Ask HN: What is the last song you discover? Where and how did you keep it? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN!
I want to understand what you do when you discovered a new music ? Do you left browser tabs open ? do you download it as a MP3? or do you search and try to find it on your own streaming service of choice ?
I'm asking you about this because I've built a browser extension to let people keep the music you find on any web page, and web-application on the baseline to let you stream what you've kept.
Why I build this :
I've stopped downloading MP3s a while ago, and I've started using & paying different streaming services like Soundcloud, Spotify and Youtube. But know, all my music data is scattered over different services and I'm not happy. I had a single go-to destination in the past: Winamp. It was a simple yet efficient solution to keep up with all my music in a single place. And this was my inspiration.
I'm basically trying to create a next generation Winamp, powered by streaming URLs instead of MP3s. <comment><USER2> I'm interested in monophony and plainchant, i.e. songs that only have vocals and no instruments and feature only one melodic line. Recently I've watched a documentary about flamenco and discovered the term "cante primitivo", which is a form of flamenco "sine guitarra" \- without a guitar accompaniment. After searching "cante primitivo" I discovered another documentary featuring a couple of artists who perform _cante primitivo_ , but it's not the whole video I am interested in, just parts of it.

Have a look: [https://youtu.be/OvYPB_1oPos?t=18m14s](https://youtu.be/OvYPB_1oPos?t=18m14s)

So what I am going to do now is to record this piece on a Mac using QuickTime and SoundFlower, which allows me to capture any audio output. If I am lazy I'd record the entire video and later cut it into pieces with Audacity. The thing that this method is lacking is a way to keep notes about the sources, such as the address, performers' names etc.

I hope it helps (and enjoy the music :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The last new song (read: piece of music) I discovered was the soundtrack to the film Gravity. I discovered it by watching the film. I then did a quick search on The Pirate Bay, downloaded one torrent, and started enjoying it in actual Winamp.

The generic case for me is: hear something, possibly search for info about the music used, download it, enjoy.

Mind if I asked why you stopped with offline music and the world's best player?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the detailed answer. Have you get a chance to try cubic.fm ? I'd love to know your views on it, since you are a llama lover :)

There is a sad story behind. I stopped using winamp, when my PC and hard-drive got stolen. I couldn't download all the music I had. Then I started using streaming services on a regular basis.

<comment><USER3> I haven't even heard about that before. Visiting their website doesn't fill me with hope (just a blank page with a nice NoScript logo). I will allow it, see what happens, and possibly report back.

And I am sorry to hear that. I was pretty devastated when my old PC died but I at least had all my data.

[EDIT] There is almost no information about the "app". A slick promotional video on youtube shows 5 seconds of it. A not so dense list of a dozen songs and a mouse clicking on one. That's all you get to see of it. I can't see whether it has good separation between its concept of a Media Library and Playlist. This is the largest thing that keeps me on Winamp.

That doesn't even go on to mention technical features. Replay gain? Gapless? Decoder quality? (I assume it uses whatever you browser has). Does it have ratings, playcounts, visualisations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey man, here is the detailed video of the app : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kUPbZfhN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kUPbZfhN8)

By the way, it's the product that I'm currently working on. It's currently in private beta, I'd love to give you a direct access, just drop me an email onur at cubic dot fm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is what I built :

[https://cubic.fm](https://cubic.fm) is for all those who discover music all around the web; on Youtube, on Soundcloud, on Pandora, on their Facebook feed, on a music blog… cubic.fm extension gives you a "save" button wherever you come across new sounds. One click will add them to your personal library.

You can easily add tracks from different music services. cubic.fm finds the best available sources, and lets you stream all on the same player.

The extension currently works on 20+ websites including Facebook, Shazam, Youtube, Soundcloud, Pandora, 8tracks, HypeM, Beatport Pro, Reddit and any blog with embedded audio content. The cubic.fm player can stream content from Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Youtube and Soundcloud.

Here is the demo video : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kUPbZfhN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kUPbZfhN8)

It's not ready yet and currently in private beta. But If you send me email on firstname.lastname@example.com, I'd love to give you direct access and get some feedback.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Found on Spotify. Added to a playlist. Easy!</comment>


Diaspora Will Now Be A Community Project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.diasporafoundation.org

<comment><USER2> At least this is progress. I'm _still_ looking forward to this project, even though it's been #deadpooled for a long time.

After just logging in, I'm surprised at how excruciatingly slooooooooooow it is. Upwards of a minute to save a minor change to my profile. I certainly hope self-hosting our profiles and content is an option sooner than later.</comment>


YouTube or PeerTube, which will it be - <AUTHOR> https://homehack.nl/youtube-or-peertube-what-will-it-be/ <comment><USER2> YouTube is the last Google service that I use (and I pay cash money for it), but I've been growing increasingly dissatisfied with it over the past few years and have begun to look for alternatives. I'll check out PeerTube -- it looks rather promising!

<comment><USER3> I really like the idea of PeerTube. I like the idea of a decentralized internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Luckily more ethical alternatives are emerging. PeerTube is one of these alternatives."

More ethical because you can upload copyrighted videos with no way to take down? How about fake news, conspiracy theory, and terrorist videos?</comment>


Dow plunges more than 950 points after China devalues its currency - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/05/investing/dow-stock-market-today/index.html <comment><USER2> Just wish China government would agree to the demands on intellectual property and tech patents transfer. Getting to a deal could be really easy if China stops the intellectual property and transfer requirements.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China–United_States_trade_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China–United_States_trade_war)

<comment><USER3> When did China originally start disrespecting intellectual property? Or is it the case that they've never respected it? Do you know of a good resource to learn about the history of this topic?

<comment><USER4> Traditionally nations only started respecting foreign intellectual property when they started to generate more IP that they wanted others to respect than they used from outside. For example, in the 19th century, the USA didn't respect British copyright. Charles Dickens was a very popular author in the USA, but he didn't get a cent from the sales of his books there. So he came over to the US a couple of times to give lectures in large auditoriums in major cities -- sort of like a rock star making money from touring rather than from album sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 750 points sounded much scarier when the DOW was below 10000. Now it's just 3%.

<comment><USER6> At current interest rates, 3% is nearly a year of interest gone.

<comment><USER7> If it were actually guaranteed to be gone, that would matter as a comparison point. The market however obviously isn't fixed and can rise or fall, bounce back or not. There's nobody that can consistently, accurately predict near- term moves.

The market could be down another 3% this time next week. Or it could snap back - emotional over-reaction - and recover most of this loss in the next week or three (sentiment on Wall St suddenly changes to eg: this means the Fed will have to step in and cut rates further, so stocks rise back up; it's just about impossible to tell how the wind will blow in the coming weeks, even if there is a hint of real bearishness about re the trade war & China).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, I'm confused.

As of my posting, the HN submission title is:

> Dow plunges 750 points after China devalues its currency

The article title:

> Dow plunges 800 points after China devalues its currency

And the first paragraph of the article is:

> The Dow tumbled more than 830 points [...]

So... which is it?

Edit to add: ok, the article's contets are apparently dynamically generated (or are being updated manually). I didn't know they did that. You can disregard this comment.

<comment><USER9> I think it's being updated as it tumbles.

Right now, it says 875

<comment><USER10> wow...950 now. As of comment, latest article update: 3:21 PM EST

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am confused about 1 thing. China can't possibly keep doing this at a rapid pace, right?

If they keep doing this, then their own people's savings is rapidly disappearing.

And since their people have a hard time buying US real estate anymore, won't the people get angry?

<comment><USER12> There is a very healthy industry based around evading Chinese capital controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know of any nice interactive models to play with that demonstrate trade, tariffs, and currency levels? I just don't have an intuitive sense for this yet.

<comment><USER14> What we saw is the market responding both to the economics of it and also to the knowledge that China has started adjusting its currency to combat Trump's tariffs.

I think many expected this to happen, but what is interesting is that it happened today, so long before the election. China is effectively signaling that it can do a LOT more of this leading up to the election.

Imagine a lager currency adjustment that sent the Dow down 3K points. A lot of people are imagining that today who were not thinking about it before.

So this puts a lot more pressure on Trump to pull back on the tariffs. But Trump won't want to do that yet, so China has a bit of time to illustrate that Trump is not in control of things the way he claims to be.

As someone who does not want the US Government meddling in the economy, I'll be very pleased if China manages to force Trump to repeal the tariffs, regardless of whether China continues its own backward trade policies.

<comment><USER13> Given this administration's thinking pattern, wouldn't they see the potential damage to US manufacturers and try to increase tariffs further, vicious-circle style? Who gets constrained first? If that doesn't cease, couldn't that eventually obliterate trade relationships entirely and make war more likely?

<comment><USER14> > Given this administration's thinking pattern, wouldn't they see the > potential damage to US manufacturers and try to increase tariffs further, > vicious-circle style?

I think they will want to do that, but ultimately the US has limited ability to do certain things.

> couldn't that eventually obliterate trade relationships entirely and make > war more likely?

Yes, that is in my opinion the worst aspect of Trump's trade policy. Economic cooperation between people of different nations helps prevent war. Trump is punishing Americans for cooperating with Chinese exporters, while trying to vilify the Chinese government, Chinese academics studying in the US, etc.

It's a horrible and repugnant political ploy. The US woke up and looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that China caught up dramatically in the past few decades (during which the US wasted trillions on the middle east).

China did not waste trillions in the middle east. Instead Xi lifted an unprecedented number of people out of poverty and invested heavily in Africa. China pours more concrete in a month than the US does in a year, and China produces more top tier hard science research than the US, not to mention China's top universities are 100x more competitive than Harvard.

Trump's actions reveal a weak and flailing US, the worst thing any of us can do is assume that he has a clue what he's doing in any kind of negotiation or foreign policy scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Funny how trump calls this "currency manipulation" when in fact they are stopping propping up their currency.

</comment><comment><USER16> "plunges" 3% ... me sobs in Brexit.

We've lost just under 20% off GBP vs USD since the vote went to Leave from the anticipated Remain.

China's an export economy, no? So, devaluing helps to buoy production for export, keeping people in work. Seems to be how China does things: I'm thinking of all those ghost cities they build.

<comment><USER17> China is not an export economy. They have a very balanced current account, < 1% of GDP.

[https://www.themoneyillusion.com/things-that-smart-people- do...](https://www.themoneyillusion.com/things-that-smart-people-dont- know/?fbclid=IwAR3j5L_WxachUW1zoEoV50Jg1-_DycRvXeEgdEOgqGnl6AUAVIwsOuVpZWo)

The justification that the Trump administration gives is that if you look at the subset current account that is trade, then further subset down to goods only (not services) and then futher subset down to bilateral goods trade with the USA then indeed China has a big surplus.

<comment><USER18> I'm not an expert but your article shows the current account, not trade. And about the trade most of the sources say between 400-500b US$ of trade surplus per year. Which means the exports are about 22% larger than the imports.

For example here: [https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/CHN](https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/CHN)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the correction/clarification. Looks like that surplus equates to ~1.7% of GDP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Say you (as the US) wanted to keep the same level of trade between the US and China- and the tariffs rose and the yuan fell in such a ratio that this remains true.

The net outcome is good right? The US gets slightly more tax (larger % of a smaller number), Chinese economy has to deal with loss of currency value?

</comment><comment><USER20> so if there's a chinese product that i like and it costs 100 yuan before devaluation, and say 1 dollar == 100 yuan. after devaluation, the product might cost 150 yuan but now 1 dollar == 150 yuan. so my dollar still buys the same amount of goods. what am i missing?

<comment><USER21> Not exactly, it depends on the particular good. The price in yuan could stay 100 or not move as much. In that case your purchasing power has increased

<comment><USER22> So its a great thing for the US if we want to import more stuff?

So its basically saying: I see your 10% Tariff and raise you a 10% discount!

<comment><USER23> But doesn't that also raise Chinese import costs the same amount? Or is that where Chinese tariffs in the things they import come into play (like Canadian canola, etc)?

This feels like a sort of race to the bottom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> From what I understand they haven't devalued anything. They withdrew some support and let the free market do the rest, which is exactly what the US have been demanding.

Of course they did that at a time when they knew the result would suit them...

It looks like a message to the US.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can someone tell me how this affects only the US Dollar and not every other currency in the world?

<comment><USER26> It has? EUR/USD is +.75%, AUD/US is -.55%, USD/JPY is +.5%.

<comment><USER25> Quoting the CNN article:

"Asian markets all fell more than 1.6% Monday, and Hong Kong's Hang Seng closed down 2.9% as protests continue in the region. In Europe, London's FTSE 100 finished down 2.5%. Germany's DAX and France' Cac 40 closed 1.8% and 2.2% lower, respectively."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> China just let its currency float more it was more pegged to the dollar before. Also isn't this a good thing for US consumers as it cancels out some of the trade war stupidity

<comment><USER28> Does that mean their currency was overvalued before?

<comment><USER29> Contrary to what you hear in the US, China has not been trying to devalue their currency for the past few years. In fact, they've been trying to strengthen it as they've been trying to build their domestic market and present the Remnibi as a dollar alternative.

Admittedly China did indeed artificially weaken their currency to help exports in the past but this hasn't been true for quite some time.

<comment><USER12> Wrong. Yuan has been devalued by close to 10% since this April.

<comment><USER29> Well yeah since the tariff wars started. This article has a good explanation of what they have been doing.

[https://thefederalist.com/2017/07/03/china-secretly- manipula...](https://thefederalist.com/2017/07/03/china-secretly-manipulating- currency-make-yuan-stronger/)

China was keen on strengthening the yuan and were doing that for a couple of years, but the trade wars have shifted their calculations. The earlier strengthening gives them some additional leeway.

I think the reason for this drop in the exchanges is because letting the yuan drop is China's way of saying they're in for a fight. A stable yuan was basically a precondition for trade talks, and this coming right after the last round means the hope for a resolution seems remote at best.

I still don't understand how China expects to win the trade war. The US has a lot more firepower. But I guess leadership incentives are not aligned with the country and it's peoples incentives (which is true in the US as well).

<comment><USER30> What is winning the war mean in this case? Because the producers in the US, such as soy bean farmers, are not winning anything. Consumers and producers generally don't seem to win trade wars. Especially when tariffs come into play.

<comment><USER12> The final prize in this war is who gets to write the rules of the world order, who gets to become/remain the hegemony. Economics/trade is just one battleground of many.

Soybeans are so inconsequential to this, in the larger picture of things. Sure, it sucks for farmers.

Would you rather have rich soybean farmers and a social credit score assigned to you personally for posting your opinions openly?

<comment><USER30> I feel like you're offering a false choice. The point of the tariffs is to punish China for a trade deficit and make companies produce things more in the United States according to this administration. Companies aren't changing things as a result of these tariffs as far as I can tell. So currently, consumers and producers are being punished and the administration isn't getting what it wants either. I just struggle to see the point. Personally I think it's more of an anti-globalist segment of the administration, as a trade deficit isn't necessarily a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So now is the time to buy buy buy?

</comment><comment><USER32> Genius, if they are using it to buy gold or bitcoin.

<comment><USER33> Are you seriously suggesting that China's angle here is to purchase economically-significant quantities of Bitcoin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone who hasn't realized that this is about more than economics is deluding themselves. This is about a struggle for global supremacy between two nations with wildly different views about reality.

The CCP does not believe in the rights of the individual and holds an iron grip on China. It is instituting policies straight out of an Orwellian dystopia and wants to export its model around the world.

The most powerful nation sets the world agenda, whether we like that or not. The United States cannot allow China to set the agenda.

</comment><comment><USER35> Trump puts 10% tariffs on Chinese imports bringing billions into the treasury, China devalues currency to compensate... net effect: Americans pay the same price but get billions in free tax money. Thanks, I guess?

<comment><USER36> Where's this nutty notion coming from that tariffs yield revenue to the government?

<comment><USER37> Tariffs do result in money to the government... from US importers. My mother, for example, sells products on Amazon that are manufactured for her in China. She must now pay tariffs to the government when she has more products made for her, and has had to stop selling several products as a result, since the tariffs made them unprofitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My first reaction was: since when does the Dow have its own currency?

</comment><comment><USER39> Great, now US can print more money and get even more stuff out of china for cheap. US will be more prospect and chines would be employed. win win?</comment>


ShingleBot: A random sentence generator based on rejection sampling Monte Carlo - <AUTHOR> http://shinglebot.com <comment><USER2> This looks good. Please email email@example.com if you'd like us to email you a repost invite. This is an experiment we're running to give good stories a second chance at attention on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is neat. (but when using it, it kinda feels like I could get as good or better results with just Math.random & a large collection of words each assigned a random value)

<comment><AUTHOR> True. I think it's a size problem. It would be interesting to have a bigger vocabulary and play with the distribution to allow rarer words in it. Without grammar, though, a random selection of words would look like in libraryofwords.com, i.e. most of the time non-sensical</comment></comment>


Mowing the lawn is a plague upon society, humanity, yourself. Stop the madness - <AUTHOR> https://steemit.com/life/@heretickitten/mowing-the-lawn-is-a-plague-upon-society-humanity-and-yourself-stop-the-madness <comment><USER2> My electric mower uses no fuel[1]. Thats what power stations are for. Recently a set of solar panels and a battery bank are stepping in. I don't mow every day so the rest of the days that power goes to aircon etc.

I don't water or fertilise my lawn. Get a tougher variety. Plus there's enough runoff from my garden so I don't need to care so much. My lawns link my gardens that grow vegetables. In summer some of the lawn dies out. Perfection is an illusion.

Grow your own vegetables[2]. Excellent for mental health and your body in general. Pushing a mower is good exercise. To argue otherwise is to argue that walking is a bad idea. Good luck with that.

[1] yeah. No fuel. I only sharpen the blade. Pedantics can scream as loud as they like. They're still wrong no matter what they say.

[2] I started in an apartment with three plants on a window sill.

</comment><comment><USER3> When my neighbors and I mow our lawns, it keeps the mosquitoes away. I'm not stopping.</comment>


Play: A P2P distributed torrent site that's impossible to shut down - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/ <comment><USER2> This is interesting, one thing that does concern me though is the fingerprint of the traffic, is this "impossible to shut down" presuming ISPs don't analyze their own users traffic and don't apply restrictions to such in certain circumstances. For example ip traffic unless to a dst of 80/443 with proto tcp (or 53/udp dns) could be classified as potential-P2P and throttled. Or if residential ISPs don't let end users run servers possibly by something as primitive as a router ACL on ports <1024, and then throttle P2P where src port and dst port both > 1024 then how will this survive?

It sounds like this solves the discover-ability issue, but weather it can be crippled vs shutdown Im not so sure.

Also does this have anything to do with popcorn time, looks very similar, movie time :)

<comment><USER3> Can you please not suggest such things? It gives the idiots ideas.

Let me just break it four different ways in three seconds to prove the point. Tor is not suitable for torrenting because the relays don't have enough bandwidth, but hosting a trivial website like this requires very little bandwidth so that wouldn't be a problem, and Tor relays use TCP port 443. Similarly, anyone using a VPN would be unaffected. And unless what you've described was done by by _every ISP everywhere in the world_ , people on ISPs that did it could still connect to everyone on an ISP that didn't do it and the site would remain available everywhere. And, because a site like this would require very little bandwidth per user, throttling would be completely ineffective anyway.

But your proposal would violate network neutrality and interfere with the nascent movement to decentralize things back from having everything go through Facebook, so no.

<comment><USER4> I2P is similar to Tor and torrents are a first class citizen in it. There is a thriving filesharing scene and speeds are often alright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested in how the site maintains database. I've heard of something like distributed hash tables, but I'm not sure if that is related. They would have to have a database to store the magnet links and they would need to be able to query the database to display content. Is each computer on the network holding the entire site or only pieces, and then are all computers holding the entire database?

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this different from other overlay networks?

Does "utilizes Bitcoin cryptography" mean that there is a BT-ish system of bandwidth credits?

<comment><USER7> It uses namecoin for domains.

Personal identities are essentially bitcoin addresses (public keys) with corresponding private keys. This provides passwordless logins and authentication.

Sites on ZeroNet are bitcoin addresses with modification permission given based on ownership of the equivalent private key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Noob question, why don't torrents get transferred over SSL?

<comment><USER9> The material doesn't need to be hidden from the world (ISP at most) because it's already public material. It includes checksums in the protocol at a more appropriate frequency.

Plus (some) SSL has only just become hardware accelerated. It's only now or in the next few years that someone would consider SSL in torrents - just for hiding from ISPs. Still too many other problems. MPAA are known to download films for the peer list. You'd still be on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> it's impossible to shut down because it doesn't open?</comment>


Digital Bodleian Library - <AUTHOR> http://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

<comment><USER2> The strangely-named [http://oaister.worldcat.org/](http://oaister.worldcat.org/) provides a search interface to 30 million digital resources from 1500 open-archive library collections worldwide, including book scans, audio and video.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent news.

FYI: The interface uses double click to navigate to the high res scans.</comment>


DeepMarks: A Digital Fingerprinting Framework for Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/322 <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or does anyone else also think the very last the world needs right now is for the Deep Learning crowd to merge with the pro-DRM crowd? This seems even worse than copyright on databases and such...

EDIT maybe to clarify what I'm afraid of here: Copyright law is _draconian_ these days, and as someone handling pre-trained models on a regular basis I am (was?) in the lucky position that all the models available are free, as is the software executing them. If this takes hold, those days are over and we might start seeing the kind of horror headlines that come with modern day arbitrary copyright enforcement...

<comment><USER3> Waaaaaaaay too late, I'm afraid... [https://www.tineye.com/technology](https://www.tineye.com/technology)

<comment><USER2> Content fingerprinting has been around for ages, yes. This is _model_ fingerprinting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the abstract:

> Sharing the trained DL models has become a trend that is ubiquitous in > various fields.

Apart from the Model Zoo[1], are there any other sites for sharing serialized models?

[1] [https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model- Zoo](https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model-Zoo)

<comment><USER2> it's not very organized for sure. but in research, barely anyone I know trains models from scratch just to _use_ them afterwards. In pytorch and tensorflow, you'd not even have to go to a model zoo page to use the most common architectures, the library will just load it on demand into a folder in ~. So yes, using and sharing models is ubiquitous from what I can tell.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I used `load_data` and friends and it is certainly convenient. I was just curious about a kind of open source market place for models, where you could find niche models that people train in their spare time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Because I see some people misunderstand the goal of this:

> DeepMarks introduces the first fingerprinting methodology that enables the > model owner to embed unique fingerprints within the parameters (weights) of > her model and later __identify undesired usages of her distributed models __

This is _not_ a content fingerprinting technology, but rather a method for $google/$facebook to prevent/detect use of their models by others.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if you can leverage adversarial networks to eliminate the fingerprint while still maintaining model performance.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this has already been done: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04633](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04633)</comment>


Here's Proof Some Pollsters Are Putting A Thumb On The Scale - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/

<comment><USER2> It sounds to me like Mr. Silver is going to have another correction to make in his models. He isn't going to be able to make people stop doing this.</comment>


Vim in modernity – why and why not - <AUTHOR> https://artur-martsinkovskyi.github.io//2019/vim-in-modernity/ <comment><USER2> Nice love letter to my favorite editor.

A couple of observations, though…

> It is installed on virtually every UNIX-like system in the world

It's a vi command that is available "on virtually every UNIX-like system in the world", and that command may be provided by Vim (most Linux distributions and MacOS), nvi (BSDs), a limited reimplementation (BusyBox-based distributions), or the real vi itself (Arch). Even if you actually have Vim by default, the Vim you have is rarely suitable for extensive use so you end up installing a beefier build anyway.

The subset of vi that's common to all those implementations is what's on every UNIX-like system.

> Its modes are insert, normal, visual, search and command mode.

"Normal mode" and "command mode" are synonyms, you meant "command-line mode", you make that mistake again, later. There's no "search mode". Those are the main ones, there are a bunch of others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrections applied.</comment></comment>


How I Start: Nim - <AUTHOR> http://howistart.org/posts/nim/1 <comment><USER2> What I really like about this post (that's somewhat different from others that I've seen about Nim) is that it goes beyond the syntax of the language and macros to dive into tooling (nimble, editor plugins) and popular libraries (docopt.nim). When I'm trying to get up to speed with a new language, it makes it a lot easier to focus on the language if I'm not fighting with my tools.

I wrote the 'init' feature for nimble - it's so awesome to see it being used!

</comment><comment><USER3> BTW check out other howistart articles:

[http://howistart.org/](http://howistart.org/)

You'll find a sampling of Go, Erlang, Haskell and a few others.

Here is the repo: [https://github.com/howistart](https://github.com/howistart)

And of course many thanks for Tristan for curating it!

</comment><comment><USER4> Some might think it unnecessary to include the line about how to install git with apt-get, but I really like it. It shows that he's going to actually walk the user through start-up. In a world of frustrating install processes and tutorials that need two more rounds of polish, that is comforting.

<comment><USER5> That's one of the things that draws me to Nim in general: it works as advertised, and the documentation, while sometimes terse, is clear and complete.

<comment><USER6> I found it a bit frustrating.

They talk about C interopt, but I didn't find any nice explanation about how to create something like a struct, that C APIs often require as their data input.

<comment> def- Usually you don't create a struct yourself, but use c2nim to wrap it, like I did here: [http://hookrace.net/blog/what-makes-nim- practical/#wrapping-...](http://hookrace.net/blog/what-makes-nim- practical/#wrapping-libraries-with-c2nim)

When you look at the resulting Nim wrapper, here's what a C struct got turned into: [https://github.com/def-/nim- bpg/blob/master/src/bpg.nim#L61-...](https://github.com/def-/nim- bpg/blob/master/src/bpg.nim#L61-L65)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an exceptional post, good enough that I'm going to follow along later even though I'm not super interested in Nim per se. At first brush it was interesting enough to pique my interest in the language.

</comment><comment><USER8> An excellent article, well written and incredibly easy to follow along and understand what's going on. We need projects to start doing documentation like this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Law of Marketing for Successful Programming Languages: the basic examples should teach sockets, websockets or http servers.

<comment> w-ll There are still tons of problems that need solving that don't involve these things.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but they don't sell programming languages in these Node/Go times...

<comment><USER10> If all you do is web development, all programming languages look like tools to build web sites with I guess. I don't think the author was trying to sell anything, it seemed like more of a gift to like-minded individuals.

<comment><USER11> It is incredibly obvious that Nim is being sold as hard as it can be sold</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Positive pregnancy test diagnoses man's cancer - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/08/positive-pregnancy-test-diagno.html

<comment><USER2> And once upon a time it would have been remarkable that someone used a telephone to diagnose a disease. Or someone watched a television show and released they had the same disease. ... I feel old and jaded now. ;)</comment>


Ask HN: Software Engineers – What is your base-salary in 2017? - <AUTHOR> What is your base-salary in 2017 working as a Software Engineer? And how many years of experience do you have? <comment><USER2> $130K and 5 years of exp...

</comment><comment><USER3> location matters</comment>


Ask HN: Want to create software with me? - <AUTHOR>

One of my goals for 2013 is to create something of value and validate that by having someone I've never met pay for it.  I'll consider a free site that generates advertising dollars validation also.
I'm looking for anyone who would like to team up with me on creating something.  I currently have a full-time job, a pretty good one actually, and I know that I can't achieve my goal without the help of others.  I could just contract out work that I don't have time for, but I believe there's more value and enjoyment in a truly collaborative process involving others.  I'm hope this will reach others that are in the same situation.  I'm not a scam artist, I'll sign NDA's, share my ideas with you, whatever makes things legit.
My background is well rounded between development, business, and leadership.  I've worked in start-ups and in corporate America.  I'd like to collaborate with people who understand design, user experience, marketing, sales, specific industry experience, etc.  Although, the only real requirement is that you think you've got something of value to contribute and we'd have some shot at successfully completing a project together.
You can email me  partnerincrimehn @ gmail.com  and we'll see what happens.
If this post is somehow in bad taste, please let me know how I should go about things. <comment><USER2> You have a vague idea of what you want to do. I am a double major computer science and business management. I am disabled, but I can contribute to something.

orionblastar @ gmail.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. To be more specific, I would like to write software. Web, Mobile, or Desktop. My goal is allow myself to scratch that itch without quitting my job.

<comment><USER2> What problems are you trying to solve to write software for? I would suggest small programs, if desktop then console based until you learn how GUI programming works. Then you can move on to mobile and web that are different.

What is your target operating system? Windows, Linux, Mac OSX? What is your target web browser? Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, HTML5, HTML4/3.2? I would suggest learning simple HTML and CSS before learning Javascript. For mobile devices, well if you want an iPhone app you have to own a Macintosh and use XCode to submit apps to the app store. Android apps don't have limitations like that, and you can develop for them first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> start a blog

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think I have any value to add to that space. I would consider blogging about my experience, if I can get something off the ground.

<comment><USER2> You start a blog to attract people to your project to help out. Having a blog is free marketing for your project. You can post updates, things you learned, and advice for others.

Your blog can link to the finished project, or if not finished can ask for beta testers to test it out so it can be finished.</comment></comment></comment>


What exactly are "preppers" prepping for? - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/what-exactly-are-preppers-prepping-for/ <comment><USER2> Remember how government agencies and people would literally advise everyone to have an emergency plan, first aid kits, flashlights, and other preparedness? It was considered wise and rational to be prepared for disasters.

Yet today some people (seemingly largely on the left, although I'm on the left and I don't share this) seem to take pride in their reliance on society to continue to function no matter what happens. They look at those who have different opinions as to the level of preparedness one should have, and what types of situations one should prepare for, with contempt.

Does that really make sense? The future is uncertain. Many people on the left believe in climate change. We talk about how climate change is a serious and potentially existential threat. It could lead to unexpected disastrous storms like Katrina. In theory someone who practices the most "crazy" form of prepping could have been better prepared for that situation than someone who simply relied on "society" which definitely let everyone down in Katrina and cost many people their lives.

Are there people who overdo prepping? In my personal opinion, yes. But they don't need my approval, and I'm not taking responsibility for their safety and security if something horrible happens. What right do I or anyone else have to tell them they're doing something wrong by being what I consider over- prepared? How can we be of the perspective of live and let live for so many lifestyles and activities, but then act like these people are contemptible fools for having different opinions about likelihoods of disasters?

</comment><comment><USER3> The thing that always bothered me about preppers is that our species already developed a really good defence against many causes of untimely death... we call it "Society" or "Community"... and so many preppers are not only anti- social but it seems like they're dead set against allowing anyone else to maintain such things.

<comment><USER4> Our household is prepared for natural disasters with stores of food, water, first aid, and emergency shelter. It benefits the whole community when people are prepared: they're less likely to be a drain on resources that other people need, and are more likely to be able to help others and rebuild.

I haven't met a prepper who wants other people not to be prepared. Whom are you thinking of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's flip that on its head. Why are people not prepping for emergencies? Who do you think is going to save or feed you?</comment>


Show HN: Bolt, my (somewhat dynamic) static website generator - <AUTHOR> http://benofsky.github.com/Bolt/

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of static site generator I've always wanted.

I'm keen to check it out now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great! Let me know, how you find it, or if there's anything you want that is missing. It's in very early stages at the moment. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> another application that can be used in this way is pyblosxom

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems to be very blog-specific, Bolt is intended to be a lot more generic. :-)

<comment><USER3> kinda true, I embraced that everything is date based, and it works well for me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Magic of Computer Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs4fn.org/magic/

<comment><USER2> Haven't really looked at it yet, but I've had the thought that if you should "not fool yourself" then probably it's a good starting point to learn how people fool other people. This looks pretty cool. Bookmarked.</comment>


The Same-Day War: Amazon, Google And Walmart Race To Bring Your Groceries - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/04/16/the-same-day-war-amazon-google-and-walmart-race-to-bring-your-groceries/ <comment><USER2> Having been a webvan customer (mentioned in the article) this race always amazes me. It seems like such a suicide mission.

<comment><USER3> >Having been a webvan customer (mentioned in the article) this race always amazes me. It seems like such a suicide mission.

It's a little like pets.com, I think. A website to sell dogfood is not a fundamentally unreasonable business to run.

The problem comes when you start buying superbowl ads for your dogfood-selling website before you are turning a profit.

Safeway has been delivering since at least the first dot-com, and they are doing okay.

Amazon is approaching this point, but unlike Safeway, they don't come by with a refrigerated truck, so I can't get my produce through them. I would watch them, though; If anyone is going to become the giant in this space, it's amazon.

As a Safeway delivery customer? the majority of the value I see isn't in driving the food the mile or so it is to my house, but in letting me choose what I want on a website, rather than making me wander through an ever- changing labyrinth looking for what I want.

Amazon is really, really good at that sort of thing. The only thing they need, really, is a contract with a delivery company that runs refrigerated trucks.

I don't think grocery delivery is a suicide mission, even same-day grocery delivery; certainly not if you look at delivery as part of your retail operations.

<comment><USER4> Amazon already does some refrigerated deliveries for limited areas with Amazon Fresh[0].

[0] [https://fresh.amazon.com/](https://fresh.amazon.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best part of services like this is that you can use it once every month- two to deliver all the large products. 20 large bottles of water, red bulls, watermelons, frozen stuff, soda drinks - all delivered to your doorstep (even if you live in the apartment they will bring it to you up the stairs). I am not really happy about buying regular food and fresh products from them, but for heavy/bulk products this is amazing.

<comment><USER6> kitty litter!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's hardly a race anymore. Home delivery of groceries has been around for about a decade now. Webvan may have been a spectacular failure, but they're hardly even worth mentioning. Many supermarkets offer it and Instacart has really perfected the art. It doesn't come without downsides, however. The price markup is one. The bigger downside, IMO, is the lack of variety. Instacart has pretty good variety and multiple stores to choose from, but it still doesn't even come close to visiting one supermarket. Hopefully someone will figure this problem out.

<comment><USER8> Some other downsides:

(1) Store gets to guess on what to do if your item isn't actually in stock - you can provide a bit of guidance, but sometimes the replacement is bad.

(2) Sometimes groceries get delivered with really aggressive sell-by dates (like one lb of ham slices that's got 3 days of shelf life left)... happened on a Safeway delivery.

(3) Occasionally I thought I clicked through and didn't, and other times one of my credit cards has a hold (fraud alert) or has been cancelled (thanks Target!) and the account still has it. (this happened a couple times with Google because they don't charge your card until your delivery is on the road).

Strangely I haven't noticed a significant price increase vs. shopping at stores.

<comment><USER7> For #1, I usually just do no replacements unless I definitely would want either the first choice or replacement. It also depends on who does deliveries. When I got Safeway delivery directly, it was messed up all the time by the shoppers (probably the biggest downside with some services), but Instacart was generally very good about following my preferences. Of course, with no replacements, you might end up without some important ingredients so that can definitely be a problem still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> anyone else put off by the idea of having someone else inspect/pick out your fresh produce?

<comment><USER10> I'm more put off by people not inspecting and simply picking up produce. The sorry state of merchandising for produce these days requires a sharp eye.

<comment><USER11> These days? Unless you're talking about "organic" food, produce has never been uniformly of such high quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Groceries is pretty much the last one thing I buy in brick and mortar stores. Please don't take this away from me. ;)

The article mentions, "Forrester predicts 10% of U.S. sales will be via e-commerce by 2017" \-- I cannot believe it's only 10%!

</comment><comment><USER13> Living in (most part's of) NYC it's pretty easy to just walk a few blocks and be in a grocery store. I actually enjoy grocery shopping, it's where I get ideas about what to cook or discover ingredients I've never used before.

This probably would be most useful in locations encompassing food deserts, but of course it looks like they're largely targeting affluent neighborhoods.

<comment><USER14> In SF I literally walk past a grocery store every day, I enjoy the occasional grocery shopping, but I can't get enough of these services. I work long enough hours that I rarely have time during the week, so that may account for my view point. But I'll say, once you start using one, it's hard to go back. With a company like instacart, if i'm at that point in the week and I don't have what I need to make dinner, instead of getting take out on the regular, I can get what I need dropped off immediately without dropping what I'm doing. With amazonfresh, I no longer need to do a week long or two week long shopping trip. Fresh produce every day. There's way less waste, at least than what I used to go through. I do still see value in the occaisional trip to the grocery store for reasons you mentioned, but when I do stop now, it's fast, and never on one of those extremely busy weekend days where half of the trip is me standing in a line trying not to block the cereal aisle. In addition, there's one major convenience other than getting large amounts of time back, and reducing waste, I can order what I purchased previously. No thought needed, there's enough duplicate items that going through the mundane process of picking up the exact same carton of milk every week, becomes pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have there been any studies as to if this type of service increases or decreases the "carbon footprint" of the food. My gut instinct says it would increase it at least until there is a certain critical mass of orders in a geographical area.

<comment><USER6> A truck can take a circuit and deliver to a bunch of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know how they will make money but I don't care. I love this.

<comment><USER17> 3rd parties like Instacart mark up the groceries from the places they deliver from. I believe the margins fluctuate but probably average 20%+.</comment></comment>


Quantum Locked: Physicists Demonstrate "Weeping Angel" Effect - <AUTHOR> http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/quantum-locked-physicists-demonstrate.html <comment><USER2> The fact that they referenced Doctor Who pleases me to no end!</comment>


Show HN: Prop up – Support creators, get rid of ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.propup.net <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I grew tired of ads and started using an ad blocker a while ago. Looking at the comments on ad related posts here, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

There are however a few sites I'd like to support, while not putting up with ads and tracking, so I set up this website. While there are other sites doing this (Patreon, Quid, Mozilla's partnership will Scroll), I think this service is different because there's as little friction as possible to get started (initial registration is like HN's, just an e-mail and password).

It's just an experiment at the moment, and the chicken and egg problem is of course an issue, but I'd appreciate any feedback. Thank you for your time.</comment>


Tell HN: Things that should change regarding voting - <AUTHOR>

If you take the time to comment on an article, then it should automatically upvote the article. Even if you don't agree with the article, and you are commenting to contend it, still the article in question is generating debate which is a good thing.
Similarly f you have setup a poll, and people vote, their vote should upvote the entire poll.
I've submitted enough articles and done a few polls and it's puzzling to me that people will actually respond to the poll yet not upvote it. So the poll might have 50 responses, but sinks into oblivion without much consideration.
Similarly articles will vanish that have had plenty of discussion but no upvoting.
I'm not trying to make it so that everything gives you karma, that's the last thing we need on here. But it's a little disappointing to setup a poll or find an interesting article, see lots of comments/activity but have it vanish before the greater HN audience notices it.
Not that these ideas will be implemented, similar to how a good portion wish links opened in a new window and while I get 'don't change it', I still don't get, and will never ever get why it's not a user preference that is OFF by default. Then if you actually care about it you can at least opt-in and turn it on.
I guess it's tricky to implement? Joking... I mean seriously it's like 5m of work to add the open window preference thing. <comment><USER2> You touch on a paradox I've been remembering lately. I noticed a long time ago how I would read an excellent article or comment, take a long time to write a response, and then later realize I'd completely forgotten to upvote the excellent post in the first place.

The more I think about this the more revealing it seems. Clicking a vote arrow is a reflexive response; thinking about content is a reflective one. Those two things (reflexive vs. reflective) seem to engage different parts of the brain. It's the latter that we want to encourage, so it's not good that the former is what we use to rank things.

Unfortunately it isn't as simple as "commenting on a story should upvote it". That would be great if we could count just the thoughtful comments on substantive stories. Widening the criterion to _any comment_ , though, would add more noise than signal. It's definitely not true that all debate is good. Flamewars are the most active debates of all.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Similarly articles will vanish that have had plenty of discussion but no > upvoting.

Apparently, that trips the flamewar detector. Not just _downvoting_ , mind you, but merely engaging in enough conversation which hasn't been sufficiently upvoted, will sink a thread.</comment>


Facebook Location Coming In A Few Weeks. But Is It Foursquare Or Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/facebook-location-foursquare-twitter/

<comment><USER2> My guess is that one of the drivers is to beef up their ad platform. It's hard to make $$$ selling local ads if you don't know where the user is located.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would you tell Facebook where you are _right now_?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the proper answer is, 'no chance in hell'. The second I do, I'll start getting bombarded by ads coming to my cell phone. Since my number is listed online, but i don't actually 'own' it.

<comment><USER4> Until Facebook negotiates plans with the cell phone providers that sneak apps onto your phone which relay your location to facebook even _without_ your approval...</comment></comment></comment>


Modern Day Jobs, a curated list of 100 modern ways to make money online - <AUTHOR> http://moderndayjobs.com <comment><AUTHOR> This week, entrepreneur Alex Taub shared a similar list on Twitter ([https://twitter.com/ajt/status/1...](https://twitter.com/ajt/status/1...)) replying to tweets from people who were wondering if there were any overviews of ways people who are affected by layoffs caused by Covid-19, could find new ways / jobs / gigs to make money and pay their bills.

He asked if there were any people who'd like to take over his idea and build a searchable database for it. My friend Elaine Zelby (from SF) and I (from Amsterdam) jumped on it and worked together for the past 2 days to launch this product today

We both got interested because the majority of people now getting laid off are not the skilled knowledge or tech workers. There are dozens of places where they could make money through the internet and we would love to help them!

We hope you like it and spread the word to anyone you think it's valuable for

Stay strong!

<comment><USER2> Looks very nice, Bram!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! (not sure if I can say this here but it's all made without code ;) haha)</comment></comment></comment>


Japan may pick robots over immigrants - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8687196.stm <comment><USER2> Regarding nursing here, the video makes the point that Japan values racial homogeneity to the point that they will let robots take care of their elderly. The flip side of the racial side is that despite bringing in approximately 300 Filipino nurses on a study program to become Japanese nurses, after the three years of their program, only 2 or 3 nurses passed the (kanji-based) test that let them become fully-fledged nurses. This was with one girl religiously studying to 1am in order to cram the necessary kanji.

The point that's missing from the whole nursing debate is that there already is enough qualified nurses in Japan, just that they don't stick around at the hospitals due to the harsh working environment and long working hours. If the hospitals were able to introduce a more flexible working system there wouldn't be as many problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Robots replace girls. So population ages. Who will nurse them now?</comment>


Project Soli – touchless gesture interactions by Google - <AUTHOR> https://atap.google.com/soli/ <comment><USER2> As always Douglas Adams had some keen, if slightly cynical, insight: "The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme." Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

</comment><comment><USER3> At Google I/O a couple weeks ago they said they had miniaturized the Soli chip and they demoed a smartwatch with the chip in the wrist band, as well as a gesture-controlled speaker. They announced the Soli beta dev kit coming "next year". You can watch starting around 21:40 here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure a lot of consumer implementations come to mind pretty quickly for most, but this could be really huge for accessibility... if you could say, train gestures tailored to the very specific nuances of a person's available range of motion. Avoiding the limitations tied to physical hardware would be huge.

<comment><USER5> It could also be huge for ergonomics. Many people develop RSI issues through repeated keyboard and mouse usage. People have as gone as far as using their nose as an input device:

[http://www.looknohands.me](http://www.looknohands.me)

There are lots of other RSI stories here: [https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org)

<comment><USER6> It'll shift to RSI doing these gestures instead. They're still fine motor control which is what's involved in RSI. Notice how runners don't get RSI in their legs but pianists do.

Background: I have RSI and have battled it for 15 years now. There's a lot that's mental and nervous system, and can easily shift in the body (almost gave myself RSI in my throat and eyes doing voice rec and eye tracking to avoid typing).

<comment><USER4> Right, but if there's flexibility to change the specific inputs... maybe you can change motions when/if they're becoming a problem?

Or maybe people should work less?

<comment><USER6> Anything fine motor, even if the motions are changed, will inevitably cause problems. The duration doesn't have to be that long -- I could feel the fatigue in my eyes with eye tracking after just 30-40 minutes. The irony of course is that my eyes are doing fine motor control all the time, but when you do it as part of a control-loop then _something_ (neuromuscular?) will cause you to go into RSI mode and you fatigue quickly. If you don't pause for the fatigue you can do permanent damage -- which is what happened to my hands on the most non-ergonomic Apple Newton keyboard.

I use fine motor control for pleasure, not just work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is truly amazing to see the photograph of the huge and complicated prototype that they managed to put on a chip in under 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER8> The radar chip central to Project Soli is developed by Infineon Technologies

[http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/](http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/)

[http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pd...](http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pdf?fileId=5546d46154cc971b0154cf4336930008)

</comment><comment><USER9> I may be old school but for every example given in the video, I would rather have an actual button to press...

<comment><USER10> the physical size of buttons/knobs/sliders requires devices to be large enough to accommodate those elements. with a chip like soli, designers can create devices that are dramatically smaller.

as the soli gets smaller (which future versions likely will), you can imagine tiny devices that maintain rich interactivity.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. I also prefer physical buttons but imagine what could be done in terms of reducing space taken by controls alone. This is in many ways vastly better than touchscreen interfaces since it will allow for many different kinds of interaction in the same space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want one of these in my glass so my desktop computer would put the focus on the screen I'm looking.

<comment><USER13> This can be done today, and probably more accurately with a webcam.

<comment><USER14> The video suggests that using radar they can more accurately track hand motions than using a camera.

<comment><USER13> It depends what you are tracking. They specifically said that they could more accurately track depth. For eye motion tracking I suspect that depth isn't a major component and the 2D image is better to track eye motion, especially because the pupil has very little change in depth compared to the surrounding area on the eyeball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the Leap ([https://www.leapmotion.com/](https://www.leapmotion.com/))

<comment><USER5> The Leap Motion uses infrared light. It was hugely disappointing at first. Supposedly it got much better after the Orion SDK release. [http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/](http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/)

Here are a few other ideas gesture devices like the Mylo, FingerIO, and Intel Real Sense:

[https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org#gesture- computing)

<comment><USER16> Why was it hugely disappointing? I've had one since the start and it was always very accurate, precise and reliable. It had some issues with not being able to persist in tracking hidden fingers, but it worked really really well on extended ones.

<comment><USER17> For me it was hugely disappointing because they passed the API off to individual applications rather than providing some OS level drivers for a common API so you could drop it in place of other interaction devices. That, and it used an immense amount of CPU resources on my computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems like it could be really interesting for home automation and accessibility projects.

</comment><comment><USER19> How's Google's Biz Dev?

Selling B2B is a whole new ball game for Google (outside of Adwords which is a special case since it is so valuable to advertisers).

I'd be very wary as a purchaser of this chip on how long Google et. al. have committed to producing it and their willingness to move up the value chain (i.e. does Google have a good chance of copying me if I come up with something valuable?).

The Infineon relationship may help in both cases since they have solid analog products

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't miss the video. They made a great job demonstrating the interactions with nice visualizations. You can watch it in 1.5x speed with subtitles. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is an incredibly exciting technology!

My first concern is how can these gestures be discovered? Will we just get used to the same sorts of gestures in different applications over time and intuit what to do?

</comment><comment><USER21> Watching the gestures reminds me of a theremin.

</comment><comment><USER22> Could this be used to create an "Air Keyboard" that allows you to type by pretending to type into the air?

<comment><USER23> Remember the gorilla arm.

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla- arm.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html)

<comment><USER24> With the size of the chip, its possible to make a wearable on the wrist to capture the finger input so your arms can face anywhere.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, that and AR and you have some interesting potential.

A wrist worn device pr hand that can track individual fingers. Thus freeing up the hand to still do grasping and such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This, plus mature augmented reality, minus device's screen... that could start to get very interesting. Maybe something like a wearable (iWatch or some such) with this, plus an AR interface creating a 'virtual screen' to interact with.

For my full sized device though, buttons have serious advantages that don't go away until the motion sensing is hooked up to a REALLY smart computer.

</comment><comment><USER27> Has anything happened on this since it was announce a year ago?

<comment><USER5> Here's this year's demo. Starts at 20:30

[https://youtu.be/8LO59eN9om4?t=20m30s](https://youtu.be/8LO59eN9om4?t=20m30s)

<comment><USER28> Using a physical button to move slides...</comment></comment></comment>


And God said Let there be text, and there was text - <AUTHOR> http://satran.in//2016/03/07/And-God-said-Let-there-be-text-and-there-was-text.html <comment><AUTHOR> Usually someone points out that I complain about JavaScript too much and yet I have chosen to use JS as the scripting language. First the front end is completely written in ClojureScript. Second JS was chosen as the scritpting environment just to validate the product. I want to support more languages soon.

</comment><comment><USER2> Very cool, very interesting. Regarding systemd, we here in the BSD camp welcome you. :) No such issue like systemd with its binary nonsense in FreeBSD or OpenBSD. And, one config file (plain text) to rule them all in /etc/rc.conf

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding systemd I really want to move to bsd. But the last time I tried dragonfly bsd I had way too much trouble setting up brightness for my laptop monitor. Felt like the old days of Linux. But I'm keen on giving it another shot.

<comment><USER2> Try OpenBSD. OpenBSD has the best laptop support of the BSDs. Dragonfly BSD offers nothing that Free- or OpenBSD doesn't IMHO. OpenBSD supports tons of chipsets, suspend, sound, wireless, you name it. Costs you nothing to try. I was sold after trying it all those years ago. It's better than ever now, and gets better every iteration. OpenBSD arguably also has the best man pages in the industry. Theo de Raadt and his devs really do care about the software they put out. Their code audits are legendary and it shows in the build quality of their OS and other products.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did hear about OpenBSD having good support for the Broadwell series. I will give it a shot. Way too many binary files to deal with in Linux. I cannot bear that logs are now binary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> No "About" page? No explanation of what the site does? Good luck to you.</comment>


AMD announces revenue for the Q3 of $1,307M, operating loss of $293M - <AUTHOR> http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2213570 <comment><USER2> Beat expectations but lower future guidance. This is to be expected with no new launches being planned until 2017.

If you can, hold onto your AMD stocks for the next 2 quarters at-least. I am hoping zen will make some inroads back into the data center.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wonder if they would interested in an idea to sell an AMD CPU/GPU to every gamer with a laptop, hint: it's not a TB2 external GPU on a PCIe bus.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, less dead than I thought they were. I too hope Zen gives them some lift.</comment>


Adaptive Optics, a rapidly-evolving technology in astronomy - <AUTHOR> http://alliance.nautil.us/article/199/opening-a-new-window-into-the-universe <comment><USER2> I'm surprised there's no mention to adaptive optics in solar physics. It's essentially the same, but some interesting differences. Since there's more light you can have more corrections per second, better approaching the assumption of constant deformación during between corrections on a small view angle ("constant isoplanatic patch"). Also there's no "perfect star" to correct to, so calculation run on a closed loop to basically improve contrast of the reference. The needed correction is also bigger during the day, since the atmosphere is more turbulent. In the last few years there also have been really cool improvements to account for different layers of the atmosphere and better faster algorithms to correct wider and wider fields of view. This is an example (from my PhD) of the state of the art 9 years ago, but illustrates the huge difference: [https://youtu.be/x3JkjXco6m0](https://youtu.be/x3JkjXco6m0)

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is very light on details about the proposed next-gen adaptive optics system. If you already know what that means, the only new info I could glean was that they mean to use seven laser spots ("guide stars") instead of one.

<comment><USER4> That's what it looks like. Having more lasers and more processing power could very well help with estimation of atmospheric disturbance (although I don't know of any model being computationally overwhelming, but my knowledge is limited), while better actuators on the mirrors would allow a more accurate correction of the wavefront (as fast as possible ideally). Sounds like a mix of HW upgrade and more inputs for estimation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author, Andrea Ghez, is one of the leading researchers on observing the center of our galaxy, and the stars that orbit the central black hole, among other things.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, just being measured many times throughout the exposure: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shack–Hartmann_wavefront_senso...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shack–Hartmann_wavefront_sensor)

</comment><comment><USER7> > there is really no substitute for the light-gathering power of telescopes > too huge to be put into space.

Why is there any limit to the size of telescopes we can put in space? The mirrors are segmented anyway - just stack 'em on top of a couple of rockets and assemble in orbit.

</comment><comment><USER8> So, unlike radio astronomy, it's not feasible yet to have multiple, smaller coherent telescopes? A phased array with magnitude and phase correction being applied to each telescope.

<comment><USER9> There are optical telescopes that use interferometry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interfero...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interferometry)

But given the we don't have multi-THZ digital sampling, I guess, all the work has to be done in the analog domain in realtime... which is pretty limiting compared to what is possible with radio.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin is not decentralized - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06/bitcoin-is-not-decentralized/ <comment><USER3> My main fear with something like bitcoin is this: imagine a virus or worm that infects machines and then transfers all bitcoin found on that machine to an anonymous address. There is absolutely no recourse. Hell, it could be a bitcoin "client" that continues to display the correct amounts to the user without them realizing they're being fleeced.

<comment><USER4> Not a concern. Hackers encrypt their high balance wallet.dat then store it on dropbox/whatever. Spending money is kept in a bitcoin bank (say < 100 usd) which can be easily used and transfered.

Once your bank wallet is too big or too small you just decrypt one of your wallet.dat files and transfer a portion of the money back to your bank wallet. Recrypt the now changed wallet.dat and you are good to go.

Once/if normal people start using bitcoin I highly doubt that they would even bother with the client ("Encrypt my what? Wallet.dat? I could lose everything?"). They would probably just use a highly reputable bitcoin bank. It could stay anonymous because there could be "cash for bitcoin" like sites around cities and a transfer could be made into the bitcoin bank without anyone ever knowing.

As for a virus in the bitcoin client itself, that has been tried a couple times. Each time someone tries a pull request with malicious code the forums/irc light on fire. Also, people are _highly_ wary of new people submitting pull requests.

<comment><USER3> _They would probably just use a highly reputable bitcoin bank. It could stay anonymous because there could be "cash for bitcoin" like sites around cities and a transfer could be made into the bitcoin bank without anyone ever knowing._

If you assume a world where everyone is using something like bitcoin these banks are extremely tempting hacker targets. If Bank of America gets hacked and someone discovers that a hacker/rouge employee/software bug/whatever transferred money from account A to account B they can reverse it.

One thing that hackers have taught me is that the only secure computer is one that's unplugged. The C compiler backdoor is a good place to start thinking about this: [http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/strange_loops_denni...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/strange_loops_dennis_ritchie_a.php)

What if you woke up one morning and on the news the president was telling the country that overnight all of the savings in Citibank had been transferred to an unknown individual/entity by a group of disgruntled employees… They're in jail now but we don't know who now has the 2 trillion dollars that was transferred. Keep using bitcoin.

Even if the wealth is gained legally, it leads to a system with no accountability. Everything is under the table.

What happened to geeks valuing transparency in government/corporate governance? I think geeks see this as freedom but it will do nothing more than might makes right. The system benefits geeks today and thugs with guns tomorrow. It's the perfect system for secretly applying your will onto the world without accountability. Who's good at that today? The mafia, gangs, corrupt politicians, dictators…

Gah, I have to collect my thoughts on this. I'm getting off into crazyville but I feel like this is where it leads.

I worry… I worry…

<comment><USER4> In reality these bitbanks would probably have time delayed "safes" that only unlock the actual bitcoins after a waiting period. Transferring money between the banks, and even to prepaid visas would probably be done with reversible bank credit from one account to another. So the rouge employee is a minor issue whose cost could be absorbed into the profits of the bank. True, this isn't "real" bitcoins, but the system's pillars would be built upon something stable and (sort of) anonymous.

As for the massive hack scenario, the same fears of large scale loss hold true if someone hacks Dropbox or Facebook/Gmail and everyones files or personal messages get leaked. I would rather lose $1000 or even $10k than have my Dropbox & Gmail hacked. Even in the extraordinarily unlikely case where cracker hackers get into the bitcoin equivalent of Citibank three thinks should happen: 1. Automated systems that detect higher than normal activity and begin immediate shutdown until the cause is resolved. 2. (Barring 1, somehow) Free market deposit insurance. 3. (Barring 2, somehow) A reversal of the block chain to some stable point.

Yes 3. would require a massive amount of consensus and the relative value of bitcoin would go down against USD, but I don't even think that is likely.

The mafia & gangs exist due to a lack of freedom and they have very little trouble moving money today. You can carry out millions of dollars fairly easily in jewelry already.

As for bribing politicians, that is an angle I haven't thought of before. I'll think about it, but I'll grant that it is a very valid concern, although synonymous with bribing politicians with expensive jewelry or art or transfer of anonymous investment corporations (Nevada iirc) or Bearer Share Corporations.

The biggest weakness of bitcoin in my opinion are some implementation details. For one, the way the difficulty rate for the miners is determined I can construct a scenario where a clandestine intelligence agency or a medium wealthy individual could take over the transaction history. By flooding a time window with gpus they could force the difficulty rate for the next time window way, way above the cost of electricity. Then they would have almost no competition in the next round because anyone with a utility bill would stop mining, so they would be left free to corrupt the block chain. The difficulty rate should have been a continuous function of the current hashing power.

Anyways, good debate. I have code to write, though. I hear you on a number of points (specifically the c compiler one, wow that is nuts), but they aren't enough to stop my libertarian nerd glee :)

<comment><USER5> Utility costs going above the block-finding reward doesn't just happen in the flooding scenario, it also happens naturally as we approach 21M. It's already (supposed to be) handled by transaction fees. I don't think you're ever going to see most of the network shut down mining.

<comment><USER4> "Utility costs going above the block-finding reward doesn't just happen in the flooding scenario"

Why not? If I throw in 4x the computational power for 2 weeks or less why wouldn't the next wave be that much harder?

<comment><USER5> I think you misunderstood me. I'll reword.

There is more than one scenario where the reward from finding a block is less than the utility cost.

This is in fact already guaranteed to happen as block-finding rewards decrease. It's nothing new to bitcoin, and is already expected to be dealt with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No, Bitcoin is decentralized. One possible path in the future might be to centralize it for a time, then decentralize again. The author claims that only the original creators could do this, but that's not necessarily true, either.

He brings up a valid concern, but the linkbait title doesn't do it any justice because everyone will be focused on the technical aspects where he's talking about socio-economic problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> I make a stronger claim then that, which is that Bitcoin _must_ perform a transfer in the future, and that if this transfer is to be non-disruptive, it must be done in a centralized fashion. I will admit I debated over the title for some time, but I decided I wanted to emphasize Bitcoin as a succession of protocols, not the current one, which is a hopelessly myopic perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This post doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't the following be a solution:

1\. Create a bitcoin client that includes a better cryptographic algorithm.

2\. When this new client is asked to vote on the validity of bitcoins created with the old algorithm it votes "no", but allows it to be grandfathered in, as long as the new client is still in the minority.

3\. Once the old clients are obsoleted, you can then no longer create bitcoins with the old hash method, but even the very last bitcoin created with the old method is considered 100% valid by all clients.

Sorry, I'm not bitcoin or cryptographic expert, so I might be using the wrong language here, but I hope my basic point is clear: Accepting a bitcoin block as valid is not the same as voting as to whether a bitcoin block should be deemed valid... or am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> The problem is that if the cryptography is broken, in regards to #3, you have no idea if a token created with the 'old method' is real or counterfeit.

In a decentralised service you would need to convert all old tokens into new tokens before the old cryptography was compromised, which requires work - <USER2> would be generating new coins, and would have an exchange rate. Or you could setup a centralised validation service for coins as the article suggests, before the cryptography was broken, to ensure people aren't creating fake money.

I am not sure what you mean by accepting a bitcoin vs voting for a bitcoin, can you clarify? "Voting" doesn't look like a method they normally use for validation...

<comment><USER9> This is very similar to the way the US Treasury handles physical currency updates. If I recall correctly, in the 1990s, Iraq still had a working money press that could print perfectly legitimate US dollars as fast as possible. PC printer technology had also advanced to the point where $20s and $100s were easily counterfeited.

The US Treasury had to go through a transition period where new money with new security features were printed and the old money was taken out of circulation. I assume BTC will have to go through a similar digital verification.

The way this would work in theory is that old BTC will be converted to new BTC on a 1 to 1 basis, but first each old BTC will need to be validated against the blockchain. You could just say that any BTC with over 1,000 confirmations is valid, since it is highly unlikely that so many confirmations could be falsified.

Another way to convert from old-BTC to new-BTC would be to use the miners to validate each conversion. For example, if a sufficient number of miners verifies that yes, indeed a certain BTC appears in the blockchain, then that one is considered valid and is inserted into the new blockchain, and removed from the old blockchain. This algorithm could actually pay a new-BTC reward for validating old-BTC to the miners that validate each transaction, thus ensuring a sufficient amount of CPU power is dedicated to this process.

<comment><USER10> It is difficult to launder huge volumes of $20's and $100's.

It is trivial to launder huge volumes of forged Bitcoins; they are as liquid and convenient as real Bitcoins of any denomination.

Similarly, while you have to read interesting long-form journalism to learn about Iraq and North Korea counterfeiting operations, the whole world would know if either country could trivially forge Nasdaq transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The actual Achilles Heel of Bitcoin is the sparse few exchanges that convert Bitcoin to hard cash. If these exchanges can not control price manipulation schemes among their traders then Bitcoin's value will quickly bubble and pop. What Bitcoin needs is to be accepted by an established trading exchange which would stabilize the real world price of Bitcoins.

<comment><USER10> Bitcoin is an Achilles Centipede; that may be _one_ of its many heels.

Another: is its conflation of efficient transaction medium and store of value, as if the simple "scarcity" of cryptographic random numbers would allow it to hold value once people decide it's no longer a competitive way to conduct business.

You see this in message board debates all the time, where bitcoin supporters, having been talked down from the notion that particularly idiosyncratic bit patterns in SHA256 hashes can ever have intrinsic value, resort to talking up bitcoin's utility as an cheap and anonymous Paypal; then, when confronted by bitcoin's manifest liabilities as a transaction media (for instance, the fact that it's so thinly traded that its price can jump double digit percentage points during the time it takes to clear a transaction), they revert back to the intrinsic value of mathematical scarcity compared to the oogie-boogie Federal Reserve.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Raise your hand if you like moon cakes. (To the down-voters: I wonder how many people managed to read to that segment of the article. I think the moon cake black market in China is independently interesting case of a currency with an expiration date.)

</comment><comment><USER12> "It is literally impossible to "change" the hashing algorithm in Bitcoin; any change would constitute a change in the protocol, and thus result in a completely new currency."

This was something that came to my mind some time ago regarding Bitcoin, but I wasn't sure if it was possible, or at least practical. What's to stop other interested parties from changing the protocol/hash and creating myriad competing virtual currencies? Metacoin, Hashcash, Bitcoin++, Digidollars, Ameribits, Eurobits, Digigold, Ingots - you get the point.

"Hi, my name is Fred, and this is my currency."

We live in a world with a wide range of currencies and exchanges, so I suppose there could just as well be an exchange that supports as many digital currencies as could ever be conceived. But couldn't that also mean that Bitcoin could be devalued through confusion and obfuscation, its present reputation notwithstanding?

</comment><comment><USER13> Stupid title, of course bitcoin is decentralized, but it brings up some interesting ideas - what happens when a currency becomes obsolete?

<comment><USER14> Traditionally, you offer a limited time where the old currency can be exchanged for the new currency, and after that date, anyone holding the old currency is shit-out-of-luck.

Note that the same scenario may apply (in some places) when new banknotes or coins are rolled out. Here in Norway, they periodically redesign the coins (and give them new sizes), and you have a certain amount of time to exchange your old ones before they are no longer considered legal tender.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that such an exchange is necessarily centralized.

<comment><USER15> You can have several competing specifications, recognizing the old BTC balance and offering a new balance in a new spec. People (who can be) separate from the spec proposers may implement clients that connect both to the Bitcoin network and the alternates. Eventually, one (or maybe more) new protocols win out and trade move to the stronger protocols. BTC would be left as legacy and eventual discontinuation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author also "risks" constructing strawmen and then proceeds happily to do so. I was wary at first, but once the speculation started flying the article lost credibility IMO. It's a neat trick but I was less than impressed.

What will happen to bitcoin with the hashing algorithm it uses becomes obsolete? Who knows. It may not be the only game in town at that point anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would it help if I linked to various Bitcoin forum posts where I found descriptions of these proposed transition plans? I don't have a very good feel for the reputability within the Bitcoin community, and I feel that simple technical reasons will limit the range of possible proposals.

<comment><USER16> It's a good article, to be sure.

Links to the threads would be nice.

The speculation is what did it in for me.

You say:

 _At the risk of constructing strawmen, I would like to now present my perception of the two most popularly voiced plans._

At which point I was expecting to read an unbiased over view of the popular proposals from the community and perhaps some links to the discussion threads.

And after presenting the "decentralized" version and colouring it with an analogy to chinese black markets, you say:

 _Is this a transition? Yes. Is it disruptive? Definitely yes. It is certainly not what you want a currency you're using for every day transactions to be doing._

Which essentially tells me you only presented the decentralized argument to me so that you could burn it down for all to see.

I won't go so far to argue whether your position is wrong.

As a reader I just felt the article to be another Internet soap box. Links would be nice and saving the speculation until the end would have helped, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author doesn't appear to distinguish between a decentralised client and a decentralised specification.

The authors of the official Bitcoin client have de-facto control over the specification, so the design of the Bitcoin protocol is effectively centralised. I don't think anyone sees this as a problem, because if people start disagreeing they can always fork the protocol.

If a flaw is discovered in Bitcoin that requires a protocol change, I doubt we'll see any fragmentation. People fork projects over a wide range of reasons, but rarely over essential security patches.

<comment><AUTHOR> This misrepresents the tight interlock between client and specification.

Suppose that there is a flaw discovered in Bitcoin that requires a protocol change. In a classic software system, the worst you'd have to worry about is a backwards incompatible protocol change; Bitcoin is designed with very little wriggle room in this respect. But furthermore, with Bitcoin, you have to worry about a change which existing Bitcoin clients will reject: for example, if you wanted to increase the reward given to miners.

You can fork the protocol, but you can't fork the economy. This is true in normal projects, and doubly true for Bitcoin.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, in order for a Bitcoin fork to succeed, you'd have to convince the majority of clients to use the new protocol. However, once you gained a majority, the Bitcoins generated by the old protocol would fall in value relative to the Bitcoins generated with the new protocol. If your Bitcoins are worth $100 using the new protocol, but only $50 using the old protocol, there's a strong financial incentive to start using the new client so you can sell your bitcoins at a higher rate and to a larger audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I argue this "convincing" process is at the very least a centralized process, and at the worst deeply problematic.

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's centralised (to a degree), but when people talk about decentralised protocols, they usually mean that the protocol itself is decentralised. There's still usually an official or de-facto standard maintained by a relatively small group of people.

Your argument that Bitcoin is not decentralised could easily be applied to any P2P protocol. I don't think there's any P2P system around, except perhaps natural language, which has a decentralised specification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He actually points out that one of the two options as successor, is decentralized. The title is therefore slightly misleading.

<comment><USER19> But then he points out the problem in the decentralized approach?

<comment><USER20> Yes, I think the point is that the decentralized approach could have horrible consequences for people with significant savings in bitcoins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone explain to me how someone would be paid a salary in bitcoins?

<comment><USER10> In the United States, you cannot lawfully be paid a salary in "bitcoins". Nor can you negotiate a contract that claims that you're a contractor and not an employee if your role is substantially that of an employee (meaning: the entity paying you controls the means, scheduling, and financing of your work over a prolonged period).

You can of course enter into an arrangement with a company, do work for the company, receive "bitcoins" from the company, and both go on your merry way. But the company "paying" you has exposed itself to extreme liability with the IRS; it is probably on the hook not only for the employers half of dollar- denominated self-employment tax, but for the employee's half as well, plus penalties, interest, and legal fees.

<comment><USER22> What is the law that prohibits payment in bitcoins? Is payment in euros also illegal?

(Might you be conflating payment in bitcoins with payment off the books?)

<comment><USER10> There are at least two things in every employment case, and at least one additional thing in the company principal case, that will keep wages anchored to dollars no matter what form of unicorn dollar we come up with next:

* There is a dollar-denominated minimum wage

* There is dollar-denominated payroll tax and, for contractors, dollar-denominated self-employment tax that scales in dollar-denominated amounts whether you're paid in moon cakes or rare freshwater fish.

* And, if you're a company principal of a non-passthrough entity, there is an IRS requirement that you be paid a wage that corresponds to the fair market value of your role, and anything you do to not pay yourself a reasonable-looking dollar-denominated wage stands a good chance of getting you audited (this rule being one of the primary ways business owners attempt to avoid paying taxes).

It's only been fairly recently that the Department of Labor has issued opinions about foreign nationals being paid in foreign currency based on the current exchange rate available in the vicinity of the employer; that is, there are very specific cases in which you _can_ pay someone both Euros and Dollars. Making geeky assumptions that, because some PHP program somewhere generates some number people call an "exchange rate" that means Bitcoins get you around the FLSA minimum wage... dubious and risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Couldn't the same argument be made of any protocol? Not all browser implement HTTP in the same way, IPv6 isn't compatible with IPv4, but all agree to switch, HTML is governed by a central body but a lot of the influence comes from the community.

<comment><USER24> The difference is that changing the HTTP protocol and moving to IPv6 won't wipe out people's savings and threaten the world economy...</comment></comment>


SILE, a typesetting system inspired by TeX, reaches 0.9.4 - <AUTHOR> http://sile-typesetter.org/ <comment><USER2> Is this just a rewrite of TeX (what Neovim is to Vim) or is the syntax different, too? There aren't any code examples on the website, and I don't really want to learn another typesetting language. I also won't be able to use it with Pandoc, which is a dealbreaker for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Directly to one sample:

[https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/sim...](https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/simple.sil)

The sample directory:

[https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/tree/master/examples)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 10MB vs ~4GB for LaTeX ? a) how much of LaTeX functionality does SILE cover and b) why is LaTeX so heavy ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that explains it nicely:

[http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex](http://sile- typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex)

> At this point, the parts of TeX that people actually use are 1) the box-and- > glue model, 2) the hyphenation algorithm, and 3) the line-breaking > algorithm. SILE follows TeX in each of these three areas;</comment></comment>