000 people. 2000 races would be 100,000,000 customers served. Assuming it's alway full. Not a historian but consistently have heard that the games were heavily subsidized by the wealthy. Kinda like the big boss handing out season tickets to favored staff and business associates. I think it's sometimes hard to imagine how important this stuff was. The Byzantine had a revolt that involved Chariot Race factions. Seriously. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots) ~~~ doikor These races weren't hold at the Colosseum but at an oval track. The biggest one called Circus Maximus seated 150,000. But in general these were free to attend. Some rich guy would pay for it to become more famous/get political power. ------ nkingsy This seems to be using scale and price changes to mislead. The modern equivalent would be Lebron James funding a school system, which seems like a similar commitment. We can imagine Lebron eg paying the police force of Cleveland for a quarter of a year. Perhaps more comparable numbers to Rome. Nothing about the numbers for the globe or the us compare to ancient Roman numbers.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mozilla increases browser privacy with encrypted DNS - jwoodswce https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/09/10/mozilla-increases-browser-privacy-with-encrypted-dns/ ====== flywithdolp I'm impressed by how Brave and Mozilla are paying attention to users privacy I'm using brave at the moment but I see so much news lately about Mozilla I'm considering switching (Apparently changing a browser is a big decision for me)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Immobile Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse - sageabilly http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse ====== soyiuz Two footnotes on this article: 1\. The problems it highlights can be reduced to low tax revenues. Our infrastructure is crumbling because we do not collect enough taxes to subsidize it. Things like roads and trains cannot (and should not) pay for themselves---they are a public good. The train might be empty at night, but the ability to take a train home prevents drunk driving, for example. One cannot put a monitory value on services like that, they speak to our collective quality of life. The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth. 2\. Re: the conversation about walk-ability of cities. The key concept here is _density_. We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. Instead, municipalities in places like the Bay Area consistently vote against new construction and against zoning laws that would allow for taller, more densely populated buildings/neighborhoods. The law of supply and demand says increase the supply of housing to make something affordable. This is not some mysterious process: there's simply no political will on the part of existing inhabitants to "devalue" their residences by increasing the supply in the housing market. ~~~ PantaloonFlames > We need to value density as it allows for more compact living. rack em and stack em, eh? recent research finds that people living in low-density suburbs are happier than people living in cities. People living in rural areas are happiest of all. [http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673](http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11673) We can promote more "compact living" but the data shows it degrades human happiness. ~~~ ch4s3 Serious question, why do rural areas have higher suicide rates per capita? ~~~ xnfndnx Arguments presented without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. The guy you're responding to cited his, please cite yours. ~~~ cmurf [http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural- suicide.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/04/rural-suicide.aspx) [http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the- growin...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/the-growing-risk- of-suicide-in-rural-america/387313/) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/rural-youth- suicide...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/16/rural-youth- suicides_n_6867420.html) ------ massysett This is not at all illuminating and is just a typical advocacy piece for more transit funding. Like most of these pieces, it compares road spending and transit spending as though this is somehow a useful comparison. It isn't. For rail transit systems, spending includes all labor and capital expenses--train operators, cars, electricity, etc. Road spending does not include the enormous capital investment that citizens and businesses spend for motor vehicles. Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road. Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point. To top it off the piece says nothing about "why traffic is awful". ~~~ nostromo Yeah, the article points out that only 20% of our federal and state transit budgets go to transit, implying that it's underfunded. But it lacks the context that only 5% of Americans use transit... ~~~ goodcanadian It is a chicken and egg problem: Transit sucks, so no one uses transit. No one uses transit, so funding is sub- optimal. Funding is sub-optimal, so transit sucks. This cycle can be broken by funding transit properly. I have been to plenty of cities where transit was cheap, convenient, and useful. And before someone trots out the density problem, I have been to plenty of places that are far less dense than LA and have far better transit. ~~~ jim-greer I'm curious about the sparse places that have good transit... Where do you mean? ~~~ goodcanadian Europe, mostly, where what are essentially small towns and villages are often connected by good train or bus service to each other. You may consider it inter-urban rather than intra-urban, but the distances would easily fit within LA, and the density is clearly lower (because there are farms in between). ------ dkopi The best method of transit is walking. A lot of the problems with traffic and public transport are solved when we invest in walk-able cities. Cities where you can live close enough to work to walk there, close enough to your friends, close enough to the grocery store, your neighborhood bar or your kid's school. No discussion of Mass transit or "giving up your car" is completely without discussing the walk-ability of cities. ~~~ api Tangent but: I live in SoCal, and I can't get my head around the car culture mentality. Of all the places that should be walkable, one that is 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the entire year should rank very high on the list. But nooo.... the walkable cities are in places that get run over by a glacier every six months. Go figure. ~~~ greggman Because it's large? I'm all for public transportation and LA used to have the best in the world 80 years ago. But, a large city as large as LA is never really going to be completely walkable unless everyone always moves close to their job. That would mean moving away from friends and family because of a job change rather than just commuting a little further. I suspect most people would chose to stay near their friends and family rather than move closer to their job. You can compare Tokyo which is large like LA but which has excellent mass transit and yet the average commute is 80 minutes each way. Why? People can't or won't uproot their families for new jobs. Also housing close to a job is probably also often either too expensive (downtown) or undesirable (industrial area). ~~~ jdmichal Also, the popularization of two-income households complicates this quite a bit. How often do you see partners that work near each other? ------ rsync Can we just come out and admit something ? Buses are terrible. They are terrible functionally, they are terrible aesthetically, and they are terrible logistically. In fact, I would go so far as to say that across a broad spectrum of preferences, you _would be very hard pressed_ to find anything worse in the urban, built environment than some big, loud, lumbering, clumsy (and usually) sooty bus bungling about the place. I love good public transit. I love light rail. I love the subway. I will _do anything_ not to ride a bus. I am reminded of that quote from steve jobs about the touchscreen phones and the stylus: "if you see a (bus), they blew it." ~~~ nulltype Well the reason light rail and subways are so good isn't because they're on rails, but because they get their own track. If you put a bus on its own street, suddenly they're not as bad anymore: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit) ~~~ rsync I agree that BRT (which I have a lot of experience with)[1][2][3] does make things a bit better. However, the successful BRT I have seen is always in very specialized circumstances, while the proposals I have seen for BRT in (for instance) San Francisco have been so full of weird compromises and bizarre edge cases that I am not optimistic they will make anything better. [1] Hop/Skip/Jump buses in Boulder [2] 16th street mall shuttle in Denver [3] "VelociRFTA" BRT in Aspen/Basalt/Glenwood ~~~ nulltype Did they change the Skip? I used to take that and it was just a normal bus in the normal street as far as I recall. ------ verg Costs are a major part of the problem. US rail construction costs are by far the most expensive in the world [1]. Other countries are able to build rail at costs in the $100-250 million per km range (even in dense cities). The East Side access project in NYC has costs around $4 billion per km. Los Angeles has much better costs in the $400-500 million per km range [2]. Its hard to imagine the US will be able to build much transit at those costs. From 2012[3]: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine." [1] [https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us- rail-construction-costs/) [2] [https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...](https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transportation/construction- costs/) [3] [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor- rules...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-08-27/labor-rules-snarl- u-s-commuter-trains) ~~~ bradleyjg There's problems on the operations side too. The same agency that is building that East Side Access (LIRR) still does fare collection by sending well compensated employees walking up and down every train to punch paper tickets twice per ride. I don't know if it's an urban legend or not, but I've been told that one of those conductors punching tickets on every train is technically designated and paid as a "fireman" i.e. person responsible for shoveling coal into a boiler because the collective bargaining agreement forbids them from eliminating the position. ------ FreedomToCreate Cities need to prioritize walking, biking and transit. What this means is that, these modes of transportation need to be made safer and faster. Currently walking through a major city is bogged down by the number of intersections you have to wait at. One idea would be to make intersection movement faster for pedestrians and transit during all hours except the morning and evening rush hour, during which vehicle movement should be prioritized to get cars off the roads as quickly as possible. ~~~ pc86 With the exception of areas where it's impossible (NYC) IME the majority of pedestrians and cyclists simply do not care about the crosswalks/laws/etc. Jaywalking is constant as is crossing in the crosswalk against the signal. What I'm saying is outside of structural changes to the roads themselves (like you mention, eliminating some intersections) I don't see much change happening. ~~~ dublinben The very concept of jaywalking or dedicated crosswalks is a symptom of the car-first mentality.[0] If pedestrians and cyclists had the right of way as they should, this wouldn't be an issue. [0] [http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention- jaywalking/...](http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention- jaywalking/1837/) ~~~ douche Crosswalks are awful. Outside of the ones where there is an actual traffic light, they are always placed in terrible locations. Moreover, they are just about the worst place possible to try to cross a street. I've been doing a lot of walking around the medium sized town I live in the past year, and I've had to get very good at looking away from the road when I want to cross, otherwise vehicles that have a quarter-mile of empty space behind them will come to a stop, and make me feel like I have to rush across, when they could have just kept going, and we would have both been able to go about our business at our leisure. ------ BurningFrog Traffic is awful because road owners aren't charging for access. From an Economics standpoint, congested traffic is the same phenomenon as the old Soviet bread lines. A underpriced good is inaccessible in practice, since supply is way lower than demand at that price. The solution is "Road Pricing", where drivers pay to drive. The price varies depending on what road, time of day etc. Maximum revenue should coincide with maximum throughput, giving everyone (ready to pay) a smooth and fast commute. It also provides incentives to build more roads where they are mostly needed. ~~~ tribe Isn't this the point of the gas tax? For every mile you drive, you use more gas. The more gas you use, the more you pay. Tracking which roads people are driving on would also require massive infrastructure investment, and have significant privacy implications. ~~~ choward The gas tax doesn't take time (or supply and demand) into account. Driving during rush hour should cost a lot more than driving at 3AM on an empty street. Sure, you use more gas sitting in traffic, but it doesn't make that much of a difference. ~~~ ams6110 Tesla can solve this. They know when and where the car was driven, and each time it's charged, the charging station can interrogate the car and compute the appropriate congestion surcharge. ~~~ kalleboo Singapore is now developing a new congestion charge system based on GPS that will have high granularity. We'll see how that works... [http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword...](http://www.lta.gov.sg/apps/news/default.aspx?scr=yes&keyword=ERP2) ------ louprado To expand upon the specific discussion of the OP, I feel we are witnessing a historical pattern: urban-flight -> under-valued urban real-estate -> then urban renewal and economic opportunity -> influx of homeless and criminals since high-population density is good for both -> then public criticism that the cops are too heavy handed -> cops less likely to enforce + strain on infrastructure and services (like mass transit) + urban unrest due to economic disparity -> urban-flight -> ... If the problem is that the BART is operating beyond capacity, adding capacity might not matter if the population is set to decline for the other reasons stated. ------ Tiktaalik The declining gas tax problem is going to get worse as electric cars increase in popularity. The solution is comprehensive road pricing, where a larger share of the real costs of road infrastructure and parking infrastructure are borne by the users. The added benefit of correctly pricing driving is that people will make more informed decisions about where they live and how they get to work, that will result in more compact communities and less urban sprawl. ~~~ jessaustin Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars. ~~~ ams6110 Big trucks do pay a substantial road use tax. I don't know the specifics, but they don't get to drive for the same cost as the passenger cars. On toll roads the trucks pay a lot more too. ~~~ jessaustin They don't pay 40 times what passenger vehicles pay. ------ supergeek133 I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system. Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter. It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options? Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work. ~~~ kuschku > However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able > to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work. But that’s possible in cities with working transit. Take Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo. You can get a bus/train/tram to anywhere from anywhere at any time. ~~~ supergeek133 I haven't been to any of those cities, so you might be right. Just working in my own frame of reference. ~~~ jessaustin I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There _are_ a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a _lot_ of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed. I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression. ~~~ kuschku I live in Kiel, a 280k city in Germany, with a mediocre transit system. I can get from anywhere to anywhere with, at maximum, 800m walking and 2h by bus, but frequently I walk directly instead of taking transit. Which is possible, since Kiel is small enough that you can get anywhere within the city walking within of about 5h (one end to the other). ------ greggman I'd really like to know what the true costs are. Are Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore all massively subsidizing their mass transit? Do they have enough riders that they're profitable? Are they more or less efficient in how the manage them? How about Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Antwerp, Koln, Barcelona, etc... which are all an order of magnitude smaller than the previously mentioned cities but all have pretty good public transportation. These last cities are all on the same order of size as SF. About 1 million people each and yet they have vastly better public transportation than SF ~~~ mike_hearn London Underground funding info is here: [https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we- ar...](https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-are-funded) About 40% comes from fares. About 25% is government subsidies. The rest is a mixture of borrowing, advertising/rental income, a central London road tax, and 8% is funding for Crossrail (but this represents pure infrastructure investment so does not affect the steady state). I have to admit, having reviewed the figures, I am a bit surprised and concerned at the level of borrowing involved. ------ CalRobert One of the biggest issues is that we force businesses and housing to have ridiculous amounts of free parking, which means that instead of dense areas where buildings can be next to each other we have a sea of asphalt with a building sprinkled here and there. In central areas these minimums amount to parking welfare for suburbanites. People say to me "but it takes 90 minutes to go 15 miles on transit!!" \- the problem isn't that transit should be faster, it's that you shouldn't have to go through 15 miles of primarily asphalt hellscape to get to basic amenities! The core of Dublin is less than two miles across. I used to live in the middle of it and never missed a car. The core of San Diego.. well it's not really a core, and even then it's routine to have to travel several miles for basic errands, even if you live fairly close to downtown. A downtown that is prevernted from growing by parking minimums. Of course, if you ask a potential employer about transit access they look at you like you're from Mars (and, of course, choose to move on to a less hippie-ish applicant) ~~~ cle Interesting observation, is there some data showing this? ~~~ verg RE parking minimums: [http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential- parking-re...](http://graphingparking.com/2013/01/25/residential-parking- requirements/) A similar issue is street sizes in the US are much larger than in countries with good transit and walkability. Anecdotal, but compare image searches for "American Street" and "Japanese Street". Not only is the driving area of the streets much narrower, on street parking doesn't really exists in Japanese cities. This contributes alot to the walking experience. "japan street" [https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440...](https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgrLPzj9rLAhXGs4MKHeNxBKwQ_AUIBigB) "american street" [https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1...](https://www.google.com/search?q=american+street&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=801&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwicu__4j9rLAhXmloMKHbQBDqgQ_AUIBygC) ~~~ CalRobert We put 25mph signs and crosswalks across ridiculously wide streets that encourage people to do 40+mph and wonder why so many people die. Of course, auto safety standards that worry only about the occupants of the vehicle, and not whoever they hit, don't help either. ------ mrfijal article is written in absolutes (talking about public transit and traffic in general) but happily ignores the fact that there is a world outside of america. maybe looking at places that are better commute-wise than sf despite being a lot poorer would be a start? ~~~ Mikeb85 Of course. Because no one likes to mention that there are countries with far better infrastructure, free education and health care, better quality of life thanks to higher taxes. Anything that suggests higher taxes are necessary seems to get ignored in the US. ------ pklausler Nearly perfect for me are (1) a city with great light rail, and (2) a Brompton folding bicycle for the first & last miles. I realize that this combination isn't available to all, but it's awesome. ~~~ pnut Counting the days until my b-spoke Brompton arrives. Folding bicycle is a life changer. ~~~ CalRobert Congratulations on a whole new world of convenient transport! ------ marknutter We created this wonderful thing called the Internet that allows us to work and collaborate with each other from anywhere in the world, yet we all still cling to the silly idea that we need to continue to expand and repair our physical transit infrastructure so we can all travel two ways every day to sit next to somebody in some office to... stare at a computer connected to the Internet for 8 hours. It becomes even more absurd in areas like San Francisco where there literally isn't even enough housing to fit everyone. We could solve our transit infrastructure woes overnight with policy. Give a tax break to companies who have remote workers. Either that or charge people to use public transportation infrastructure on a supply/demand basis. If more people use a freeway to get to work, the cost to use it goes up, and if you don't use it at all, you don't pay a dime. This would force companies who require their workforce to be physically present to pay higher salaries to cover the cost of commuting, which may cause them to re-evaluate remote work. Commuting to and from work really only makes sense if you are interacting with things you can't take home with you. And before you jump in and start spreading FUD about remote work, consider this: if it suddenly became illegal to require employees who could do their work remotely to come into a physical office every day, would businesses simply shut down? Or would they figure out a way to make it work? I'm guessing they would figure out a way to make it work. ~~~ mike_hearn It's going that way anyway. I work for a company in London, but I work remotely from Switzerland. Many of the people who _live_ in the UK but work in the London office only come in a few days a week because their commute takes a long time, and if there's any kind of transit disruption at all that automatically means a WFH day. It's not a big deal. Modern comms tech is really good. ------ trhway Beside everything else, i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here. Thus i have to have a car. In Russia, when i wasn't able to afford car, my cat rode bus, train, subway with me when we had to get him somewhere. Of course, i'd get a car there too the moment i could afford it, yet public transit was a feasible alternative when i didn't have a car. ~~~ rsync "i can't get a dog or cat on public transit here." _Thank God._ ~~~ trhway it is hard to understand that knee-jerk reaction to animals in US ( personally i think it is rooted in basic Puritan habit of blaming somebody else [government, immigrants, regulations, dogs, ...] for your own problems). I understand that Russia isn't a good example of civilized society. Well, in France you can take your dog or cat into any restaurant, cafe, bar, etc ... pretty much everywhere. The public and personal health situation in France is among the best in the world. Sanitary rules in US prohibiting dogs is just red-herring. ~~~ Armisael16 I look at it as choosing to ban animals over choosing to ban humans with allergies. ~~~ trhway Do you seriously mean that France thus banned humans with allergies? It is false dichotomy. Completely fits pattern of blaming somebody else. To the comment below: "but allowing animals that spread dander everywhere makes the environment hazardous to anyone with serious pet allergies." unfounded BS (sounds very similar to industrial bread producers propaganda 100 years ago about those dirty immigrants touching your bread with their dirty hands in their dirty bakeries). Until it is a sterile OR, the surrounding environment is full of living matter. Dog or cat in a cafe doesn't change the situation. Or do you seriously mean that France doesn't care about such dangerous hazard to people's health? ~~~ rsync (parent here) I have no allergies at all. I was not thinking of allergies at all when I expressed my gratitude that your "dog or cat" is not allowed on public transportation in the US. You shouldn't bring cats and dogs onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a cat on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on. Grow up. ~~~ CalRobert You shouldn't bring _children_ onto public transportation because it's rude, immodest and impositional. I have the same objective to your bringing a _small, poorly trained animal_ on the train as I do to your boarding the train without pants on. FTFY. ~~~ trhway Unfortunately, even the pretty unhealthy and disturbing content of the "modesty" standards of those types like the parent isn't the biggest problem here. After all, people do have different opinions. Education, exposition to facts and reasonable discussion are known tools in dealing with it in normal case. The biggest problem though is the underlying egocentric worldview of the likes of the parent that the other people do something, like in this particular case bring a dog or a cat on a public transit, with the specific goal of offending those "modesty" standards. That immediately makes them feel offended and under attack. It doesn't cross their mind that a dog or especially cat owner would take the dog or cat on public transit with just the goal of getting to some destination (especially when the public transit is the only realistically feasible option in the given situation). It is the same situation like with same-sex marriage - people marry same sex partners because of love or taxes/finances/etc., and not because of the goal to destroy the "marriage must be heterosexual" standard of and thus offend the "modesty"/"values" types. Such deep-gut egocentric worldview - people is out there to get me - naturally drives the aggressiveness with which they attempt to impose their "modesty" standards upon the others and makes the things like education/enlightenment, reasonable discourse, exposition to facts, etc. pretty ineffective, unfortunately. ------ thatfrenchguy Let's not forget that BART also made bad engineering choices, like non- standard tracks and trains that probably cost a lot of taxpayer money... ~~~ samtho BART is the only transit system in North America that uses the Indian gauge. The wider gauge also contributes to the noise it generates and the wear on the track around turns. ~~~ AnimalMuppet Why should the wider gauge do either? Noise: It's just steel wheels rolling on steel rails. Why should the distance between the rails change the amount of noise it generates? Wear on the track: Presuming that the turns aren't too tight a radius (which may be larger for the larger gauge), and the superelevation is correct (which probably has to be larger for the larger gauge), why should wider track mean greater wear on curves? ------ merraksh _The money that funds mass transit [...] comes from a mix of four sources: [...] On the federal side, most of that money comes from the federal gas tax: 18.4 cents on a gallon of regular gas 24.3 cents on the gallon for diesel, [...] 19 percent going to mass transit. That’s right—mass transit depends on people driving cars for a significant portion of its federal funding._ I don't find this counterintuitive: the more people use their car, the more the mass transit system is strengthened and more capable to ease car traffic. Maybe it's far fetched, but it's like tax on cigarettes to finance lung cancer research. ------ pdonis I find it interesting that the article points out that neither mass transit riders nor automobile drivers pay the full cost of their trips. Yet it never asks the obvious question: couldn't that be the main reason why both forms of transportation are inefficient? ~~~ twoodfin There's a difference though: If it were politically feasible, a marginally higher gas tax could fund all road construction & maintenance. People might drive a little less, but the system wouldn't go into a death spiral. If mass transit riders had to fund the system purely through user fees, the result for most systems would be a collapse, as fewer riders would require higher prices leading to fewer riders... ~~~ CalRobert At least in the US, the gas tax would need to be substantially higher. If we accounted for the externalities (dead people hit by cars, mostly, and perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable) the gas tax would rise even more. If anyone asks I'll dig up the math because citation is important (and I'm not sure I did it right years ago), but I remember doing some calculation a while back that we could pay to remove the carbon emitted by gasoline with a tax that made it around $15 a gallon. That doesn't seem bad, really. Perfectly happy societies function with $8-$11 a gallon gas, and not destroying civilization seems worth it. Edit - though I realize that by the latter argument, reducing the population is, in a horribly macabre way, a positive externality. It's not one I support, though. ~~~ pdonis _> perhaps the potential collapse of human civilization as we render much of the planet uninhabitable_ The problem with trying to base taxes on something like this is that you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable. I certainly am not convinced that climate science is accurate enough to support such a claim (or economics, for that matter, since part of the claim is really about the economics of adaptation to climate change vs. mitigation of climate change). ~~~ CalRobert "you would have to be really, really sure this consequence was unavoidable" Why? Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely? If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it? ~~~ pdonis _> Wouldn't we actually need to be really, really sure this consequence was extremely unlikely?_ No, because that would imply a level of predictive power that we do not have in climate science and economics. Basically, with the accuracy of prediction we currently have in those fields, it is impossible to be sure that the impact of climate change will be extremely unlikely to cause severe disruption of our civilization. And the key point is that that is true _regardless_ of whether or not we spend trillions of dollars on trying to mitigate climate change. So the only real choice we have is adaptation; any resources we spend on getting better at adapting to climate change will at least move us in a positive direction, whereas we can't be sure of that with regard to resources spent on attempts at mitigation. In order for adaptation to not be a rational response, we would have to be so sure that climate change _was_ going to cause severe disruption that it was worth trying to mitigate the change even though we can't predict what specific actions would do that. In other words, we would have to be so desperate that it was worth trying whatever mitigations we could think of without even trying to predict their effects. Climate change alarmists would like us all to believe that we _are_ that desperate, but the case for that does not stand up to scrutiny. _> If an asteroid had only a 50/50 chance of hitting Earth would we be wise to disregard it?_ If an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting the Earth, we would be able to predict that specific actions we could take could reduce that probability to something negligible, because we have very accurate predictive power with regard to the orbits of astronomical bodies, at least on the relevant timescales (years to decades). Given that, of course we would not be wise to disregard the prediction. But, as above, that argument does not apply to the climate, because we can't predict the effects of any specific actions well enough to know how, or even if, they will reduce the probability of a severe disruption to our civilization. ------ sna1l The fact that we don't have a couple operators instead of a driver for each individual train on BART is beyond me. Look at all the private companies (Magic Bus, etc) that are sprouting up because of how terrible our public transportation is. BART essentially holds a monopoly on our transport. I believe their contract states even during a strike, new drivers have to be trained for 6 months before they are allowed to drive BART trains. There is absolutely no way that it takes 6 months to learn how to drive an AUTOMATED train. There should be public bids submitted from private companies to run on these railways, which would lead to better service and lower costs. ------ blizkreeg I read someplace that a large part of the budget that is allocated to local government agencies in SF goes to pay pensions and very generous benefits of its employees. How true is that? ------ Spooky23 Public transit sucks because the quality of governance has corkscrewed down as the media gets weaker and dumber. This is literally the best time in history to be an inept and/or corrupt politician -- nobody is watching. Roads suck because capital is easy to come by, so real estate squatters control central business districts. It's cheaper/easier/more convenient to build commercial space in he burbs. ------ pdq The solution in the future will be driverless cars, shared driverless vans, etc. These should improve overall commute times, since there will be fewer accidents and denser transportation. Also people will be able to spend their commute time reading books/news, doing work, watching videos, or other recreation, rather than driving the car. ~~~ darkr Sure, I mean if you want a WALL-E vision of the future. Personally I'd prefer a Netherlands/Denmark present day kind of future, where people live within 5-10 miles of their place of work and cycle or walk. Less apathetic fat people and psychotic auto-pilots. ~~~ continuational I go by bike from west to east Copenhagen every day, a 25 minute ride, and it's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for any perk. ~~~ ams6110 What do you do when it's raining or snowing? What do you do when it's hot, can you shower at work? ~~~ Symbiote I think this is like asking a Texan how they cope with rain (turn the wipers on) or heat (turn the A/C on). Imagine getting the same puzzled look. Rain/snow: wear a coat, optionally overtrousers. Hot: go slower if you normally race in, and it doesn't get much above 20 degrees anyway. ------ known Provide free public transportation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window) ------ Hermel More human life-years get wasted every day in Europe's traffic jams than we lost in the Brussels attacks. Maybe we should rethink our priorities. ------ coldtea > _Public Transit Is Worse_ Depends on the country. In some places it is excellent. ------ cowardlydragon Power assisted bicycles that take minimum effort to go 20mph would be amazing ------ stevewilhelm > In fact, planners and economists call road building “induced demand” because > it encourages people to hop into their cars instead of walking or taking > mass transit. In the Bay Area, building transit infrastructure is expensive and time consuming. Case in point: a five mile extension including one new train station of an existing BART line costs $890 million and took seven years to build. [1] The resulting extension is expected to increase in ridership by 5000 to 7000 daily trips in the next decade. [2] There are currently 400,000 daily automobile trips from East Bay to and from Santa Clara County. [2] [1] [http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx](http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx) [2] [http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology](http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/wsx/chronology)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ShoeMoney Sues Google Employee For AdWords Violations - vaksel http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-employee-for-adwords-violations/ ====== patio11 I'm absolutely astounded that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. There are tens of thousands of Google employees who have access to data which is commercially sensitive and worth, literally, millions. (To say nothing of how many search engineers could transfer a million dollars with a single hand- edit to "remove web-spam" on a single keyword.) Most of them are AdWords account reps, Google's dirty little secret: we'll pay you $40,000 to about one step above a call center monkey intellectually, you have no opportunity for advancement, and the work is soul-suckingly boring next to the Wow I Get To Work At Google thoughts that brought you here. (Disclosure: I was once a call-center monkey, though not at Google.) In banking or finance, there would be an entire department tasked with nothing but playing Big Brother over these employees. Failure to aggressively monitor for non-compliance would result in regulatory slap-down. Does Google strike you as the kind of place where they monitor every entry made by employees and _have an actual human perform random audits just to be sure_? ~~~ nessence this happens in every market, it's called insider trading and to expect google to be immune is naive. it's a risk and/or cost of doing business. ~~~ patio11 Insider trading? You mean that defined crime with the lock-you-away-in-federal prison penalties routinely imposed? Investigated by a dedicated government agency? Which I got an email about four days ago? From the corporate division whose job it is to sniff out and eliminate insider trading? By, for example, emailing every engineer 4th class to remind them that earnings announcements are coming out this week and that all trades of company stock within 4 days of the announcement are to be made only with signed authorization and that infringement of the rule is grounds for immediate termination regardless of whether I have actual insider information or not? That insider trading? This resembles what you think goes on inside Google? In what way, pray tell? ~~~ jraines There's a market for keywords, and these employees (we are, I guess, assuming for this discussion) have insider information on those. Like you said, it's worth millions, and like stock trading, it's basically a zero-sum game, so if you become a big winner by cheating, there are people losing unfairly. Just because it doesn't have the kind of rules around it that you describe doesn't mean it's not analogous. In fact, I thought that analogy and the galling lack of such oversight was your original point. ------ prawn If the story as printed is true, the Google employee in question should be fired. ~~~ froo _the Google employee in question should be fired._ That should read... _the Google employee in question should be fired, out of a cannon, into the sun._ If this story turns out to be true, I think this might not bode well for Google, given their current position with antitrust and their dominating (monopoly?) position in online advertising.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Free for reddit Django & Python course- eCommerce site - patrickk http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1cnmfq/free_for_reddit_coding_for_entrepreneurs_with/ ====== alfasin The coupon has expired... ~~~ vilgax Use "learnmore" instead of "freedom" coupon. ~~~ alfasin sold out as well :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Healing Power of Your Own Medical Records - dnetesn http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/technology/the-healing-power-of-your-own-medical-data.html?ref=technology&_r=0 ====== mcculley I've tried to take responsibility for my own health records. I've diligently over the last few years scanned in various bits of paperwork and downloaded test results. I recently had to see a doctor. When he asked about a recent test result, I handed him a very small flash drive I keep in my pocket. I told him that it contained my last few years of test results and my most recent CT scan. He was delighted and went back to his office with my flash drive in hand. He returned dejected, informing me that the anti-virus system on his office desktop would not allow him to read the flash drive in accordance with corporate policy. We are not quite yet in the future. ~~~ beering Good on them. Sticking random flash drives into hospital computers seems like a good way to compromise medical records. ------ gleb There is a YC company that will collect and maintain medical records for you. PicnicHealth - [https://picnichealth.com/](https://picnichealth.com/) I am a customer, recommended. Also, "medicine for the rich" companies like Pinnacle Care and Private Health will do it for you as part of their services. And for a good reason, you need records to do anything else. Whether you do it yourself, or have somebody do it for you - do it. EMR portals are nice, but not nearly enough, you need the real backend records. ~~~ therobot24 Just checked out your suggestion, i agree that the aggregation is nice, but $40/month for something i won't actively use but a few times a year is quite expensive. ~~~ nogaleviner PicnicHealth CEO here and happy to answer questions. We're starting with the people who need the product most, so our customers tend to be pretty sick and have a ton of records going back and forth and sometimes multiple doctors appointments per week. We've brought the price down a lot from the companies that do record collection/aggregation for insurance and pharma (about $1000/patient just to start) but stay tuned for an even lower priced option for those with less intensive needs. ~~~ therobot24 Is there a point for which you don't collect info? For instance is it possible to see records from my birth? ~~~ troyastorino We get records as far back as we can. Unfortunately, records that are more than 10 or 15 years old are often destroyed. Offices are only legally required to keep records for a certain period of time (e.g., for 7 years in California), and so after a patient leaves a practice, the practice will typically clear out that patient's records at some point. Long story short: we get records any records that still exist. ------ jtheory This is what we do! I'm at Patients Know Best; we've been live for a few years now, and the momentum continues to grow -- this is an issue that is hitting a tipping point. The article touches on several important aspects of working in this space -- mainly, the benefits are real (even for people who aren't able to diagnose their own brain tumors), but there is cultural resistance to giving patients the "real" data. We've worked with medical professionals who are seriously uneasy about giving patients access to their own records -- sometimes for more sensible reasons ("a patient could easily misinterpret what this result means without context") but also fears that just don't materialize in reality (like "patients will bombard me with questions" \-- as discussed in the OP). Some of the resistance is curiously connected to the legal protections that healthcare professionals need to enforce _on behalf of_ the patient. They're actively trained to follow laws that seriously restrict data-sharing, insecure storage, etc... and it takes a while for it to click that this is actually the patient's data, and the patient is the one person who has more right to it than anyone. ~~~ pimlottc This sounds great, so I went to check it out. A few issues I noticed on the site - * The text on the first slideshow image cuts off abruptly: "Patients Know Best ('PKB') is the most integrated patient portal and health information exchange. PKB is live in over" * The patient signup link is hard to find. I left the patient page [1] thinking it was just an info page before realizing that the sign up link is there, all the way at the bottom after the letter from the CEO and 6 videos * It's not very clear what regions you serve. Mentions of HIPAA led me to believe you might serve the US, but entering my California zip-code on the customers map [2] gives me results in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. 1: [https://www.patientsknowbest.com/patients.html](https://www.patientsknowbest.com/patients.html) 2: [https://www.patientsknowbest.com/customers.html](https://www.patientsknowbest.com/customers.html) ------ Hydraulix989 I have sleep apnea and have to use a CPAP machine by wearing a mask that pressurizes the air that I breathe while I'm asleep. The pressure keeps my airways splinted open so that when my muscles relax during REM sleep, my airways don't collapse, causing me to stop breathing and choke in my sleep. Among many other health complications, these apneas destroy the quality of my sleep, and without my CPAP, I cannot physically or mentally function. It's amazing how many CPAP machines out there do not give the patient access to their efficacy data, and often, the data itself is hidden behind a secret clinicians'/provider-only menu. For a while (from 2006-2010), CPAP machines used proprietary smartcards and non-standard $100 readers manufactured in China to store the data. I had to purchase a data-capable machine out of pocket since my DME only gave me a "brick" \-- a machine that does not record any efficacy data. Of course, my insurance did not cover the slightly more expensive data-capable machine. Patients with sleep apnea need efficacy data to track how their treatment is going (how many apneas they had per hour per night of sleep). Without this information, it's completely unclear whether the CPAP is set correctly to deliver therapeutic pressures, let alone actually help that patient's sleep. It is expected that the patient takes their CPAP machine every month or so to the doctor for the doctor to download and interpret the data for them, who may then adjust the titrated pressure settings on the machine based on the data. This, of course, is a trivial process that the patient can easily do on their own which can DRASTICALLY improve the patient's quality of life. There's a blog with a ridiculous table of devices and advice for fighting the DME provider/insurance company for data-capable machines with such gems as: "Ask for the System One Pro with C-flex Plus . . . (AVOID the System One CPAP Plus with C-flex -- not data capable). Note how confusing the names are as the Pro also has 'plus' in the name! To further confuse you, all the Philips Respironics machines are marked 'Remstar' but that name isn't really used anymore." Imagine navigating the maze of complexities and argumentative DMEs/insurance companies while thoroughly sleep-deprived because you stop breathing 30 times per hour while asleep. That was me 3 years ago... [https://maskarrayed.wordpress.com/](https://maskarrayed.wordpress.com/) ------ Someone I doubt individuals studying their own records and diagnosing themselves is the big thing that comes from opening up patient data. Most people lack the combination of intelligence and tenacity to do that. I also doubt the real gain is in spectacular cases such as the brain tumor in this example. I find it way more likely that we will see some advanced version of IBM's Watson use that data to cross-correlate data and suggest things like _" with your genes and current condition, you should use antibiotic X, rather than Y, even though Y is the better choice for most."_ or even _" you should stay home today, or you'll be ill for 2-3 days."_ Each such choice may only give a small gain, but there will be way more choices to make. ~~~ minthd I think you don't account how little time doctors invest in a single patient, and how much expertise they've got compared to the net. And on the other hand, many patients have a lot of tenacity ,because those are large problems for them. But i agree that the ideal result from opening all this up, is the rise of medical expert systems advising patients, the same systems that have been blocked by doctors, some of it because of conservatism, some because they don't want to lose autonomy and let their job become automated with what that entails.There's no need to wait for watson, they already exist. And with the medical error rate around 15%, the fact that doctor only gather half the needed questions in their medical interview, etc. - i'm sure something like this could have pretty big effect on health. ------ blueatlas My initial thought is how long will it take doctors to cross-over to acceptance of patients having more data and coming to see them well informed. Experience comes with age, and many of our doctors today just aren't use to being given detailed data by their patients. It will happen, but right now I don't feel that this is the case. Will it be 10 years, 20 years? ~~~ sithu Patients who know their conditions to the extent that they're able to have a well informed discussion with you at the visit are still quite uncommon. Most people google their diagnoses and glance at the top 2-3 hits, but very very few really dig deep into the guidelines, physiology or publications to see if what is being recommended makes sense. I think there's still a lot of faith being placed in experts, which in my opinion is appropriate because the likelihood of someone misunderstanding what they've read still exceeds the chance that they've uncovered ways to further optimize. That being said, learning is always good. I always encourage people to discuss anything they've read with me. I print out guidelines, trial data, etc in the interest of leveling the playing field and complete transparency. There's really no point in trying to maintain an information gradient. Now the article is not about understanding your disease, but rather, having complete access to your medical records- which is a related but different issue. Unfortunately, 99% of people have no idea what people are writing about them and I find that really troubling. Not sure why, but patients still seem to feel that it's somehow antagonist to ask to have a look. Like it's some threat or precursor to a lawsuit. It's not. When I turn the screen and ask the family to gather around so I can explain stuff, there's often hesitation or even surprise - "What? Can I really look at that? Is that ok?". Yes You Can folks. ~~~ vacri _the likelihood of someone misunderstanding what they 've read still exceeds the chance that they've uncovered ways to further optimize._ It's also worth noting that many of the "I had access to my own records and it was great" stories are of autodidacts who already know how to consume and digest complex information. The first story in the article is of a PhD student. Not everyone is like this, and that's worth remembering. A simple example is the vaccines-create-autism movement, full of people who aren't digging deep into the treatment or research. They see their child is affected, they are upset, and so they look for something to blame and rail against, causing lots of damage for other people. People certainly feel a lot more in control if they can see what the experts are thinking about their condition, but there is some selection bias in the stories that accompany these articles. On the whole I absolutely think medical records should be shared with patients (except in certain cases, eg discussion of certain mental illnesses), but whatever guidelines we come up with should remember we're talking about an issue affecting "the general public" not "PhD students and medical scientists". ------ clamprecht Mint for medical records. I want it.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Canada denied visas to dozens of Africans for a big A.I. conference - masonic https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/canada-denied-visas-dozens-africans-big-artificial-intelligence-conference ====== mindcrime _I’m going to hang up this phone, and then show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible._ This is still what we should be aspiring to. Sad how little progress we've made over the last 20 years. Hell, we've probably regressed. :-(	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
YC Demo Day Session 3 - TheMakeA http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/19/yc-demo-day-session-3-upower-edyn-craft-coffee-immunity-project-and-more/ ====== kenko Maciej Cegłowski's ongoing twitter commentary on these things is priceless. ~~~ kome Words of wisdom: [https://twitter.com/Pinboard](https://twitter.com/Pinboard) ~~~ justin It's easy to write trivializing one-liners when you haven't bothered to learn anything about the companies or the problems they are solving. ~~~ Ntrails I assume s/he's going for humour rather than communicating any useful information, which is perfectly reasonable. "And now an online community especially for women! They even got the domain. Please don’t let it be pink. Please don’t let it be pink." ... "@Pinboard Spoiler: it's pink." Made me giggle - so op success? ------ specular Immunity Project and BlockScore are my favorites. Both appear to be solving real problems at the right level of scope (rather than providing feature support for a niche, for ex.). ------ jedberg I was really fascinated by Beep. They are basically providing the platform to turn your house into the Enterprise. :) ------ elyrly Immunity Project- This product sounds amazing. ~~~ halcyondaze Did they talk about how they would make money, or is it a non-profit that YC is funding? ~~~ jedberg It's a non-profit. ~~~ rdl If they're successful they should probably include a line-item in their budgets for Nobel prize money. ------ DrJ neptune.io's seems to be providing the solution that someone didn't fix during the day whenever an alert fires. out of disk space -> clean up your disks (e.g. logrotate) process crash -> should be using a process supervisor low cpu utilization -> autoscaling ~~~ mind_heist Do you know of any existing solutions that do this automatically ? ------ foobarqux What type of quantum computer is Rigetti building? ~~~ levlandau Just based off this google search: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=rigetti&btnG=&as_s...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=rigetti&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=) I'm going to guess it's Josephson Junction based. Possibly similar to D-Wave in that it's based on adiabatic computing and focused on specific optimization problems. Details from the horse's mouth have been super sparse though. ------ mind_heist with respect to neptune.io : What are some of the existing products that are capable of remediation ? Cant products like Whatsup gold do this ?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The dark web: Not so anonymous after all - finphil https://medium.com/futuresin/the-dark-web-not-so-anonymous-after-all-450854d9805f ====== luckylion Problematic title. It's not "the dark web" that isn't anonymous, it's lack of security by service operators. "This admin allowed root login via ssh and had 'root' set as password: SSH not so secure after all"	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
US blacklists 17 firms from applying H1-B - artsandsci http://gulte.com/movienews/61927/US-blacklists-17-firms-from-applying-H1-B ====== justboxing This does nothing. The 'little guys' have gotten scape-goated. I don't see Infosys, CapGemini, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), Cognizant, Tech Mahindra or for that matter any of the Top 10 H1B Visa Abusers [1] in this List. Business as Usual. It's strikingly similar to the list of countries in the Trump's Muslim Ban wherein countries that sponsored terrorism, but that in which he had business interests in ,were not listed, incl. Saudi Arabia ( 15 of the 19 911 hijackers were Saudi Citizens) EDIT: Addressing @praneshp's question. Microsoft might be a red herring, but the rest, esp. the Indian Companies like TCS, Infosys, Congnizant are also the TOP 10 Abusers of H1B Visa. Speaking from personal experience here. I've written at length about this on Quora, so don't want to re-hash it. You can read it here => [https://www.quora.com/Being-on-H1B-is-it-worth-joining- TCS-i...](https://www.quora.com/Being-on-H1B-is-it-worth-joining-TCS-in-the- US-1/answer/Shiva-Kumar-1902?srid=C5p) Not only do these Indian Companies abuse the H1B Visa program, but they also abuse and underpay the workers they bring on the H1B Program. I've written about this also in my Quora answer linked above. [1] Source: [https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/...](https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2017/04/18/H-1BVisas-01_0.png) ~~~ praneshp Asking because I have no clue: You just linked to the top-10 H1B holders, not abusers, no? I see Microsoft on that list, and find it difficult to believe they are abusers. From what I know from extended family, firms like the ones in the link do things like faking a job/resume, etc. Do the large Indian firms do that as well, in addition to flooding the lottery pool? ~~~ bactrian Microsoft hires thousands of H1B workers for generic roles like project manager and software developer. Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles? Of course there are but it would cost more. A true shortage would not affect Microsoft at all. They have as much money as anyone. This is a dirty secret of tech that you can’t discuss without being labeled racist or xenophobic no matter how untrue that is. ~~~ ActsJuvenile I have hired a few H1-Bs, and here is how the first step goes: Before you file for a H1-B visa with USCIS, employer needs to get Department of Labor (DOL) certification. Employers have to advertise the job in local media for 30 days. Jobs have to offer median salary for the given skill based on DOL numbers (Roughly $104K per year). All resumes received, and interview notes must be included in DOL application for labor certification. If a qualified American applied for the job, DOL rejects the certification request. I would love to hear where you see a material flaw in this process. To me it signifies there is a real talent shortage. ~~~ raincom Here is the flaw, material or otherwise: (a) companies post jobs with descriptions that filter out all but the candidate they are filing for DOL certification. Next time, look at your company postings with exacting requirements: 3 yrs of experience in the stack A, 5 years in the language X, 6 years in Y, etc. That's how the game is played. (b) During green card processing, I have seen companies setting up fake interviews only to disqualify whoever comes for the interview. I was a victim of that. ~~~ ActsJuvenile I have seen pretty much every company be guilty of (a), so it is hard to regulate it away. (b) seems downright malicious and/or stupid. Why conduct fake interviews if employer is going to pay the same amount? Especially when you future foreign worker won't be able to work for you till next October at the earliest? ~~~ raincom (b) is to file I-140 for those who have been already on H1B. If I were an employer, and if I wanna apply for I-140 for one of my employees who is on H1B, I need to do that. ------ spydum The actual source list: [https://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/H1BDebarment.htm](https://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/H1BDebarment.htm) "The Wage and Hour Division maintains the list below of willful violator employers under the H-1B program." One really odd stand out on the list... Popeyes chicken?!? Yummi Enterprises, Inc. d/b/a Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen 1310 El Camino Real San Bruno, CA 94066 ~~~ dylanpyle I'd guess this is a single franchise owner abusing H-1b petitions, not Popeye's corporate. ------ john_moscow Strange move given that all you could do to stop the current abuse is to start prioritizing the applications by salary rather than picking them randomly until the cap is reached. ~~~ adrianbg That would penalize startups, giving only large companies access to the foreign labour pool. It's rare that a problem like this has a simple solution. ~~~ spinlock Startups do not use H1B workers. A startup is actually hiring someone for a role and they can't take the risk that their guy will lose the lottery. Plus, the application is just beyond what most startups are going to have the time to do. ~~~ cardine That is not even remotely true. Anyone who can afford a software developer can afford an immigration attorney to handle applying for an H1B. Plus it usually takes 2-3 years to know if someone isn't going to get the H1B lottery during their OPT which is a longer time horizon than most startups are concerned with anyways. I think most startups simply hire who they view as the most qualified person regardless of immigration status. Source: Have a startup that hires software developers. ~~~ praneshp > That is not even remotely true. Anyone who can afford a software developer > can afford an immigration attorney to handle applying for an H1B. The problem with using sweeping statements like "anyone who can..." is that one example is enough to disprove you. There'll be Who's Hiring thread in a couple of days, watch how many young startups say no new H1Bs on that. Your OPT case is only true when hiring a student on F1 ~~~ cardine > The problem with using sweeping statements like "anyone who can..." is that > one example is enough to disprove you. There'll be Who's Hiring thread in a > couple of days, watch how many young startups say no new H1Bs on that. We don't have to wait - we can look at the one from last month: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384262) I did a Ctrl+F and nothing came up for "H1B" and the only thing that came up for "citizen" was a job posting for the US government itself. ~~~ praneshp Did you keep clicking on see more and get the entire page? Give me an hour or so, I'll find you a few links when I'm off the Caltrain. Edit: I had to get to page3, but: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15391862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15391862) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15386201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15386201) (Though I believe the second one is some team specific thing, I know that at least AWS sponsor H1Bs for fresh grads). Then on p5: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384311) (I was confident about this because I was job hunting about a year ago, and was exclusively looking at companies under 50 people. Most of them were fine with H1B transfer, but explicitly said no new applications.) ------ nashashmi Wouldn't it been better for there to have been a silent blacklist? Won't these companies just rename themselves now to get around this restriction? ------ the_rock_says I don't see how by only blocking firms will help clean this H1B abuse. The H1B visa abusers and spammers should be screened out before the applications are put into the lottery. Having this process in place, companies like Infosys, TCS etc. can't misuse it as all the 'real' and 'well-deserved' applications are in lottery. ------ mc32 What would keep these affected companies from creating new companies to engage in the same behavior? ~~~ partycoder Or outsource to a company that does the visas for them. ------ partycoder Surprised to not see Infosys on this list. Business as usual for H-1B cheaters.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Mastercard thinks millennials want payments with selfies - alexwoodcreates http://www.thememo.com/2015/07/06/mastercards-cool-selfie-verification-is-cringeworthy/ ====== darceeanne [http://trooclick.com/event/selfies-set-to-verify-online- paym...](http://trooclick.com/event/selfies-set-to-verify-online- payments-38430)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Give HN: There Are No Rules (book on entrepreneurship) - wj http://personalopz.com/books/there_are_no_rules.html ====== wj This is my latest collection of notes from the talks of Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. Truly inspirational stuff. I highly recommend listening to them ([http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html](http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html)). You can also download it free from LeanPub at: [https://leanpub.com/there_are_no_rules](https://leanpub.com/there_are_no_rules) I'm also donating 100% of any royalties from LeanPub to the EFF which you can see on that page. Let's give them a good Valentine's Day.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
We Are SpaceX Software Engineers - afshinmeh https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1853ap/we_are_spacex_software_engineers_we_launch/ ====== nrki Time is running out... [–] TheRealFroman 848 points 4 years ago I'd love to know when I can start packing my bags for mars ;) [–] spacexdevttySPACEX[S] 1638 points 4 years ago Give us 5-10 years. ~~~ godelski Realistically I'd say a minimum of 10 years. From now. ------ zyngaro I guess they also have a big hardware/FPGA division. I mean systems that control the launcher vertical landing are most probably done in hardware. ------ godelski While interesting, this AMA was from 4 years ago... ~~~ abepark That makes sense! 4 years ago knockout was pretty popular and was often paired with ASP.NET MVC 4 ------ DCRichards submitted 4 years ago * by spacexdevtty	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
time element dropped from HTML5 spec - akdetrick http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2011/goodbye-html5-time-hello-data/ ====== untog I agree with the article- replacing <time> with <data> seems particularly unwise, given that the HTML5 improvements are supposed to allow content providers to provide semantic sense to their documents. <data> might just as well be <stuff and things> for all the specificity it brings. All that aside, I'm baffled that people are still amending and discussing the HTML5 spec. Criticise browser manufacturers all you want for implementing their own standards, but they don't really have a lot of choice when the standards bodies spend all their time dithering about and arguing over tiny semantics. The HTML5 spec isn't going to be finalised until 2014. Insanity. It'll be out of date before it's even finished. HTML5 and CSS3 should have been finished long ago, and we should be talking about the next iteration of these standards by now. ~~~ pantaloons Bureaucracy is the price we pay for standardization. You imply that there is an easier way that could have standardized these technologies "long ago", I'd like to hear it. ~~~ untog Bureaucracies don't _have_ to be slow. Why not publish the draft and say you're going to finalize six months after that? Right now the idea of a W3C certified HTML5 standard is useless- browsers are already implementing what we have now, and people are writing code against it. If that doesn't work for you, how about the idea of splitting this stuff up? Web browsers are now rapidly iterating through versions, why not do the same with web standards? Small changes each time. Uncouple stuff like the <canvas> tag from HTML5 as a whole. I'm not saying that it's the ideal solution, but it might make the web standards practise at least slightly relevant. ------ adamjernst I have to agree with the article author. Sure, dates and times are really hard to get right. But to say "you know, times are really a kind of data" is a cop- out. Relevant: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html> ------ tomelders What happens if we, as developers, just keep on using it? I personally think the time element is important, and very very useful. How likely is it that the browser vendors will drop support for a new element that's already being used? My point being, can we simply keep on using it in order to force it back into the spec? ~~~ wlievens > What happens if we, as developers, just keep on using it? IE6 happens, I guess ------ lusis This is a horrible idea. Detecting things like publish date is incredibly difficult. I can totally understand the aversion to wanting to generalize tags but this one is, IMHO, appropriate.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to Grow Your Leads Faster for SaaS Founders (4-Part Course) - kennyfrc http://www.growthhackerkit.com/courses/lead-acquisition-toolkit-for-saas ====== kennyfrc hello! hope you folks find it helpful -- there's a pdf/epub as well in the course that you can download. growth hacker kit has been previously featured in product hunt ([https://www.producthunt.com/tech/growth-hacker- kit](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/growth-hacker-kit))	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Why can't I pay for Firefox? - spinningslate Google's "jump the shark" post yesterday [0] puts into sharp relief the perilous state of the net and privacy generally. If nothing else, it reaffirmed my decision to delete Chrome and fully embrace Firefox - not just as <i>a</i> browser, but the <i>only</i> browser I use across desktop, laptop and phone.<p>Apple's pro-privacy stance is laudable, but questionable in its permanence - it's more strategy credit [1] than structurally embedded principle.<p>Mozilla might not be perfect but they're the closest to a organisation where privacy stands a chance of being a meaningful commitment rather than disingenuous propaganda or convenient byproduct of monetisation strategy.<p>And yet: Firefox is free, and Google remains a major funding source.<p>Whilst I can donate to the Mozilla foundation [2] (and have) I can't imagine it's a path many will easily find.<p>Which makes me wonder: why doesn't Mozilla offered a paid Firefox subscription option? Not suggesting it's mandatory, or that it has to offer premium features. Equally realistic about the percentage of users who would actually pay.<p>Google's funding is around $300M pa [3]. That's 10M users paying $30pa. That's a lot of people, but the internet's a big place. The wikimedia foundation has so far managed to function on donations.<p>So: why wouldn't Mozilla offer the option? Would you pay?<p>[0] https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/building-a-more-private-web/<p>[1] https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/<p>[2] https://donate.mozilla.org/<p>[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ ====== ShakataGaNai "...wikimedia foundation has so far managed to function on donations." "Whilst I can donate to the Mozilla foundation [2] (and have) I can't imagine it's a path many will easily find." Uh. So... Are donations viable or not? I'm sure if Firefox pop'd up a note on install and once a year saying "Help support Internet Freedom & Firefox" with a link to Moz's donation page... they'd get plenty.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
This is what a corporation looks like... - th0ma5 http://skyeome.net/wordpress/?p=248 ====== igrekel The re-layout of nodes is annoying and makes it hard to see what are the effective changes. The result is mostly eye candy and I don't find it provides any new insights. Maybe if the layout was done with the final structure and that layout was kept all along, it would be easier to grasp what is going on. ------ onreact-com This will become a classic like theyrule.net	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Tell HN: StackOverflow is just terrific - brandnewlow I just wanted to sing the praises of StackOverflow.com for a second. I wanted to put together a custom query to display a few key metrics for my social news site. The folks on IRC ignored a polite request and I found a few folks willing to help for $50/hour. Both of these were expected, sensible outcomes.<p>StackOverflow came through with the answer in about 15 minutes.<p>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/696289<p>The impressive part, to me at least, is that the initial answer posted wasn't yet easy enough for me to follow. I asked a few questions in the comments, more detail was added, I asked a few more questions and came back in a few hours and a copy-and-paste code snippet was waiting for me.<p>A+ ====== petercooper It's cool, but I couldn't get into it - and I usually get into all of these sorts of sites. Why? People seem to answer questions almost instantaneously and as a new user I can't do anything to flagrantly incorrect answers. As a new user, I am next to powerless on there - at least on HN the only real "power" held back is downvoting. So I'm just a reader of SO and not a contributor - which is a shame really. ~~~ sdragon One method to fight "the fastest gun" problem, is to cherrypick good questions, and actually write well-written, detailed essays, along with samples. Although more time consuming, these answers usually float to the top in rather short time frames -adding more quality. ~~~ archgrove I've tried this approach; taking the time to give a detailed answer with reasoning behind my choices and explanations for areas that might be unclear. Two things happen: 1 - The fast, but "good enough" answer wins out for the short term 10+ votes (and "Accepted status), then the question falls into the mire, occasionally floating to the surface via a Google search, where I might get one or two votes. 2 - My answer is accepted, enough that noone else bothers to partake in the question, and it falls off the radar having received maybe 1 or 2 votes. In terms of getting good answers into the system, I guess things are working as intended. In terms of creating an engaging experience for the questioner and answerer, this seems sub-optimal. ------ jmatt Ok I can't be the only one that doesn't find answers at SO. The question that brandnewlow submitted was relatively simple and thus you found a quick answer. Try asking a challenging question and you are just as likely to find an old blog post with an answer as a StackOverflow answer. Now, I think SO has it's place. For instance when you are picking up a new language that is used in the industry. But I've rarely found answers there recently (C#, VB.NET or Lisp...). I agree that they are improving and that some of the these rare challenging questions are beginning to be answered (Woot no complaints). And that when they are answered the answers are usually correct. But it's far from terrific. ~~~ praptak Manage your expectations :) There are questions that are challenging by nature (objectively hard problems) and those that are challenging to me, mostly because of my lack of experience in a particular domain, but are no-brainers for an expert (or even someone who spent an hour RTFM-ing). For the latter ones, SO works like magic. ------ adrianwaj People on Stack Overflow are generally very charitable. Thanks S.O. people. ------ axod >> "The folks on IRC ignored a polite request" People do tend to idle on IRC :/ You may need to try a few channels, or wait until someone is awake ;) ------ richardw It's starting to come up a lot in Google searches, which is better than paid- for sites, say. Make an effort to read through all answers and up-rate those that are lower down but _you_ think are better. Sometimes they're newer and better but people ignore them and just consider the top one. ------ mustpax Like everyone else said, SO is great for answering questions like yours. But if you have a more complicated question around code style or something more subjective it doesn't work as well. It really helps to update a question to clarify if answers seem inadequate. Because of the volume of answers, there's a tendency to post the shortest quickest answer. Otherwise you end up on the third page, unread and forgotten. Since it's not really a discussion forum, you have to learn to work with the question-answer format to be able to hash answers out and get real insight out of them. SO still feels a little off for me, partly because it's large and impersonal. The answers don't speak to each other (for good reason) so the whole thread feels disconnected, and doesn't seem to move forward too much. ------ nopassrecover Raises the interesting points of a) when will regular coders start outsourcing their jobs on SO and b) when will the large community of "offshore" coders currently doing this sort of patch work swarm SO. Having said that, I have noticed that people are more likely to help helpful people so unless those people add value to the system first it is unlikely they'll get extreme amounts of help. ~~~ StrawberryFrog What do you mean by "start outsourcing their jobs on SO"? I've had situations where instead of spending another day struggling with an issue on my own, I post a problem description on SO before leaving work, and have a good idea or two waiting for me when I get back in the morning. Sometimes it was there already when I did a late night check. SO makes me more productive. My boss does not exactly object to that. ~~~ nopassrecover I guess I'm thinking of freelance sites etc. reselling SO solutions. ------ draegtun Stackoverflow is informational, educational & addictive! Its "PerlMonks" for the general programming community. ------ ken If you're in one of the big languages on SO (C#, SQL, Python, Ruby), it's terrific. If you're trying to get help with some other language, I've found it to be far worse than mailing lists, IRC, or even USENET. In less-popular languages, the only questions are of the form "How/Should I learn $(lang)?". There's no Jon Skeet of Haskell there. ------ Herring I've tried to get something like this for the math/physics communities, but they're lagging behind a few decades. That code release by cnprog was painful to watch. ------ pieter I just typed in a really long question on StackOverflow and pressed 'post', site is down and now I lost my question :( it's nice if it works though ------ cmos It has saved my butt on a few occasions already.. all within a couple hours. For 'non expert' programmers the answers always have actual code and not just high level explanations that take hours to figure out. I too can't say enough about it. Perhaps it's most appealing to people with lower level questions (like mine) that can be answered in 2 paragraphs? ------ muon SO is just amazing, pretty much useful in every aspect of programming and software development. ------ acangiano A StackOverflow for the business of software would be a big success. ~~~ johns I'd be hesitant to provide business advice unless I were a lawyer or accountant and those guys aren't doing it for free. There's not enough questions either and you really don't want someone else telling you how to run your business. Find a trusted advisor and good reference material and figure it out. The scope is not nearly as big as programming questions. The place I work at built a small business resource and discussion site for a client with some similarities to SO and it's not doing so hot. ------ EastSmith Since SO is "Currently offline for maintenance", here is the question from Google cache: <http://tinyurl.com/csjjxg> ------ thenduks If you got the answer you needed you should really mark it as the accepted answer. ------ viggity Don't forget to mark a response as the "Accepted Answer", it'll give the poster some additional rep ~~~ brandnewlow I did forget. But I just went back and did it. Thanks! ------ csbartus yes, it is powered by joel, you really can't expect more. ~~~ lubos it's not really powered by joel. his technical contribution is roughly 1%. that's what it seems like from SO podcasts. ------ scorpion032 SO is the HN for programmer discussion ++1 ------ lbolognini Stack Overflow is ace! ------ geeko My question was answered within 5minutes. It's sick!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Twitter User Replaces Word 'White' with 'Black,' Gets Banned - kushti http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55863 ====== Kenji It is part of the liberal agenda that the oppressors cannot be discriminated against. So, in this case, racism against white people is impossible, because white people are seen as oppressors. Retarded but that's what they believe. ~~~ Hnrobert42 Yes, people/companies can and do discriminate against whites all the time. Yes, discrimination is bad in all forms. But comparatively, discrimination against whites is limited in scope and impact. In the words of our president-elect, those concerned with discrimination against whites are just being big babies. ~~~ Kenji Look, all I said was that modern liberals apply a divisive double-standard to racism (and other forms of bigotry). I am concerned with this thinking in general. I think it is illogical, anti-humanist and divisive. And with you ridiculing people who are against all forms of racism, rather than just a subset, you prove my point. ~~~ vorotato No, he didn't prove your point... ------ SwellJoe Why is so hard to understand that some people are protected classes, and there's a good reason for that? There are people in the US who have been marginalized and oppressed because of the color of their skin, their disability, the gender, their age, or their religion. Being white isn't one of those protected classes, because no one experiences oppression for being white. It's so incredibly simple that it takes a white person to so stubbornly misunderstand it. ~~~ supergirl What are you trying to say? Racism against white is OK because whites are not a protected class? ~~~ SwellJoe I'm saying racism against white people holds approximately* no power in the US. Being white will approximately never prevent you from getting a job, getting a promotion, holding public office, feeling safe around police, being treated fairly by teachers, etc. Because it holds no power, it is (rightly) seen as a harmless joke when someone makes a racist comment about white folks. White folks don't feel a twinge of fear when they see something like that on twitter or wherever it is. People of color do, because they know it is genuinely reflected in the sentiments and actions of their white neighbors, their white bosses, etc. * - I use the word approximately, because I'm sure there are some very limited cases where being white could be a disadvantage, but they are vastly outnumbered by the situations where being white is an advantage. ~~~ TheSpiceIsLife I'm white, and the police fucking _terrify_ me. ------ Overtonwindow He should do it again but use a lot more tweets. One, or even a few tweets, is not enough. Create 50, and see what happens. Prejudice of any kinds by anyone should be punished the same. ------ supergirl how did this post drop so much? One minute I see it at nr 7, now I can't even find it. Is it hidden or did it drop 1000 places in literally 1 minute. ~~~ detaro users flagging a post has a massive impact on its ranking, I assume that's what has happened here. ~~~ supergirl I thought it would first show as flagged. Now it just disappeared.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Gentrification of the Internet - jboynyc http://culturedigitally.org/2019/03/the-gentrification-of-the-internet/ ====== joefourier Isn't gentrification the opposite of what's been happening to the Internet? Previously, only a small, well-educated minority was online, but now the Internet has never been more accessible to the masses. With a cheap smartphone and data, even rural Indians who make a fraction of the average person in the West are able to have access to the Internet, while previously you need an expensive computer, an expensive modem, and the required knowledge. And let's not get into the cost of server and hosting, which have never been so low. ~~~ sgillen Author seems to use gentrification to describe a shift in power dynamics: those who are on the internet now have more rules governing their behavior and those in charge of the internet are now more interested in corporate profits than the public good. Now I disagree with using gentrification to describe that, and I don’t totally agree with the authors point anyway, but I think that is what he’s trying to say. ~~~ anfilt Yea gentrification seems like the wrong term for sure. Honestly, the most worrying though to me is Google. #1 search engine, #1 browser, #1 email provider, #1 mobile platform, #1 online video platform. The concern is with all those places domination google can dictate de-facto standards or push standards that they want. Gone are the days that one person or small team could keep up and maintain all the standards for a "modern browser". Microsoft even gave up. ~~~ skybrian I don't think Microsoft gave up so much as shifted strategy. Building on Chromium means they start out already compatible with most websites on the Internet, neutralizing one of Google's advantages. They have enough resources to maintain a fork and add their own features. Google did the same thing starting with Safari's WebKit. ------ tranced It's pretty interesting how the author attempts to tie gentrification, caused by real life constraints like supply+demand, to a corporate-backed internet mono culture. It's kind of a stretch since one of the causes of real-life gentrification is protections for existing stakeholders, the lack of change/adaptation(Friendster -> myspace -> FB for example), and an inherent lack of supply(whereas on the internet there's a near infinite). I'm not sure whether you can call this gentrification or rather the internet being less of a niche sub culture + more mainstream or just attribute it to a human tendency to self-segregate/put ourselves in our own bubbles. Tbh, internet n/yimbyism doesn't really have too many effects besides sanitization of content. Other message boards have names for it like noob or a popular one where the word start with "old" or "new' after all. ------ mistypedlambda Neoclassical economics tells the story that algorithms drive differentiated news and other content because different users seek different content out, and the market obliges. This form of gentrification, like many other forms, is generally downstream of an equilibrium around different preferences, whether stated or just manifest. Given how many commerical forces shape the structure of the internet as a marketplace of ideas, I don't think this is the only thing going on, but I think it's ignored at one's peril. > Platforms like reddit and 4chan still operate this [non- > algorithmized/gentrified] way, but most social media platforms use existing > IRL personal networks to link users and push content. This passage in particular struck me as revealing. Reddit is a meta-community with a notorious echochamber problem while 4chan is a meta-community with a notorious troll/dirtbag problem. That the majority of internet users tend to avoid both isn't due to unfair competition over their eyeballs from Facebook et al. so much as an appetite for curation, content accountability/surveillance, content differentiation, community standards, and all the other forms of "online gentrification". The same attitude that bemoans the existence of content differentation as a cause of problems rather than a response to existing conditions that are far harder to improve seems to drive the belief that the appetite for fake news will evaporate if fake news is made harder to find. I consider both rather wrong-headed. ------ joemi The Master Switch by Tim Wu describes this "gentrification" process (though not with that term since it doesn't seem to be the best term for this). Further, the book shows how it happens systematically whenever a new invention initially leads to greater freedom. Radio, TV, etc have all suffered the same fate. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in digital freedom, though its message isn't exactly uplifting. ------ fartcannon The Eternal September. ------ emptyparadise I miss the old internet. Discovery and interaction were the big thing - meeting strangers in strange places. Now, that's basically impossible because each site that you use is designed with the goal of boxing you, keeping you where you are, talking to people who are just like you, because that apparently makes the most money. So now you'll pretty much always be stuck in an echo chamber into which only the angriest, meanest crowds can break through. You could really be anybody, try strange things and explore strange ideas - and you did it all under an alias that you could just easily abandon if you felt unsafe. No doxxing, because nobody knows your real name. Good luck pulling that off now. The logging, the real name/email/phone requirements, it's just not possible anymore. The combined might of sockpuppet abuse, increasing complexity of bad actors' attacks, and the need for gathering real customers' information took that away. I miss the old internet. And I don't even know how it could have survived to the present day. It makes sense why we entered the age of surveillance capitalism. You give data, you get free stuff. It's simple. People love free stuff, after all. But I wonder, did people even imagine that things would turn out like this? I wonder, is there some sort of an alternate future where this could be avoided? If things played out just a little differently? What could save the old internet? Could it be the subscription-like model where sites you visit get a few pennies from you? Could it be keeping things decentralized, keeping the costs low enough to be manageable? Or is this just it, is an internet that's this corporate-greed fueled quest to gather more data and to show you more stuff the only way? ~~~ reciprocity Small forums like that did a number of things that I feel we haven’t been able to replicate. You got to know people over time. It wasn’t a feed you vaguely subscribed to, but a forum (in literal definition of the word) that you chose to participate in. I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms. I think it's safe to include reddit there now too with the direction that site has been going in. These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which _nothing is left unplanned_), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ (!) of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on. My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards. A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything. "You're either with us or against us" and other types of fallacy-addled thinking. I've also seen a lot of the kind of lowbrow "edginess" caked in psuedo-ironic bottom of the barrel commentary where people try to pass off low effort one liners as a means of scoring cheap points with a crowd. And then there's also this brand of posting [0]. Usually this behavior has a negative effect associated with it as this kind of driveby posting encourages more of itself at the expense of discussion. Quality then decreases as people seek other sources of community (I think this is what has been happening with reddit). I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough. [0] [https://i.imgur.com/iYT5pPl.png](https://i.imgur.com/iYT5pPl.png) ~~~ Grangar Wow, you knocked it out of the park. This is exactly how I feel about the direction the internet, or maybe even western society as a whole, has been going in over the last 10 years. ~~~ mjevans It's been going this way for longer than 10 years if you look past the Internet as the medium. It might be possible to trace this back to the inception of the 24 hour news networks if not earlier; that first taste of ad-fueled insanity, and the modern terrorist attacks of (2001-0)9-11 on US soil sort of catalyzed the trend. It really became solidly about fear and outrage, and the enfeeblement of being unable to actually do anything to address that negative emotional state. A real solution is going to require the people as a whole to "grow up", to take responsibility in the sense of breaking the cycles of fear, violence, and greed. To instead focus on building a world where we all get better, and do better overall, rather than individually getting enough and kicking the ladder off for those that should follow.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
My humble tribute to Zed Shaw : The first 50 Python scripts later - romymisra http://www.romymisra.com/50-scripts-later/ ====== romymisra I'm a beginner in programming. I think there are lot less resources in programming for beginners. Zed Shaw's Python tutorial is amazing. I will highly recommend it for anyone who starts programming regardless of Python. What are the best resources you have come across? ------ abyssknight I read this after seeing the retweet from Zed. If you haven't checked out Learning Python the Hard Way, you should. I consider myself a decent, experienced developer and this tutorial was awesome. I learned things about Python that you just can't learn anywhere else. It's the details that really make this one the best.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
R.I.P., the movie camera: 1888-2011 - RyanMcGreal http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/r_i_p_the_movie_camera_1888_2011/singleton/ ====== trimbo Ex-VFX guy here. For me it's more like "don't let the door hit you on the way out." Consider all of the issues: * A toxic chemical process for development. Both the source negative and the (thousands of) projected copies. * Weave, both during filming and projection. * Aspect ratio madness because of legacy formats. For example, academy formats have an offset center thanks to the audio track. * Light leak, and other physical film issues you don't have with digital. * Film is very inconsistent, and between projects, stock choices can make the source material really bad to work with. Take the legendarily bad Vision 500T that many cameramen would use even on critical bluescreen/greenscreen shots it had no place in. * For IMAX, going digital has the added benefit of losing weight. IMAX reels can only go about 90 seconds at a time. That'll also help high speed. Filming 500-1000 fps will tear through a 35mm reel in about 5 seconds. Again, pretty wasteful when you think about it compared to using a Phantom. Now it's just a matter of getting all theaters to use digital projection. ------ pluies I am at the moment working with a guy whose job is to digitalise old (usually amateur) movies filmed on 8mm and 16mm reels. It's a bit of a shame to see these go, because the quality of 50-yo footage is quite incredible, even without any post-processing. The sheer simplicity and sturdiness of some old mechanical Russian camera is also amazing. What will happen of the videos we are shooting now? I'm pretty sure we'll be losing a lot more of it to hard drive failures or simple mistakes. Digital is a lot harder to store away in the attic to be re-discovered by your grandchildren. ~~~ Klinky People have lost troves of footage & pictures due to fire & water damage thanks to physical formats. People will also lose footage & pictures to digital media loss/damage, though it's much easier to duplicate a hard drive or a couple thousand data files than it is to duplicate a physical format. While it may be sad that the grandkids aren't going to find 8mm film in the attic, there's nothing really stipulating that even if they did find it they'd have the ambitiousness to track down the proper equipment to view the footage. It's not like you can walk into most any store & find an 8mm or 16mm player. If the fear is that people won't be able to play the content a previous generation created, that fear has already been realized with 8mm & 16mm film. ~~~ codedivine On the other hand, I am hoping people won't be storing content in proprietary formats without a spec, or heaven-forbid with some DRM restrictions, or you might not have the proper software (or the proper rights if DRMed) to play it back 50 years later. ~~~ InclinedPlane In the realm of master copies for films the issue isn't so much DRM as merely encryption. There's likely to be some pressure to ensure that the master is "secure" from "thievery" regardless of where the bits physically reside, which will probably manifest itself in the use of strong encryption. Which, of course, brings up the question of what happens when the files are still around but the encryption keys are lost. The bigger problem is the classic fundamental problem of data retention. The people responsible for retention probably do not value the retention of the data independent of other developments to be of sufficient value to guarantee that retention with robust measures. For example, they could leave unencrypted copies (or encrypted copies with the encryption keys separate) in the custody of the library of congress. Or they could use some sort of N of M keys encryption system and distribute copies and keys to numerous individuals or institutions around the world. Etc. However, while such things would retention of the media would be valuable to the world at large even after, say, a global catastrophe (asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.) or merely the bankruptcy of the company that created the media such concerns the company itself would tend not to share those ideals. ~~~ Klinky This is more of a management issue than anything to do with the format your information is stored in. Lots of physical reels of film, photographs & documents have been lost due to poor management & I am sure this trend will continue into the digital age. ------ bprater I knew the film camera was dead when I saw the first video coming from the Canon 5D Mark II. It wasn't perfect, but it was close. All coming from a package that fits in your fists and uses no film. ------ mark_l_watson I used conventional movie cameras for most of my life (videographer for my high scholl movie club, family stuff), but you would have to forcefully pry my Sony EX1 from my hands (unless you were swapping in an EX3). A good hidef digital video camera is a joy to use, and great software like FCP is so much better than splicing film when editing. Even digital cameras are adequate (<http://youtu.be/zIe3EKO43Sg> \- I took this last week with my Canon T2i) and in some cases when you want a very narrow in-focus zone, better than a digital video camera. ------ trafficlight At my previous employer we had a Red One (<http://red.com>). 5 minutes with that thing and you could see the writing on the wall. ~~~ stephen_g And now cinematographers (like John Schwartzman, DOP on the new Spiderman reboot) say the RED Epic has picture quality like 65mm film, and it shoots full resolution at up to 96 frames per second! All onto a 2.5mm SSD drive. ------ cromulent James Jannard's Red obviously had something to do with this. If you can buy a Red for less than the cost of renting a film camera from Panavision, then that's the way it will go. [http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-09/...](http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16-09/ff_redcamera?currentPage=all) ------ mathattack I am frequently the crotchety old man in these situations but video (and sound) are ripe for digital technology. New technologies in these fields won't replace good stories, but they will replace old technologies. ------ antidaily I'll miss the grain. ~~~ thwarted There are filters for that. ~~~ paganel They're fake, just like Instagram is a fake. ~~~ pavlov In that sense, the letters you're looking at on this webpage are also "fake" because these letterforms were not achieved by using hot-metal typesetting. Art constantly reinvents its methods while retaining forms derived from the past. That's cultural heritage. If efficiency on a particular medium were the only concern, it wouldn't make any sense to use Latin letters on a computer screen, with all these awkward shapes derived from Roman stonecutting and Medieval handwriting... (The Braille alphabet would probably be the most suitable for digital displays.) ------ wegwegerg So film has an digital equivalent resolution of 4k If you don't shoot in 4k digital you are screwing yourself badly, and most people are... ~~~ Keyframe Actually, I've read somewhere (somewhere credible, maybe it was cinefex) that 35mm 2-perf has a maximum equivalent resolution of 8.5K, 4-perf is probably then a double or quadruple of that? 2K in output is more than enough today, but there are technical reasons on some cameras to shoot in 4K - for example on RED One. If you don't shoot in 4K, you're not using the whole area of sensor, which results in odd behavior of lenses you're using. ~~~ stephen_g You can scan film at whatever resolution you want, but on average (and this varies between different stocks, different film speeds, different processing) you won't get that much effective resolution from 35mm beyond 4K - you just start seeing the grains in more detail! And that is assuming a camera negative. A 3rd generation release print that has been played a few times can have less than 1.8K resolution. ------ RandallBrown It's pretty funny that the youtube video the guy posted wasn't even filmed with a camera. Brakhage just put moth wings on film and projected it. ------ protomyth I'm pretty sure IMax still uses a film camera. ~~~ bradleyland Current IMAX cameras use 70 mm film, but they're looking to go to 4K digital with new equipment. Cameras like the RED Epic can already capture at 5K resolutions. There's not much reason to stick with the 70 mm format. ~~~ protomyth I seem to remember from an interview on the rc podcast that 4k would not be enough for them. ------ suivix Fascinating read. It's amazing to see such established things become obsolete.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: What do you think of http://decks.io? - sausheong Hello HN.<p>I wanted to scratch a specific itch -- how can a speaker/presenter do remote presentation and control his slides, without installing proprietary software?<p>The result is http://decks.io. It has a very specific purpose to allow someone doing presentations to show and control a set of slides to a wide range of audience. Simply send anyone a URL then start the presentation!<p>Slides can be uploaded directly or through Dropbox. Controlling the slides can be done through any HTML5-compliant browser, including ones on smartphones and tablets. The slides can even be scribbled on! No additional plugins or software required.<p>Slides can be viewed from any browser, anywhere without installing any plugins or software either.<p>Would appreciate feedback and comments on it. It's useful for me, but would it be useful for you?<p>Here's the link again:<p>http://decks.io ====== thomasd Hi sausheong. It would be nice if there are more information (e.g. videos) showing how it works. I don't think many people will want to sign up to something they have no idea about just to try. ~~~ sausheong Thanks for the feedback. It's a good idea and I'm on it. ------ SunboX Why not "sign up with existing DropBox account"? ------ Robby2012 what about if I don't have internet? ~~~ sausheong It's a cloud based service :) ~~~ SunboX web-cache, offline/persistant storage ... DropBox is "cloud-based" but I can use it without WiFi ~~~ Robby2012 that's what I'm asking, what happens if I don't have internet? does it work offline or is there any way to make it work? ~~~ sausheong I see what you mean. The current service is entirely cloud-based meaning you can't view the slides without an Internet connection. It follows the model for most remote presentation software. I see the benefits of having off-line presentations but that's more in the domain of Slideshare, where you can download the slides and view them offline. However this means the presenter is no longer able to control the presentation any more and this is one of the main reasons for the service.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The San Franciso Fire Department makes its own wooden ladders by hand - lisper https://gizmodo.com/inside-san-francisos-fire-department-where-ladders-are-1552279252 ====== AdieuToLogic The Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs"[0] show made a segment involving the SFFD's ladder construction/maintenance crew. In it, they explained that wooden ladders are cheaper to maintain than aluminum ones and I _think_ also discount fiberglass ladders as well. It's worth a watch if one is interested in this topic. 0 - [http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/about-this- show...](http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/about-this-show/dirty- jobs-about/) ~~~ curun1r LOL at SFFD giving any shits about costs. This is the same department that power grabbed emergency medical response away from dedicated paramedics in ambulances. Responding in full ladder trucks to take care of drunk homeless people...yeah, they do that, costing millions every year in added expenses and road repairs. But good for them for saving a few bucks on ladders, that must make a huge difference. ~~~ AndrewUnmuted Coming from NYC, it is somewhat surprising to see such anger directed at fire departments. Here, the FDNY seems universally loved. ~~~ Gargoyle The LAFD might be the most admired municipal organization in the city. They have a very difficult range of environments and handle them very well. ~~~ jpster From afar it seems the LAPD has a horrible reputation. So the LAFD must seem like saints by comparison. ------ chrisseaton Americans seem to take a lot of pride in their fire brigades - their fire engines are still shiny and polished with more traditional signage and the fire fighters still wear helmets with their traditional shape. In the United Kingdom they wear more simple uniforms and the engines are just a box shape with no bells any more - seems a shame. Usually it's UK the has more ceremony in these kind of things. ~~~ eigenvector One of the biggest differences between Europe and North America in this regard is that in European cities, emergency vehicles have to be designed to fit a 1000-year-old city in terms of width, turning radius, maximum weight, etc. This leads to a much more compact shape and shorter wheelbase. In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example. ~~~ Cofike You should see some streets in San Francisco. No way that a fire engine is fitting on those. ~~~ estebank The narrowest street in San Francisco is roughly a regular European street. This[1] is par for the course on most European cities, while San Francisco has very few streets narrower than this[2] (and the average is probably wider, if you look anywhere westwards of Park Presidio where theoretically two way streets are wide enough for traffic to continue flowing in both direction even with double parked trucks. I would also point out that I'd prefer narrower streets in SF[3]. [1]: [https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-narrow-san- francisco-...](https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-narrow-san-francisco- street-image7772310) [2]: [https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7998615,-122.4141133,3a,75y,...](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7998615,-122.4141133,3a,75y,259.45h,91.52t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sAF1QipOPfUtW2v0nV3jvk1PMMnZY0AzEeig-R8tcM04F!2e10!3e11!7i11000!8i5500) [3]: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/08/san- francisco...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/08/san-francisco- narrow-streets-european-style) ~~~ dalbasal Just as a side point... A lot of architects like this idea from an aesthetic or architectural-sociological reasons. Living in em.. these as houses don't give you a lot of privacy. People walk by, less than a meter from where you're sitting. They sometimes stop to look at your TV. You get used to it, but it's not the kind of thing people go looking for on purpose. ~~~ morsch Put stores or offices in the ground floor. Or have a raised ground floor. ~~~ estebank Or just embrace it, like the Dutch do[0]. [0]: [https://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2010/11/24/no-8-not- owning-...](https://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2010/11/24/no-8-not-owning- curtains/) ------ DannyBee I can't think of any reason to acclimatize them this way instead of kiln drying/vaporizing them (depending) to roughly the right moisture content and waiting for 1% change (instead of kiln drying them to 0, or waiting forever for completely green wood) There are studies going back to the 70's by the forestry service (and others) showing there is no change in mechanical properties of pine/fir from these drying schedules. (This is _not_ true of a lot of hardwoods, but is true of these softwoods) Waiting years seems like a pointless waste of time. ~~~ padobson I'm not sure how many degrees of separation this knowledge is from programming, but it's got to be one of the highest values I've ever seen on HN. Bravo. ~~~ tptacek It's funny how well this kind of lowbrow snark works here until exactly the moment it totally doesn't. ------ legitster If you get a chance to visit a Smokejumper base, I highly recommend it. One of the things you learn is that everyone on the team is required to make all of their own equipment by hand. So all of these highly trained, ex-military guys spend days on end doing nothing but sewing clothes and packing parachutes. The reasons described: \- Cheaper than contracting out everything \- They have a better idea of the exact specifications they need for everything \- It instills a strong culture of self-reliance and trust (anyone has to be able to pack your parachute) \- It fills a lot of offseason downtime My takeaway is that it makes a lot of sense to in-house your own tools - a lesson from outside of the software industry. ~~~ BurningFrog It makes sense _for a job where 95% of the time is spent waiting for an emergency to react to_. ~~~ enriquto > a job where 95% of the time is spent waiting for an emergency to react to. this describes quite accurately the work of many people maintaining computer systems ~~~ craftyguy I must be maintaining the wrong systems, because over here 95% of the time is reacting to emergencies (some technical, but most fabricated by management) ~~~ qop First thing that came to my mind too! I've had two "Please call me, it's broke" calls just this morning! ~~~ WJW Why does your manager know this before you do though? ~~~ sli I would never in a million years, as a developer, give my personal phone number to a client. That's probably why. I get the same issue where I work. The client states that "everything is broken," but it often turns out that their own servers are down (or sometimes our API guys made a breaking change and I wasn't informed, but that's not common anymore). I find this stuff out when I get to work in the morning, because they certainly aren't calling me directly. ~~~ lostcolony I think the implication is that the system should alert you directly. Though if you are building systems for clients to run, you obviously would want the system alerting them, not you. ------ mindcrime There's an old saying among firefighters: "The fire service is 200+ years of tradition, unimpeded by progress". Now obviously that isn't _strictly_ true, and SF does have some good reasons for sticking with their wooden ladders... but one can't help but suspect that sheer tradition is a somewhat significant factor. Of course some departments adopt change faster than others, and some kinds of change are adopted more readily, so it's hard to make any sweeping generalizations. ~~~ lisper > one can't help but suspect that sheer tradition is a somewhat significant > factor Only if you didn't read the article. "There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high-voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too dangerous to use." ~~~ LeifCarrotson And only if you're also about 40 years behind ladder tech - notice the stepladders in the "A view of the main repair facility" photo? They're nonconductive fiberglass. They're stronger than wood, lighter than wood, don't need to be oiled/varnished, don't require cutting down old-growth trees, and aren't susceptible to moisture damage. You can buy them exhaustively tested, mass produced, in whatever quantities you require for a couple hundred dollars - probably an order of magnitude less than these artisanal wooden ladders. ~~~ reaperducer _> They're nonconductive fiberglass_ They're also not being used right next to flames. Yes, fiberglass can be made that won't buckle under both weight and heat, but not at the same price point as wood. ~~~ zrobotics Because wood reacts so well to fires? ~~~ yjftsjthsd-h Oddly, yes. Sufficiently dense wood takes a lot to ignite and burns quite slowly, and I assume they coated it to make it even harder to get started. ------ qiqing Favorite excerpt: "We had one ladder here that was fully involved in a fire for 25 minutes, and the whole tip of it—six feet—was crispy. It looked like a log you pull out of a campfire," Braun says. "That can't go back in service but we were curious, so we put a new halyard [rope used to hoist ladders] on it for a load test. Even in that condition, it passed." ~~~ Doxin Wood is a surprisingly good building material for surviving fires. A nice thick wooden beam can take days to burn through in a house fire where e.g. a metal support would yield as soon as it gets hot enough. ------ petee Great read, but loved the end - _" "Pete has collected all these different donuts over the years. They're all real, and covered with lacquer so they won't go bad. Some of these are ten years old.""_ ~~~ sparrish Impressive collection but I only see a waste of a good donut! ------ emodendroket I never knew we had so many experts on firefighting among us to tell us why this makes no sense. ------ cesarb > There's a city-specific reason why San Francisco has stuck with wood rather > than swap over to metals, and the answer lies in looking up. The high- > voltage cables and wires that guide the city's (oft-maligned) public > transport system Muni, and trolley cars crisscross above nearly every > street, mean that ladders made of conductive elements are generally just too > dangerous to use. I wonder how it's done in European cities with their trams (the ones which don't use APS). ~~~ xienze Fiberglass, probably. Which is what SF should be doing. ~~~ ra1n85 Most ladders are fiber glass - which makes me wonder why any off the shelf ladder wouldn't suffice. ~~~ 52-6F-62 The film industry uses almost exclusively fiberglass as well. There's no shortage. They're swimming in those things. I would bet their lifespan is shorter than the wooden ladders, however. At least from what I've seen. ~~~ throwaway5752 Fiberglass is reinforced plastic, though, so that might explain why it isn't used in FDs even if it's heavily used in other domains. How well does it hold up to heat? How does that exposure effect it structural properties? I honestly don't know and don't have time to look it up, but I could see thermal plastic deformation over such a long run as potentially hazardous. ~~~ 52-6F-62 Could be. I know film shoots can end up occurring in all kinds of weather (especially here in Canada), and often the ladders will be sidled up to large sun lamps (which I can assure you get very hot), and in electrically- compromising situations, but all of those are very different from an actual fire. ~~~ throwaway5752 Wow. I wish I had time in the day to look at NFPA (Nat'l FIre Protection Assn) standards. 1931, 1914, and 1911 seem pertinent - this is clearly something that many people have devoted a lot of time and energy to. edit: [http://tkolb.net/safety/LadderSafety/LadderSafety.html](http://tkolb.net/safety/LadderSafety/LadderSafety.html) ... can't vouch for site but interesting. ------ ladders ive spent most of my last 10 years on a ladder due to my job. This is absurd. Aluminum ladders require practically no maintenance and are far far lighter. Weight of a ladder being a significant factor in set up speed, required manpower for set up, and ease of handling. A wood ladder is completely impractical. Fiberglass however is another great option. ~~~ hosh From the article: > Wood is resilient in ways which aluminum—now standard for fire department > ladders—can't even compare. "You know if you take an empty coke can and bend > it three or four times and it tears really easy? That's what aluminum > ladders will do," Braun says. "They have a seven to eight year lifespan, > after which they need to be replaced." > Wooden ladders, on the other hand, can last indefinitely. "You can stress > wood right up to its failure point a million times; as long as you don't go > beyond that, it will come right back to where it was. They can be involved > in a fire for a pretty long time; after that, it's just a matter of sanding > off the top coat of material then inspecting the wood. If it's good we'll > re-oil it, revarnish it, and put it back in service." ------ larrik [2014] Dirty Jobs did an episode there in 2012 (which is probably where Gizmodo got their inspiration from) [http://www.tv.com/shows/dirty-jobs/onion- processor-2392294/](http://www.tv.com/shows/dirty-jobs/onion- processor-2392294/) ------ hfdgiutdryg I would love to read about that big ladder with the multi-part, triangulated side rails. ------ packeted Loved reading this! I just finished restored a 1912 house in Oakland made out of the same old growth west coast douglas fir - from the framing to the copious clear vertical grain and quarter sawn wainscoting, all stripped, sanded and refinished in a natural varnish. Great to see this kind of craftsmanship alive and well! ------ ddingus I love this. Fire is a mutual threat. I will very gladly pay for great, capable people taking pride in what is so often tough, dangerous work. They can and should own as much as they think makes sense. Economically, the potential cost is trivial. Not a concern to me at all. ------ jonknee This site has an interesting detail: [https://sf-fire.org/wooden-ladders](https://sf-fire.org/wooden-ladders) > The largest ladder made by the artisans is 50 feet, weighs 350 pounds and > takes six firefighters to lift. ~~~ icey I live near a fire station in SF, and see them practicing raising a huge 20+ foot ladder monthly out front of the station. They're pretty impressive ladders, and it looks like it takes quite a lot of coordination to raise them up. ------ duxup I'd really like to learn some woodworking and make some stuff some day. I recently found myself admiring the grain on the wooden train track my kids were playing with... ~~~ fuball63 I started with this book, which is a furniture book that uses a technique involving cutting slots in plywood. It's good practices measuring, cutting, sanding, and finishing. [https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Furniture-Forgotten-Building- Bea...](https://www.amazon.com/Fast-Furniture-Forgotten-Building- Beautiful/dp/0894710281/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531342036&sr=1-9&keywords=fast+furniture) ------ BarkMore Previous post on the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852400) ------ djacobs Interesting to see that this headline typo (copied from the Gizmodo article) has lasted on the front page of HN for 9+ hours! Chalk it up to only reading the beginnings and endings of words? ------ Havoc I like the mindset but... Wooden ladders are heavy as hell compared to alu ladders. Really not what I'd want to be schlepping across the place under pressure. ~~~ dasil003 They also conduct heat, electricity and lose their structural integrity faster. ------ wenbert Is there a good supply of bamboo in SF? If there is, they make really good ladders. Very light and very strong. ~~~ bullosB But would they withstand fire ? ------ buchanae Great article, ruined by Gizmodo's disrespect for its readers by including animated junk on the page. ------ robbrown451 In related news, San Francisco is now the most expensive place to live in the whole world. ------ threatofrain Reminds me of the supposedly dying art of scientific glasswork. ------ exabrial I'm surprised they don't use an ablative coating ------ sasaf5 Hipster ladders :) ------ wpdev_63 Guess you would too if you were paid for all that overtime. ------ kugestu L ------ chadwilken Of course they do, that is the hipster capital of the world and hipsters need everything to be retro. ~~~ butterfi I would pay money to watch you tell a SFFD firefighter they were a hipster. ~~~ TimTheTinker That was really funny. Thanks & kudos. ------ xixi77 But, are these approved by the American Ladder Institute? [https://www.americanladderinstitute.org](https://www.americanladderinstitute.org) ~~~ SllX I think the better question is: do they do the job the SFFD requires them to do? Given one of the ladders talked about in the article was over 60 years old and still in service, I think the safe answer is: yeah, they do the job. ------ ksherlock Yep, just like a Jedi warrior should build his own light saber and a programmer should build her own editor and a Tesla driver should build his own car, a firefighter should build her own ladder. ------ jack_quack This is super cool but I'm positive this is also super wasteful ~~~ BanazirGalbasi You should try reading the article. They specifically state that they re-use components whenever possible, and they regularly service their ladders to keep them in good condition. Aluminum ladders only have a 7-8 year lifespan vs some of the ladders they use going on 60 years before being taken out of commission. ~~~ jack_quack I don't just mean wasteful in terms of materials, but also in terms of man- hours, equipment needing to be owned and maintained. Once all factors for the total cost of ownership are taken in to account I highly doesn't it's efficient. It's like everyone growing their own vegetables.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Orchestra – Model and data pipeline monitoring as a service - tixocloud Hi HN-ers,<p>We're Teren and Qiyan, founders of Orchestra (https://orchestrahq.com). We help data scientists/data engineers discover, prioritize and investigate machine learning model performance issues in real-time. We're Datadog for machine learning.<p>We first came across this problem while Teren was leading a team of analysts and data scientists at a global bank. Their main role was to identify opportunities to apply AI/ML to drive business performance internally and externally. When he joined, several models were already in production but upon further investigation, there were a few that were unusable for years. One particular model need significant manual rework to make it usable again.<p>With an early detection system, model performance issues such as the one Teren faced can easily be fixed before it causes further damage not only to the business but the reputation of the data science community internally as a whole. That's the motivation behind Orchestra - to provide robust ML-specific tools to help AI/ML/data science teams build trust and credibility.<p>Our tools are designed for data scientists who are time starved with a million priorities. Let us handle the infrastructure and you can focus on improving the model to actually deliver value for the business.<p>We want to make it easy to use but also flexible enough to meet your monitoring needs for just about any kind of model you develop. In short, a few code snippets allow us to extract, monitor and analyze model inputs/outputs as well as the data pipeline.<p>We want to build a product that solves a problem and loved by customers so we're eager to learn from all the experiences you've had in this area and ideas on how you've built trust and credibility within your organizations. We welcome any feedback so please feel free to share. We're also looking for testers/collaborators to join us on the journey to building high quality machine learning models.<p>Thanks in advance ====== brudgers The marketing material does not appear to be tuned toward data wrangling individual contributors or line managers making decisions on a technical basis. It might be helpful to provide some technical marketing collateral as well if the sales funnel is includes self-service via the web in lieu of or in addition to traditional enterprise sales. Good luck. ~~~ tixocloud Thanks for your feedback. How would the marketing differ between the 2 types of users? Do you have any good examples of technical marketing collateral? We are indeed hoping to start off with a self-service offering mainly geared towards AI startups or data scientists at smaller companies. ~~~ brudgers You're welcome. I don't have examples because I'm not in that industry. It probably makes more sense to pursue enterprise if that's your background. And even if it isn't, enterprises have money to spend and a lot of startups don't spend money on things they can do in house. Attracting startups usually means low prices and low prices make a sustainable capital structure difficult to establish. Good luck.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Miraculous Fingertip Regrowing Powder Strikes Again - kkleiner http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/12/miraculous-fingertip-regrowing-powder-strikes-again-video/ ====== bobds I lost the tip of one of my fingers when I was young, to a slamming door. It grew back itself, without any magic powders. "Little pieces (16mm or so) are possible, but most of our wildest dreams about regenerating amputated body parts are still a long ways off." I just had to measure it when I read that. Funnily enough, the mark that this wound left starts at about 15 to 17mm from the tip. I remember I lost my whole fingernail but somehow it grew back perfectly shaped. ~~~ relix That's amazing, I didn't know that was even possible. 1.6cm is huge! ~~~ Vivtek Depends on the age. Very young children can regenerate fingertips. That's about it, though. ~~~ bobds I was about 10 years old, if I remember it right. Also note that the door completely missed the bone, although I remember being able to see a small part of it. ------ tomjen3 It might not be able to regrow the limbs today, but it is nice to know that somebody in the medical industry is actually working on improving our lives through new innovations. Far too often it looks like they are happy just getting rent and doing a few modifications to existent patented medicine so that they can get another 20 years monopoly. ~~~ lionhearted I voted this up after reading the first half - I disagree with the second half. It might appear that way sometimes, but it's wrong - pharmaceutical companies do a mix of billions of dollars in research (most of which never pans out), and also provide exits/buy-outs for smaller labs who make a discovery, which stimulates innovation as well. Some rent seeking, yes, too much, maybe, but pharmaceuticals have been on balance one of the most wealth creating industries over the last 20 years. Azithromicin alone was worth the $120 before it went generic, and now you can get it for dirt cheap. People laugh and joke about things like Viagra, but it's helped a lot of people, especially as we're all living longer now. All sorts of other things. Pharmaceutical and medical research companies are amazing. ------ poppers Can I regrow my dick? ~~~ Twisol Sorry, not yet. That's a pretty tough one to do, from what I've read. But given the stories I've heard about some angry partners... I hope it will be possible eventually. :S	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Startup SkipTheDishes cancels job interview because applicant asked about pay - joosters https://twitter.com/feministjourney/status/841156011780116480 ====== NonEUCitizen Better to find out early that they can't afford than to waste even more time. ------ UK-AL Sad but not unexpected in the tech industry. ~~~ joosters That's what I find so strange though. I don't mean to gloss over the difficulties in getting funding, but in a very general simplification, there's much more VC and investor money being thrown at startup companies right now. And yet, the culture persists that you can't possibly pay employees well.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt - based2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet ====== nandemo Here's a more informative account, hosted on Board Game Geek: [https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/166814/senet-review- version...](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/166814/senet-review-versions- updated) Excerpt: > _Everyone seems to agree that play moved back and forth down the 30 spaces > rather like a game of Snakes & Ladders. Most believe play started in the > upper left corner and moved to the lower right. All also seem to agree that > it's in the backgammon family of games, and indeed, it may be the original > founding game of the type. Each player had an equal number of identical > pieces (either 5 or 7) and the "dice" were four throwing sticks that were > flat on one side and rounded on the other. The board comprised 30 spaces in three rows of 10 each. 24 of the spaces were plain or decorated with art that had no game effect. If we start the numbering system at the upper left, the first special space is No. 15. This seems to be a "starting" space of some kind, according to most authorities, although probably not the game start. Instead it seems to be a restarting space for pieces that are sent back from the "water trap" in space 27, which I'll discuss later on. The next space of note is No. 26, which apparently usually had a symbol implying it was a "good" space. Space No. 27 is the "water trap" which is a "bad" space. Most authorities believe that pieces that landed there were sent back to Space 15. Finally, spaces 28, 29 and 30 are marked III, II and I, respectively. Most believe these were "bearing off" spaces, although some versions treat them as entering spaces, RC Bell, for example. Apparently these markings were remarkably stable for the several thousand years that the game was played._ ------ jnem For those in the Bay Area, there's a full sized version of Senet at the Egyptian museum in San Jose. Not sure where they got there rules from. Also saw Senet on Steam recently. Seems like the game is on a comeback. ------ aesof Someone should make up rules and ship it. The world needs more board games. ------ pervycreeper tl;dr--- the rules are unknown ~~~ JoeDaDude Senet dates from the time games were played not just as entertainment, but as a way to divine the will of the gods. As such , the absence of rules robs us of a little understanding of Egyptian religion, culture, and civilization. This is touched upon briefly in the following article about game rules that appeared in Escapist Magazine: [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video- games/is...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video- games/issues/issue_41/247-Game-Rules-as-Art)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Thinking Journeys rather than Estimates - bobm_kite9 https://riskfirst.org/estimating/Journeys ====== humanrebar > Eventually, I decide I’ve done enough planning. How? I stop at the point > where I’m happy with the risks I’m taking, or unable to mitigate them > further. There are other important places to stop. An important one that planning-eager folks neglect is complexity. The high-level estimation needs to be light enough that you will redo it, perhaps entirely, if the facts on the ground change. You will need to assign _some_ risk to the plan itself since it will cost some time, energy, money, communication bandwidth, political capital, etc. to change the plan. How much planning risk depends on a few things, but how much the details of the plan are exposed is an important thing to factor in. If you've signed contracts with 1000 people promising that you will complete step M on exactly the week of April 8 and it will be entirely free, you have made it hard on yourself to change many things in your plan. ~~~ jacques_chester If the prevailing culture interprets estimates as plans and interprets plans as commitments written in blood, nobody will actually be making estimates or plans. I do agree that estimation comes at a cost, but I suspect that tool support could make that go down a lot. ------ thinkingkong The last sentence of this article rings true. Do the riskiest parts first, essentially. The rest feels prescriptive and way too rigid and I have a hard time believing teams would want to or get a benefit from sticking to it. Eliminating risk is awesome though and even that practice is compatible with estimates if thats what your team is doing. Simply asking the question “whats the riskiest part?” prompts some healthy discussion. ~~~ hinkley I would qualify that idea. Momentum is important and you can lose it by tackling risk too late or too early. When a new team or project is forming, doing the riskiest thing first can become a self fulfilling prophecy. I suspect that’s a big part of why so many of us get wedged trying to start personal projects or businesses. We go toward the risk too quickly in an effort to save time and then we save loads of it by giving up. You do want to build toward the risky things, both as a team and individual contributors. Some teams fail to thrive because the senior members continue to take on the bulk of the risk, while new or younger members are forever stuck at mid-level until they quit and join another team. ------ mjfisher I wish as an industry we practiced quantitative risk management more. I run a small training workshop about producing better estimates, and the single idea that I want people to take away is that a single-valued estimate is a really terrible shorthand for describing a probability distribution. If you describe estimates as ranges or distributions, a whole world of risk analysis tools open up - PERT, Monte Carlo, etc. More crucially, it allows you to start communicating and managing risk openly with everyone involved, instead of pretending it doesn't exist. ~~~ bobm_kite9 Well I’m not going to disagree, obviously. The hard part is figuring out what these distributions look like. For example, in the summer I got an intern to build an app. It demoed well and people naturally asked when it would be in production. Working in quite a regulated environment, I knew this wouldn’t be as simple as just firing up a couple of EC2 instances, so I said a couple of months to get it live on the ‘internal cloud’. It still isn’t live. Maybe someone more experienced than me could have predicted that. ------ coldcode The smaller the team (by team I mean everyone in the project not just programmers) the easier the estimation can be done and the more thought you can put into it. When you get into projects as big as the two (simultaneous) I am in the more the estimation becomes random guesswork. In one project they defined 1400 or so user stories, a portion of which I had to estimate in less than a day which is basically dice throwing. But this is a huge company, and the ultimate money involved is also huge in both cost and revenue. I wish we could spend more time thinking of it as a journey instead of launching off a cliff. ~~~ jacques_chester At the scale of 1400 stories, using Little's Law as an estimation tool would become tractable. As you proceed through the stories you would have an average latency and throughput. When multiplied these give the total of all stories either in the backlog or in-flight. Then you solve for when that number reaches zero and you have a fairly decent estimate of the 50% completion time. What you couldn't do well is say when particular stories would be completed, or what the 80%/90% etc times would be. You'd need to use something more sophisticated. ~~~ bobm_kite9 I think I understand Little's Law, but I'm struggling to see how it works here - are you saying the backlog size would be predictable? ~~~ jacques_chester More that since you know the backlog size, you can use figures on either average latency or average throughput to calculate when the backlog will be drained. ------ m4r35n357 Serious question, what is the difference between software development and alchemy? ~~~ zubairq Quite a lot of difference. Alchemy is science and software development is art ~~~ tonyedgecombe From my dictionary: Alchemy: the medieval forerunner of chemistry, concerned with the transmutation of matter, in particular with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a universal elixir. ~~~ zubairq Cool, so alchemy was like medieval chemistry! But I guess the motive was to make a quick buck by making gold! :)	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Baidu’s Andrew Ng on Deep Learning and Innovation in Silicon Valley - avgn http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/11/21/baidus-andrew-ng-on-deep-learning-and-innovation-in-silicon-valley/ ====== malandrew Having lived in China and experienced the Great Firewall of China firsthand, I've always wondered what role Baidu and other firms like it play in controlling the conversation and identifying dissidents. It would not surprise me if Baidu plays a large role in not only in providing search like Google but specifically tailoring those results to be inline with the content the Party would like the people to see and uses it's crawling and machine learning ability to identify dissidents. This is of course speculative based on my own experience with the Firewall and seeing the degree to which companies located within the PRC need to cooperate, but it wouldn't surprise me if machine learning techniques are already used in such a capacity. Does anyone here that know a lot more about Baidu have any information supporting or refuting such speculation? I know Google has already ventured into this territory with it's autocomplete word blacklist[0] and modified results for terms like torrents. [0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577513) ------ therobot24 > There are a lot of deep-learning startups. Unfortunately, deep learning is > so hot today that there are startups that call themselves deep learning > using a somewhat generous interpretation. It’s creating tons of value for > users and for companies, but there’s also a lot of hype. We tend to say deep > learning is loosely a simulation of the brain. That sound bite is so easy > for all of us to use that it sometimes causes people to over-extrapolate to > what deep learning is. The reality is it’s really very different than the > brain. We barely (even) know what the human brain does. 100% agree. Needs to be said 100x more. What is one of the first things Ng taught in his ML class? These methods are tools, but that doesn't mean every problem requires a hammer. Because Deep Learning is getting press start-ups think they need to use it. And i really doubt that most of the start-ups that claim they are using it, are really using it properly. It's at the point now that when i see a start-up claim they use deep learning i flat out don't believe them. ~~~ agibsonccc As someone building a deep learning platform as a startup[0], I do training among many other things and some of the trends I have seen in this space are that many aren't even familiar with what deep learning is good for, let alone why they should use it or where the hype is coming from. If you want a good explanation or 2 about deep learning, I would suggest a recent panel discussion by some people brought together by gigaom (disclaimer I was one of them)[2] as well as Andrew. What most people who try to sell you deep learning won't tell you is how impractical the algorithms can be to use and train. If you need that extra bit of accuracy, make sure you understand what you're getting yourself in to. [0]: [http://skymind.io/](http://skymind.io/) [1]: [http://gigaom.com/2014/09/22/heres-what-you-missed-at- gigaom...](http://gigaom.com/2014/09/22/heres-what-you-missed-at-gigaoms- future-of-ai-meetup/) ------ Wogef >Large parts of China are still a developing economy. If you’re illiterate, you can’t type, so enabling users to speak to us is critical for helping them find information. Baidu needs voice search because so many Chinese are illiterate? WTF! This is an incredibly bizarre statement. He's suggesting there are a significant number of Mainland Chinese users who speak Mandarin good enough for machine transcription- but are illiterate? Anyone who has lived in China for a significant amount of time can tell you that's just not plausible. The people who have poor reading skills (in ten years I have never met any completely illiterate Chinese) generally only speak their provincial dialect. Last check only 53% of Chinese can communicate in Mandarin, while only 5% are illiterate. The overlap is nearly non-existent. I think Ng picked up a bit of Singaporean bias during his time there- it certianly seems he has spent no time on the Mainland. ~~~ cadamsau Hi Wogef, Sorry to bother you (and everyone else) on this thread. I'm interested in visiting Shenzhen and would like to meet up. I tried to reach you on the email on your profile but it didn't work. Are you able to reach out on the email in my profile? Regards, ------ valgaze Watch Ng at 57 minutes discuss the "cocktail party" problem and present an amazing solution: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&t=57m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E&t=57m0s) ------ phatak-dev His course on ML made me interested in ML field and drew to coursera.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Table Top Fusion: Beast that will not die - brkumar http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13361472 ====== asciilifeform Tabletop fusion per se is trivial: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor> Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer. Breakeven is another matter. ~~~ thaumaturgy Right. One of my clients has working sonofusion, but are currently spending several magnitudes more energy to produce the effect than they are getting for output. ------ mattmaroon They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission. ------ troystribling Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate. ~~~ rkowalick Apparantly you don't either. There are plenty of scientific theories that are indisputably resolved and closed to debate. ~~~ troystribling I think indisputable and what a scientific assertion is not clear. I would interpret an indisputable assertion as having probability 1 of accurately describing a collection of observations. Falsifiability, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability>, is used by many to define an assertion as scientific. From the article, "Sophisticated methodological falsification, on the other hand, is a prescription of a way in which scientists ought to behave as a matter of choice. The object of this is to arrive at an evolutionary process whereby theories become less bad". A scientific assertion will never have a probability of 1 of describing a set of observations since the supporting observations are of a finite accuracy. There are many scientific theories that have many supporting observations within a range of parameters, so have a high probability of describing those observations, but none describe the observations with probability 1. I worked as a theoretical physicist for about 10 years and never worked on anything where I did not make a set of approximations and assumptions that left me with doubts about the accuracy of any assertion I made.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
The Fundamental Problem in Python 3 - psibi https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10063-the-fundamental-problem-in-python-3 ====== mikl "Python does not cater to my favourite edge case" != fundamental problem In the days before UTF-8-everywhere, file names with anything besides alphanumerics and safe symbols like dashes or underscores were always a problem. If you had special characters in your filenames, you were almost certain to run in to problems, since their meaning varied greatly depending on how the system was set up - codepages and whatnot. But this is only a problem if you have such files, and unless you’ve kept files around for decades, you don’t. So young programmers can grow up never having problems with this. Everything will be UTF-8 and it’ll just work. And as for broken old file names, who cares? Fix your file names and move on. There’s no reason that Python 3 should have workarounds for problems that were solved over a decade ago. ~~~ KaiserPro > And as for broken old file names, who cares? Fix your file names and move > on. what if you are trying to process "foreign"(as in, not created by you) filenames, trying to validate/conform with python? I mean its a great DoS vector, which is difficult to protect against with python. it'll crash. Which the point the article is trying to make. > unless you’ve kept files around for decades, you don’t. Thats both untrue and not very helpful. Its perfectly possible to bump into files like this. ~~~ oefrha > what if you are trying to process "foreign"(as in, not created by you) > filenames, trying to validate/conform with python? I mean its a great DoS > vector, which is difficult to protect against with python. 1\. Have catch-all exception handling. Exception may not be your fault, exception-caused "crashing" whatever that means is entirely your fault. 2\. Use os.fsdecode. [https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.fsdecode](https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.fsdecode) 3\. Don't process random untrusted filenames. Sanitize if it's some sort of HTTP upload, for instance. ------ oefrha Just a rehash of [https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the- incredible...](https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10053-the-incredible- disaster-of-python-3) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606416) Arguing that python3’s str model doesn’t work well with POSIX’s “any bag of bytes can be a filename” model. Plus new rants about surrogateescape which the author has learned since publishing the last article. The author sure has a penchant for flamebait titles. ~~~ mehrdadn No comment on the titles, but the issues are real (the linked page explains some of it decently [1]). I know I've found it excruciatingly difficult to write Python code that handles non-ASCII stdio correctly, especially one that might display on a terminal, especially a portable manner. Some of the compatibility issues are inherently hard problems in any language, but others are Python-related, and it didn't get better in Python 3. [1] [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about- unicode/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/) ~~~ oefrha > I've found it excruciatingly difficult to write Python code that handles > non-ASCII stdio correctly, especially one that might display on a terminal, > especially a portable manner, and it didn't get better in Python 3. I've been doing just that in Python 3 for half a decade at least -- got a fairly popular open source CLI application that hasn't seen a Unicode complaint for years. It doesn't come for free on all possible configurations (yeah, every developer with a wide enough userbase has seen the dreaded "'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position ...: ordinal not in range" at some point) but it's definitely not "excruciatingly difficult". Bad things only happen sys.stdout.encoding isn't utf-8, which is rare on * nix systems -- fixed by setting PYTHONIOENCODING or setting locale to * .UTF-8. Encoding on windows is always a headache (not specific to Python at all) but somehow we seemed to have managed to steer clear too. Anyway, just check sys.stdout.encoding. Meanwhile, this article is about problems that arise when you have garbage filenames that are neither Unicode nor whatever Microsoft's encoding; I wouldn't expect the average user to deal with files like that in day-to-day usage. ~~~ mehrdadn > Bad things only happen sys.stdout.encoding isn't utf-8 Yes, so your code will break when the caller or user sets it to something else. > which is rare on * nix systems "UNIX only" is not exactly what I meant by "portable"... > It doesn't come for free but it's definitely not "excruciatingly difficult". It's not when you're ignoring the difficult parts! > Encoding on windows is always a headache (not specific to Python at all) It's a headache in Windows, but in some cases encoding is worse in Python 3. Sadly I've never sat down to make a library of all the examples I come across, but here's one: Try predicting what this shell script should print on each platform. (It's Bash/Batch cross-compatible, so once you tell me your prediction, try running in both.) (python2 -c "import sys; sys.stdout.write('\xDD')" && python3 -c "import sys; sys.stdout.buffer.write(b'\xDD'); sys.stdout.write('\xDD')") > Temp.bin && python3 -c "import binascii; print(binascii.hexlify(open('Temp.bin', 'rb').read()).decode('ascii'))" && rm Temp.bin ~~~ oefrha > Yes, so your code will break when the caller or user sets it to something > else. No, it will break when the encoding is set to something where the _output text simply can 't be encoded_. There's simply no such thing as “” in the ASCII locale, or the C locale, so when you try to print those you get an encoding error; if the encoding is set to cp1252 it would be fine. If you don't want to encode _text_ according to user's preferred encoding, just encode as utf-8 regardless and write the bytes. Let me say this again: if you want to print text, print text; if you want to print a byte stream, print a byte stream. Python3 doesn't make this trivial but it's also not terribly hard. But by printing utf-8 byte stream under all scenarios, you would be conveniently ignoring the fact that default console encoding on Windows is cp437, not cp65001, so non-ASCII parts of the utf-8 byte stream would be garbled on Windows consoles by default. (And I see garbled Unicode filenames from programs written in other languages all too often when I'm on a Windows console.) It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Interestingly, the default now is utf-8 on Windows consoles, unless PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSSTDIO is set. They probably decided that printing (the occasional) garbage is better than correctness. > Try predicting what this shell script should print on each platform. Again, not surprising when you realize the default encoding on (en_US) Windows is cp1252. If you want to write a byte 0xdd, don't use '\xDD' which is U+00DD which of course is encoded differently in utf-8 (0xc3 0x9d) and cp1252 (0xdd). ~~~ mehrdadn > Again, not surprising when you realize the default encoding on (en_US) > Windows is cp1252. By "the encoding" you're referring to PYTHONIOENCODING, right? Somehow PYTHONIOENCODING is _" not specific to Python at all"_? ~~~ oefrha PYTHONIOENCODING is an override env var you can set. cp1252 being the default on Windows is of course not Python-specific, it’s convention set by Microsoft. In fact, you do realize cp1252 aka Latin-1 was even the default encoding used by the HTML spec before the advent of HTML5 (postdates Python3)? Creators of Python3 certainly didn’t set this default to mess with you. ~~~ mehrdadn No, this is just insane Python behavior. There's clearly nothing in the Windows I/O path that's doing this, and if it's a "convention", it's not even one that Python 2 has followed! PHP doesn't do it this way: php -r "echo json_decode(chr(34).'\u00DD'.chr(34));" Ruby doesn't do it this way either: ruby -e "puts \"\u00DD\"" Neither does MSYS2's Bash: printf '\u00DD' Neither does Node.js: node --eval="process.stdout.write('\u00DD');" Hell, even Python 2's behavior of raising an error is more sane than just encoding in cp1252 silently and expecting every developer to somehow _know_ the resulting byte sequence is going to be different on each platform: python3 -c "print(u'\u00DD')" Obviously, I'm not the only one who thinks that whatever this (ancient?) so- called "convention" is, it's actively harmful enough to avoid in 2019. And as if that's not enough, that's not even the end of it. Even literally writing a _string_ to a _file_ (with _no_ console or stdio in between!!) ends up producing _a completely different file_ depending on which platform the code is run on: python3 -c "open('Temp.bin', 'w+').write(u'\u00DD')" && xxd Temp.bin && rm Temp.bin How is any programmer supposed to deal with this insanity? A program writes to a file, but produces files with _completely different contents_ depending on the platform? Heaven help you if you try to interacting with a program in another language. At least with newlines, as painful as they are, most people _know_ and _recognize_ how to deal with them. But dealing with that mess is enough, and not a reason to make the situation even worse?! It's almost as if they took the CRLF issue and then went "Hmm, that's not fair to CR or LF, we need to do this to _even more characters_." Somehow we have all this nonsense in the name of "fixing" strings from Python 2. Instead of finding a better convention or at least leaving the existing behavior alone, Python 3—which is intended to let people write cross-platform code!—actively _embraced_ it and _botched_ Python 2's safe behavior, making programs produce garbled output completely silently... and blaming it on the stupid developer for trying to write a broken cross-platform program without first getting a PhD on the history of Code Pages on Windows. ------ adrian17 "into what is fundamentally a weakly-typed, dynamic language." Nit: isn't Python generally considered to be strongly, dynamically typed? ~~~ shean_massey Exactly. I stopped looking for insights as soon as I read that one. ~~~ coldtea Yes, because any post containing an error can never also include insights... ------ kresten It takes a specific type of personality to remain angry about Python 3 in Dec 2019. Didn’t that story finish? ~~~ jasondclinton I know if at least a few big tech companies that haven't migrated from 2 yet. So, a lot of folks are discovering Python 3 for the first time. ~~~ philipov In my experience, companies haven't yet migrated from Python 2 for the same reason they haven't yet migrated from COBOL. It has nothing to do with Python 3's benefits or flaws. ------ xapata Use pathlib? ------ smitty1e The lack of any Pathlib discussion seemed curious. ------ kthejoker2 > This was the most common objection raised to my prior post. “Get over it, > the world’s moved on.” Gee I wonder why ... ------ goatinaboat The truth is that 99% of programmers can do everything they need to in ASCII and the other 1% are working on tools to handle Unicode itself. It’s a mistake and as soon as it goes the way of the <blink> tag the better. At least that tag was amusing for a short while... ~~~ bildung This is only true for the native English speakers. 96% of the world population aren't. ~~~ doteka Always felt like a strange argument to me. I grew up bilingual, neither of these languages was English. Never in my life has it occurred to me to name a file I created with something else than ascii characters. ~~~ goatinaboat _neither of these languages was English. Never in my life has it occurred to me to name a file I created with something else than ascii characters._ This is the totally normal experience of every programmer from every country. The only people pushing Unicode, ironically, are white native English speakers who think they’re saving the world. ~~~ coldtea > _This is the totally normal experience of every programmer from every > country._ What experience? Never naming a file in "something else than ascii characters"? It might be true for programmers. Users, which 99.9% of them are not programmers, do it ALL THE TIME in any country in the world. And why shouldn't they? Should they learn english just to name files, or use transliterations of their language names for the contents of the file? > _The only people pushing Unicode, ironically, are white native English > speakers who think they’re saving the world._ Spoken like a person with no experience outside an English speaking country or developer echo bubble whatsoever.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Scientists Are Trying to Figure Out Why People Are OK with Lies - projectramo https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/trump-lies-research/ ====== hekocelsius This will be an interesting read.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: API for Hong Kong public data - slygent https://publicdatamarket.com/ ====== slygent Thanks to saasify.sh for providing the front-end and API gateway. I used scrapy on scrapinghub, singer.io and getdbt.com for the data pipeline.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
ShowHN: my first submission, what skills you need to work at a local startup? - davguij http://whathack.herokuapp.com ====== davguij This is a little experiment I made out of curiosity. I was wondering how different skills can be more or less valuable depending on where you live (or more exactly, where you want to work). For example, node.js might be trending for US startups, while European startups might be more interested in RoR... You get the idea. I built this using AngularJS and the data is taken from the Angel.co Jobs API. Feedback is welcome!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Real-time social network aggregation, correlation, and other analysis? - ThaddeusQuay2 I recently came up with the idea of a website which would track, and report on, where people, and their friends (across multiple social networks), are, in physical space, in real time. For example, you could post on your Twitter that you are at a particular party and how you feel about it. Then, your friends (on Twitter and Google Plus and Facebook and MySpace and wherever else) would see that and possibly come over to the same party. As they make their own posts, such as yours, their friends would see that this party now involves a number of people which they know, and then they might attend, and so on. I might work on this, but before I start, I want to know if such a web-based service already exists. I ask because I have a faint recollection of reading about something similar, recently, and perhaps even on HN. Thanks, in advance, for any replies. ====== mckndsnco <https://foursquare.com/> and <http://ban.jo/> come to mind, although not quite the scope of interconnectivity that you described. ~~~ ThaddeusQuay2 Thank you. I didn't know about Banjo. ------ OJKoukaz Like hotlist.com? ~~~ ThaddeusQuay2 "Hotlist" does not ring a bell, but yes, that seems to be like my idea, although Hotlist appears to be limited to Facebook and Twitter, because: "So you want to go out but aren't sure which place has the crowd or event you're looking for? Hotlist enables you to take a peek inside of venues to see the crowds before you head out. Read reviews and real-time Tweets, discover upcoming events, and check out key stats like the guy-to-girl ratio and the general age of the crowd, all from your computer or smartphone. Then use Hotlist to coordinate with your friends on Facebook." (#1) I'm reading through the articles on their Wikipedia page (#2), to better understand what they do, and how it compares to my idea. Thank you! #1: <http://hotlist.com/about> #2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlist>	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
UK ISPs Start Blocking KickassTorrents, H33T and Fenopy - Lightning http://torrentfreak.com/uk-isps-start-blocking-kickasstorrents-h33t-and-fenopy-130321/ ====== danielsamuels Because it worked so well for The Pirate Bay, right?	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Auroracoin is solid and continue its growth - gionn http://www.reddit.com/r/auroracoin/comments/21qokp/quick_update_on_auroracoin/ ====== gus_massa On the other hand the price dropped form $15 to $1.8 in a week, just after the airdrop. (From $90 in 3/4?!) [http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html](http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html) > _More and more stores are accepting Auroracoin and business where people are > even selling and buying cars is taking place between people._ I’d like to see a link to the story of someone selling a car for Auroracoin.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Show HN: Mailbrew, all-in-one RSS reader, newsletters inbox, and Read Later - linuz90 https://mailbrew.com/?ref=hn ====== frankdilo Hey people, I am one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions (product or startup related). We are offering a 25% discount for HN readers [1]. You may also be interested in knowing that Hacker News is one of the officially supported sources that you can receive in your digests. [1]: [https://mailbrew.com/?coupon=HN25](https://mailbrew.com/?coupon=HN25) ------ coconido Amazing!	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
Ask HN: Where can I host a file for free in 2020? - dzej_bi I'd like to host a file somewhere in the cloud and publicly share a link to download it.<p>1. For free 2. Reliable 3. I want the file to start downloading right after a link is clicked. So that no "download page" shows up in between. All major cloud vendors offering free file sharing (Google Drive, WeTransfer, etc.) show this download page.<p>It is EXE file, 29MB large. ====== arkadiyt You can copy the direct download link from Google Drive's download page. For instance: [https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1cwRBCm3TbjpYMTVqJBsjfFGtrQ5Z...](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1cwRBCm3TbjpYMTVqJBsjfFGtrQ5ZdkGq&export=download) I'm sure other providers are similar. ------ badrabbit Use a ngrok tunnel. I also had some luck with transfer.sh I believe. Your operating word here is "free". For a exe, just use github . i know a few projects that host downloads on there.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How to make wealth - yarapavan http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html ====== yarapavan reposting oft-used PG's essay on wealth.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }
How Google’s CDN prevents your site from loading in China - anubiann00b http://edjiang.com/post/97299595332/how-googles-cdn-prevents-your-site-from-loading-in ====== realusername It's partially related but something I would really like to have is a cross- website cache for public scripts. Around 80% of the size of the scripts is public libraries used by almost everyone (jquery, bootstrap, moment.js, various jquery plugins, angular...) and each of them is downloaded thousands of times. One simple solution could be something like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.min.js" public="sha1:356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab"> This way the browser can have a look at the hash and not query the file at all. This could not lead to security issues since the hash saved by the browser is not the hash displayed but the one computed with the actual file. (and obviously you are only using the public attribute for scripts which are meant to be public). With this technique, the most popular libraries could be cached and not downloaded by users. ~~~ ris Great - use the hash of an obscure site specific script, then detect how quickly the script loads and you know whether your victim has visited the site because they have it in their cache. Looks like a surefire route to a cache information leak to me. ~~~ cbr You can already do that. good.com: <script src="/js/site.js"> evil.com: <img src="https://www.good.com/js/site.js"> Then use the navigation timing api to figure out whether the js was already in cache. ~~~ cbr (Actually, you could use the onload event; you don't actually need navigation timings.) ------ scrollaway Linkbait title aside, this is a pretty good argument in favour of graceful degradation for scriptless pages. If the JS libraries/cdn/what not you deal with are on a CDN which is down for whatever reason (be it blocked, temporarily offline or "I forgot to pay them"), it's important for your site not to block on the requests and to display the text content your users want in a readable format. We're not talking "web 3.0 apps" here, we're talking documents - news articles, "Contact Us" pages on a company site, etc. It's also one of the scarier downsides of centralized CDNs. It's too easy for a single site to get blocked or go down temporarily and suddenly, thousands of websites become unaccessible. And this is not a situation we can keep brushing off for long, there is a real need for decentralized solutions. ------ lnanek2 Every time I've talked to a business that wants a web site or server backed software product for Chinese users, they've said the server has to be in China. This is why. Even when you do manage to get a request out, it is often laggy and worthless from a UX perspective. Linking out of the country for resources needed to load the page is just ignorant. ------ tnuc The problem is that most things hosted by Google resolve to ghs.google.com. Given that China blocks sites that it doesn't like by simple dns then all Google hosted content is blocked. And of course Google blocks sites hosted from being seen in places like North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, etc. due to the way that Google enforces U.S. sanctions. Google is not alone on this. ------ final Or maybe just use the standard fonts and don't use a CDN. 99.99999% of the sites on the internet gain very little from CDN. Yeah it's a cool technology, it's nice to pretend you're important, but in the end CDN is an expensive (in complexity and risks) toy. ------ cornewut It's not like Google is blocking something. Google is blocked by China. ------ kbar13 google fonts alternative = [https://github.com/alfredxing/brick](https://github.com/alfredxing/brick) ~~~ thoughtpalette Thanks for that! I have not seen this one come up. ------ azinman2 Why does the "fix" have to be the cdn versus China itself? Why is that being ignored as the real issue? ~~~ untog Pragmatism? If you want your web site to be viewable in China you can a) change a URL b) campaign for open internet access in China which one is likely to be more effective? ------ cj > I’m not sure of a good alternative to Google Fonts though. Is Adobe's Typekit blocked? ------ crishoj Simple solution: Host JS libs on a HTTPS domain that China cannot afford to block, e.g. GitHub. See [https://greatfire.org](https://greatfire.org) for a practical take on this approach. ~~~ jdbernard I don't understand. If China can afford to block Google, why wouldn't the be able to afford blocking GitHub? ~~~ final Because in OP's world GitHub is very important, and he believes Chinese bureaucrats are like him. I currently do consulting work for a Fortune 20 corporation and their firewall blocks cloning of Github repositories. They have over a thousand developers on site ... I'm thinking of writing a scraper, that clones from the Web pages, which do open.	{ "pile_set_name": "HackerNews" }

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