Self-Driving Taxis Will Become the Most Disgusting Spaces on Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/07/self-driving-taxis-will-become-the-most-disgusting-spaces-on-earth/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps, if you let your personal vehicle join the taxi fleet.

But I suspect (dedicated) self-driving taxis will become the most intimately surveilled space on earth, and anyone littering etc will be fined for it, certainly to the point of covering cleaning costs, and most likely as an additional revenue stream.

Additonally I suspect, far from ushering in an era of care-free, and almost cost-free travel, the self-driving fleet will be metered like cell-phones (ridiculously complex price plans), and part of the 'price' will be that your travel data is sold on.

True freedom will be a bicycle - assuming viable routes between "bicycle friendly areas" remain open - a danger is that inter-city/town/village roads become robot-only, and you can only actually travel 'manually' within bounded living areas, eg a city precinct, village, etc.

<comment><USER3> I expect cities full of robotic cars to be great bike cities. The reason why I don't bike every day is because with human drivers, I have to fear for my life. A robotic car, however, will not turn into me, will not speed, will not run the red light.

<comment><USER2> That's the hope, yes. It depends if robot cars can deal well with cyclists or not. If not, the two may not be allowed to mix, and guess which will get priority.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure robot cars won't randomly drive into bike lanes or park in them or make illegal turns or ...

<comment><USER5> Luxury robot cars will definitely have an, "asshole mode". So yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Airplane interiors experience havoc within the first hour of a flight as the worst of us begin defecating into the seats, too lazy and weak to control ourselves_

Wait, what? The author seems to have problems with more than just self-driving cars...

Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant. This works pretty well with people who smoke in non-smoking hotel rooms.

<comment><USER7> > Anyway, the problem seems pretty trivial to solve: have a button so riders > can report disgusting cars, send the bill to the previous occupant.

The workaround seems to be: do whatever you want to make the cab disgusting, then press the button. (If the button has to be pressed at the _beginning_ of the ride, then press it at the beginning, _then_ do what you want.)

<comment><USER4> If only there was a modern way to make a quick daguerreotype or even a watercolor of the state of the car at the end and beginning of rides ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That depends on a few of things:

1\. culture 2\. surveillance and consequence 3\. maintenance.

some cultures are cleaner than others (Japan vs US, or India). if you record activities (remotely stored) and you can impose consequences plus you maintain the fleet properly (routinely and specially when people intentionally or accidentally soil interiors, that will go a long way.

I know I'd want vehicles which get routinely cleaned (BART vs JR subways and trains)

<comment><USER9> Adding a "reject for maintenance" button to an app that summons an automated car is the obvious solution to a problem that was brought up years ago. To avoid abuse, you use a consensus pattern (2 or 3 rejects in a row).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This whole article is based on the presumption that the interiors of driverless taxis won't be recorded... and yet security cameras in Ubers already exist[0] (and aren't dissuaded by the company)

[0]: [https://uberpeople.net/threads/security- camera.52864/](https://uberpeople.net/threads/security-camera.52864/)

<comment><USER11> Interior of the local metro trains is recorded from every possible angle you can think of, yet almost every night they turn into garbage cans on wheels. The problem is always reviewing the footage, finding the culprit and making them pay. If an automated taxi comes back to the depot after 12 hours of driving and you find it in a messy state, are you just going to pay someone $50 to clean it, or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage to find out who made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money back?

Which of course creates a self-perpetuating problem, because if the behaviour is not punished, it will never be corrected and it will become "ok" to make a mess in an auto taxi(not vomit, but just leaving your rubbish behind).

<comment><USER12> _or are you going to spend time reviewing 12 hours of footage to find out who made the mess and then spend weeks trying to get the money back?_

Fortunately, I can get that done for me at a cost of much, much less than 12 hours of my own time. I can farm it out overseas to somewhere with a large supply of very cheap labour. I wouldn't be surprised if sitting in front of a bank of a half-dozen taxi-interior replays running backwards at triple-speed (with the empty periods already taken out by some relatively simple processing) from a point at which the uncleanliness is visible was seen as a good job, compared to some other options available.

Wouldn't be surprised if I could have that done for me at a cost of a few dollars a time; if I then charge the culprit a hundred bucks on their already registered credit card or taxi account for cleaning (fifty sounds too low), it becomes very economical for me.

<comment><USER13> Triple speed?

You know exactly what time your customers entered and left the vehicle. All you have to do is pull out a set of freeze frames from before and after each customer and compare the two.

<comment><USER14> This is basically a git bisect. You don't even have to linearly check every customer, you can do a binary search in log time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hotel rooms should suffer all the same problems. In practice, some do and most don't.

If your SDT brand equates to Four Seasons people will pay top dollar, and vice versa.

Unlike hotel rooms you have flexibility to design the cars for easy sterilising and automate some cleaning tasks.

<comment><USER16> Hotels cost orders of magnitude per night than renting an apartment, largely because of the cost of cleaning them. The ones that are cheaper are the ones that tend to suffer problems with cleanliness.

Taxis currently cost orders of magnitude more than owning a car. One of the main goals of a self-driving taxi service would be to radically reduce this cost, but it would probably be too expensive to do a manual clean between trips.

Maybe we just need to design cars that are self-cleaning as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Self-cleaning public restrooms and sanitary units for hotel rooms have been around for _decades_. Why shouldn't the same technology be applicable to cars or why shouldn't a self-driving car be able to drive itself to the next car wash?

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe there is some opportunity to embrace the trash.

What if we replace the dashboard with a selection of recycling bins and expect people to be unpacking their shopping, eating food on the way and creating waste, putting facilities in place?

Perhaps we even expect people to just bring their wastebin contents with them because it is easier than putting it in street collection bins. Time in transit can be spent 'doing the recycling'.

Well filtered fresh waste may even be preferable for recycling and perhaps the autonomous car driving company has a nice sideline in collecting raw materials for recycling.

Tesla are leading the way with a minimal aesthetic, where the fiddly knobs and switches are all gone and there is just one massive touchscreen instead. There is also no central tunnel to disguise or carpet over. Soon all cars will adopt this look and it may even be possible to offer a selection of power-wash friendly trim levels.

Given the choice of a regular car, e.g. my dad's or one of my workmates, or a power-washed autonomous car, I would imagine the latter to be cleaner even if it had seen multiple vomit stains in the last month.

</comment><comment><USER19> Car2go and ReachNow cars are always clean, at least in Seattle (I think once I saw a wrapper in a side door). When you're paying by the minute there's not much time to make a mess.

This won't be a problem for self-driving cars because they're purely vaporware.

<comment><USER5> I find half filled coffee cups and food wrappers all the time. Last one was bare gum in the cup holder, cleaned it out myself so it wasn't on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> a car not having a driver isn't at all the same thing as a car not having an owner. The owner will care about cleanliness to precisely the same extent as its customers do.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love this article because it reveals just how terrible many of us are at truly understanding the impact that new technologies can have in the world. The author takes the possibility of self-driving cars and then basically predicts what the world would be like if we did EVERYTHING EXACTLY THE SAME except for the fact that there is no human driver.

Except that's not how this works. No driver means many of the costs of operating the vehicle change -- including the cleaning cost. It will become far, far cheaper to clean the vehicles, not less. Fleets will be able to intelligently organize themselves to drive to cleaning stations in the most efficient manner. With dedicated self-driving cars, it will be trivial to install a ceiling mounted camera in the car. You could simply take a picture of the car before the customer enters and after he leaves, and simply diffing it could give you some estimate of how "messy" it is -- and it could even be used to alert customers if they left something in the car. Accountability for what the customer does in in the car will be higher than ever.

Self-driving cars will make taxis cheaper AND cleaner.

<comment><USER22> If someone barfs in the taxi (which I think is quite common tbh) it may not be visible to the camera even if they wipe it up.

In either case, that car still smells like barf until it is _really_ cleaned.

Pretty sure if I got in a car that was full of barf while on my way to the airport I would stay in the car (and probably barf a bit myself, too).

<comment><USER23> It amuses me to think somewhere there is a team of engineers developing barf detection systems for driverless vehicles. Perhaps using a combination of camera, sound (imagine collecting the training data for barf sound machine learning!) and scent detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't this the same for all types of public transportation? I sometimes find BART very disgusting. If you ride it 11PM on a Friday night, the whole section reeks of drunken people smell. Not to mention, you sometimes see throw ups that never gets cleaned.

It also has a lot to do with competition and the self driving taxi market. If self driving taxi company A is consistently giving riders bad experience with dirtiness, then there's going to be a company B that will come out with cleaner solution.

If you think about it, there are far more places that's more disgusting than self driving taxis..

<comment><USER25> Not all types, no. I'm currently sitting on a 3-coach (UK) train halfway through its daily diagram and though it's not 100% spotless, it's pretty good. It'll get a light clean in the depot at the end of the day and be back in service first thing tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Automatically snap a picture of the backseat and have some remote operator decide if it needs to be returned for cleaning. A couple operators and cleaners are a lot cheaper than a fleet of drivers.

</comment><comment><USER27> There are few things more effective in controlling people's behaviour than shame and humiliation. Of course you need to be a part of a strong community for that to be effective as well. Shame and humiliation, I suspect has less of an effect in societies based on transactional relationships.

In either case, I feel we'll see a return to older type of punishments, like public flogging or being tied down in a post to enforce shame. That's if, companies come to this realisation in order to protect their bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER28> Or, I don't know, maybe the companies will sign cleaning contracts with car wash companies, and send their cars to the wash once a week?

Even well behaved humans make goo. This is why even the most obsessive person has to take a bath and clean their house.

If a company can't keep their cars clean, the well heeled consumer will change their habits to prefer the company's cars that are cleaned out from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER29> I predict a reputation system that impacts the cost of the ride. Nowadays the reputation system is unidirectional from rider to driver, but in the future perhaps it is unidirectional from the car to the passenger. Bad behavior dings your reputation, a dinged reputation costs you money.

<comment><USER30> The reputation system is not unidirectional today. I don't accept rides from any Uber passenger with less than 4.5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So.. self driving cars... I'm not sure I can trust them. Looks like an easy way to kidnap people.

<comment><USER32> For someone willing to do it, what (non police, non legal system) impediments do you currently see that inhibit kidnappers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe we'll see self cleaning taxi pods akin to those self cleaning public bathrooms in Paris. Cleaning cycle after every ride...

</comment><comment><USER34> I suppose they will just end up with interiors similar to the walls around urinals. So someone can hose and mop them regularly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Has the author never used car sharing?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you decide when to use a library? - <AUTHOR>

I'm teaching myself bioinformatics and have some knowledge of the major libraries (eg, scikit-bio and biopython). I'm finding it helpful to lean on the libraries sometimes, but then I'll feel guilty and go back and rewrite those sections from primitives. Is this a normal pattern of behavior? <comment><USER2> I try to balance development time versus research and learning time. When you go to use a library, you have to consider the time it takes to determine which libraries exists to solve your problem and evaluate them to determine which matches your project best. Then, you have to decide whether the additional dependenc(y|ies)is worth the development time saved. Like everything else in software development, it's a balancing act. Having said that, as you get older, and have worked in the field longer, you find yourself less and less willing to reinvent the wheel and more willing to just use someone else's code.

</comment><comment><USER3> In general libraries are there to make your life easier and help speed up development so you don't reinvent the wheel. The issue is then that you have a dependency, so you have to be able to manage that going forward(including testing other versions usually). In my experience, people normally use libraries pretty heavily and don't rewrite the functionality using primitives unless there is a real reason that everything needs to be standalone(such as writing embedded software where there are space or other limitations).

</comment><comment><USER4> When the risk of implementing something you come up with is greater than the risk of relying on something you didn't.

risk is measured as some combination of time and money. how they interact should depend on the specific project.</comment>


Motorola Xoom Looking Like Epic Flop - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2011/05/02/motorola-xoom-looking-like-epic-flop/ <comment><USER2> Google has done everything it can to hamstring this launch. The software sucks. Buggy, Crashy, Beta quality. The emulator's performance is so bad it's unusable. The tablet section of the market is empty of real tablet apps. The Android Market can't even handle reorienting itself.

The Android team doesn't seem to give a shit. Ask anyone who has tried to support Android is an Enterprise how bad the Exchange, VPN and 802.1x stacks have been since day one. Business as usual. Their public issue tracker is obviously intended as a space for frustrated users [1] to shout into a bottomless pit of who gives a shit.

I used to be a major Android fan but screw this. If only WebOS was open source...

[1] - Edited to substitute users for customers. Real users are not Google's customers. And the experience shows.

<comment><USER3> That's not Google doing 'everything it can to hamstring' — That's Motorola shipping a product based on an OS that's obviously not ready. Motorola's fault.

<comment><USER2> "That's not Google doing 'everything it can to hamstring' — That's Motorola shipping a product based on an OS that's obviously not ready. Motorola's fault."

Google controls Android 3.0 completely. They very intentionally did not make a source release. Google entered the relationship with Motorola and it damn well had control over who was going to ship a 3.0 device. They knew what they were doing. They HAD to beat the iPad 2 release date at all costs.

So now all we have is a buggy as hell 3.0 OS with no source release and we're still waiting for them to fix stuff. I hope the early release to beat the iPad furthered some other business goal because it didn't further Android as a great Tablet OS.

The flaws I've seen in the device are clear OS and Software issues. So unless your point of view is that it's up to other people to fix Google's fuckups... eh...

<comment><USER4> The box says Motorola. That means they signed off shipping it. Even if any problems with it can be placed firmly at Google's door, it still says Motorola on the box. I think that was the previous commenter's point.

<comment><USER5> The box says Motorola AND Google.

The device has both logos on the back, and they're the same size.

<comment><USER4> did Google order manufacturing of the device? did Google order printing of the manuals and the box? did Google stack the boxed up devices onto palettes and ship them out to shops? Is it called the Google Xoom? No no no no. All of the above are Motorola, and more. It's a Motorola product which uses hardware and software components from probably dozens of suppliers. One of those suppliers is Google. They may have supplied a shitty component, but Motorola shipped the device instead of saying "this isn't ready, don't ship it".

How are you actually arguing with this point? Is it just because this is the internet and fingertips are a renewable resource?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently bought a Xoom (since the Android Honeycomb emulator is _unusable_ ), and it's a laughably poor product from the unboxing experience all the way to the _horrible_ UI that is Honeycomb (even worse than standard phone Android, and that's laughable UI -- where's the HIG, Google?).

Honeycomb is like taking the worst Linux WM you can find and sticking it onto a tablet with no thought for how a tablet should work. This is going to appeal to some Android fans, but that's about it.

Everything on this device is horrible. The device feels chunky and heavy, the screen looks dithered (you can see individual pixels) and unevenly lit, and you can see UI element flicker into place. And there are about 2 or 3 tablet specific apps that are actually tablet apps in the Market (Angry Birds, and some other poor quality Android games). ClockOS even lives on, with a dedicated clock on the home screen, and the bottom right corner, and there's even a 'Clock' app. Fantastic.

Oh, it also doesn't charge via USB. WTF?

Anyway, it has one thing going for it: it has Angry Birds and it works more or less like the iPad version of Angry Birds. That's about it.

<comment><USER6> I own a Xoom, and while I agree it is nowhere near the iPad experience, the device is not THAT bad, your comment is way too harsh. There are 64 tablet specific apps. And you are lying about seeing individual pixels, it has a higher pixel density than the iPad, on par with an iPhone 3G.

<comment><USER5> I'm not lying. I can see the dithering and have terrible eyesight.

The pixel density may be higher than the iPad, but the screen quality is _nowhere near it_.

And the device is that bad. What's with the system tray? And the Windows Vista style app switcher? It's like we've gone back in time to when Windows 95 was cool (and Honeycomb has a UI that is less consistent than Windows 95), except with tappable UI widgets.

Maybe 4.0 will fix it all (ala how 2.0 brought Android into the 'usable' category), but this is not a tablet for anyone but nerds.

'64 tablet specific apps' is being generous. Maybe the people developing these apps upped targetSdk and stuck in a poorly-recreated-fragment-API-using-thing- aka-UISplitViewController widget, but that's pretty much it.

The rest are games that are available on iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I own a whole stack of Apple kit, including an iPad, and some AAPL).

I've not played with a Xoom, but it keeps striking me that all of the people launching Android tablets are totally the wrong people to be doing it. Apple has (at least) the following things going for it:

1) It gets great deals on components and manufacturing 2) It maintains very consistent retail pricing 3) It does a lot of retail itself 4) It gets 30% off the top of all app purchases on the device 5) It gets ?% off the top of all music/movie purchases on the device

Points 1-3 are good for initial profit margins. It means they're making decent money on every iPad sold. Points 4 and 5 are good for ARPU (average revenue per user) - it means you're continuing to make money from every device sale, long into the future.

Now look at the Xoom or the Galaxy Tab or any other android tablet currently available or announced and think very hard about which of the above points apply. I think you'd struggle to apply anything other than point 1 and even that probably only applies to Samsung. Most of the vendors do small manufacturing runs, sell them wholesale to retailers and get no money from end users until it's time for new hardware. The only exception to this I can think of would be revenue sharing deals from the mobile networks on the 3G models. I don't know what kind of deals these would be, but my guess is that the networks would demand pretty cheap unit prices on the hardware.

So who could do better? The obvious answer is Amazon, they could at least get points 3, 4 and 5 (and 3 strongly suggests they'd also get point 2) and what are they doing? Running an Android app store right now. If they can make a good tablet (and the Kindle hardware suggests they should be able to), they could really make a splash with it, and that would help them improve on point 1. Sony might be able to, in that they could arrange point 5 and potentially 1 and 2, but my general view on Sony's ability to execute in the 'digital lifestyle' arena is very very negative ;)

Alternatively perhaps Samsung's desire to copy Apple's hardware will translate into a desire to copy their services. If they could get deals on content then they could get points 4 and 5 and differentiate themselves from the Android crowd.

That's my take on part of the tablet world. I also think Android badly needs some really slick tablet apps - on a par with iMovie and GarageBand, both of which are stunningly good.

<comment><USER7> Those are the reasons why Apple is well situated in the market, and can offer low prices and still make great margins.

The reasons that their products are successful beyond that are even more important, IMO. Unlike Motorola, Samsung, Google, Nokia, and so many other companies in this space, Apple has been working very hard on designing interfaces for applications and personal computer operating systems for a very long time. When you put Apple with their experience with OS X and Mac software up against Motorola, even with Google's help, it's clear who has the advantage.

There's not really another company with Apple's sort of experience out there, other than Microsoft. The problem is their mobile strategy is a mess still, and they don't seem the same quality of vision that Apple does.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you at all. The software is a huge part of Apple's success, but I was being generous and assuming Android is as good. Even with ideal hardware specs and software quality, Android tablets would still be worse business than iPad.

<comment><USER7> Android _is_ good, but the non-Google (Motorola) software that came with my phone is clearly not as well designed as the Google stuff, and definitely not as good as the Apple software that comes with iPhones - mail clients being a good example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not so sure that there's any useful conclusions to draw from this article (even assuming that the numbers they cite are correct).

If the Xoom turns out to be unsuccessful, there's no shortage of possible explanations as to why that was the case. At this point, I think we need to either have a successful non-iPad tablet, or a longer period without a successful non-iPad to make any kind of useful analysis.

If another Android tablet launches and is successful, than that may tell us something about what Motorola did wrong here. If the Playbook becomes successful, that might also tell us something, but again, these would be things specific to Motorola's product.

The only meaningful conclusion that this seems to suggest is that just launching a tablet doesn't guarantee success (which shouldn't be a surprise, as that's been the status quo for the past decade at least).

<comment><USER9> Slowly but surely, there are new Honeycomb tablets being shipped. In the US, this past week has seen the release of two new tablets: the Acer Iconia A500 and the Asus EEE Pad Transformer. Both of these tablets have functioning SD card slots, showing that the lack of a working slot is Motorola's fault, not Google's. In addition, these have some neat features that, as I understand it, the iPad does not support, such as USB host mode (allowing use of a USB thumb drive, external HD, keyboard or mouse). Both of these devices also sport prices lower than the Xoom.

I am particularly intrigued by the Asus device, as it has a keyboard accessory that effectively turns the tablet into a netbook. For me, this type of versatility can have real value. Unfortunately, Asus has not done a very good job of supplying enough devices to meet the demand.

<comment><USER10> I've got the ASUS Transformer, I was one of the lucky few who got an order in around midnight of the launch date (bought mine on BestBuy.com). The device is really quite fantastic, far better than the Xoom (which I've used but don't own) and cheaper. The IPS screen is just absolutely gorgeous to look at and really elevates it over the other Honeycomb tablets I've seen.

Unfortunately the keyboard docking station is largely vaporware here in the USA -- reviewers got them but I don't believe a single unit has sold at retail here. It is somewhat puzzling why the docks are even more scarce than the tablets since the dock is a relatively straightforward piece of electronics compared to tablet itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I haven't seen them around, I mean I can buy a Playbook at Indigo ( a bookstore in Canada) but good luck finding a Xoom. Plus for the price it's hard to justify I guess for non android nerds like me.

But whatever, the Xoom is one devices, like the HTC Dream, this isn't a big deal in the Android big picture.

<comment><USER4> "the Android big picture" == "throw enough crap at the wall and some of it will stick" ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If Xoom had shipped six months earlier, it could have been a killer product. Sure, the OS would have been beta quality at best, but the hardware was killer compared to iPad 1.

However, compared to iPad 2, it has no significant hardware advantage. Maybe the screen aspect ratio for some people. It has no price advantage. The OS is still beta quality. For all but the small number of people who want a tablet without the restrictions of the Apple Store and who aren't willing to jailbreak an iPad 2, there is simply no reason to buy a Xoom.

Unless Motorola are idiots, they HAD to have predicted that there would be an iPad 2 and that it would be announced about a year after iPad 1. So unless the plan was for the Xoom to come out long before that and the schedule slipped, I don't understand what their plan was.

<comment><USER13> So admitting that the OS is beta quality even now, you really think it would have been a killer product 6 months ago?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While the Xoom looks pretty neat to me, I've heard of some people having problems with their XOOMs and I'm not surprised. My Moto Droid 2 phone experience has been rather shocking, quality wise. Even when the hardware seems to be working 100%, I could fill a page with all the little-to-medium software glitches I deal with daily.

<comment><USER14> I have one and love it. My only issues with it are that some apps don't manage memory for screen rotations well, so crash when trying to allocate another buffer the size of the screen when you rotate it (Aldiko in particular). Most apps work fantastically though, and the preinstalled ones are all beautiful. Google Books in particular.

<comment><USER7> I _like_ it, and I wanted to like it, but I've had so many problems. I went through several units that I returned to Verizon. Currently, now that I have what seems to be a fully functional unit, my two main issues are instability of the hotspot (which I've seen zillions of people complain about on Droid Xs, too) and poor/inconsistent camera image quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hmm. This article claims 25-125,000 Xoom units sold. Last week Motorola said that they shipped 250,000 units in the first quarter [0].

I'm aware of the difference between "shipped" and "sold", but the figures in the Forbes article should be taken with a grain of salt.

[0] <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384615,00.asp>

<comment><AUTHOR> They're different verbs with different implications, I think Forbes is being pretty clear. Xoom may have shipped 250,000, but only 125k were actually sold. The other half are sitting on the shelves somewhere, which means inventory is high--a bad sign, which usually leads to price-cuts to clear space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's probably good reason. It was way too expensive, for one thing. I haven't seen any of these tablets hit the sweet spot of pricing that a few surveys revealed a while back.

</comment><comment><USER17> Bogus numbers, the report is based on an analyst who predicted between 25,000 to 120,000 sales. The company reported 250,000 shipped in their earnings. Not an iPad killer for sure but not as dire as reported either. Most importantly, the wi-fi version had been on sale starting only March 27th. The initial sales were predominantly for the overpriced wifi/3G model.

<comment><USER18> Shipped ≠ Sales

<comment><USER17> Yes, but motorola doesn't own any retail stores unlike Apple. So they don't have visibility into sales until a couple of months. Unless you are looking at a very high return rate, it is a good proxy for sales.

<comment><USER19> You forgot the existence of a very high sitting-on-the-shelf rate.

You can ship all the units you want, but unless people are taking them home, the number is definitely not a good proxy for sales.

<comment><USER17> Well sure, I mean there is always the possibility that there is channel stuffing. But why take the pessimistic view that all the shipped tablets are on the shelf when you don't have any information. Things to note --

1\. at amazon.com, the only site I have been tracking the tablets in actual sales, the Xoom is either #1 or #2 in tablet sales over the past two months. I mean, it is ahead of even the iPad 2 that is supposed to supply constrained. So all the guys who stood in line and brought iPad2's so they could sell for a markup -- finding it difficult to sell even for a $100 premium -- compared to the flop show that is the Xoom. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1232597011/...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1232597011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_e_1_3_last) (this keeps changing, so don't hold me to it).

2\. the wifi model is flying off the shelf at some of the local retailers. did someone earlier mention out of stock situation in Canada?

3\. the wifi was introducted on Mar 26th, a couple of days before their quarter ended

4\. more channels and price points are yet to be introduced.

<comment><USER20> 1\. More people, I think, are likely to buy an iPad from Apple.com rather than Amazon.com, so the fact that Xoom is higher-rated than iPad there doesn't mean much. IMO.

2\. I have yet to see one in Canada, but I'm not really looking. However, it's certainly possible that people are always out of stock because they're only ordering 1 - 3 of them and there's definitely people out there who will buy things _because_ they're not from Apple.

3\. Granted.

4\. If they're having problems with the channels and price points they have already, they're not likely to do much better outside. Motorola's built on the mobile phone channel. Building up a channel outside of your niche is _hard_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Oracle May Really Be Doomed This Time - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/11/why-oracle-may-really-be-doomed-this-time/

<comment><USER2> I don't think Sarah Lacy knows very much about enterprise software sales cycle, or the concerns of enterprise customers.

When you have enterprise customers, their tolerance for downtime is extremely small. When you become big enough, your IT infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage. Maybe more accurately, the C-level executives _believe_ that their IT infrastructure is a competitive advantage, and they will continue to spend money to maintain the status quo. They believe they can't afford to outsource things like CRM, IT Service Management, etc. And enterprise software companies exploit this belief, and extract billions of dollars from them through software upgrades and service contracts.

I worked for enterprise software companies, and I scratched my head wondering why companies kept spending so much money on mediocre software. And it's exactly the old adage from the 80s: "No one gets fired for buying IBM". When you buy Oracle/Siebel, no one will question the status quo. If you throw out Siebel and switch to Salesforce, and Salesforce suffers a 3-day outage much like EC2 did last year, then your head is on the chopping block. That's why CIOs like Oracle.

Now the one thing that Oracle has to really worry about is new companies that never grew up on Oracle, that grow big, like Facebook, Google, etc. The new multi-billion-dollar companies will balk at the idea of spending millions of dollars a year on database licenses, but as long as the enterprise companies are still around, there's more than enough money to sustain Oracle for a long, long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of people seem to miss the point about enterprise software and the purveyors of that software; the end goal is not agile or slim (that is incidental) but to enable many, many disparate systems to function at least somewhat coherently. Probably on a level that boggles the minds of most people who have never worked in a large enterprise.

Big businesses end up with lots of disparate technology because they consume a lot of software and it creeps its way into the business by way of developers wanting to play with tools; some C-level moron making 'strategic' decisions; or real demands of the business. But unless you're the technological masters of the universe (like Google) the idea of replacing something wholesale is a recipe for disaster once it's entrenched: it's expensive and what would you replace it with? Who out there can furnish an accounting system that works across 40 different countries that also ties in neatly with a company's logistics or shipping department AND comes with consulting and bespoke development services to handle the 50 billion edge cases that each big business has? This is not a simple problem. This very same thing happens amusingly enough just as frequently in startups and SMEs, but on a different scale ("Oh we couldn't use Mongo, it didn't fit our needs, so we rolled our own -- but then we had to use Frob X and Widget Y and patch it up with Python")

That's why tools like Oracle RDBMS come with such a kitchen sink variety of tools and features.

For instance, I once had to do some reporting and OLAP work across multiple DB systems and stuff the data into an Oracle instance. Unfortunately said systems used a mixture of Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL (oh the wonders of maintaining shrinkwrap products...) so we bought a database link for Sybase and MSSQL so we could query the databases from inside Oracle using two-phase commit. Sure, each adapter cost us $15k but so what? That's pocket change compared to the hackneyed approach of using some external, asynchronous batch job. All this money and patchwork effort in the name of report generation -- but that's all businesses care about.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel a lot of the pain he mentions. I remember designing a SOA system many years ago where transaction sharing across web services would save a ton of effort writing the rollback logic that would be needed otherwise. Went to the Oracle web site and saw it supports WS-*, awesome! That must include WS- AtomicTransaction and whatnot. Went to a solution specialist and he said sure you can do transaction sharing! Just export your EJB as a web service and use JTA! Fire up the technology and get things running - not supported at all. Research a bit more - more technical Oracle employees on official forums pointing out it isn't working either. Ugh. They wasted so much of my time by lying and saying they supported something they didn't back then. Definitely not happy with those old crappy systems the article makes fun of every couple paragraphs, nor the whole sales culture where they try to sell me something that doesn't actually fit my needs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Argh. Pando Daily again.

I don't know how a site can be _worse_ than TechCrunch, but they've managed it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oracle is entrenched far too deeply within the inner workings of IT operations of corporations worldwide to ever truly be doomed.</comment>


Linux Find Command Examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/15-practical-linux-find-command-examples/

<comment><USER2> A mention of xargs might be worth slipping into this. A lot of the time it doesn't really matter whether you use that or -exec, but it's faster on large lists of files. And some commands (grep) act differently if there are multiple files specified as input.

<comment><USER3> xargs was my first thought as well. I think I type in this line almost daily (why have i not made an alias already?):

find . -type f | xargs grep needle

gnu find and xargs have the -print0 and -0 arguments for piping nul terminated filenames, so special chars in file names wont bite you.

<comment><USER4> I used to use the find | xargs grep idiom a lot too until I installed ack ( <http://betterthangrep.com/> ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reading this article I realized I always put `find .`, i.e. explicitly specifying the current directory. I guess this is like saying `ls .` all the time, but oh well.

Sometimes I find that I need to chain a few actions for my search results that aren't possible with multiple -execs, so I employ the shell script loop:

      for js in `find . -name '*.js'`; do
        dir=`dirname $js`;
        cd $dir && make;
        java -jar jsmin.jar "$i";
      done;

Unfortunately if you've got spaces in your filenames, this will throw off /bin/sh and you have to specify delimiters or work around that.

Lastly, I've found with find that if you have a n-sized conditional where n > 1 _and_ an -exec, you'll want to use escaped parentheses or otherwise the conditionals won't evaluate properly.

Edits: addressing formatting woes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always use it in the form:

      find . -iname '*.someextension' -exec ls -l {} \;

{} gets expanded to the matching file names. Of course ls -l is just an example of command to run against the file name.

</comment><comment><USER7> sudo find / -size +1G -exec ls -lah '{}' \; | awk '{print $8" : "$5}' | tee files_over_1G.txt ### This I use alot.

</comment><comment><USER8> man find expanded into article? nice.</comment>


Tech's Other Diversity Problem - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-ascent/techs-other-diversity-problem-ef45b9dd23b8 <comment><USER2> That's interesting, because I think my employers (all in Germany) were pretty typical insofar as most of the people in HR were women. And I think that's normal in German companies. Is it really so different in America?

<comment><USER3> I think you misread the article. The author is saying that HR is female- dominated and gives the example of a team she was on which was entirely women.</comment></comment>


How Do You Dismantle a 90-Ton Whale? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-you-dismantle-a-90-ton-whale-start-with-a-strong-stomach-and-a-machete-1483380824 <comment><USER2> Don't use explosives.

[https://youtu.be/XVVW8BferzQ](https://youtu.be/XVVW8BferzQ)

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, a shaped charge is probably the most humane, as well as most feasable way to euthanize a dying whale.

But it is a very, very foolish disposal approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One bite at a time...

</comment><comment><USER5> Requires log-in to read the full story.

<comment><USER6> On HN, click the "web" link (next to the "flag" etc. links.) Click the top search result. Now you can read the whole article.

<comment><USER5> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft gives up on new YouTube Windows Phone app, reverts back to web player - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/7/4813836/microsoft-reverts-back-to-basic-youtube-app-windows-phone <comment><USER2> Rewording of [http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-updates-youtube-app- surre...](http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-updates-youtube-app-surrenders- to-google)</comment>


Building websites that work on an e-ink Kindle - <AUTHOR> http://gomakethings.com/building-websites-that-work-on-an-e-ink-kindle/

<comment><USER2> Note that this is on an ancient Kindle without a touch screen. I have a Kindle Paperwhite and it most certainly does CSS and JavaScript. It's slow as hell and scrolling on an e-ink display is very painful due to the time it takes to refresh the screen (especially because scrolling is done by dragging, like on an iPad, but there is no visual feedback – it would be much better if there was a "page down" control).

</comment><comment><USER3> "The Kindle completely ignores CSS and JavaScript"

As someone who started using web browsers before CSS was adopted and when client-side scripting was a new and adventurous thing (and it was far from settled that JS was the winning language), this is really refreshing to read. Somehow it made me really happy. An acknowledgement that web pages _are_ (or at least were) marked-up documents. A reminder of gentler times.

<comment><USER4> My favourite website of all time:

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)</comment></comment>


Swift and C# Quick Reference – Language Equivalents and Code Examples [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/6/9/469501F4-5F6B-4E51-897C-9A216CFB30A3/SwiftCSharpPoster.pdf <comment><USER3> I can't find an accompanying article or anything for this. I'm curious as to why Microsoft would put something like this out? Why make the comparison in the first place? Why compare it to Swift?

Also, the code at [http://aka.ms/scspostercode](http://aka.ms/scspostercode) is nice.

<comment><USER4> They are trying to get you to use Xamarin. See here: [https://twitter.com/masters3d/status/571785335702626304](https://twitter.com/masters3d/status/571785335702626304)

<comment><USER5> Speaking as someone who loves C# and has tried Xamarin ... it ain't ready for iOS yet. A significant amount of iOS development is done in the Designer and Storyboard, and Xamarin falls well short. The addition of needing to use a mac as a buildhost just makes it inconvenient.

I definitely see it improving in the future (I personally view Xamarin development as a better option for Android than standard Java), but it's not something I would recommend for an actual workplace to use.

<comment><USER6> What issues do you have with Xamarin's iOS Designer? I actually prefer it to Xcode's.

<comment><USER7> What are your reasons for preferring Xamarin? I've been meaning to try it out but have not gotten around to it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you find the "classes" section makes no sense, it's because the heading column is one line out of sync with the other columns.

</comment><comment><USER9> What I find strange is that some of these examples dont even do the same thing, which is a little odd when you're trying to do a fair comparison. And some weird non optimal syntax on both sides.

Im also a not a fan of the pure white, but thats quite a minor complaint.

</comment><comment><USER10> I went to an 'Azure Mobile DevCamp' event for iOS a couple of days ago. It was sponsored by Microsoft but run by someone otherwise unaffiliated who ran a mobile development shop coding in each platform's native language.

The session was interactive/follow along, the instructor led in swift and I decided to try following along using C#/Xamarin iOS (disclosure: I use Xamarin.iOS daily and am a big fan of C#). On iOS I had worked for a couple of years in obj-c before moving to Xamarin, but hadn't touched swift. Having read comparison articles similar to this, my otherwise uninformed opinion was that swift looked to provided a far more reasonable experience, similar to C# - <USER2> the point that I wondered whether it was worth paying the fee for Xamarin to avoid the archaic objective c language. However, there were a few things from the demo that changed my mind (some are apple ecosystem, some are swift):

\- no first class support for package management, and adding references to to libraries by hand can still be error prone and frustrating. We spent 10 minutes getting the room set up with their cocoapods - lucky me I had NuGet and in a few clicks had the packages installed. \- no `await`-style capability - it seems small but nested callbacks is not something I want to have to deal with anymore, and it makes certain patterns unwieldy. \- no LINQ query provider style support - making a call to the azure mobile service with a filter and sort clauses required newing up awkward predicate and sort objects and attaching them to a query before running (which then, again, required a callback!). In C# you could use the same syntax you would use if the collection were local - `await table.Where(i=> i.Name.Contains("Bob")).OrderBy(i=> i.LastName).ToListAsync()` - and the clauses would be transparently translated into parameters for the service call. \- Lots of "crashes" in the IDE while writing swift code, where the compiler would bomb out and syntax highlighting etc. would be disabled while it sorted itself out again.

Swift still seems to be a huge improvement over obj-c, and some of these will be improved as time goes by, but fundamental features like await make a big difference, especially working on mobile where you are often waiting on network calls, user activity etc. And that's all before you even touch the topic of code sharing.

<comment><USER11> > We spent 10 minutes getting the room set up with their cocoapods

Cocoapods with Swift support is still in beta. You'll probably have a better experience once it's been officially released.

> Lots of "crashes" in the IDE while writing swift code, where the compiler > would bomb out and syntax highlighting etc. would be disabled while it > sorted itself out again.

Likewise for this; Xcode is a much better IDE for Objective-C than it is for Swift at the moment, but it is improving (a new beta of Swift 1.2 + Xcode has just been released that fixes a lot of problems).

<comment><USER12> XCode is a horrible IDE for any language.

<comment><USER13> I think it has improved a lot in the last years,to the point where it'S actually pretty good

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As it's relevant, ServiceStack also provides integration with XCode that lets you generate a typed API for easily consuming C# JSON Web Services in Swift iOS/OSX Apps:

[https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Swift- Add-...](https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Swift-Add- ServiceStack-Reference)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I made a couple of tables to keep track of the changes to swift [https://github.com/masters3d/SwiftCSharp](https://github.com/masters3d/SwiftCSharp)

</comment><comment><USER4> Swift has internal now.

<comment><USER15> And C# has string interpolation!

<comment><USER16> C# _will soon have_ string interpolation. The release date is, I think, still some time later in 2015. it's just the compiler's syntactic sugar around string.Format() but yeah, it looks nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Beautiful presentation.</comment>


20 Ways Your Independent Contractor Might Actually Be An Employee - <AUTHOR> http://www.bakerdonelson.com/ContentWide.aspx?NodeID=200&PublicationID=801

<comment><USER2> Wow, what a bureaucracy. In Finland the State has simple database (called "Ennakkoperintärekisteri"). If you register to that database as a contractor, you are held responsible for your own taxes/worker payments, and you can bill companies. Then companies can buy your services without worries. Really simple.

<comment><USER3> Nobody except the contractors wants this to be simple. The contractors would love it though, there would be less income lost to "preferred vendors" who provide the contractors with a stiff take on the paychecks, and they'd get to negotiate their own rates.

<comment><USER4> People wanting to hire contractors don't want this to be simple?

<comment><USER5> The implication being that a lot of company hire people as contractors when they are really employees and a database like this would instantly eliminate all the underhandedness.

It's a favorite pastime of labor lawyers to beat companies over the head with the Fair Labor Standards Act for classifying people as independent contractors when they are really acting like employees. I'm sure the IRS enjoys it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why does the government want to discourage a free-flowing labor market? Some thoughts:

1\. It's easier to force GE to pay the correct payroll taxes for 100K employees than it is to police thousands of single-employee "companies" that file Schedule C's.

2\. The government has co-opted corporations into providing pieces of the social safety net such as unemployment benefits, health insurance, etc. If a minimum wage employee was offered $1/hour more to be a contractor, he might take it. Then, if laid off, he might go on welfare instead of unemployment insurance paid for by the employer's contributions. Employment law enforces a bunch of social safety net stuff which can be circumvented by contractors.

3\. Net taxes paid would decrease if everyone was a contractor. I have the right to pay myself a percentage of my earnings and take the rest as dividends which are not subject to payroll tax, etc. Also, I can deduct mileage from my home office and other things that reduce taxable earnings.

Can anyone think of other reasons?

<comment><USER7> Because individual contractors don't pay lobbyists like lawyers and union bosses. Point 1 is kinda wrong because the IRS has a better chance of "convincing" individual contractors to pay taxes correctly. Point 3 evens out and you tend to pay just as much.

<comment><USER6> "the IRS has a better chance of "convincing" individual contractors to pay taxes correctly"

Two things here:

1\. Auditing GE's centralized payroll system is a lot easier than auditing 10K little businesses. Also, GE has so much to lose that it likely obeys the letter of the law.

2\. GE doesn't pay its employees and then realize on April 15th that it doesn't have any money in the bank. Tons of small businesses end up owing money to the IRS because the owner (the painting contractor, etc.) didn't plan ahead.

Edit: Please note that I was referring specifically to payroll taxes in my original comment -- not international tax law, etc.

<comment><USER7> GE can lawyer up pretty fast, most individuals will do exactly what the IRS tells them since they can freeze your accounts and put liens on you without a court date. As I pointed out elsewhere, this isn't driven by logic or the IRS, it is driven by lobbying money.

<comment><USER6> There clearly are many grey areas in corporate taxation, especially when certain laws only apply to a few large companies. However, payroll taxes are not such a beast. The rules for how much must be paid as a percentage of W2 wages are pretty simple and easily audited. Furthermore, there's a built-in cheating detection system -- employees file individual income taxes and assert the tax payment details provided by their employers. So, it's easy for the IRS to figure out where fraud is happening. Dispatching an army of lawyers to argue against the obvious is of little value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I get the feeling that this particular issue is probably being examined and this particular link has been provided based on the research someone did from when that guy flew his plane into the IRS building. (I forgot his name and do not feel like looking it up in the moment.) One of his major, even if it was strange, complaints was the inability for contractors to properly identify themselves as contractors when small changes to their working patterns can make them employees instead.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my internship days, I had an employer who filed me as a contractor for tax purposes. It felt a bit sleazy, and I felt especially robbed when I later realized that I had to pay extra self-employment taxes. I really wish I had spoken up at the time.

There _are_ cases of "independent contractor" abuse, and my case clearly violated almost every rule on this list.

<comment><USER10> This happened to me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's an almost identical set of rules in the UK: <http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ir35/>

<comment><USER12> From my experience, I feel IR35 is actually set out to be beneficial for the worker and the organization, whereas it looks as if the US policy is set out to be beneficial for the IRS and US government.

Although in my circumstances it was quite easy for me to be IR35 compliant...so I may be biased.

<comment><USER11> IR35 always seemed very reasonable to me. The only thing annoying was that it could affect those who were being genuinely entrepreneurial because it had to be general enough to catch all the tax cheats.

Still, in the end it worked out OK. Annoyingly, it also worked out OK for many of the tax cheats, who just worded their contracts differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this apply to overseas workers hired by a company to perform accounting and back office communications task. If you pay for a full time employee in the Philippines or India do you have to worry about payroll taxes?

</comment><comment><USER14> Not just with techies: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202154.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Does a contractor need to meed all or any one of those 20 points?

How does this relate to contractors hired trough oDesk or Elance?

I see number of points they would meet, for example Payment by Hour, Right to Discharge, Oral or Written Reports etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> What about a US company having a offshore office in some poor Asian country and having some of the employees as contractors. Is there any accountability for these companies? Can those employees do anything?</comment>


Raspberry Pi as a dedicated Bitcoin miner - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/chips/turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-dedicated-bitcoin-mining-machine-1559862/

<comment><USER2> Looks fun but I don't think the ROI on this would be all that great..</comment>


The Upside-Down "e" - an Editor's Nightmare (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai104_folder/104_articles/104_alphabet_nightmare.html

<comment><USER2> "You're right. Man should not be a slave to technology. The 'tail shouldn't wag the dog'. But that's idealistic and unreal. Technology always has its own limitations and parameters. It's not the first time technology has shaped the alphabet. The same story has been repeating itself since the origin of the alphabet. Greek and Latin were clearly determined by the hammer and chisel against marble - it's easier to carve straight lines in stone than rounded ones. That's why so many of our capitals are based on straight lines. The cursive Arabic was influenced by pen; cuneiform, by clay and sharp stick. Other alphabets were created by carving on bamboo. Simply today, the determining tools are fonts, computer keyboards, and satellite transmissions - the only difference being that they're a bit new and unfamiliar in the alphabet designers' hands."

<comment><USER3> I'm reminded of the English language and the "thorn" character (Þ). It used to be the character for the sound "th" but it fell out of favor and the final nail in its coffin happened when the printing press came into play--the typefaces were imported from Germany and Italy and they didn't have thorn. The printers substituted "y" for a while (hence "Ye olde shoppe"--It's actually pronounced "The", not "yee").

So I would say it's not unheard of for an alphabet to be shaped by technology. We English speakers are not the worse for wear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, when you ask a committee of linguists to design an orthography for you --- you get a godawful almost-IPA "one phoneme = one grapheme" academic exercise which is utterly impractical for everyday use. (Again, an object lesson in the robustness of top-down-designed systems vs. ones which evolved from centuries of use). Azerbaijan would have had the same problem even if they had stayed with the Cyrillic alphabet. E.g. after Kazakhstan became independent, they had lots of trouble trying to use Kazakh as the administrative language due to a shortage of typewriters with the appropriate letters.

Uzbekistan is greatly underappreciated for having done something really neat after the Soviet breakup --- designing an orthography with no "funny letters". They use context to distinguish the "back" and "front" versions of phonemes like i [1]. And in the two cases where that would be too confusing (o and u), they put an apostrophe after the letter --- i.e. u', instead of something like ü.

[1] Turkey, which speaks a closely-related language, solved the "front i" vs "back i" problem by making one dotted and the other dotless --- those of us here probably know all of the toLowerCase-related bugs that caused, I think articles about this have been posted a couple of months ago

</comment><comment> j-g-faustus I remember we had problems with Norwegian fonts in the early 1990s - printing, copying between computers and email would invariably mess up the æ, ø and å. Even the computer science department of the university I attended in the mid-90s didn't get it right. I think it took close to ten years before the majority of printouts and emails were correct.

But compared to Azerbaijan, I understand we were lucky - at least we didn't have to mess around with creating our own fonts :)

Good point on how tools put constraints on expression, BTW. I guess ASCII art is another example, and the ASCII smiley :-) is still with us.

Even today mixing text and freehand drawing or images is troublesome enough that we rarely bother. In a sense it is somewhat curious that 60 years of computer science has not been enough to replicate the convenience of a handwritten note...

</comment><comment><USER5> Also relevant: "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets"

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Aren't they talking about U+018F and U+0259?

Nowadays, adding that glyph to an existing font could be a very easy thing to do. It depends a lot on the font design you're after...

Fonts released under a free license would have helped.

A nice font editor: <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Who'd have known I'd cause so much trouble.

</comment><comment><USER8> Painful to read something easily solved by free software, even in 1993

<comment><USER9> Really? One problem was the lack of diverse fonts with an ə in it. How does free software solve that? Another was the different programs used different ways to input the ə character. Free software doesn't help there - why would they all use the same entry sequence? A third was that no keyboard supported that common character in the home row. While key remappers exist, what should the new standard layout be?

Had they chosen æ instead then they could have just used Latin-1 and the large number of existing fonts, keyboards, etc. for languages like Danish which already solved the problem.

<comment><USER8> Bitmap fonts are easy. I made a truetype font in the 1990s using CorelDraw so I know that's not hard. Keyboard maps, again trivial. And don't discount the power of a felt tip when it comes to marking a keyboard.

<comment><USER9> The article goes into well-written details of why what you suggested here was tried and didn't work. 1) they also wanted print fonts, 2) they made a bitmap font but it didn't scale right, 3) people want a large variety of font forms, which they couldn't provide. 4) At the OS level, what do you map your key to, if the character code doesn't exist? 5) Applications chose different, incompatible key-bindings, and 6) for the entire country?

There's also a difference between making a font and making a good, generally usable font, just like I as a 7th grader could program, but they weren't good, generally usable programs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does LTC have the same transaction malleability flaw as BTC? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Yesterday, I asked the same thing about doge: The answer was "No coin is immune to this. [...]"

More details in the original thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7220337)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks !</comment></comment>


Why British Singers Lose Their Accents When Singing - <AUTHOR> http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/08/why-british-singers-lose-their-accent-when-singing/ <comment><USER2> I suspect the author of the article is American. Everyone thinks that their own accent is neutral and measures everyone else relative to that.

As a non-American, the mentioned singers don't sound American to me, although I would also agree that they sound neutral.

I suspect that a more reasonable explanation is that the phonemes used while singing are more universal than those used in normal speech, and so everyone perceives singing to be closer to their own accent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Related discussion on Reddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owfuv/el...](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1owfuv/eli5_why_do_british_singers_seem_to_lose_their/)</comment>


Gitlab 13.2 - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/07/22/gitlab-13-2-released/ <comment><USER2> Hi! Sharing a few highlights from this release, and links with additional information:

\- MVC release of iterations, to break down work into more manageable tasks[1]

\- Diff changes for wiki pages to simplify edit history comparisons between page versions [2]

\- Use of advanced global search on GitLab.com[3]

[1] [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2422#mvc- user-f...](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2422#mvc-user-flow)

[2] [https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/07/22/gitlab-13-2-rel...](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/07/22/gitlab-13-2-released/#wiki- page-diffs)

[3] [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/advanced_global_searc...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/search/advanced_global_search.html)

Also, our team would love to hear your feedback on our Iterations MVC, which you can provide on this issue: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/221284](https://gitlab.com/gitlab- org/gitlab/-/issues/221284)</comment>


SproutCore 1.5.pre.4 - TemplateView is Here - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sproutcore.com/post/3575607410/sproutcore-1-5-pre-4-templateview-is-here

<comment><USER2> I'm glad to see the introduction of template views. The main thing that turned me off from sproutcore was having to design all of your views in js.</comment>


Cosmic strings are super-massive, ultra-thin cracks in the universe - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5661564/cosmic-strings-are-super+massive-ultra+thin-cracks-in-the-universe <comment><USER2> I always said, the thing is broken. Never worked properly...</comment>


Coronavirus: China reports 14,840 new cases, 242 new deaths - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1227741314911031296 <comment><USER2> For context, the sudden jump is due to a change in the reporting criteria [1]:

> BEIJING: China's Hubei province on Thursday (Feb 13) reported a sharp rise > in confirmed coronavirus cases and a surge in the death toll after the > adoption of new methodology for diagnosis, health officials said.

> The death toll leapt by a record 242, more than double the prior provincial > daily record of 103 set on Monday, while the number of new cases soared by > 14,840 - also a daily record - to a total of 48,206 cases.

> Health officials in the province, the epicentre of the epidemic, said they > had started including people diagnosed using the new methods from Thursday. > Excluding cases confirmed using the new methods, the number of new cases > rose by only 1,508, the official data showed.

[1] [https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/wuhan-virus- hubei-...](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/wuhan-virus-hubei-new- cases-covid-19-coronavirus-new-method-12429726)</comment>


E-Books from NASA - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/index.html

<comment><USER2> Oh wow, this is really interesting.

For example, this is a monograph about the precautions and ethics in contaminating the moon and planets with our chemicals and bio-life.

As we study things like the brittle atmosphere of the moon, we change it.

[http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/607072main_WhenBiospheresCollide- ebo...](http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/607072main_WhenBiospheresCollide-ebook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> E-books are about space.</comment>


Show HN: Brute-Force IPFS / IPNS Peer ID Generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meehow/peer-id-generator/ <comment><USER2> This is a wonderful little tool, thank you for publishing it! It was super easy to install and run.</comment>


Lark Will Wake You Silently Without A Jarring Alarm - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/lark-will-wake-you-silently-without-a-jarring-alarm/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> Why not just a built-in alarm clock in the wrist device?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Vibrating-Personal-Alarm- Shake-...](http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Vibrating-Personal-Alarm-Shake-N- Wake/dp/B0027A573Q)

$30, with a $25 restaurant.com gift card.</comment></comment>


Why I Left Rackspace and What About OpenStack - <AUTHOR> http://dendrobates.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/rackspace-openstac/

<comment><USER2> Why I joined Rackspace: to make OpenStack awesome!

The folks I met at Rackspace share our (Anso Labs) vision of making OpenStack the best cloud platform for themselves and others.

The "marketing" team at Rackspace were the folks who understood the importance of OpenStack and worked to convince the rest of the company to open source their cloud.

Sure there are growing pains. And one could point out technical areas that the community has struggled with (automated testing against real clusters)... The point is that everyone I've talked to from developers to the CEO understand that OpenStack needs to be its own project. We (individually and as a company) are trying to shepherd the project.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I think that Rackspace is trying to control Openstack rather than influence it."

So that's why you're up in arms over them making a move to _reduce_ their presence on the board? Sure, they should have handled it better, but it seems silly to jump from a bumbling move to a power grab, especially when the point was to reduce the near-total domination of Rackspace on the board after the Anso purchase.

Wonder if there are more sour grapes behind this than you're letting on.

</comment><comment><USER4> is anyone renting out infrastructure using the OpenStack API? Seems to me like it'll be more valuable both to consumers and to providers once there are several inter-operable providers. Also, social proof would make the traditionally conservative VPS providers more comfortable, I think.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a senior engineer? How do you become one? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A somewhat pragmatic definition of seniority:

The more senior you are, the more damage you get to do to the business if you're wrong. Intern working on a file format? Somebody else can redo the work if you screw up. CTO setting development strategy? Tank the whole product development effort, hobbling even good developers.

I consider a senior engineer to be (in broad strokes):

\- Somebody who can organize other engineers to accomplish an objective.

\- Somebody who can pinch hit if needed on any projects under their direction.

\- Somebody who actively teachers other engineers about what the engineer knows, inside of work or out.

\- Somebody who has either fucked up a few times, or salvaged a fucked-up situation (business or development), and can explain what happened, what their role in it was, and how they should've done things differently (because there's _always_ a better set of actions to take).

\- Somebody who can interface directly with customers if needed and who can help compromise between business objectives and engineering ones--even if it means saying no to new shiny or sugardadddy customer.

EDIT:

It's very important not to confuse a domain expert with a senior engineer. I've worked with brilliant DBAs and syadmins and OOP folks, and they're much better in their fields than I am--but that doesn't make them suited for architecture and project work.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a very good definition for what a senior engineer should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Senior Engineer usually means someone with a number of years experience. An easy number is 10 however this isn't the only thing. Generally you have worked on enough coding projects that you are wise in how you put forward your effort. Also I would assume a SR Engineer has a good understanding of software design patterns. When I started out I thought that OO concepts were enough to master C# but everything changed once I started to grasp design patterns. I think SR generally means you have a certain amount of experience paired with a strong ability to code.

<comment><USER5> I had the feeling it was mostly time based.

When I tell a recruiter I worked for 7 years as a dev, they often categorize me as a senior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As others have mentioned before it depends on the context.

From the perspective of HR departments, "Senior" means "Has worked in this field for at least N years, and therefore can command a salary between $X and $(X+Y)". You become one by keep working on the field, but I don't think this is what you asked.

From the perspective of management, "Senior" means "can work on roughly defined goals with minimal supervision". Contrast that with "Intern" := "Needs micromanagement" and "JuniorDev" := "Can work independently, but needs to be assigned well specified tasks". Please note that this is only weakly correlated with your technical expertise, and has more to do with your ability to work around issues beyond your direct control: How do you learn stuff on your own. How do you reach out for help when you get stuck. How do you resolve conflicts when your perceived goals get in the way of those of your team member's, or viceversa.

You learn to do this by doing (that's why HR uses the proxy of "N years of experience"), but more than that you learn by striving to keep a good attitude and not allow roadblocks to stop you from completing your assigned tasks. It also help a lot if you learn to listen to people and try to figure out how to fix the problem at hand for good (instead of doing the bare minimum to get a perfect row of check marks on your weekly report).

Finally, from developers perspective "Senior" means "is an expert in X, Y or Z technology". This usually gets in conflict with the manager's definition and causes a lot of unneeded friction and resentment. You obviously do this by working on something that interest you, but the not so obvious part is that you have to try to avoid doing work too far from your intended area of expertise. This is what some people call "quality work" (vs simply "chores"). You cannot always avoid chores, neither should you aim to... but if you get too sucked into them, you will have a hard time building up expertise.

</comment><comment><USER7> In the enterprise world, you become a senior engineer by saying something like "I'd love to work for you and my required salary is $X".

"But that would put you in the pay band of a senior engineer!"

 _shrug_</comment>


Japanese 'Prince' Switched At Birth Was Raised A Pauper - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/11/29/247807768/japanese-prince-switched-at-birth-was-raised-a-pauper <comment><USER2> If you think about it, it makes no more sense to be angry at having been switched in the hospital than to be angry about having been born to poor parents in the first place. Adding the random element of the hospital switch doesn't make the underlying process any more random than it already was.

And of course while the single data point of the fact that the man ended up being a truck driver, while his counterpart became the president of a real estate company, proves nothing, I do find it an interesting anecdote. People who want to downplay the importance of class delineation like to point to the extraordinary people who rise from poverty into success. But my hunch is that given two individuals of ordinary moral fortitude, the one born into a rich family will tend to be pretty successful, while the one born into a poor family will tend not to be.

<comment><USER3> _my hunch is that given two individuals of ordinary moral fortitude, the one born into a rich family will tend to be pretty successful, while the one born into a poor family will tend not to be._

Is it even possible to disagree? This seems as obvious as gravity, but the counterargument (if one exists) may be interesting to hear.

<comment><USER4> You'd be surprised. There's a certain segment of the population thats finds it vital to their self-image to insist that-- _in America,_ now--absolutely anyone from any social background can be guaranteed success if they only work hard and apply themselves; and therefore, if you're poor, you must obviously be lazy and deserve to be poor.

Naturally it's mainly successful people who say this, but they say it with such fervent faith and belief that there's a fair few miserably poor folks who buy it, generally in the form of "I'm better than the rest of you poor bastards 'cause I work hard and I'm gonna be rich any minute now." And then they spend the rest of their lives slaving for minimum wage and not rocking the boat, always convinced that the American Dream is right over the next hill. It's sad.

<comment><USER5> The Declaration of Independence says "pursuit of Happiness" and anybody can pursue it. I've never met anyone who thought it was a guarantee even with hard work and I live in the area of the country that still believes in the American Dream.

Of course, I also live in the part of the country that doesn't measure happiness by the size of the bank account when you shuffle off the the great beyond. Although the farmers and vocationally trained in the area are doing pretty darn well.

Hard work seems to give one a better chance at reaching your goals, much like exercise seems to help with keeping you healthy. Some folks live a long time without exercising and some die early even when exercising regularly.

<comment><USER6> "The pursuit of happiness" is an attempt to express human rights in a _positive_ way. That is, rather than say what the state cannot stop you from doing, it attempts to say what it is you are supposed to be allowed to do. This is important because many people will want to say "I agree with human rights but why would you ever want to do X". "The pursuit of happiness" is an expression of what we are trying to protect: people freely choosing the lifestyle that they feel is best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The craziest part is that the three brothers were so sure that their oldest brother didn't belong that they travelled back 60 years in time to uncover the truth... can you imagine being so convinced someone in your family was an outsider?

Casts my weird uncle in a whole new light.

<comment><USER5> Before the US was so identity heavy[1], it was not an uncommon phenomena for a family to raise a child as their own[2] and the child not be told. That crazy uncle or great aunt might find out and might not.

In more modern times, questions generally get asked as a result of some blood tests or organ compatibility tests.

1) birth certificate for everything, although I remember an old story that the birth certificate might have been written by a sympathetic official

2) sadly, some stigmas were pretty great

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an interesting news story about one case of a "natural experiment" on human beings that would be quite unethical to perform on a large scale. The study of twins reared apart, which was especially active at my alma mater university while I was a student there,[1] took advantage of some other happenstance separations of monozygotic ("identical") twins into more than one family of upbringing to see what effects of home environment on genetically identical young people as they grow up might be.

For behavior genetic studies on fruit flies, direct gene manipulation is considered ethical, and quite harsh environmental tests, tests that would never be considered ethical for mice, are also used. For mice, they can be bred into inbred strains in which every individual for generation after generation is all but identical, and can also be given gene "knockouts" through genetic engineering technology, and the environments can be varied by systematic controlled experiments rather than the haphazardly varying experiences of human beings.

I discuss issues related to this research every week during the school year at my alma mater university with some of the world's leading experts on human behavior genetics.[2] This is a fascinating area of research, and there is always more to learn. Some of the more puzzling questions will probably only get answers as more researchers from varied postgraduate educational background collaborate on conducting continued research.

[1] [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055469](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055469)

[2] [http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/](http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/)

<comment><USER9> I don't suppose anyone knows if there is _any_ ethical review required for experiments on fruit flies?

And, follow up question, at what level (higher or lower than fruit flies) are experimenters allowed to proceed experimenting on life forms without an ethics review.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to work in a fly lab. As far as I know, there are no ethical reviews required for insect studies.

I know that animal welfare and ethics reviews are required for mice, rats and other small mammals, but I don't know where a formal line is drawn.

<comment><USER10> Vertebrates.

<comment><USER11> And octopuses

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of an episode of Curb'd where Larry David is under the impression that he was switched at birth and isn't really Jewish.

This made him giddy and broke imaginary bonds that were the source of his real personal flaws. It was hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER13> Made me think of the following though experiment: what if we randomly shuffled all babies at birth?

<comment><USER14> People would rebel with tremendous violence against it. Either you would have a total revolution, or a dual system, where the elites had a separate set of rules for themselves. Probably the latter.

<comment><USER15> I don't know why but I have a feeling women would be more against it than men.

<comment><USER16> I'm lead to believe the bond that a mother has for the child that grew inside her for 9 months is something a man can never _truly_ understand. I just asked my wife what she'd do if she found out our 3yr-old daughter wasn't biologically ours. She said she'd keep this child _AND_ fight to get our biological one as well. I said, as painful as it'd be, I'd prefer to give up our current child and get our biological one....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It doesn't matter who you are. Success seems to be shaped entirely by your environment.

<comment><USER18> Not entirely. Look at Oprah. But on a general level, yes.

<comment><USER19> Exception or the rule?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The fact that he even got a settlement made me laugh. Being brought up poor is now fair consideration for compensation? I hope every poor person sues the rich for the kleptocracy they have constructed. Oh wait, only the rich can do that. Carry on. But before you leave, I'd like to toast to kleptocracy; never have so few been given so much for doing so little. To plopping out of the right vagina, my friends.

</comment><comment><USER21> Once I was the King of Spain… [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Spain_(song)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Spain_\(song\))

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen > The story has also reignited the nature vs. nurture debate, with, as Lucy > points out, many people saying that "this is proof positive that it doesn't > matter what your background is, nature cannot overcome nurture, and people > who are born into poverty are doomed to stay there."

"With...many people saying that 'this is proof positive...'" is bullshit. You don't have many people saying exactly that. I don't think you even have one person saying exactly that, other than Lucy. Many people? Which people, and where? In Japan? In America? Did you count them? Weasel words, trying to lend credibility to the _Lucy 's_ claim that this is proof positive (!) that nature cannot overcome nurture (!). Third clause of this whopper: people who are born into poverty are doomed to stay there. Wow. You know, I'm not altogether sure that the prince-born pauper is actually _poor._ Going by what we know, he has a job as a truck driver, which is more than can be said for his mother, who was on welfare, and formally poor. He simply couldn't go to high school or college. In other words, he moved up a bit in life, though granted, not much.

And as rayiner pointed out, this is a single data point. It proves nothing.

Now, what if it did prove exactly that nature cannot overcome nurture? This would mean so much! Suddenly, so much of the progressive agenda would be validated! It would truly be bigotry, and literally nothing else, that was responsible for minorities in perpetual plight. It would truly be sexism, and literally nothing else, that was responsible for how many fewer women are CEO's. It would be a rallying cry for the communists of the world to unite against the pure, distilled evil that etcetera.

<comment><USER22> There's no dearth of evidence showing that, for instance, parental wealth correlates with educational success of children. And then there's a loads of evidence showing that educational outcomes correlate with lifetime earnings.

Have you even tried looking for these citations? It's hard to believe you didn't find them because there is no shortage of published research on this topic. Here's the first link I picked off google scholar: [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2673145](http://www.jstor.org/stable/2673145)

How about you provide citations for the case that you are making?

<comment><USER23> The correlations you present don't inform the nature v nurture debate at all.

The pro-nature side would simply contend that wealth correlates with more advantageous genetics and that the success of their prodigy mostly has to do with the genetics they pass down, and less to do with the economic advantages presented to them

<comment><USER22> Maybe I didn't make it very clear but I was responding to daniel-cussen's sarcastic comments about "the progressive agenda".

 _The pro-nature side would simply contend that wealth correlates with more advantageous genetics_

Seems like this is easily testable by looking at the distinction in, say, educational outcomes between "old" and "new" money. Are you aware of any citations supporting this hypothesis?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24>
      Louis: Looking good, Billy Ray!
      Billy Ray: Feeling good, Louis!

</comment><comment><USER25> Twist: Pauper guy is Satoshi.

<comment><USER26> Re-twist: Pauper guy's landlord is the real estate company the other guy runs.

Triple-twist: Property manager woman working for real estate guy is shared love interest, leaves other guy for pauper guy.

Quadruple-twist: They all wind up friends, throwing in city life and moving to the countryside.

Quintuple-twist: The woman winds up working for a country hospital. In closing, she is presented with an opportunity to switch two look-alike babies that have just been delivered...</comment></comment>


Civ 5 AI battle – All 43 Civs on same map [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOKwIrTWeDo <comment><USER2> Civ 5, with the add-ons, is one of my favourite games of all times. It's really well-balanced and thoroughly thought through. Everything is just in place, game mechanics, city management, unit system, science tree, social policies, trade, etc. I do turn off espionage, though. And the AI leaves room for improvement.

Another thing that I also really like about the game is that you can get away with very little micro-management. However, some some micro-management gives you slight advantage. I think they struck a nice balance here.

And beating deity was great, it almost felt like playing chess. Sure, you have to have a bit of luck with your starting position. And you need some luck later-on when it comes to the distribution of certain resources. But apart from that, it's in your hands and everything you do has to be near-perfect in order for you to succeed.

<comment><USER3> No it's not. It's a good game but has loads of flaws.

For example, you just spent the last 30 turns building a powerful ancient wonder. It's ready next turn! Oops, the computer builds that ancient wonder the turn before you do, you get nothing.

How's that well thought through? It's an extremely bad game mechanic, un-fun in the worst possible way. You have no visibility of the race. The old games at least let you switch to your 2nd choice or another building.

Also, generally speaking, the happiness mechanic sucks. It's such an unintuitive way of stopping people growing too fast. It's supposed to make a choice between lots of small cities Vs a few big ones, but it's only fun for a few big ones. So if you enjoy actually expanding and finding new places to put cities, it's not as good as the old games.

Also the entire city states mechanic is tedious.

As for the chess anecdote, the AI is bad, they give it massive bonuses, so it's like playing chess where you start with half the pieces of your opponent. This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game, as you get little opportunity to make wonders or other things early game as the computer simply brute forces past you.

<comment><USER4> In regards to the wonder mechanic, that's just completely wrong. You get a 1:1 conversion of hammer input to gold if you don't complete the wonder.[1] Compare this to the usual 1:4 conversion if you just use the city to produce gold.

[1] [https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to- cal...](https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/126105/how-to-calculate- gold-earned-from-a-wonder-if-another-civilization-finishes-firs)

<comment><USER5> Oh wow the game could let you know that, Otherwise yeah it's super frustrating. Of course I'd much rather have the wonder than the gold since say the pyramids would give you less than 185 gold and buying even a worker costs more than that IIRC.

<comment><USER6> It does, and has since Civ 4 at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unsurprisingly, being near a corner helps one's chance of survival, as you need to defend on fewer sides with the same amount of resources.

<comment><USER8> Although I was surprised that the civ in bottom left didn't prevail. They seemed to be able to expand first.

<comment><USER9> What was that civ? I couldn't figure it out with the light background + orange font for city names, nor did I recognize that color scheme.

<comment><USER10> Assyria

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love playing these kind of "strategy" games (Civ, Total War, to a lesser extent DotA 2, etc). I don't have time anymore, as I am a startup founder, and I simply can't play these for just 1-2 hours a week. I'll play again in a few years :)

What typically annoys me is the AI in these games: never challenging enough, or challenging in the right way. Years and years, and the only hope is that the AI team at Google will figure out a way to apply their ML/DL AI to many games at once. (they did it for DotA 2, with remarkable results).

<comment><USER12> I actually find Civ great to play on a long flight (as long as I have access to a power outlet, it chews through my laptop battery). Makes a 6-7 hour flight, er, fly by. But I never finish a game, I just get to somewhere around the Classic era and have to shut my laptop off. And the next flight I take I'm never in the mood to resume a game, so I just start again.

Lots of fun, though.

<comment><USER11> I tried a couple of times over the last several years. Somehow I find it very uncomfortable to play a videogame on a flight, where a few people can easily see what I am doing. Not sure why being observed makes me feel awkward.

<comment><USER12> I feel the same way sometimes. There's something about planes - if you're in an aisle seat you can see everything a person in front of you is doing, but it's next to impossible to know if they're looking.

My preferred solution is to drink a couple of beers while I play, I forget quickly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recommend watching true start location earth all AI play through. It's interesting to watch how America is divided if Europe wasn't technologically ahead.

<comment><USER13> Drew Durnil has multiple videos

Start state: [https://youtu.be/NdpX_2OZJZY](https://youtu.be/NdpX_2OZJZY)

End state: [https://youtu.be/xxfCxUB4VMQ](https://youtu.be/xxfCxUB4VMQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now give these players a side channel to communicate and you have a solid research paper. An example here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06960](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.06960)

Plus all of their code is on github

</comment><comment><USER15> I was surprised at how much time they spent building up their cities, technologies, religions etc., rather than just doing each others head in.

There's this open-source game, Battle for Wesnoth, which is sort of like Civilization without the civilization part, so it's pretty much just hexgrid- and turn-based strategy warfare (and that part much more fleshed out). Would be interesting to do the same with that.

</comment><comment><USER16> In Civ 5, There are so many things to choose from that give tiny 10% or +1 bonuses here and there. Unit promotions, religious bonuses, civics, buildings. I get bonus hunting fatigue.

At least in Civ 1, even if there was only a handful of different forms of government, they had massively different effects. I've played every Civ game except four and six.

Certain elements in the map in Civ 1 gave good bonuses. Now everything's watered down. I feel it's a cop out way to balance something by making everything have a tiny effect.

The automation also leads to you playing by reacting to popups, which is not fun. Oh, this city state now wants this random thing. Your game totally hangs on the ability to get them on your side.

It's fun to make plans and try to follow them through. It's fun (and harrowing) to make interesting decisions. You can't do it with just such random elements. It's not fun calculating cumulative bonuses. And it's also not fun even if it's automated. Have less gameplay elements!

Civ V is a game for coupon hunters and bean counters.

</comment><comment><USER17> The result has a lot to do with:

\- what Civ is next to each other: each civ has unique units, buildings, etc. this can be decisive during an engagement.

\- resources

\- what alliances form

There is also another factor in play here: you will see that the last civilizations to lose are the ones that secured the corners. This is because they have a smaller border to protect. In this sense it's similar to game of Go, were openings often start with corner enclosures.

</comment><comment><USER18> Soon as I saw the Greeks had riflemen I knew it was all over :D

</comment><comment><USER19> This might be OOT, but I'm just curious how do you train AI on video games? Do you connect AI to internal API of the game or you let AI parse image data the from the screen and use external input (like keyboard or mouse) in order to play the game?

<comment><USER20> The first option is how "game AI" has been developed by most gaming companies until recently. The second option is how DeepMind, OpenAI, and a few others are now building gaming AI. Only the latter is about building a gaming AI that "learns to play the game like a human does".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested in some of the math here - e.g. if you wanted to compare civ fitness - would you need to test every iteration of initial starting conditions? And then I wonder how that changes if the map is a hexagonal sphere...

</comment><comment><USER22> The cpu on that computer must be running quite hot. That would definitely be a way to do a computer burn in test. Plus it's more fun ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any AI battles with more normal Civ 5 settings?

Like maybe 8 civs, bigger map with varying features etc

</comment><comment><USER24> are they classical AI or learned (RL) actual AIs

<comment><USER25> They are classical rule-based AIs

<comment><USER24> too bad. I'd really like to see a genuine (learned) Civ ai</comment></comment></comment>


Any tips for someone who's quitting full-time tech job to start a venture? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> On Finances:

\- Overbudget and underspend

\- Double the runway you think you will need

\- Don't hire anyone until they are _desperately_ needed

\- If nobody knows about running a business (tax & books) then ask an accountant for help

\- If your a founder, regardless of role, know how much money you have and your burn rate

On Fundraising (if your going this route)

\- Keep simplifying your pitch until its so ridiculously basic a kid could understand (literally - test on kids)

\- Remember what VCs are looking for: Huge Market, Proven Demand & ability to make money

\- Look for VCs that actually have cash and focus on your market

\- Keep a clean cap table, majority of shares with founders, use founder vesting

\- Raise as much as you need (with some fat) at standard rates, valuation isn't as important as it seems.

\- If a VC doesn't say "Yes" it means no, but always keep in touch and keep them updated if you like them

Of course you will fail miserably at both of these without actually building a business. On that front:

\- Just talk to customers and build what they need. Soo many distractions. Ignore them all.

\- Best platform/feature is the one you don't have to build. Second best is the quickest to build.

\- Its a hard road. Be 100% straight with co-founders, youll need each other. Exercise, dont forsake friends & family!

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you live in a big city, consider moving to a cheaper location to reduce your burn rate. Halving your rent can buy you several more months of runway.

Ideally, do as much up front work as you can while still getting a monthly paycheck while doing justice to $dayjob.

Nominate one or more people who you will be accountable to, and track your progress and discuss strategy with them once per month. Like a board of directors.

Find a good co-working space. If you haven't worked on your own full time before, get a time tracking app and find a daily cadence that lets you 6-7 hours of productivity per day, pack it up at a reasonable hour, go the the gym, socialize.</comment>