Ten Thousand Cents - <AUTHOR> http://www.tenthousandcents.com/index.html

<comment><USER2> >> The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

How does this explore "the circumstances we live in"? I'm not knocking the project, but that is a bold, unsubstantiated claim.

<comment><USER3> It's boilerplate art installation talk. The more profound sounding the higher the chances of getting someone to exhibit the work.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is pretty standard stuff for artist statements. One of my favorite part about going to art shows is finding the pieces with the most pretentious descriptions.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users- gui...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide- international-art-english?INTCMP=SRCH)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People in India spent an average of 11 minutes to make one cent? I must be reading those statistics incorrectly. I know work is cheap on MTurk but it's not THAT cheap.

<comment><USER7> This is a 2008 project; Turk's marketplace was a bit different 5 years ago.

One problem with open marketplaces is that there's always someone who will do the work badly and unhappily, no matter how low you price it (usually a new or disgruntled entrant).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome!

Laughed out loud in my cube at the white block by the tip of his nose.

<comment><USER9> Look at the white block on the far right side about one-third of the way down.

edit: And the white block on the top, far right a little in. <3

And just right of the left hand side black border, about halfway down.

And the white block to the left of the F on the bottom right serial.

And the white block in the top of his hair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome. Also reminds me of Ai Wei Wei's Sunflower Seeds [1]. Where millions of chinese laborers hand made and painted millions of porcelain sunflower seeds. Wonderful parallels of thinking that Amazon Turk is the West's version of labor.

1\. [http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/ai-weiwei-unloads- millions-...](http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/ai-weiwei-unloads-millions- sunflower-seeds-new-york-winter)

<comment><USER11> > Where millions of chinese laborers [...]

Not that many. Wikipedia talks about 1,600 artisans.

<comment><USER10> Sorry about that. Guess I conflated the number of seeds with the workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guys this is old.

It's Aaron Koblin's work.

He speaks about the project on this ted talk

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4v4XxlfVk3o#t=237s)

His Johnny Cash project with Rick Rubin and Mr Doob is breathtaking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a little bit of tiles.ice.org, the old collaborative drawing site from the ANSI art group iCE, where you were each provided the edges of the neighboring tiles from which to extend your own piece of artwork. The site is down now, but some of the creations that came out of there were phenomenal.

</comment><comment><USER14> Cheater: [http://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/707fc56c-8165-45b1-a2e8-...](http://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/sh/707fc56c-8165-45b1-a2e8-bf214cb822ec/652a7d2b3720762ba82a8ec8d215beb4)

<comment><USER15> There are several lazy guys and cheaters just click in th whiter ones and you will see.

<comment><USER16> Under the '1' in "L12" is a tree complete with label. Gave me a good laugh.

<comment><USER17> <http://i.imgur.com/4oDNx1q.png>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Virus? Kaspersky flags the site as trying to load <http://feedma.com/cgi- bin/v/v.cgi//v> in the homepage. watch out. Wepawet seems to think its clean.. _shrugs_ [http://wepawet.iseclab.org/view.php?hash=e8b60fe27c3cfcb149d...](http://wepawet.iseclab.org/view.php?hash=e8b60fe27c3cfcb149de22a68721746a&t=1360329959&type=js)

<comment><USER9> Here's the project description, I think it's probably safe.

"Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using custom drawing tool, thousands individuals working in isolation from one another painted tiny part the bill without knowledge overall task. Workers were paid cent each via amazon's mechanical turk distributed labor tool. Total cost of the bill, creation, and reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as video piece with 10,000 parts drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, new uncharted combination markets, crowdsourcing, virtual economies, and reproduction."

<comment><USER19> Drive-by exploitations don't stop to read project descriptions before scanning ports or sending carefully selected strings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome project! Didn't understand it at first when I was hovering until I read the about page. Really really cool art!

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought it looked familiar. I remember when this came out in 2008.

It's a shame it's not updated...

<comment><USER22> ditto the mona lisa

<comment><USER23> The monal Lisa did not require flash. It is forwards compatible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you want a super high resolution scan of a hundred dollar bill, you can grab all the original tiles here: <http://www.tenthousandcents.com/imagebits/>

</comment><comment><USER25> \-- Missing Plug-in --

ugh.

</comment><comment><USER26> Elegant, I like it.</comment>


Heating Up Word2vec: BlazingText for Real-Time Search - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-ibotta/heating-up-word2vec-blazingtext-for-real-time-search-c2121bd1396 <comment><USER2> An interesting approach to a common problem. Great write up!</comment>


NeRF in the Wild: reconstructing 3D scenes from internet photography - <AUTHOR> https://nerf-w.github.io/ <comment><USER2> I recall many years back a website, I think a Microsoft project, that linked together photos in a 3D space of tourist destinations. It created something of a point cloud, but nothing this advanced. You could click through the points/photos to jump into each photos perspective of the space.

Anyone remember what that project was called, or if it is even still around?

Edit: Found it. [http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/](http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/) Later the discontinued. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth)

<comment> ur-whale Was it PhotoSynth ?

[https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosyn...](https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_photosynth_can_connect_the_world_s_images/transcript?language=en)

<comment><USER2> Watching this demo makes it very stark how much our single page webapps are regressions in fluid performance.

<comment><USER3> Is this not a Silverlight app or something?

I highly doubt that demo was JS / could run in multiple browsers without some proprietary runtime.

<comment><USER4> It was, in point of fact, a Java applet. [0] Older, less secure, but more powerful.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20191231213153/http://phototour....](https://web.archive.org/web/20191231213153/http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/applet/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original author here. AMA!

<comment><USER6> I had this vision that one day we'll be able to reconstruct memories from our past by taking old photos and having a ML model collate everything together to form a 3D rendering of that point in time. It seems like you have gotten most of the way there.

The next step would be to have the user grab a VR headset and immerse themselves in their favorite childhood moment. One could even add avatars for loved ones using again ML-generated audio based on recordings of their voices.

Your project made me think that it wouldn't be that interesting for _me_ to view _your_ memories, so perhaps the best initial step for a proof-of-concept that would allow the technology to mature would be to recreate historical moments so everyone people could relive them – and they could do so entirely virtually, from the comfort of their own couch. Side note: it feels like this technology can disrupt traditional museums with the added bonus of being pandemic-proof.

Anyway, I don't really have a question... Just wanted to compliment you on this amazing work and throw this idea out there in case others want to think about it, as I'm in an entirely different field and don't have the skills and resources to make it real, and I do strongly feel this will inevitably come to life.

<comment><USER5> That's a really cool idea! This technology does a fantastic job at reconstructing _static_ scenes. The moving objects -- people, cars, even flora -- are out of scope here. Why? It's really hard to build a 3D model of something you only see from one direction.

<comment><USER6> But if we know what a car ought to look like in 3D, can't we take the one photo we have from one direction and just fill in the blanks with that a priori 3D knowledge?

<comment><USER7> Similar to how GPT-3 can be applied not only to create Text, but also fill in missing pieces of Images (ie. complete the missing half of a face).

Would the logical next step, use GPT-3 to create a 3D world? :)

<comment><USER6> GPT-3D rolls off the tongue nicely

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those are some very cool 3D visualizations generated, but it's a bit difficult to understand what the form of the dataset they generated it from is. They say "in-the-wild" photography, but of course don't really give you a great sense.

The light->dark transitions having consistent geometry is clean though.

<comment><USER5> We use images from the Image Matching Challenge 2020 dataset. If you look at the Appendix, we list how many images we use and the process by which they were chosen.

Download and have a look! [https://vision.uvic.ca/image-matching- challenge/data/](https://vision.uvic.ca/image-matching-challenge/data/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that's a clean reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still looking for a program that takes a video and turns it into an animated 3D scene. All the stuff I've seen is on static scenery, besides some neural nets that can tweak camera angles.

<comment><USER10> Check this. Code coming (very) soon :) [https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth- Estimati...](https://roxanneluo.github.io/Consistent-Video-Depth-Estimation/)

<comment><USER11> Do you happen to know how intellectual property works when someone wants to use the algorithm/code?

<comment><USER10> I think we're going to use the MIT license. So, you'll be able to use it in almost any way you like...

<comment><USER12> MIT actually does not give an explicit patent grant. So if "any way you like" is your goal, you should choose something different like Apache License 2.0

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A while back I stitched together a "hyperlapse" of Stanford's Hoover Tower using lots of Flickr-scraped images. Everything was aligned using "classical" CV tricks and I was really happy with the results. I wonder how NeRF-w would fare on this data?

[https://github.com/kach/hootow-hyperlapse](https://github.com/kach/hootow- hyperlapse)

</comment><comment><USER14> After going to one of the early Maker Faires, and seeing so many interesting exhibits and projects, I had this same idea, of course with absolutely no clue about how to implement it. If enough people take pictures of the exhibits from a variety of angles, and make them available online, a virtual Maker Faire could be created. Thanks for sharing this!

</comment><comment><USER15> Great work! Having tried the code from the original NeRF paper I found the inference time (generation of new views) to be rather slow because the network had to be queried multiple times per ray (pixel). The paper said that there is still potential to speed this up. Did you improve inference speed and do you think that it will be possible to get it to real-time (>30 fps) in the foreseeable future?

<comment><USER5> We did not aim to speed this part of NeRF up. Check out Neural Sparse Voxel Fields ([https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11571](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.11571)) for some effort in that direction. It's 10x faster, but there's still another 10x to go till you get video frame rates :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sort of work will both allow for digital forensics (imagine reconstructing a scene from multiple socially shared images or video), as well as to create even better "deep fakes" (putting people in scenes they never actually went to; or at different times of day/night, or with different weather effects).

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a reason why the skies do not appear to be picked up by their "transient" filter of the scene? You end up with the skies constantly changing when moving in 3D point of view, which looks strange.

<comment><USER5> A good question! And a problem yet to be solved!

</comment></comment><comment> ur-whale This is _really_ cool and IMHO an area where ML truly shines: being able to disentangle the base geometric signal from lighting / crowds / occlusion via learning is truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Amazing work! Reminds me of something I saw at SIGGRAPH back in '95 called 'Tour into Picture' I think the work came out of Japan.

When will you be sharing some code?!

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow that is fantastic work! And so quick since NeRF debuted. This is exactly the kind of work I have been waiting for to reconstruct some old photos I have.

<comment> ur-whale > reconstruct some old photos I have.

Note that it generates a light field, which is note exactly like a polygonal mesh ... YMMV

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is the geometry from each of the examples available in some format? It would be fun to look more closely. Apologies if I missed a link somewhere!

<comment><USER5> The magic of this method is that we don't construct a "geometry" the same way one might think. There are no triangles or textures here. Instead, we train a machine learning model to predict the derivative of the color and opacity at every point in 3D space. We then integrate along rays emitted from the camera to render an image. It's similar to what's used in CT scans!

<comment><USER21> This means you don't have an occlusion mesh or any other depth information, correct?

<comment><USER22> There is depth information, just not in the form of a mesh.

The model learns to compute a function that takes an XYZ position within a volume as input, and returns color and opacity. You can then render images by tracing rays through this volume. You can pretty easily compute the distance to the first sufficiently-opaque region, or the "average" depth (weighted by each sample's contribution to the final pixel color), at the same time.

Another recent Google project figured out a way to approximate these radiance fields with layered, partially transparent images for efficient rendering: [https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/](https://augmentedperception.github.io/deepviewvideo/)

<comment><USER5> Another related project by our friends in NYC: [https://twitter.com/Jimantha/status/1289184432553734144](https://twitter.com/Jimantha/status/1289184432553734144)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> so why does it use multi-layer perceptron? is it the same as ANN? why not calling it ANN? Does it have activation?

There is another thing I don't understand. Traditional volume data is a map of position to density (or color). There doesn't seem to be the need for a direction as an input.

Why does the network need a direction? Why can't we get a density and a color given a position?

<comment><USER5> > so why does it use multi-layer perceptron? is it the same as ANN? why not > calling it ANN? Does it have activation?

According to Wikipedia, "A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN)." We're being more specific about what we use :)

> There is another thing I don't understand. Traditional volume data is a map > of position to density (or color). There doesn't seem to be the need for a > direction as an input. Why does the network need a direction? Why can't we > get a density and a color given a position?

Volume data of this form is unable to express the idea of view-dependent reflections. I admit, we don't make much use of that here, but it does help! See NeRF for where it makes a big, big difference: [https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf](https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The videos are very impressive. I wish you let us move the 3D scene with the mouse in the browser to get a better idea of the result.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also, can you share any details of the compute requirement for this?

</comment><comment><USER25> How does this compare to photogrammetry?

<comment><USER5> According to Wikipedia, "Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery and other phenomena."

I'd say that this research is in the field of photogrammetry.

<comment><USER25> I guess I meant how it compares to the commercial photogrammetry software out there.

<comment> ur-whale As mentioned in another comment, traditional photogrammetry software typically generates a 3D polygonal mesh.

It looks like this generates a light field, which is not something that traditional 3D software handles directly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Allowance for kids? - <AUTHOR> For those of you with children, what is your approach to allowance? The three common approaches are having a regular allowance, tying it to chores, or no allowance at all. That said, there can be huge variations once you get into the details. I'd love to hear how you help (or helped!) your kids grow into financially responsible adults.<p>If you yourself had an allowance structure set up when you were growing up that you think had positive impact, would love to hear about it as well. <comment><USER3> My parents gave me a large allowance, but they didn't give me extra money if I needed it. That made me more independent.

For practical purposes, assume 1 CHF = 1 USD (it's actually 1.04 USD, but close enough). Also note that my parents lived in the countryside and didn't have "curfew" rules. There was no bus to their house, so if I stayed out after they went to bed, I wouldn't be able to get back home! It was lonely, but effective at keeping me out of trouble.

From age 5 to 11, I got 10 CHF.

From age 11 to 14, I got 25 CHF. Of that, 12.5 was "current", 10 was "savings" (only spend on things that cost over 100 CHF), and 2.5 was "giving". From my own money, I had to pay 10% of all my trips (e.g. church camp, travel alone, etc).

From age 14 to 16, I got 125 CHF. Of that, 25 CHF was the same as above. The extra 100 CHF was for "trips". Then I had to pay 50% of travels. This was a big expense, and important for some volunteer service projects I joined.

From age 16 to 18, I got 270 CHF. Of that, 23 CHF was "current", 20 CHF was "savings", 27 CHF was "giving", and 200 CHF was "trips". I then had to pay 100% of trips, although I negotiated with my parents to let me pay only 50% of a trip to visit universities.

I used an Excel spreadsheet to manage my money from when I was 13 years old. It has a record of 230 expenses over 4 years, and is interesting to look back at now, to see what was important to me then (iPod accessories, the price of my first date).

The allowance money was not tied to chores. I could earn an extra 0.5 CHF for washing or drying dishes, or 5 CHF for some gardening. I also got some lunch money for school, and secretly saved the change from that.

My dad gave me a broken computer when I was 8, which I fixed and then used until he gave me my own laptop. That broke, and I then bought & sold a class set of old laptops from the school to let me upgrade.

My parents did not pay for TV. They said that my brother and I would have to share our allowance and pay for the subscription to Sky TV if we really wanted it. We couldn't afford that. However, we had the best Internet connection available in our area (ISDN). So all my entertainment has been web-based. The TV set was too old for consoles (only SCART, no composite video), so all my games were on computer (and we used Mac, so there were very few games). Instead, I started building my own things with AppleScript, and I'm still doing that now.

<comment><USER4> The current/saving and % of travel is a very interesting approach! I'm assuming that the numbers represent your _monthly_ allowance?

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's right - those were monthly values.

I paid for half of my iPod (the other half was a Christmas present), all of my food expenses outside (but none if eating with my parents). Education was paid by my dad's job (CERN). They didn't pay for me to learn to drive, and I still can't (I bike to work). They now want me to pay rent if I want to live with them, which is why I call it "my parents' house" not "home".

The bleak reality is in most places I lived since, my disposable income (after food & rent) has usually gone down from that time, now I'm working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have kids but I can talk about my dad.

For all the regular purposes like transport, school fee, repairing the vehicle etc. he gave a little more than required, he knew how much it cost but still let me keep the rest. That was enough to hang out with friends, go to movies (it was cheap back then), a little snack here and there. For anything bigger than that I would ask him and he'd mostly say yes. But never encouraged regular allowance on a monthly/weekly basis.

We weren't affluent, I had to be a little conservative on my expenditure. Was also taught early that you should do/buy four things that you need and one thing that you want.

For better or worse I think this made me more responsible than others who grew up with me.

<comment><USER4> This was exactly my father's approach, especially as I grew older. He eventually gave me my own CC with a limit for emergency use. I think it was a great approach, but I also see the merit of having a limited allowance per period.

Perhaps it's just my nature, but I'm just terrible at tracking my spending in a detailed manner. For instance, if you asked me how much I spend on groceries per month, I would not be able to give you an accurate number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No kids myself but my parents did not give me an allowance.

Instead, they were very transparent about our finances. We were situated in the lower-to-mid working class, we have basics covered and some "fun money" but no vacations, new cars, little eating out, etc.

If there was something my Brother or I needed (things we wanted but were not necessary were usually given as birthday/holiday gifts only), they would walk us through their thought processes on how they decided if they could afford it. They included us in the decision and explained how buying certain things would mean sacrificing others.

We were also given money management tasks that were used for necessities. For example, we would be given $20 each to come up with meals we wanted that week at the grocery store. Same thing with new school clothes, sports gear, etc. They let us be decision makers but didn't hand us money to do with as we pleased.

I also got my first job at 13 (farm labor), and haven't stopped working yet.

I was always a little jealous of the kids who got $5, $10, or $15 per week to do with as they pleased - but I will say I feel like I've had a leg up on budgeting, saving, and general money management than many of my peers.

If I have kids I will probably have some sort of similar system. I don't like the idea of giving away "free" money, and tying it to chores is weird to me because they are something that need to be done and won't ever be "rewarded" again after you're a kid.

<comment><USER7> I read this as if I would have wrote it.

I never got an allowance but I mostly got want I needed and wanted within reason. This was basically determined by the chores I did and how much I generally helped in the house.

My parents and grandparents always sat me down to do the monthly budget with them. I learned early on the way money flowed in and out of the household. That gave me a perspective on debt and credit that many of my friends didn't have.

I did get cash on birthdays and holidays and on some other special occasions.

Once I started working (around 13) that money was mine to do with as I pleased. There was a great sense of personal responsibility. I think that really helped me once I left my parents home at about 17.

I have no opinion on the "free" money of not doing chores. All kids and families are different. I will say that having my parents be honest about our finances and not shielding my as much did help me in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a six-year-old and started giving him an allowance when he was five.

The goals for the allowance are:

1\. Teach him about saving and compound interest 2\. Get him off my back for buying things

Therefore, it's not tied to chores. Getting work out of him would be great but I figure the benefit of teaching him the benefits of saving are much more important.

I pay him $5 a week because it's large enough that he can buy something at the toy store but not anything particularly nice so he needs to save.

And here's the crazy part, I pay him interest for saved money, a crazy large amount. For every $10 he has saved I give him another dollar before I dole out his week's allowance. The money grows fast!

He's already seeing the benefit. He reaaaaaaaly wanted a remote control BB8 and was super good about saving for it. Every Saturday morning we laid out his money, we traded in 10 ones for 1 ten dollar bill and then I paid out his interest by placing a one dollar bill on top of each ten dollar bill, and then I paid his normal allowance.

He's already better with money at 6 than I was at 25.

At some point I'm going to have to lower his interest rate or I'll go broke.

<comment><USER9> 10% compound interest, compounded weekly?

I can't believe you made it a a year, to be honest.

<comment><USER8> I retroactively instituted a $100 cutoff too. :-)

<comment><USER10> That's clever :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't have kids.. but I got paid $1 a week for doing chores, and eventually it was raised over the years, $2.. until $5. Mom helped me get a job around 14-15 years old and my money started being my own.

I think it definitely teaches lessons. I had to save up to get a $5 ninja turtle. That was like 5 weeks worth of work for a while! Chores included: dishes, laundry, vacuuming, dusting. I think I split them with my sister. My mom would even make me cook for myself, teaching me hot to boil pasta, cook an egg, cook steak, etc.

I can only say that it gave me all the life skills I needed to survive. Thanks mom! Thanks dad! Appreciate it! As for the value of money? Which $5 ninja turtle should I save up for? Which one was worth it the most? Which one would be able to keep me happy until I could afford the next best ninja turtle?

This logic has stuck with me and I've managed to mostly stay out of debt.. at least credit card debt for my entire life. Student loans.. paid those off. I currently just have a mortgage and a personal loan that I took out to help my girlfriend is the only major debt I have at the moment.

<comment><USER12> They say that one of the things that determines future success is the ability to defer spending and not have to have something instantly. So this is a good way to see how your child would do. Can they save up for something bigger and better or do they blow it all straight away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Allowance for doing nothing works pretty well. When you go to stores make sure they bring their money. They ask for less if they are holding their money. When you tell them they can buy anything they want with their money. Suddenly the crap items that said they wanted are long forgotten. The moral of the story is always go shopping with them but make sure they have their allowance on them. This helps them learn the value of a dollar. They become really cheap.

</comment><comment><USER14> My son is only 2 so we haven't gotten there yet. But I like the block of tasks that the child has to do with no reward because that is a refection of real life(we all have to take out the trash, mow the lawn, etc).

But in addition to that you encourage the child to think outside of those tasks and to proposal tasks for money/reward mini-business plans. Get them to think entrepreneurial. Then hopefully as they grow older they may petition the neighbors, etc.

<comment><USER15> The incredible amount of time my family spent maintaining, cleaning, improving, and repairing our suburban house definitely motivated me to choose housing as an adult that wouldn't require so much work.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, how good are your DIY skills?

Were you involved in said repairs/improvements or just an onlooker?

<comment><USER15> Decent. I got the _spirit_ from my dad but most of the actual practice on my high school's stage crew, and a part-time technician job at one of my university's concert halls.

I couldn't finish a basement or build cabinetry from scratch like my dad did, but I can use a drill and table saw to put together sets that'll look reasonable at 30 feet. Or go at basic household issues with my bag of hand tools.

More to my interests, I can spec, build, configure, troubleshoot, solder, etc. my way around a performance venue's sound, communications, and lighting control systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In our household, the kids have chores. The kids also have an allowance.

The important part for us is that the allowance isn't tied to the performance of the chores - chores are mandatory, part of living in a household.

The allowance is tied to doing said chores promptly and completely when asked, without complaint.

Complaint or lack of completion of chores results in deductions from the allowance. But importantly, the chore must still be done.

Works pretty well for us.

<comment><USER18> Confused how that's not tying allowance to chores.

<comment><USER17> It's tied, but indirectly. Completion of chores properly is obviously required for allowance to be received. But it was important to us to not give the impression that this was "pay for work done". Rather, the work has to get done, the payment is for doing it properly and without complaint (ie. to save my and my wife's sanity).

But the important bits are:

1\. The job gets done always. There is not an option for the child to say "keep your $2, I'd rather watch TV today."

2\. If the job isn't done right, the child has to re-do or otherwise complete the job.

3\. Complaints about the job, or failure to do the job promptly (ie. nagging), lead to deductions in allowance, but #1 still applies.

4\. The size of the allowance and the size/number of chores are not directly related.

We also give the kids the option to change chores (within reason) - <USER2> the allowance isn't tied to specific chores. As they get older, they get more responsibility (more and/or more complex chores) but also more allowance.

Like I said, it seems to work well for us. The chores range from feeding the cats to doing a load of washing to helping cook dinner. They quickly learn that complaining about chores is a no-win situation, and accept that it's simply a part of week to week life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With the caveat that they're not quite adults yet (eldest is 16) so there are no actual results to this experiment...

The children get regular money put into their accounts. We don't put many restrictions on what they spend it on. We take the approach (with this as well as internet access etc) that we trust them until they prove us wrong then we will stomp on them from a great height. Touch wood not much stomping so far.

They have assigned chores that are not directly connected to the money. I guess if they didn't do their chores we could pull some money but TBH there are better levers.

Although some of the chores are there just so they participate in the household (taking out bins/recycling etc), we also require them to make lunch/dinner or go shopping for the family periodically. The main reason is so that they're reasonably self sufficient when they eventually fly/get pushed from the coop.

None of them actually earn money yet (as in from outside family and friends) although only the eldest would be technically legal. He does have a regular job in the voluntary sector which gives him most of the discipline skills having a job entails.

I would say that they're all fairly aware of the cost of things. I'm not so convinced that they're sufficiently aware of the value of things. Maybe that's hard to do unless you've either genuinely lived on your earnings or struggled for money.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have kids, but they are still too young to set any rules.

When I was younger, I didn't have any allowances at all. I was lucky to get bought what I needed and wanted as long as it made reasonable sense, e.g. books, clothes or toys which kids in my age would have, but I did not get everything. For a while we didn't have any TV at all, then only one for all of us. I never had a NES, playstation, etc... and I had to "work" on my parents for more than 1 year for us to get the first PC. If I got money from my grandparents or other family members, then it was put on my savings account which was put aside, where I didn't really had access to.

I was also lucky that my parents paid my studies afterwards. This would also cover going out, small vacations, etc... I assume as long as reasonable. Whatever I earned in side projects/work was my personal money, and wouldn't be deducted from what my parents gave me. This kept me very much motivated to work on my own projects and gave me the opportunity to start my own company afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm a parent of two boys (16 and 10) and I'd strongly, strongly advice tying it to chores and then using it to teach that performance matters. Do a good job? You get your allowance. Do a bad job? Sorry; no allowance. Saving is a hard skill to learn as is that performance matters. An allowance is a great way to teach both.

<comment><USER22> I have been told the opposite. Kids should learn to do chores as part of living in a house, not to be paid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We started giving our kids money to spend on a comic or similar at the corner shop as soon as they were old enough to handle it. From school age they had regular pocket money that they could save or spend. This was mostly not tied to chores, which were expected anyway, though we did give them opportunity to earn extra for doing extra chores when they were saving for something significant. From early teens we gave them a monthly allowance intended to cover clothes as well as spending money. I would say that they've turned out very good with everyday money and also very helpful about the house. They are all grown up now.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had a meger allowance of 0.25 USD per week. At the time, in my cohort, it was below average but at least it was something.

What really benefited me was having a before school newspaper delivery job. I felt a responsibility to my employer and the subscribers and would get up early in the dark to walk though the cold Detroit winters to deliver papers every day.

In retrospect, it was just the right level of challenge and reward for me as a kid. I saved enough money to buy some things I wanted as a kid: a new bike, a tennis racket, and a slide rule!

<comment><USER4> > a slide rule

Now that is interesting! Care to share the story behind that?

<comment><USER24> I used that yellow Pickett slide rule from junior high school through my EE degree at MIT. It was a yellow Pickett model N4 ([http://www.sliderule.ca/pickett.htm](http://www.sliderule.ca/pickett.htm)).

The slide rule was a wonderful thing for me. I got the idea that I would like having one from the book _Have Spacesuit--Will Travel_ , by Robert Heinlein, a book I read when I was around twelve. The paper route a couple of years later gave me enough money that I could buy one.

Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, there were no computers used in everyday life. The slide rule was the only practical way to perform calculations quickly, sadly to only 3 significant digits. An important skill taught in High School back then was using tables of logarithms and trig functions to perform calculations (with this approach one can easily get 5 significant digits of accuracy). I still have my CRC handbook of Mathematics that I bought for myself in High School, I learned a lot by studying each formula and each kind of reference table in that book.

I taught myself to program from a book on Fortran in 1967. I was able to submit programs punched on cards to a friend who would run the program on the School district's single computer used in their administration building. A couple of days later I would get my listing back!

Like the TI Calculators today, slide rules were ubiquitous in my engineering classes. Although I went to college in 1969, I've taken classes at the local University as recently as ten years ago for fun. I brushed up on my long unused differential equations and learned some new things, a Graduate course on Combinatorics.

It's very interesting to see the difference between my approach to working through problems and the methods used by other students in my differential equations class. They would almost invariably reach for the calculator to work through a complex expression, entering each term and finally coming up with the answer. By habit, I normally simplify, factor and reduce the complex expressions before doing any arithmetic. The younger students are masters of the calculator; I'm not very fast with a calculator. I just never had access to a calculator while in school and never gained the proficiency of today's typical college students.

I've got an advanced TI calculator sitting in a drawer (and the old slide rule stashed somewhere in the house), but I never really use it. If I need to do some quick calculation my preferred method is to simply fire up the Python REPL in a terminal window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Growing up I initially had tiny regular allowance, which gradually became tied to specific weekly chores & subsequently bigger. As parent myself now I think approach works well, as it balances "I'm giving you this $ because I love and support you" and "hard work should be rewarded"

</comment><comment><USER26> Don't have kids, but heard of a cool company doing something tangential: Current (current.com)

> The debit card for teens (and parents)

> – Automates chores and allowances

> – Notifies you about spending

> – Works with your bank

<comment><USER27> Tools for snooping in on your kid's spending is an instant ugh reaction from me.

<comment><USER28> I used to think so too, then I had kids :)

One interesting approach is to use snooping tools but to then explicitly tell the kids and to discuss the results periodically. I.e., "my job as a parent is to help you figure out how to be a grown up. Part of that is managing money. I noticed you spent money on X and wanted to talk about it"

I think for the 'cellphone based GPS-tracking' there was also an explicit rule that the parents wouldn't get the kids in trouble for information gathered from the GPS tracking. They might talk to them about it afterwards, but they wanted the kids to be willing to not circumvent the device for safety purposes.

But yeah - it's weird how it both ughs me out and at the same time scratches a deep itch/fear that I'll still be able to keep my kids safe even as they age.

<comment><USER27> Keeping your kids safe at all costs isn't good parenting. It encourages suffocating closeness and loss of independence. The point isn't to get your child to the age of 22 without getting criticized for it. The point is to provide the necessary conditions for a successful adult to form.

>"my job as a parent is to help you figure out how to be a grown up. Part of that is managing money. I noticed you spent money on X and wanted to talk about it"

This will teach children to spend like someone's watching. It's external motivation, and it's likely counterproductive IMO. Better, in my opinion, is to let them find out the natural consequences of spending money - that is, not having it for other purposes, or needing to do things to get more money.

<comment><USER29> > The point is to provide the necessary conditions for a successful adult to > form.T

+1000

When I grew up it was routine for children to deceive their parents, especially about stuff like friends, smoking, drugs, drinking, sex etc. The assumed parental answer was always no so if you did any of that stuff you had to hide it. It was amazingly easy, we (four brothers) lead our secret lives and the parents mostly had no idea. There are problems with this: if the child gets in a bind there is no way they can ask for advice or help; if the parent finds out and overreacts badly it can seriously damage the relationship. I have a stepfather who I've never contacted since leaving home partly due to this.

Raising our son my wife and I agreed (mostly) that there is no practical way to completely control a _person_ and that trying to do so would just make him hide things from us. We thought the best we could do was to try to instill decent values and good judgment and to avoid useless opposition. This was a bit scary sometimes, "good judgment" and "14 year old boy" are not an obvious combination. He has turned out really well. It may have been just good luck, but I like to think that we avoided a lot of the mistakes our own parents made and that it helped.

As for allowance, we tried to pick a reasonable basic amount for the age and set no conditions. He could earn extra by doing extra work around the house. We also set up "Bank of Dad" where he could save money and get a good return. Learning how to make choices was definitely part of the plan.

Chores were not optional but were not tied to allowance. This was not completely satisfactory as he often delayed chores more than we liked unless cajoled into it somehow. I do this too sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have kids yet, but I just wanted to thank OP for starting such an interesting thread. Definitely bookmarking for future reference.</comment>


Royal Melbourne Hospital attacked by damaging computer virus - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/royal-melbourne-hospital-attacked-by-damaging-computer-virus-20160118-gm8m3v.html <comment><USER2> There are some places which could really benefit from stateless systems, or even local dumb consoles. That's commonplace at air traffic control I hear - it would be good if hospitals had the same.</comment>


The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/the-u-s-is-charging-huawei-with-racketeering/ <comment><USER2> Using a throwaway to share our $0.02 relating to this. AMA I guess.

We're a US-based startup that does about $100-200k in business annually with Futurewei (Huawei's R&D subsidiary). I've never dealt with Huawei proper. I can say they're genuinely investing in R&D, and trying to build a product unlike anything being offered right now. We're working with tech that's floating around the academic conferences, but no one else commercially will touch.

This in contrast to our experiences with established US companies which, a) don't want to deal with early-stage research, b) wouldn't work with us as a new, small company, and c) gave bad IP terms (ironically).

Not excusing other activities, but for us it's been above-board and beneficial. If they want to pump their profits into the US ecosystem, I see that as beneficial.

<comment><USER3> But, don't you see the connection between their risk high investments and the IP they've stolen from US companies? If anything, Huawei made its name of stealing from Nortel, Cisco, etc. Not to mention, questionable ties to the CCP. If they have R&D money to burn, it's because they've saved billions on R&D because they stole it.

To see them as "good actor" because of a token $200k, while stealing literally tens of billions is missing the forest for the trees. Strategically, feels penny wise, pound foolish.

<comment><USER2> I think the stealing instead of R&D thing is somewhat misled. These guys are definitely spending billions on research as well.

I get the concern, and fines and punishment is all fine. But I think they might also have got caught in the geopolitical crossfire. It's a messy world; Samsung and Apple are stealing eachother's billions everyday, Google and Facebook are spying on us, DOD is killing people. I don't know who it's morally permissible to do business with anymore, but we're trying to get by.

<comment><USER4> They stole IP from western companies so they could reach the bleeding edge and then spent billions on R&D research to get ahead. Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen. No western company should trust their 5G equipment.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how your conclusion follows from the premise. I don't think anyone really doubts that they've stolen IP, but it doesn't follow from that that their 5G equipment is therefore untrustworthy. That conclusion requires its own evidence, and also presentation of the wider context about why we should trust equipment from other manufacturers instead.

<comment><USER6> It does follow. Question why they would steal it and realize the Chinese government can force them to do whatever they want. Given they've been stealing IP it's clear this is already happening. Then start questioning why? It's a very interesting position to be in to have built a majority of the worlds wireless networks, especially with that type of gov.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> About a dozen years ago I was working for a small-ish hardware company ($350-400M revenue), which was acquired by a bigger company. BiggerCo had a Joint Venture with Huawei (let's called it JVco).

About 6 months Post acquisition one of our employees found that Huawei was selling a 100% complete rip-off of one of our products. JVco had access to some of our development resources, but Huawei was never supposed to see any of that per the agreements.

The box looked, acted, and functioned the same - all they did was localize the language, _barely_ rebrand it, and repackage our weekly updates for their customers the day after we released them.

Legal from BiggerCo got involved, and it was all papered over as a 'misunderstanding' by the Joint Venture company. Haven't trusted a thing with their name on it or any company that does business with them since...

<comment><USER8> Kind of makes you wonder why Boeing would build a finishing plant in Zhoushan and Apple would put so much of its iPhone production in Zhengzhou and Shenzhen.

<comment><USER9> Because its cheap, if you only look at the immediate profit without considering the long term implications

<comment><USER10> The long term implications have been that American companies are richer than ever before.

<comment><USER11> What about longer than that. In GPs case what if Huawei outcompetes with stolen IP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My previous employer and my current one (both Fortune-50 tech companies) each had quiet policies that prospective job candidates who had Huawei on their resume needed extra clearing before they could even interview. Reading through the indictment makes the policies seem less paranoid or perhaps even not paranoid enough.

<comment><USER13> [deleted]

<comment><USER14> While I hear your reasoning, and parts of it make total sense, it is explicitly illegal to discriminate against someone due to their citizenship (yes, citizenship as well, not just national origin or anything like that) during the recruitment process (exceptions apply, i.e., if they are in the US illegally or if the position requires some sort of security clearance).

Imo the only way it would work is if there was a separate law passed that addresses hiring workers who have Chinese citizenship specifically (with no US citizenship at the same time, obviously, as dual nationals are a thing), but that would never happen unless the situation escalated dramatically way beyond what it is now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential > agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the > trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that > intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei's business.

These American companies thought they could build their products for a fraction of the price in China and increase margins. They didn't stop to consider that by teaching China how to build their products they were creating a new low-cost competitor. And they've since lost their manufacturing ability. Oops.

It's hard to feel too sorry for these companies. It's not exactly a secret that this is how China operates and has operated for a very long time.

<comment><USER16> > It's hard to feel too sorry for these companies. It's not exactly a secret > that this is how China operates

You mean every developing nation? Just look at U.S. industrial espionage in Europe during the 18th-19th century when it was developing.

Pretending this is somehow how _China_ specifically operates is disingenuous.

<comment><USER17> I attended a top 5 business school in France at the turn of the century. We had partnerships with similar schools in NYC, Tokyo, Sydney, you name it.

It was taught in first year of international business classes that outsourcing abroad was functionally equivalent to a transfer of technology — so you always had to factor in the time it took for your magic low-cost solution to fade out and become your competitor, essentially, but not just them: by then the whole market has access to that cost structure, so you have to keep finding new lower-cost solutions, and keep innovating on your technological part (HQ in Europe, USA, Japan, etc).

It's just international business 101, really, and has been for at least 20 years in my personal experience — but I'm pretty sure I read articles from the 1970s describing this process, because Japan was the first one to pull it off brilliantly.

People focus on China because somebody is waiving that name a lot and his voice carries a lot through the media; but this is definitely just how the world works, and has been forever — if you ask workers from the next village to come and help build stuff with your super tech, it won't take long before they replicate the process over there.

And that's called culture, knowledge, it lives and grows and moves like populations of viruses or molecules, it's been modeled for some time in anthropology at that macro-level.

<comment><USER18> This is a misleading narrative in the context of the charges against Huawei.

To somehow equate the direct theft of IP and innovation as just 'shared culture and knowledge' completely avoids the material criminality at hand.

Huawei is charged with literally incentivizing their employees to steal knowledge and IP, and of directly copying designs, on a systematic and widespread scale. These activities are instituted far beyond just Huawei.

This is not a situation of the natural flow of industrial knowledge, it's direct theft.

<comment><USER19> The concept of IP is a relatively recent invention, created by legislatures to prop up specific industries hurt by copying of data, and, as is being demonstrated, not everyone agrees that it should be treated the same as existing systems of physical property.

You wouldn't download a car. But I would. I don't think it's possible to steal information.

<comment><USER18> This history of IP is not relevant. China knows the rules and they broke them. Therefore, there must be consequences.

<comment><USER20> > China knows the rules and they broke them

So did Turing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's the DOJ statement:

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications- co...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-conglomerate- huawei-and-subsidiaries-charged-racketeering)

Also here's Huawei Technologies Chief Security Officer Andy Purdy talking to Maria Bartiromo:

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

<comment><USER22> That was a terrible interview - are they all like that? She was just shouting at him and every time he tried to elaborate on their testing mechanisms she just called him a communist. He asked for the evidence and she said that she doesn't need evidence... ??? !!!

As much as I assume that Huawei and co have backdoors in foreign electronics, I can't get over the racism and hatred for China shared by her and the comment section.

Are the comments real? Everyone is claiming that he's a traitor, a "Clinton friend", a liar, a commie, and that he should rot in hell. And the videos already got 80k views and a near perfect like/dislike ratio. Am I crazy for thinking this a bad interview, or does half the United States really feel this way?

<comment><USER23> It will get worse before it's better.

Sometimes I wanted to get off this planet so I can get away from humans and all of those irrationality and hatred. But in retrospect I probably just need to get rid of the part of me that are engaging the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In a small town in Israel, called Hod Hasharon there was a company named "Toga Networks".

This company was paying as twice as you currenly earn, if you work at Cisco or Juniper. Just like that, as twice as, just ocme work with us.

One year went by, and it turned out that Toga Network is no other than Huawei.

So I do not know about stealing source code, but I know they looked after its IP which is in people's mind.

<comment><USER23> > IP which is in peoples mind

I think a general term for acquiring that IP is called employment.

<comment><USER24> when you target crowd from 2 specific companies and offer 2x market value salaries it is more aggressive than just "employment".

<comment><USER25> Yep, it's called job poaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> While this doesn't directly have to do with the CCP having backdoors in Huawei products, it does seem a bit too coincidental that the DOJ is just happening to go after them since corporate espionage is a common theme when dealing with China.

Hopefully this reflects a changing of the tides when it comes to enforcing IP laws in China rather than just an excuse to target a single company. I don't even like IP laws but if we are going to hold the rest of the industrialized world to the letter of the law then at some point China will have to be brought into the fold.

<comment><USER27> I think the perception that people commonly have of IP protection in China is out-of-date by several years.

From what I've read, the level of IP enforcement has increased dramatically since about 2014, to the point where there are more IP cases heard in Chinese courts now than in any other country. Likewise, more patents are now filed in China each year than in any other country. It's also not as if local companies always win disputes - foreign companies apparently have a very good track record in Chinese courts.

There's a description of the changes in recent years here:

1\. [https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/05/07/rapid-changes- chinese-...](https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/05/07/rapid-changes-chinese- legal-system-attractive-venue-ip-litigation/)

2\. [https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/chinas-progress-on- intellect...](https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/chinas-progress-on-intellectual- property-rights-yes-really/)

Back when China was in the earlier stages of industrialization, it really didn't care much about IP. But things aren't the same any more: China spends about as much on R&D as the US, and it has its own IP to protect. IP law was not on their radar before, but it very much appears to be now. But you can imagine how difficult it is to set such a system up. They've had to create an entirely new legal system, train judges, etc. China has changed so rapidly that it's difficult for these sorts of systems to keep up.

<comment><USER28> China protecting their own IP does not preclude China conducting industrial espionage in other countries; for that matter, the US NSA conducts industrial espionage in other countries for the benefit of US companies.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

<comment><USER27> Parent comment asks when China will start respecting IP. I addressed that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the train on Huawei has already left the station. The most likely scenario is a U.S. maybe a few states highly dependent on U.S. security assurances vis-a-vis China toeing the line and everybody else using some combination of Huawei and Nokia/Ericsson in various combinations within their infrastructure based on how close they align with the U.S. or China.

This whole thing looks just like AIIB a couple years ago where the U.S. made a huge stink about not joining the club and in the end everybody but Japan and Taiwan signed up.

</comment><comment><USER30> > "Huawei is alleged to have stolen source code for Company 1's routers, which > it then used in its own products."

I've never really understood how IP theft works. I've been a software engineer for a long time and I know that Reading and making sense of an existing million line code base is a hella of a lot harder than just writing new code from scratch. Why on earth would anyone want to steal source code from a competitor?

<comment><USER31> Million lines of code from scratch is not easy in any way. Especially if you are talking about battle-tested code, which had already faced and accounted for many corner cases.

<comment><USER32> Maybe the best way is to write it yourself and when you face an issue you try to see how they solved it? It's fairly doable to understand a small part of the code until you see what they needed to do. I wouldn't call it reading all the millions of lines,I agree with OP that that would most likely take longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> >Charges also Reveal Huawei's Business in North Korea and Assistance to the Government of Iran in Performing Domestic Surveillance //

Surely evidence would reveal that, but this DOJ press release doesn't appear to be concerned with that.

>As revealed by the government's independent investigation and review of court filings, //

Mwah-ha-ha-ha! They know how to tell 'em.

>the new charges in this case relate to the alleged decades-long efforts by Huawei, and several of its subsidiaries, both in the U.S. and in the People's Republic of China, to misappropriate intellectual property //

Aren't new charges a new case? Aren't these extending speculations rather leading for a case that is in process, shouldn't they make the allegations and present any evidence - if they wish - rather than make extended claims bracketed by "allegedly". I can't believe that this has been written as anything other than a chance to make unsubstantiated claims ... have the courts hear the charges and then expound at length about the conviction.

I thought these sorts of things from one of the main parties involved (the USA government) were strongly decried by courts as they tend to colour juries and judicial bodies; aren't the DOJ perverting the course of justice here with such a diatribe?

>"Huawei's efforts to steal trade secrets and other sophisticated U.S. technology were successful. Through the methods of deception described above, the defendants obtained nonpublic intellectual property relating to internet router source code, cellular antenna technology and robotics. As a consequence of its campaign to steal this technology and intellectual property, Huawei was able to drastically cut its research and development costs and associated delays, giving the company a significant and unfair competitive advantage."

That may all be true, but if you're currently prosecuting a case and have to determine if it's true it would be nice, as a DOJ, to not making statements that -- despite legal ass covering -- is clearly intended to presuppose the guilt of the defendant.

When USA decided to go after Huawei to bolster their own telecoms companies, I wondered if they realised they'd end up stooping so low?

<comment><USER34> All indictments are written like this. Of course the prosecution thinks the defendant is guilty, that's why they're bringing the charges. In an adversarial legal system, it's their job to make the case for guilt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Huawei clearly is on parity with western technology. The evidence is here:

[https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/Integrated-5G-Chips- Unv...](https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/Integrated-5G-Chips-Unveiled-by- Samsung-Huawei-Qualcomm)

And in particular, with its 5G modem:

[http://www.hisilicon.com/en/Products/ProductList/Balong](http://www.hisilicon.com/en/Products/ProductList/Balong)

Some news about this:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/huawei- an...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/huawei-and-samsung- s-new-5g-chips-designed-to-threaten-qualcomm)

And also for the base stations:

[https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/huawei-s-5g-ran- port...](https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/huawei-s-5g-ran-portfolio- beats-ericsson-nokia-and-others-report-says)

<comment><USER36> It's clearly ahead in some respect and behind in others. Particularly ahead in 5G where it's the clear world leader, behind in video recording though. The P30's EIS is seriously garbage compared to iPhone.

<comment><USER35> Well here is one comparison:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yvtfl3gp0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yvtfl3gp0M)

iPhone 11 and Pixel 4 do seem better, but I would be careful declaring it "garbage". I just think they have reached parity- where each vendor could leapfrog the others for any particular feature for successive generations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> >In one case, a technology company looking for a partnership with Huawei sent over a presentation deck with confidential information about its business in order to generate commercial interest with Huawei. From the indictment:

> Immediately upon receipt of the slide deck, each page of which was marked > 'Proprietary and Confidential' by Company 6, HUAWEI distributed the slide > deck to HUAWEI engineers, including engineers in the subsidiary that was > working on technology that directly competed with Company 6's products and > services. These engineers discussed developments by Company 6 that would > have application to HUAWEI's own prototypes then under design.

Well, _yeah_ , what the hell else are you supposed to do when some supplier sends you a highly technical slide deck, except discuss it with your engineers working on the same thing? I seriously can't fathom why anybody involved here would have any expectation to the contrary.

</comment><comment><USER38> Copying successful technology is a goes-around, comes-around cycle. In 1780-1850, the USA was the premier pirate, stealing the world's premier technology and know-how, from Britain. By 2050, the Chinese will be fighting the very same battle with someone else (Nigeria and Angola maybe?), and bitterly bemoaning IP theft in the same terms.

</comment><comment><USER39> <quote>and using proxies such as professors working at research institutions to obtain and provide the technology to the defendants</quote> You know this talk about using American Professors as proxies for exfiltrating information reminds me of this: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00291-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00291-2)

</comment><comment><USER40> Any lawyer that can pitch in? I don't think that this fits the spirit of the RICO laws.

<comment><USER41> Since when do lawyers care about the spirit of a law, instead of what the law makes possible.

<comment><USER42> Which is their billing rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Pretty clearly Huawei is now the cow that the US and China will be fighting over. Meng is now likely to be caught up in this as well regardless of how the current charges go. The US standing right up to China and punching it the nose. It's an inflection point for the world economy.

</comment><comment><USER44> It is all about backdoor.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/us-german- intel-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/us-german-intel-owned- swiss-crypto-used-by-dozens-of-countries/)

</comment><comment><USER45> This another example of what is called the Master-Slave dialectic from Hegel, an 18th century philosopher. Something that I studied in a philosophy class and had a profound influence on my understanding of work. Please take 10' to understand it and it applies to the relationship between engineers and salespeople, to the relationship now between China and the USA. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_dialectic)

<comment><USER46> Can you explain how this relates to this story?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> so what does this mean? do they haul all the executives and workers into court? what happens if they are found guilty? do the executives go to jail, is the company forced to shutdown, or do they just have to pay a fine and all is good. hell, do they even have to pay the fine?

so many questions :(

<comment><USER48> Well, I am not an expert on that particular subject, but Huawei's CFO was arrested in Canada by the end of 2018. It seems US upped the ante a little and really decided to bring her in to face charges.

Now that would bring some fireworks. I am not convinced China would not respond in kind.

<comment><USER49> > I am not convinced China would not respond in kind.

Indeed. In diplomatic retaliation, China responded to the Huawei CFO's arrest in Canada by quickly arresting two Canadians on charges without evidence or explanation. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. These Canadians have been in Chinese detention for over a year without access to a lawyer or the ability to speak to family or loved ones. Canadian pawns in a USA-China game.

[https://globalnews.ca/news/6410460/michael-kovrig-china- cana...](https://globalnews.ca/news/6410460/michael-kovrig-china-canada- detention/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Something seems off.

If China steals all the US IP, why are US technology companies still so valuable?

For example, Apple is a very valuable US technology company that also has extensive dealings in China.

<comment><USER8> I see it this way, apologies if it seems off topic or judgmental but....

The third world is a place where many people have an idea of astuteness that differs from intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to design, build, create, manage, or otherwise achieve something in a novel way.

Astuteness is the ability to take an advantage when one presents itself. Think Diego Maradona, or Aladdin.

US technology companies have a great deal of creative intelligence, institutional knowledge, trust from customers, access to talent, and freedom to execute on corporate strategy.

But even the company you mention, Apple, is arguably being outdone by Samsung (moved production out of China) and Huawei (Chinese).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> >The superseding indictment also includes new allegations about Huawei and its subsidiaries' involvement in business and technology projects in countries subject to U.S., E.U. and/or U.N. sanctions, such as Iran and North Korea – as well as the company's efforts to conceal the full scope of that involvement. The defendants' activities, which included arranging for shipment of Huawei goods and services to end users in sanctioned countries, were typically conducted through local affiliates in the sanctioned countries. Reflecting the inherent sensitivity of conducting business in jurisdictions subject to sanctions, internal Huawei documents allegedly referred to such jurisdictions with code names. For example, the code "A2" referred to Iran, and "A9" referred to North Korea. edit from this superseding indictment itself:

>For example, an official HUAWEI manual labeled "Top Secret" instructed certain individuals working for HUAWEI to conceal their employment with HUAWEI during encounters with foreign law enforcement officials.

>Beginning in or about 2000, the defendants HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI misappropriated operating system source code for internet routers, command line interface (a structure of textual commands used to communicate with routers) and operating system manuals from a U.S. technology company headquartered in the Northern District of California ("Company 1"), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, and incorporated the misappropriated source code into HUAWEI internet routers that FUTUREWEI sold in the United States from approximately April 2002 until December 2002. Toward this end, HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI hired or attempted to hire Company 1 employees and directed these employees to misappropriate Company 1 source code on behalf of the defendants.

>In or about July 2004, at a trade show in Chicago, Illinois, a HUAWEI employee ("Individual-3"), an individual whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company ("Company 3"), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as "Weihua," HUAWEI spelled with its syllables reversed. In official correspondence with Company 3 shortly after this incident, HUAWEI claimed that Individual-3 attended the trade show in his personal capacity and that his attempted misappropriation occurred "without Huawei's authorization." According to a purported official statement published in Reuters, HUAWEI claimed, "This is a junior engineer who had never traveled to the United States before. His actions do not reflect the culture or values of Huawei." Notably, a resume that Individual-3 submitted to the U.S. government in approximately 2012 stated that he had been a "senior R&D Engineer" at HUAWEI from 1997 until July 2004, the time of the incident.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22320499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22320499)

</comment><comment> rickety-gherkin US political and militarized forces protecting corporate interest for the sake of...what again? Upholding ridiculous IP law?

Is it naive to think that IP law should be disintegrated? How would the world, and more specifically the digital landscape, look if there was no concept of IP.

<comment><USER8> There'd be little incentive to invest in long-term R&D projects. Where's the profit in research on a new drug if you'll have to immediately compete with other pharma companies in selling it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wonder when the US will start charging Israeli companies for IP theft?....

</comment><comment><USER53> Here's my question: which American companies are so insanely dumb that they actually thought sharing any version of any of this made any sense? are these the organizational consequences of rich people not actually managing the companies that the engineers are working for? Maybe the engineers are like "Just to hell with my country, my company, my neighbors my family and futire myself, I'll do whatever it takes to get my raise. The left-wing folks at Berkeley are right, everyone's here for the common good, we just don't really understand the Chinese. We should share more, and gain their trust."

<comment><USER54> Is it truly so hard to understand that what is the best action for oneself isn't necessarily the best action for the community (however one defines community)?

American companies want to sell their products in China. Quite often that requires them to base some part of production in China.

As for the last, yes, there is a large cultural gap between the US and the Chinese and frankly that gap exists mostly on the US side. I'd argue that without understanding the language, you'll never really understand another culture.

Sure, you can base your understanding on a few people that do understand the language, but your understanding will always be skewed by their prejudices.

In my lifetime, I've dealt with business people from a variety of cultures. Some are honest, some aren't. Some are cheap, some believe you have to spend money to make money. Some are successful, some aren't. None of that aligns with any particular culture.

We assign attributes to remote cultures based on reports of the extremes (because the day to day doesn't get reported). When the same behavior gets reported in our own cultures, we simply say well, it's those guys that were bad, not the entire culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> So Huawei is coping US companies and still creating better equipment than those it copy from? Ask anyone (well maybe anyone outside the US) in the tele industry and they'll tell you that Huawei is cheaper, better and also faster to fix a problem in both software and hardware. At least I have never heard anyone state otherwise outside of anon people on a forum. So, ask a real person and see.

<comment><USER56> The argument goes that Huawei would not be able to "create better equipment" had they been unable to wrongfully copy others' work in the first place. If the allegations are true, Huawei enjoys a position that resulted from unlawful and immoral behavior, and their ill-gotten gains should be confiscated from them.

Who knows what would have happened had Huawei done all their own R&D in the first place. Maybe they'd be in the same place as they are today; maybe not. But when you start from a position of copying someone else's work, the presumption is that everything you added since is tainted, and any profits should be someone else's, not yours.

<comment><USER57> relax bro,

we all stand in other's shoulders.

also, you in what army ? are you going to invade Asia ?

<comment><USER56> There are two ways to stand on another's shoulders. One is with consent; the other (to mix legal metaphors) is assault.

It would be one thing if Huawei said, "do you mind if I use this?" and received permission. But if they had to use deception to gather information, that's a pretty clear indication that it's wrong and is done without consent.

<comment><USER57> The entire legal system that exists as of today is mainly to benefit rich folks.

You should read the book "Code of Capital".

The CCP has made it clear that "rule of law" as stated by Mr. Obama is about favoring western capital interests.

I think it's a bigger crime that 6 billion people do not get to enjoy the same standard of living as the 2 billion people on top.

By having no brittle IP rules, the CCP makes sure Chinese businesses stay dynamic and continue to dominate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "A 'competition management group' was tasked with reviewing the submissions and awarding monthly bonuses to the employees who provided the most valuable stolen information."

Just wow.

How could any nation, let alone any company, allow any employee of Huawei anywhere near their operations?

Literally, they are incented to steal whatever they can from you, out in the open, systematically, with nary much effort to cover it up it seems.

</comment><comment><USER58> Irony that a country led by Donald Trump is charging companies with racketeering. Shows what a joke we have become.

</comment><comment><USER59> What the fuck is up with these comments? Are you all really okay with blatant lawbreaking with no consequences?

<comment><USER41> laws =/= morals

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> All low level geopolitics from Trumpist USA.

The message is, you Chinese can do some tech but don't grow too big! Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Amd, Google, AWS, Cisco. Those big must remain American.

Mobile World Congress suden cancelation because Huawei represents half of it... Same same

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this what TPP was supposed to solve? It's ironic that the Trump admin killed Obama's China containment strategy, only to try to implement it in a half assed way without any allied alignment. Also doesn't help Trump is a highly polarizing figure.

Pretty much describes the Trump admin in a nutshell. Whatever Obama did, get rid of it, regardless of its value, then implement a worse solution instead.

<comment><USER61> I'm not sure how TPP was supposed to be a China containment strategy. I've heard this said a few times, but the explanations for how it was supposed to work always seemed like hand-wavey versions of "well, it would make US partnerships with non-China countries stronger and that would somehow contain China".

<comment><USER62> The TPP was absolutely designed to be a China containment strategy.

The idea was to reduce trade barriers within the Pacific region, which would make trade there cheaper and hence more attractive vs China.

Specifically, lower wage countries (Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico) would have been more attractive as outsourcing locations compared to China, and in return good and services from high wage countries would have been cheaper in those countries making them more attractive compared to Chinese competitors.

As a specific example, most industrial machinery imported to Vietnam is subject to a 20% import tariff[1]. This means US companies like Caterpillar and GE are relying on political intervention to win deals[2], instead of being more competitive on price.

[1] [https://www.customs.gov.vn/SitePages/Tariff- Search.aspx?port...](https://www.customs.gov.vn/SitePages/Tariff- Search.aspx?portlet=DetailsImportTax&language=en- US&code=40118021&searchTerms=englishDescription%3dmachinery)

[2] [https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/nation-and- world/us-...](https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/nation-and-world/us- companies-general-electric-co-and-caterpillar-inc-sign-billions-in-deals-with- vietnam-20170531)

<comment><USER61> Right, but you need to show that knocking down tariffs like the Vietnam one would actually directly result in more non-Chinese trade. I can pretty much guarantee that even without the 20% tariff, US imports would still be far more expensive than Chinese equivalents. Do you have any economic analysis articles or papers you can point me to that model the expected impacts based on actual market prices and labor costs?

<comment><USER62> Sure. Here's one on a potential free trade agreement between the US and Malaysia[1] (which is another TPP nation) that calculates direct changes:

 _As shown, following a free trade, the Malaysia's export to the USA would increase by USD 30984 million or 7 percent and the US export to Malaysia would increase by USD 16051 million(22 percent). The substantial increase in the volume of export between two countries is due to removal of trade barriers. The higher increase in the US export to Malaysia relative to the Malaysia export to the US is because Malaysia currently has a higher tariff than the US._

Worth noting that it's absolutely unclear _if_ it would have worked, but _how TPP was supposed to be a China containment strategy_ is clear (which was your original question).

[1] [http://www2.southeastern.edu/orgs/econjournal/index_files/JI...](http://www2.southeastern.edu/orgs/econjournal/index_files/JIGES%20JUNE%202013%20yaghoob%20&%20Jamal%2010-27-2013%20R1.pdf)

<comment><USER61> Thanks! I'm still looking for an analysis on how this would impact the Asia region in general, and China specifically. For example, from the paper, the net result export impact outside the US-Malaysia trade relationship would be a decline:

"Further, the export of Malaysia and the US to the world is expected to decline by 0.8 percent and 0.1 percent respectively."

But it doesn't break out "rest of world" into groups, so it's not clear what the impact to China would be, if any. To me, the implication is that without a corresponding drop in imports from China, the net result is zero. Unfortunately the tables at the end are garbled, so I can't see in Table 2 what the import impacts would be from their dataset.

<comment><USER62> Yeah I agree entirely. I don't know where to find this analysis.

I'd also argue that most analysis is likely to be incorrect given that the rapid growth and specifically industrial expansion of China into new industries is unprecedented.

Having said that, all analysis is incorrect at some level, but some is still useful.

(Also, someone is going an downvoting all my comments on this thread! I'm not sure why - I'm not making an argument for or against TPP, just trying to explain how it _aimed_ to contain China. Someone even downvoted my comment pointing out that China is TPP participant Australia's biggest trading partner, so it was never designed to cut off all trade to China, just make the region less dependant on it. It's pretty annoying really)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Ironically, this is an attempt by the Trump administration to steal IP from China. US firms are behind in 5G because they have sat on the sidelines while Huawei engineered the chipsets.

It's tremendously ironic that these charges will likely allow US firms to steal money and/or IP from Huawei through what is for all intents and purposes the Trump administration's fiat.

Worse yet, as has been the pattern with the Trump administration so far, many aspects of the economy that were relatively stable and allowed planning and investment have been destroyed, like when a child throws a tantrum and upsets a board game sending the pieces onto the floor. Many international agreements, standards, and trade and diplomatic relationships have been set back decades by the administration.

Note that the major claims have all been false so far:

\- The daughter (a journalist) of the Huawei CEO was harrassed and detained without cause, in what was essentially a kidnapping for ransom/extortion. How did the American people not feel outrage when Trump did this?

\- There have been repeated accusations of backdoors into 5G hardware, but yet no example of a device that has been hacked by the US or any private sector researchers.

\- US officials have (quite inappropriately) tried to foment xenophobia and hatred of Chinese immigrants in the US. This combined with Trump's xenophobic comments show the US's hand quite clearly. China is now a rival and no dirty tactics are off limits.

As an American, I am so deeply embarrassed by all of this.

<comment><USER8> Hold up, hold up. Did you just describe Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, as "a journalist"?

If you're gonna peddle a biased narrative, put some effort into making it appear reasonable.

<comment><USER63> My narrative had one factual problem, Meng's job title, but it is not biased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> You can charge a company with RICO? Maybe we can charge a political party then.

<comment><USER65> U.S. law says corporations are people. People can be charged with RICO. It may be weird, but it's consistent.

<comment><USER66> Corporations are people mainly when it's convenient. I am not aware of a company being sent to jail or sentenced to death. Regular persons can't always settle things by paying a big (or small) fine.

<comment> kube-system The corporate death penalty (i.e. judicial dissolution) is a thing in the US, but is very rarely used.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1889/11/08/archives/against-the- suga...](https://www.nytimes.com/1889/11/08/archives/against-the-sugar-trust- decision-of-the-supreme-court-general-term.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I have a Huawei phone and home gateway ... oh dear.

I wonder how much GM and Boeing depends on the Chinese home market , two can play that game since the soybean tradewar went so great they had to bailout oops sorry "aid" the farmers.</comment>


Education of a Programmer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@terrycrowley/education-of-a-programmer-aaecf2d35312 <comment><USER3> One thing I'd add to these principles: I always emphasize when I teach programming that there's no magic. There's always a reason behind everything and regular folks like you can understand it. There are people (even among tech community) who like to say something is "magic" or "beyond one's comprehension", but don't take their words seriously. Mysticism is just intellectual laziness. Don't indulge in it.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure this is not going to help "ordinary" people. Unless they already think like you and me.

When I was a kid, I wanted to know how all the black boxes worked -- one of my greatest days was when my father explained the internal combustion engine well enough that cars no longer seemed like magic.

Later I noticed that many people -- especially when talking about electronics -- would ask "How does it work?", when they actually meant "How do you use it?" I thought this was just a quirk of the Australian dialect, but as I gained more experience with people, I realised it was really an aspect of human thought.

To most people, knowing "how it works" is no more than being familiar enough with the magic spells that you can use them with confidence.

<comment><USER5> Isn't "the magic spells that you can use", exactly how we (programmers) use interfaces.

I trust that the interface, be it the C++ standard, or boost::whatever, is well enough tested that I don't need to know "how it works".

It would be nice to know how everything works but there is only finite time in the working day.

<comment><USER6> Is it truly possible to have a solid understanding of the interface and its use, though, without having a reasonable insight into, at least, the likely implementation of something?

<comment><USER7> I'm sure this isn't what you meant, but how about something like movement? I've met doctors who know anatomy like the (ahem) back of their hand, but they couldn't perform coordinated physical tasks to save their life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The "end to end argument" in that paper reflects the issue of how dumb the network should be. This goes back and forth. With telephone switches and Plan 55-A message switching, all the intelligence was in the network. With the ARPANET, the network did reliable delivery, but the work was distributed among the dedicated network machines. IP was pure dumb datagram, which was controversial at the time. It still is; the last few years have seen the proliferation of non-transparent middle boxes, from the Great Firewall of China to Comcast to Cloudflare to Google.

<comment> loup-vaillant One day we'll have 2 available outgoing ports: 80 and 443 —the web. IPv6 won't be needed because nobody will have servers, and can all be served behind a NAT. Email will go through webmail interfaces, and there will be a couple dozen providers in the whole world. Anything else will instantly be rejected as spam —only spammers use small providers anyway.

We will see conspicuously interesting ads, thanks to ever more accurate, automated analysis of our communications and browsing patterns. Sometimes, such analysis will be performed to stop criminals (mainly terrorists, paedophiles, and intellectual thieves).

How about getting our shit together and starting to fight this nightmare?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love how he says "revel in the asynchrony" when discussing distributed systems.

In a more general sense, taking the bull by the horns and dealing with the underlying, sometimes unwanted, realities of the system rather than burying one's head in the sand and pretending the problems do not exist (only to be forced to deal with them later and apply band-aid solutions that are not robust).

As he goes on to say _Rather than trying to hide it, you accept it and design for it._

<comment> joatmon-snoo There was a PhD thesis that appeared on HN a few weeks ago - <USER2> Subtyping (which I still have open in another tab because I've been making my way through it at a dreadfully slow pace) and its core claim is that traditional type systems start from a simple interface, which results in a needlessly complex model, whereas starting from a simple model enables the development of a slightly more complicated, yet still elegant and simple interface.

The similarities between that claim and this one are striking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article really resonates with my experience.

The section on "performance" is so spot on. It is remarkable how rare it is that programmers think in these terms. There is no absolute truth to any particular performance optimization; optimizations only exist within the context of a complex topology of resource constraints that vary with time and application. It seems like a lot of work but this type of analysis becomes routine and automatic with experience. You really do have to evaluate your optimizations from first principles each time.

Props also for "Einsteinian" (I use the terms relativistic/Newtonian). I frequently say "all software systems are distributed systems". Programmers often resist the idea but it actually makes the design of systems much easier once you fully embrace the implications.

</comment><comment><USER11> "If someone tries to explain a system by describing the code structure and does not understand the rate and volume of data flow, they do not understand the system."

This is something that becomes evident when you stop using OOP languages, and then you cannot unsee it anymore.

<comment><USER12> Could you elaborate a bit? I'm super curious but I have little experience with non-OOP languages.

<comment><USER11> You could go and learn Clojure, or Haskell if you're particularly masochistic, but even C will do the trick. Be warned that it will be frustrating at first, it definitely takes some brain rewiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some great quotes in here, though quite a few are effective restatements.

As usual, added to [https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

I particularly liked the _light speed analysis_ technique, the bold statement that a clean start is a fundamental technique in managing complexity, and the expression of effective technical management as the design of transparent, self-coordinating feedback loops.

</comment><comment><USER14> honestly, i am an ardent believer of the ancient simian proverb (as popularized by silvanus p. thompson, in calculus made easy): 'what one fool can do, so can another' (given sufficient motivation, that is).

edit-001: feynman's infamous algorithm contains more detail: [http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm](http://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm)

<comment><USER15> I also like this quote:

"What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." \- Fred Brooks

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > I had been designing asynchronous distributed systems for decades but was > struck by this quote from Pat Helland, a SQL architect, at an internal > Microsoft talk. "We live in an Einsteinian universe — there is no such thing > as simultaneity."

Had the author really not heard this idea from Lamport already?

<comment><USER17> Surely, but that's beside the point. After decades of experience working in its cognitive neighborhood, the author finally got to know that idea well enough that Helland's point resonated with him. It's no simple matter to go from being aware of a concept to weaving the concept and all its implications fluently into ones thoughts. I'm familiar with all the main ideas presented in this piece, but I still found a lot to think about and took a lot of notes while reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> he uses the phrase "anti-fragile" which as far as i know was coined by nassim taleb in his book "anti fragile" kind of an economist or chaos theorist idk good book regardless

</comment><comment><USER19> Attempting to read or even skim an article of this length on mobile makes me wish my browser had a minimap scroll bar. I wonder if that could be feasibly implemented as a bookmarklet.</comment>


New Website Lets Bands Setup a Free Website - <AUTHOR> https://yovigo.com/bands

<comment><USER2> Yet another tool on the already overflowing workbench of "ways to make your music famous!"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still waiting for a website to make free websites that let bands setup a free website ;)</comment>


Intel predicts 10ghz chips by 2011 - <AUTHOR> https://www.geek.com/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-2011-564808/ <comment><USER2> Please mods add (2000)</comment>


Ebay shuts down Half.com - <AUTHOR> http://pages.half.ebay.com/help/account/closing.html <comment><USER2> In case anyone was wondering what the service was:

"It was a web site where sellers offered items for sale at fixed prices. The items available on half.com are limited to books, textbooks, music, movies, video games, and video game consoles."[0]

It curiously is also the reason why a town in Oregon was named "Half.com" for an entire year in '99[1]. Man, those dot-com days...

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half.com)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway,_Oregon#Half.com_name_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfway,_Oregon#Half.com_name_change)

<comment><USER3> Hahaha that's the best 99 throwback I've seen a long time! Funny part is the web is just as influential as they thought it would be someday, just in a different way than many expected.

Seems like the hype cycle brings out all the crackpots. Once everything explodes businesses come in and start welding the pieces to existing processes. That's when most of the real potential is realized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Half.com was useful back when Ebay was more of a strict auction site. I remember using it circa 2001 or so to buy some rare PS1 games. I may have used it as recently as 2008 or so to buy textbooks. Now-a-days, most Ebay Sellers have "stores" anyway, where stuff is strictly on a Buy it Now price, so half.com is basically obsolete.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's entirely a matter of Half.com becoming obsolete because of changes to eBay; I suspect they lost out to Amazon Marketplace, which provides basically the same service with (I'd assume) a larger reach. I would often check both sites and see the same listings by the same sellers.

<comment><USER6> Yup. My first textbooks I sold on half.com. My last textbooks I sold on Amazon marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow this was a name I hadn't heard in about 15 years. The cycle of life is real on the web. A business is born, thrives, and dies. Rest easy old friend.

</comment><comment><USER8> This was Josh Koppelman's startup, and he went on to co-found First Round Capital.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sad to hear it. I just started selling my old books on half.com and found the experience to be pretty great. I sold a couple hundred dollars worth of books in a month or two.

<comment><USER10> Same here. I would buy and re-sell all my textbooks back in college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am a bit surprised by this in some ways, but not in others. Half.com was a decent place for textbooks, but they've gone down hill in recent years. Ebay never seemed to do much development though; logging into my old seller dashboard I found it looked nearly the same as it did a decade ago- and it seemed old back then.

I imagine the half.com domain is worth quite a bit. I wonder what their plans for it are?

</comment><comment><USER12> Half.com was the best place to buy academic textbooks. I just used it a couple of weeks back actually for a copy of On Cooking.

</comment><comment><USER13> They have some of the worst scores I have ever seen on consumer advocacy sites.

Seems like either they had a model that doesn't work in this day and age or just a site that tries to scam every last cent it can while it lasts.

</comment><comment><USER14> Too bad, I bought a lot of cheap books and years back, cheap DVDs there.

</comment><comment><USER15> RIP, just listed 10 books on half.com on Wednesday.</comment>


Firefox Monitor - <AUTHOR> http://monitor.firefox.com/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the site notification, but you shouldn't use the site without https.

Use: [https://monitor.firefox.com/](https://monitor.firefox.com/)</comment>